Economy column of yoga6d dot org: ARCHIVE PAGE 10 -- WELCOME!!! Completing page FOR THE MOST UPDATED WRITINGS INCL ESSAYS AND BOOKS BY ARISTO TACOMA alias S.R.WEBER PLEASE GO TO THE AVENUEGE LIBRARY. By S R Weber {Soulful texts SHOULD have at least one 'fast-typing' issue about it, and nobody should believe fully in any text which has no grammatical issues, in our opinion; there's plenty of soul in what follows ;-) } * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ===========>You are now viewing the ARCHIVE SECTION of the Yoga6dOrg EcoNomy column, its significant PAGE 10. A number of key articles about philosophy, art, physics, intuition and many more themes are here.==================== {All written by S.R. Weber, the preferred pen name for Stein Henning Br. Reusch and who also use the pen name Aristo Tacoma and some more} WHY CURRENCY TRADING MAKES MORE SENSE THAN STOCK TRADING The world's rich are facing one common problem: what is the most ethical--not just legal, but ethical--way to handle their surplus money? A bank account is fine, but it provides very little interest rate, generally speaking. The few of the rich who have no trace of ethical concerns look to the statistics as how stock- oriented funds are doing it, and pick the ones that make the most of their money. As Abraham Maslow and many others have pointed out, wealth is an opportunity to be philosophical--to do such things as those who are too focussed on survival cannot have the spare energy or resources to do. And those who are philosophical, naturally (like not few of the world's richest) would like to do something to benefit the upcoming generations, and they would like to do less of the things that create havoc on the planet. So, in addition to giving some money away for what they consider to be "good causes", they are trying to make more money from the money they have, and, generally speaking, there are few obvious alternatives to stock trading. There is currency trading, of course, but there are some myths surrounding it. One of these myths is that it is hard to earn money on currency trading, and easy to waste it. Let's dispell those myths--or, more precisely, those misconceptions (for "myth" is inherently a positive word). It is only easy to waste money if one trades badly. And there are very many more than George Soros who earns a good 25, 30, 40 or 50 percent yearly by doing a bunch of currency trades each year. That's generally as good as, or better than, what stock funds tend to offer. (To be precise, the Quantum Fund of Soros typically diversifies somewhat between approaches.) Now why should currency trading be a better solution than stock trading? There are two reasons, broadly speaking: one is the ethical one, and the other is the long-term steadiness of the approach. When, in 2008, the world's stocks had a phase in which their value were cut sharply, the physicist-turned-billionaire Soros had a bad year--he only had about 30 percent profit. So 30 percent revenue qualifies as a 'bad' year in currency trading terms. Now, compare that to the recent stock gains by investing in some of the largest and, in Wall Street terms, most successful companies. The stock traders are falling upon each other with congratulations about this or that fabulous stock when the earnings report support the notion of an increase, compared to the previous year, of about 20 percent the company value (apart from inflation). That's ten percent less than what a good currency trader can reckon to make duing a bad year. As for any long-term steadiness of the approach as for stocks the simple story is that, in the long term, it doesn't quite exist. The reason is that world's stocks are traded on much the same premises as Los Angeles casinos. As long as people flock to the casinos with optimism, money spins around. If they don't flock there with optimism, money don't spin around. In other words, stock trading is entirely flock and mood dependent and this to a much larger extent than the world's biggest currencies, which have to function no matter what. And so the largest funds are doing wise in spreading over to other things than mere stocks-- real estate, for instance, or gold. A billion can be cut into two-thirds of it given some sort of not impossible crisis, natural or political or somehow systemic. Given several such crises, money invested in even a broad spectre of stocks may be reduced to a fraction of it. Now consider the ethical dimension: and let's quickly list three factors. First of all, if you have any sense at all of connecting causes and effects, there is no doubt that if you own a bit of a company and partake in raising its value by buying stocks, you are entangled into what that comapny is doing. What that entanglement MEANS for you depends on your religion, or lack thereof. Most have some sort of faith in some sort of karma or whatshallwecallit, and, put in easy terms--your karma gets tied up with what you invest in. Secondly, the investment in stocks is, more often than not, a contribution to putting a premium on 'endless growth' of companies. Most companies that have grown enormously have become enormously arrogant relative to customers. These companies think they get income no matter what, and they put up more and more fences against direct communication with those who work in it. They are typically happy about using technology so that individual citizens have less of a say over them. They remove cash and try and make themselves immune against customer enquiries, such as by automated responses. They look to statistics and if a certain thing is demanded by only one in ten customers they may, after achieving a monopoly, cut out that thing which, when the companies were many and diverse and competing, was easily available all over the cities. The streamlining of their business model against the diversity of customers may mean that they drop physical stores in favour of internet-via-post delivery, and use only stores to sell some standard objects or just to showcase what's sold digitally. That means income for them and less nuissances such as employees. This leads us to the second factor: what type of society do we want to have? A society of dinosaurs? Of monopolies? Whether you regard it spiritually or not, that is an important question to many. And there is no law of nature that says that a very rich person should automatically favour the trend of Wall Street to support, more than anything, the businesses that are already too big. This question of 'what society do we want to have' is also discussed in the third ethical factor, that we list next. The third ethical factor is one that has been discussed ever sense the introduction of stocks in the first place, and is generally recognised as a serious one: when staff owns the company they are working in, they know more, care more and work harder for it, and generally the company becomes more interesting to have in a society and more interesting to meet for a customer. This type of company which you by natural ethical considerations may want to see more of isn't at all up for long or short bets at the biggest stock exchanges. The company owned by its employees or, if small, owned privately by a person actually involved with the company and knowing all employees first-hand, haven't entered the casino nor, perhaps, do they want to in the future. Their premium is on relationship, responsibility, excellent work, and connectivity to staff. Such a company can get relatively large and it can get wealthy and yet it avoids being listed on the stock trades. If you want to see more of this type of companies in the world, then you shouldn't put your vote to Wall Street stock exchanges or their sub-sects around the world. Let us add another factor speaking against stock trading which is chiefly psychological: To surf on the slopes of the stock values of a set of companies, there is no end to the gossip you must parse through often. Every little insignificant bit of fake news may shake the stock value of a company for enough days to make it vastly important to have full knowledge of these bits of unwisdom. As for individual companies on the stock exchange, there is no limit to how rediculous an illusion floating on the winds of public internet forums may be: it is the intensity of focus the illusions get, not their truth value, that determines their immediate effect on the stock. And what psycholological influence does all this have on you? When survival of your money is dependent on unmotivated, unwarranted, unsupported gossip? And let's bear in mind that for some, gossip-making and prolification is big business. Indeed, in a way, that's what the socalled "social media" is mostly about, as seen from the perspective of most of their owners. And so one sees, does one not, that the most ardent stock traders are generally people who work like machines, sleep little, detoriate fast, eat much, and pump up their brains and bodies with chemical artefacts for them to be wakeful enough to carry on for yet another season. These people won't learn from experience because learning (another point that Maslow made, to continue to refer to him) depends on a surplus energy that they never get and can't get via the methods they choose. Is the support of such mis-cultures that which is the best you can do with all your surplus money? Come on! In some cases stock trading is called for: for instance, when there is meaningful reason for one person to work towards taking over some companies in order to do good work together with these companies. I'm not fanatically against stock trading, but I do think that the case should be made strong for something else as a general vehicle for holding surplus money in general. So, having going beyond stock trading, let's now look at the misconception that it is hard to earn money with currency trading, and easy to loose there. But before that, let's briefly look at the ethical aspect. The currencies, the biggest ones, are every day in such demand and they are exchanged in such giantic quantities that the ethical components are correspondingly smaller. The dollar may be used as much to support buying land in Amazonas to protect the trees on that land as it can be used to buy a field for fracking. The trillions exchanged every day in Euro, Dollar, Yen, Renminbi etc are like oceans: the little stone you throw into them isn't by any means shaking these currencies. Not unless you are both trading exclusively in terms of billions of dollars and, on top of that, using a very big leverage and in addition doing it at particularly sensitive moments. So, in a way, the big currencies are as the blood flow of the world society, or, to be more moderate, as one type of blood flow, complelementing all the other types of interaction that makes society tick. How do you earn money on this in a way that offers a fairly small risk? By reading the news and having a good framework within which to trade. And if you don't want to do this, find somebody who does do this, and let them handle the money for you, given that they have good track records. Reading the news means, here, briefly, focussing on the news which concern the biggest currencies, such as things the governments are saying and doing, and what challenges they are getting, and whether there are elections that are seen to creating uncertainties and so on (in which case one may want to not do any trade before election is done). When trading is done, it must be done within a certain framework, a framework decided perhaps primarely from past experience. Only with a good framework within which logic and your intuition can operate, can risk be minimal. If one wishes to experiment with trading without a framework, one must do so with game accounts. The real live accounts requires a real live framework that you stick to through all sorts of currency weathers. A framework might say, for instance, "do not maintain a bet on a currency raising relative to another one for more than this many days". After this number of days, the bet you make may come off and bring a profit, or it may have been a bad bet and there's a loss, but with a good frameowrk, the loss isn't that great and with good betting much more common than bad betting, the profits will add up neatly. Good betting requires an interest and a degree of logic and also a component of intuition. But no trader is infalliable, and so the framework must be made so as to handle bad bets also, so that, over a period of, say, two months, a profit is typically showing. The framework may also say which of the biggest currencies you are going to trade with. Smaller currencies are highly dependent on individual governments. Of course, even the U.S. Dollar is highly dependent on the decisions of the U.S. Federal Bank and the U.S. Government, but the price is set by means of an interaction with all the world's biggest bankers and biggest currency investors, moment by moment, and, ever since the gold standard was set aside some decades ago, the shared sense of a needed stability in the largest currencies have typically worked to provide the needed stability for everything else--and that 'everything else' includes stock trading. The absence of a framework isn't advisable: for instance there have been stories of some people who have betted on a period of half a year or so that the dollar is going to slide or increase relative to another currency and when it didn't, they didn't understand how much loss they had. Also, one can argue that Soros before year 2000 did a number of rather 'framework-less' bets that could have gone as bad as they went good--as it was, he had luck and good timing and all that--but the types of earnings we see from Soros after year 2000 are, as I understand it, rather made from a number of far more careful bets. These carry with them much more moderate risks and they give more moderate earnings but still the earnings are greater than that of most stock-trading funds. Abstractly, long-term bets in general can have some role relative to such as companies you really love and support no matter what--for instance your own company or companies-- but relative to currencies, the logical approach, as I see it, is to go from one week to the next so that earlier bets are all completed as you start a new week. This makes sense also because, what with the internet and all sorts of things like that, so many things can happen that may affect the currencies in just a few days. There are some companies, typically companies physically situated near the biggest stock exchanges, that have become somewhat notorious for their interest in doing what can be called "milliseconds-trading". Here, they have special agreements in which their proximity to such as Wall Street computers are utilized in what one can call a 'parasite' form of stock trading. These companies profit from the digital information that a certain company, within one or two seconds, are going to be exposed to a large investment, or a large sell, relative to the value of the whole stock, so that scripts go in and do dealings just before this order comes along to the stock exchange--perhaps from their own customer. As far as I can tell, this is precisely one of those things that makes the stock market a poor place to put surplus money for the rich. In the currency trading market, there is another, though related challenge, and one must apply conscious thought to meet it: the currency exchange price in any second is something that is not regulated by any official body. This means that if the quantity of trades you do each day on the Foreign Exchange, or Forex Interbank market, is huge, you are highly dependent on just who you are collaborating with to make those exchanges. The banks or brokers are not obliged to give you a fair price. A high-integrity bank or broker will give you a fair price, also to avoid having gossip about them on the Internet that they are swinging prices at the last moment to cash in some extra beyond the agreed-upon margins with their Forex customers. A still more high-integrity solution would be for the bank or broker to publish all the prices operated with for all customers, without naming these customers, all the time, say, for the last month or so, so that everyone can see and compare the prices they got--also that with other banks and brokers. Perhaps in the future, we'll see a regulation of this sort, leading to an increased transparency in the market. The solution to the price-swinging dilemma, it appears to me, is threefold: first, pick the solidest high-integrity bank or brokerage you can find. Second, keep quantity of trades pr month as low as you can. In that way, you are not dependent on second- or minute-peaks at all. You are rather concerned with the broad swings. Third, beware of the 'stop loss' autoclosure mechanism. This mechanism is meant as a safeguard but it is the most vulnerable element in all currency trading, as it just takes a one-second peak of a currency curve to close a trade, and these one-second peaks can be artificially generated by a broker and this without breaking the law. Instead, you must be willing to operate with such a small leverage that in case of your 'take profit' parameter doesn't lead to a cash in for a certain week, and you must manually close the trade, that manual closing of the trade leads to a modest loss, a loss that you make up for by averaging many weeks after one another. In looking for solidity and integrity, you should, as a rule of thumb, use a company that has a steady profit, has had it for many years, which has a huge backup capital to rely on, and which have a large quantity of customers and a great desire to be seen as a high-integrity company. In order to mitigate what is known as counter-party risks (ie, to reduce risks associated with the possibility that the brokerage cannot handle some of the buys or sells you are doing), you should have the twofold approach of avoiding to trade during weeks that COULD BECOME stormy in the currency area (which requires you to have good intuition as well), and in addition only trade through a company that has a backup capital that is at the very least thousands of times greater than the sums you trade with, and then only trade at a very modest leverage (like a dozen or so). You must continually check up on the integrity and financial balancies and backup capitals of the bank or brokerage you have chosen. This means that the options for safe trading for millionaires are generally larger than the options for billionaires. When you aim to earning by cashing in on moderate swings on the most stable of the world's currencies and you have a track record that shows that you can do so with small sums you can then move to larger and larger sums. In sum, the currency trader must have a steady approach, and a non-greedy one: by going for, let's say, 30-45 percent of yearly profit, one is never trying to make five hundred percent out of a single bet but then one is also not taking pointless risks. This is the steady approach of professional currency traders, and this is the approach with which it is easy to make money on currency trading. Finally, those who feel that only money made connected to work that one really loves is worth it, let me counter that and say that in order to do love that you really work you need a lot of funds coming from somewhere else-- because, apart from some extraordinary exceptions (maybe BodyShop is one), most people's enthusiasm cannot be cashed in on in the type of society we have in this world. The way the world works, as I see it, is this way: in order to make money, you must do something or other, usually not that totally interesting; and in order to follow the pathway of your heart, you must be ready to spend money more than earn it, at least for a very long time. The balanced approach, then, is to fund the projects of your heart by something that is a surer and safer way to earn money than the projects of your heart, but which isn't entirely contrary to your heart either (ie, it's ethical enough). Currency trading can, when done right, be a way in which good things can get the sponsorship they deserve, in this world of many people and moderately many resources. *** Reproduction of whole unedited essay in educational settings and such is permitted. Contact info to author is in the link above as for reprint permissions. HOW REAL ARE THE MUSES? How right was the ancient hellene myth of Olympus? And notes about philosophy of science, and Tolkien It has baffled, puzzled, and--to use a word that comes from the same root as the word "muse"--amused those writing about the dawn of european philosophy in ancient Greece, that no matter how rational, logical and concerned with pure reason the various greek philosophers were, mostly all of them--including Aristotle, who sometimes spoke as drily as any modern professor with a dozen ph.d.'s on his resume--took it more or less for granted that the supreme beings of the Olympus do exist. More than that, it was more or less taken for granted that human beings as we see around us are, at best, rather like shadows of the light of these beings. The teacher of Aristotle, Plato, very vividly described a view that could imply such an understanding in his metaphor of the Cave of Lights. A few people, Plato suggested, in one of his writings calling on the voice of Plato's teacher, the bohemian anarchist Socrates, raise to see the light as it is, for a few moments. In those moments, Plato claimed, they see that all that is taken for light in amongst fellow citizens is but shadows of the play of these higher beings, which again refer, somehow, to higher ideas or forms as the source of all creation. The Olympic realm held many forms of supreme beings. In a parallel development in the myths around all the world, the more modern concepts of God arose out of the idea of one supreme being who was more powerful than all the others. Thus, for instance, the Hebrew God of the Jews, Jahve, was, in earlier myths, a god amongst many, but a stronger one, who defeated the others. And so Zeus was the God of gods in Olympus, and the Olympus had other gods and beings as well, such as the muses. With the advent of the revision of Hebrew religion that Jesus undertook while the Greek culture was still flourishing, despite increasing pressures from Rome, Zeus became the Roman concept of Deus, while supreme beings of the Olympus such as Pallas Athena--the warrior goddess of Athens--kept inspiring the roman folklore and their interpretations of events. For instance, at the time of the beginning of Christianity, with Deus and its (related word) monotheism, --in a way, a christianized Zeus made into the top God and as a furthering of the jewish concept of Jahve-- it was assumed that people you hear chatting together while they pass you and your friends on the street might occasionally convey messages from these supreme beings directly to you, to solve concrete challenges you have in your own life. How could this happen? While C G Jung many centures later would formulate the concept of "synchronicity" (ie, meaningful coincidence), the romans had a very concrete, substance-oriented way of handling this question: they imagined that the supreme beings can take the form of any normal person they'd like, be it friend or stranger, and in that way be in your surroundings, in your environment, and give you messages physically, and then go up in their higher, more sublime, more essential and subtle etheric regions of the universe where they do all the things they do--which in both roman and hellene awareness involved plenty of copulation. Fortunately or unfortunately, christianity had thinkers whose main agenda seemed to be, without entirely clear roots in the original and rather sparse teachings of the Jesus character, to clamp down on sexuality. Thus, while Zeus (or Zevs) was well-known for not only being a fair though also sometimes very ruthless judger of man and gods he was also passionately and often incestously engulfed in the wildest schemes of seduction of the beauties of his realm. And his realm, indeed, was the universe. So great was the power of Zeus that he had captured time itself, Chronos, and enslaved time. Zeus, being male, gave birth to some of his most beautiful supreme beings through his thighs. But his main form was pure force, pure energy, like Tor the Norse God of Thunder. So when Semele, one of his consorts, a tender girl, asked to see Zeus in his most truest form, Zeus recommended to her that she shouldn't ask for that; it wasn't a wise thing to ask. Yet Semele insisted: seated on his knees, she flirted with Zeus until Zeus gave in and let her see him as he is. But as with the legend of Moses on the mountain, being told by God from behind that he cannot both see God and live,--the God that, like Tolkien's fairy-tale figure Tom Bombadil, "is who he is", "eldest, that's what I am"-- Semele could only get her wish fulfilled by being struck down by the lightening that Zeus most essentially were. For suddenly she was seated on the knees not of an attractive, powerful male, but on the sharp corners of a sizzling burst of lightening, stronger than Earth, capable of splitting the Heavens. In the more modern language, with Zeus--Deus--Theos--or, if we like, God--or Allah, Jahve, whatever name we'd like (and the Sanskrit parallels are many)--by far the mythically most powerful of the supreme beings, it makes far less sense to speak of the other beings in the realm of Zeus as 'gods', and much more--in a modernized mytho- logy, inspired by the hellene scheme--to speak of the other beings as a generalized form of muses. They may be more or less male-ish in their character, but given the powerful inclination Zeus has for females, it makes most sense to speak of all his fellow beings as his girls, his angels--if we like--or his muses. And as modern, rational beings, with a hundred theories of fundamental physics, chemistry, biology and brain science behind us, or to stand on the shoulders of, we'd like to know, of course--how much sense does it make? Are the muses real? And in what way could they be real in ways that might fit with at least some interpretations of some of the most widespread modern religions? As for worldview, let us at once point out that the Christianity that has its roots in Rome is more rich and open to possibilities of other supreme beings than God in their worldview than most lutherian interpretations. Having said as much, there are many other branches of modern christianity that are more willing to see sex as part of divinity rather than a hellish thing; indeed, roman christianity seems obsessed with speaking about the Satan character all the time, and especially when money or sex are involved. Some of the branches of Islam share this obsessiveness with characterising some things as dark and evil with roman christianity; while other branches of Islam, notably what we may call Rumi (or Sufi) Islam, have more liberal views on some of these themes. Turning to other religions, there are interpretations of some branches both of Jainism and Sikhism, Hinduism and Buddhism, Shinto and varieties of Zen, as well as less-documented religions such as Zoroasterianism, that have a glad openness to the view of sexuality rather as Zeus saw it, and not as much as the roman St Augustine saw it. The questions, in order to rational intellect to go through them all, require more than one, or even a thousand essays of this size, to go through. But let us say something that is old news to some, but intuitively and rationally pretty evident to this writer, and perhaps unusual in some people's horizon: that it is in a way an insult toward the view of God as omnipotent to imagine that he has as much struggle with a Satan character as the roman catholics or the darker forms of muslims would have it. Obviously, with Zeus infinite powers, over, indeed, the very force of time itself,--and as the judge over the other gods--there is nothing existing that is not approved of by Zeus, by Deus, by Allah, by God. And there is no use for any big bad Devil or Satan character. There is enough capacity for interesting devillery in natural man, in egotism, in the noise and pettiness of having a messy, bored, pleasure-seeking, fame-seeking, alcoholized decayed brain. Why invent a master character of badness? Noise is noise; it has no particular intelligence, just a bunch of ad hoc schemes, however potent they may temporarily appear to be. There is no need in this universe to invent a Master Noise. So, rationally, only an impotent God would admit to a dualism with a Devil. A Zeus-inspired concept of God doesn't admit to impotence at all, not now, not before, not ever. Whatever appearancies there might have been in mythic past of a battle with demonic forces, the infinite strength of Zeus, God, has dealt with it all. And it is logical, then, that the natural inclination to associate beauty with also procreative sexuality as appealed to people of such character as Plato and Aristotle should be considered part of what the natural human being has been blessed with, from the very origin--from Zeus and his consorts, or muses--directly. Alright, but how does it fit with science? The question has a simple solution, if we take a truly grand picture: science concerns the finer analysis of some of the surface scratches that humankind is able to do in its tiny little corner of the universe. When some people who call them- selves scientists dare to speak of the number of galaxies in the universe as known, or that they dare to speak of the size of the universe as known, or that they have nearly, or recently, found or theorized over the 'God particle', or that they regard their little manmade "laws of physics" as pretty much "complete", they they are committing very understandable, but not defendable acts of extrapolating from their ignorance into pompeous unscientific forms of reasoning. Humanity knows hardly anything about anything: and science, though big and huge and sometimes distastefully AND meaninglessly pompous-- and never more than when there are prizes like the so-called "Nobel Prize" involved--is a tiny little surface map over a vastness that humanity has no knowledge about. Douglas Adams called Earth--as seen by an intergalactic space traveller--"mostly harmless". It had taken this traveller many years to change "harmless" into "mostly harmless", by means of study of the planet. It would have been just as well to say of Earth's people that their knolwedge of the universe is "nonexisting". After many years of study of science we may edit the phrase, likewise --"mostly nonexisting". The quantities of galaxies is NOT known. The size of the universe is NOT known. The age of the universe is NOT known. The future of the universe is ABSOLUTELY not known. And so most cosmology and writings in physics along the lines of talking in cocksure notions about the "missing black matter" and "the fundamental forces and particles of the universe" and "the beginning of time" should be relegated to the portion of libraries called "fiction", and their books should be called short stories or even "novels" instead of "factual". That is a belief held by many scientists and respectable philosophers of science. I repeat, many scientists have the belief that science hardly knows anything about anything--and they are right, as I see it. Many respectable philosophers of science also have this view. Scientists, however eager writers may sometimes present this group, is not a homogenous group. There is no universeal worldview of science. Indeed, many respectable philosophers of science have the point of view that a scientific theory CANNOT produce a "worldview" at all. A worldview, they will argue, is something done by human imagination. A scientific theory concerns some numerical correlations. The pathways between the two are comprised of so many assumptions that there can be no verification nor falsification. This has been written forcefully about by a number of philosophers of science. A lot of scientists agree. (As an early example, consult "The Possibilist and Pluralist Aspect of Science", by Arne Naess, who was a visiting member of the Vienna circle on philosophers of science in the first half of the twentieth century, and respected by such people as Niels Bohr.) Of course, there are other ways of interpret science than the mainstream interpretations. This work we can begin on once we admit the truth of a central thesis of the philosophy of science: that to any set of data, we can make infinitely many theories that fit with them. There isn't a mechanical procedure to select which one is the best, the simplest, the most interesting or the most necessary, without throwing in a number of invented assumptions in each case, and closing in the context. Ultimately, this also means that there is no machine intelligence. There is no artificial intelligence. Mind can only be alive, if there is to be mind. In the fairy tale, or modern myth, as created by J R R Tolkien, the Hobbits symbolize perhaps children, and perhaps also those meaningful synchroous events, or synchronicities, that change the powers of the world without the powers of the world being able to predict them, control them, or shape them entirely. These Hobbits are not easily seen, but they may be essential to the deeper flow of patterns, and the victory, in Tolkien's view, of Light over Darkness, or--in more scientific terms--of coherence or wholeness over noise or fragmentation--in the unfolding history of the world. A key feature, as postulated by Tolkien, of the darker forces is that, like the Orcs, and like Saruman, they can often work at odds with one another. In other words, noise can split noise, and fragmentation can fragment fragmentation; but good music doesn't fight with good music, and wholeness can fight ALL fragmentation. The questions in the heading of this essay cannot be answered conclusively by any chain of reasoning here. But I appeal to the interested reader to gently, and wholesomely, divide the answering approach into two: * rationally, if you do have some kind of faith in a God-like origin somewhat like Zeus, Deus, what makes most sense AS SEEN FROM THE PERSPECTIVE of this origin? * intuitively, without pushing it by means of desire, childhood teachings, cultural conditionining, or the opinions of your friends or mothers or fathers, what is it that you are most at ease with thinking of as the truth of the matter? As for the second answering approach, this requires time, meditation, dance, waiting, patience, quest, prayer and a contact with art, nature, beaches, and a willingness to find out what is right beyond mere likes and dislikes. As for the first answering approach, I'd like to suggest what I think is a worthwhile notion here: that it would be a bit peculiar, don't you think etc, that an infinite source like Zeus, with all the sensous natural divine lust playing in his whole sizzling being, would be at ease with MERELY having this messy humanity as his main creation. Surely, he would want to have his consorts, his muses, his supreme beings, who could stand more of his lightening power--even if, like Semele, they must be on the watch if he shows too much of it. And would it not make sense for Zeus, Deus, in having his consorts, his muses, his god-girls if you like, somehow along the lines of the vaguely hierarchical forms suggested by some forms of the ancient hellene or greek stories? I am thinking, for instance, of the glorious beauty and power of Pallas Athene; I am thinking of the fountainhead of love and beauty of Aphrodite; of fierce strength yet feminine beauty of Helena; and of how the various muses--be it trillions of trillions of them, when all comes to all--might not in a way perhaps being the offspring of Zeus with just these three; rather as humanity, its souls and spirits, as if are the offsprings of the child-muses, or submuses if we like again. Helena {or Helene} is, according to 9th Edition of Encyclopedia Britannica {cfr eg http://www.libraryindex.com/encyclopedia/ for quote}, "daughter of Zeus and of Leda the wife of Tyndareus king of Sparta, was sister of Castor, Pollux, and Clytemnestra [..]." Such a metaphysical worldview is quite compatible with the ancient Greek myths, in a slightly modernized form, and --armed with the insights of philosophy of science-- we can say as the physicist of David Bohm (in a comment to the indian thinker J Krishnamurti in "The Ending of Time": I know of nothing in science that says that this cannot be right. I propose, further, that the muses WANT to be known, and honored, and that there should be an element of caution when we compare mere human beings with supreme beings. The ancient Greek concept of "hubris" is all about this: it is not given to mere human beings to even have right in trying to live infinitely, whether in time as immortality, in mind as the ultimate machine intelligence or in beauty as being the princess of the universe or anything like that. There is, then, hubris in simply saying of a pretty girl that she is a muse or angel, there is hubris when a big company says it is developing artificial intelligence, and also when such a company, or a sect like Scientology says that its members are immortal. These statements they come with--when said in a serious, pompeous tone--are such as are wont to be challenged by synchronicities; if the muses do exist, they are likely to strike down on people who harbour such forms of hubris most dominantly. At a lighter tone, if the muses want to be known, then they must have names that fit with the modern languages, and English is by far the most dominant language. In this language, Pallas Athena easily becomes "Athina", or pronounced "ath-ee-na". Helena is easy to use in modern language, Helena is Helena. The long name "Aphrodite", as been connected to a large number of love-associated words and has suffered by overuse; its original sense was derived from greek words indicating love, but if we think out a simple name, fitting remarkably well with Helenea and Athina that ALSO resonates with the modern word "love", it is obviously Lisa. So Lisa, Athina and Helena, L.A.H., may be the mantra you wish to invoke to come to the tranquility to see more of the muses. But as even the muses must be watchful as to the Semele- effect of the lightening that is at the source of Zeus, so must there be a caution of mere manifest folks that not too much of the muses, these higher human beings, should be seen. The effects of seeing Lisa, Athina and Helena too much would be perhaps as the effect of cryptonite on Superman. It is not that seeing them is impossible, but it is rather that, as Plato also indicated, you may have trouble relating to the shadows after you have gazed directly into the light. And so, in this rational approach to thinking about a form of religion unfettered by the often self-centered and patriarchic ways of thinking in the most common world religions nowadays, we can see a rational reason why the ego, or egotism--the noise of fellow human beings --must exist, and why, therefore, also violence must exist, stupidity, ignorance, quarrels, and all the rest of it. The noise is like the noise on a radio, preventing the pure reception of the music of the transmitter. But if we have a creation in which the light of the source is so strong it easily dumbfunds the intellect of mere mortal people, then it is good that mortal people makes noises so as to block out portions of this light. The noise prevents the reception of the melody of the origin; and does so, partially, as a self-protection; it is an irrationality, perhaps, but an irrationality that protects the brain again wrecking itself in too much of religious ecstasies--what the Indians (never at loss with making up new suitable religious words) call "Kundalini overblow". In this situation, then, we may suggest that also such appearently modern and appearantly very logical thinkers, speaking much of direct perception and befriending also scientists such as David Bohm--I am thinking of the aforementioned Jiddu Krishnamurti--may have overestimated the capacity of the human brain; perhaps also his own, albeit admittedly amazing brain. His repeated postulate, in various forms, for many decades at least, was that a human being can have absolute insight, enduring total insight, absolute perception, and come to enduring awakening of a kind that cannot be shattered. The postulate makes sense to investigate whoever said it. He may have been deceiving himself and believing himself to be having such insight, and still the statement can make sense independently. There is no particularly strong reason to imagine that Jiddu Krishnamurti had anything such as absolute insight, by the way. It is my own perception, or understanding, that the statement that 'absolute insight is possible'--if we take it to mean in an 'enduring' way, so that persistent 'awakening' to divine features of reality is totally and absolutely the case, all the time--is a false one. It doesn't bear up to rational investigation, and it is also false when seen by means of intuition, as I take it (although Krishnamurti disliked the word "intuition" and would rather speak of "intelligence" in the same way that most people use this word--however the words do not matter as long as we use them with awareness). However, we may still imagine that humanity is able to go ahead on the path to enhanced understandings--in the plural, and in a non-absolute sense. We may even speak of a (relative) Enlightenment--not as something that happened centuries ago, but as something that may happen in what to Zeus or Deus must be a mere eyeflicker in terms of time horizon--say, a thousand millenia ahead. A mere million years. (Such time perspectives are, as it is known to some of my readers, entirely commonplace in some forms of buddhism.) Creating something like the universe, again seen by the perspective of Zeus, takes a mind that is fully willing to call on all sorts of hierarchies in order to make it work out. Thus, for instance, the biology of the human brain has in it elements of chemistry that it plays upon hierarchically, while the chemistry of the same brain has elements of subatomic processes that this chemistry again calls on hierarchically. Also, the big interactions in nature bears evidence of a capacity to call on hierarchies of many forms. In this view, manifest humanity--people made of stuff, living inside the cage of gravitation on a planet--may form a class in a hierarchy of Zeus God-like creations, that is pretty far underneath the higher beings, the muses, and he Himself. Another view, then, of striving towards absolute insights is this: it cannot be done, because it would be punching far above one's weight. With my own knowledge of science, which is, perhaps, somewhat wider and deeper than that which is the average (speaking immodestly, but faithfully to fact), I know myself of nothing to disprove the possibilities of such notions as put forward in this essay. However, what is implied in what is said is that the universe and our human existence together is so remarkably complex that it would be a vaste to imagine that any such set of notions are all we have to think about to set further about in life's journey. There are many things to do. Some of them involve boredom. And indeed, boredom--whether it may involve working with machines such as cars, or machines such as computers, or computers with arms and legs and cameras such as robots, or concern such daily things as hygiencs and so on--may have an important function. Boredom, whatever its unpleasant features, has the merit of giving the brain, our minds, a rest and respite and come to a clarity of a different, although less divine kind. Boredom, indeed, is something that provides an opportunity for our bodies and brains to recharge. We must invoke boredom, even endorse it: and in that way, we become also able to handle practical things in life, even as we reserve a room regularly, perhaps even several times a day, for going into vaster themes, divine, or sexual, or both. When we go from a mode in which we do routines, perhaps as that we can call a Business Mode, into that which concerns the wholeness of existence, we may find, as many tantric explorers of the divine, that there may be truth to seeing things holistically as including the sexual perception; that, indeed, the orgasmic sense of perception is at once both the religious perception AND the sexual perception. This approach to religion is complicated to handle for some, for they may get so worked-up with the sexual that they loose sight of the religious aspect, and also loose sight of the legal, the laws of society, and how to relate to them at the same time. But here we need to assert, if indeed the mode of divine exploration is ALSO what we can call the Porn Mode, then we certainly must be able to splice our activities and thoughts and priorities suitably to also adhere to laws and to manners. For this, in our present era, the computers may be magnificent vehicles to prepare us for the next parts of our journeys. Tolkien, in Bilbo's words, reminded his readers that the very path you see outside your own home, wherever it is, be it the Shire or somewhere else, can take you to all the most exciting places in existence--that very same path, that road. But in setting out, we may meet people who may be far from the most obvious helpers--like the Aragorn, or Strider, the "ranger", who also was to become the radiant healing king of light in the completing volume of the Lord of the Rings. While cultivating the depth of intuition of an unprejudiced kind, we must be willing to set aside rash judgements to connect to the right people. Indeed, I would say of Tolkien's books that these constitute in many ways a map of life, more suitable than any movie and more suitable than most books, to remind ourselves of the importance of going for the deeper truths, and the paths of wisdom, where other forces-- egotism, not satanism (for the latter is an illuion, and fits only in a fairy tale)--can do its works. *** ********************** Copyright -- redistribution You are granted the right to redistribute any such essay from yoga6d.org/economy.htm without asking on the condition that the context is respectful and that no deletion or addition or change of text takes place, and that this notice is included. *** ***** [This redistribution license extends to the archive section, and to all related pages in the yoga6d.org set of sites, and you can copy and paste this notice to any essay that doesn't already have it on it.] ART, MEDITATION, THE TANTRIC AND THE TWO TYPES OF ESTHETICS IN HUMAN PHOTO-MODELLING, THE CHILD MODEL AND THE YOUNG ADULT MODEL Ever since S Freud undertook the complicated beginnings of investigations into the various impulses and instincts connected also to the erotic realm of the very young, humanity has tottered along in, at most, half-certitude about conventional morals. But every time there have been a somewhat pervasive attitude towards rethinking the whole issues, political/emotional thinking driven often by nonscientific agendas interested in entirely different things than the general well-being of all human beings have come in and slammed the doors on open investigations. It has to be said that a modern reader can get much out of eclectic bits of Freud's works, while other parts must be cautioned as preliminary and informed, or misinformed, by conventions of his time more than by objective empirical material. And when Freud was challenged by the somewhat younger C G Jung to start taking spirituality more seriously than merely a mathic, primitive form of misconstruing the reality of causes and effects, Freud had had it: the strain, perhaps, of what he had sought to challenge of the conventional morals of his european societies, had hammered him into a person who did not want to open yet another corridor of potential conflict with conventional morals. On the other hand, though Jung worked out such as--in particular--the interesting concept of "synchronicity" (defined as a coincidence to which we attribute, rightly or wrongly, deep meaning)--he didn't for real extend and deepen what we almost certainly the most complicated part of Freud's investigations, namely, those of the libido of the not-yet-adult. Now when we seek, deliberately, to be "scientific" about anything, we must take into consideration that what by a mainstream comes to be defined as scientific isn't exactly produced by a rigorous procedure of the kind that is taught as ideal in the field called "theory of science". Indeed, while Freud, and with some right, regarded his works as scientific, there exists very readable books almost entirely devoted to showing that the criterions Freud used as to what is scientific are so flexible that just about any human behaviour, no matter what it is, can be explained by some part or other of some of Freud's works. But as K R Popper forcefully suggested, science ought to have a vulnerability about it--he held up a quote by A Einstein as a noble example. Einstein, after his publications of his first works, but before some rather decisive observations and experiments had been undertaken, had replied to a journalist that if his predictions didn't come out as expected, there was nothing to but just put his whole theory to the trashcan. This possibility of some degree of 'falsification', or, as R Carnap and A Naess preferred to put it, 'instances of disconfirmation', came to Popper to be regarded as one of the chief characteristics of a scientific theory. It is clear, by the way, that this means that speculations about things that are extremely far from possibility of direct observation in any manner cannot properly be called "science" in this sense, and that much of speculations about the vastness of the universe, its origin and its future, therefore clearly don't pass the criterions Popper set up for proper scientific theorising. In other words, Popper's criticism attacks 'cosmology' not merely Freud. However, Popper isn't the last word on what science can be all about. It may be that in at least some interpretations, Popper's view of what can be regarded as scientific was unnecessarily restrictive. The physicist D Bohm (who I met several times) had a more open-minded definition of science, but yet one that subtly is highly demanding of any individual: it is the attitude of intending to see facts beyond any question of likes and dislikes. But, perhaps leaning on Popper, Bohm also wrote about the 'importance of the vulnerability of ideas' and clearly had a shared belief with J Krishnamurti, the indian pantheist thinker, in the reality of human intuition. Indeed, if we go to more ancient philosophical writings, before the more sensory/empirical writings of the 19th and 20th century scientifically oriented 'natural philosophers' such as B Russell, we find that the theme of intuition is a recurrent one. In between the ancient writers and the more modern ones, we find that for instance R Descartes spoke of self-evident or clear ideas or intuitions relative to the fact that his own existence can be deduced from the fact that he observes that he is doing thinking. He went as far as to postulate that this fact is more self-evident even than the phenomenon of material existence. In other words, Descartes regarded the fact of thinking as a more trustworthy fact than the to him more vague fact that the world exists, that bodies exist and so on. Looking to ancient philosophers, we find that both such figures as Socrates in the West, who is one of the earliest hellenes that we just may happen to have a lot of information about (through the earliest writings of his student Plato), and Patanjali, Vyasa and Shanakara, and indeed a number of other indian thinkers (where the texts, handed over in a verbal auditory tradition for centuries, before they took physical form as written papers, notoriously make them more hard to date),--all these subscribe to the notion of using intuition, indeed what we can call a somewhat both spiritual and artistic intuition, and not merely logic in deciding essential questions in life. Moreover, they shared the attitude of the aforementioned Bohm that going 'beyond likes and dislikes'--indeed, going beyond all the emotional patterns of more self-centered structures as we may call, vaguely (but not in the freudian sense) "the ego", are some of the greatest challenges in bringing forth pure intuitions and deep meditations (in contrast, Freud used the word 'ego' more in a practial rather than emotional sense; he preferred to speak of unnecessary and often trauma- based emotions as part of strains in the psyche which he called such as a 'neurosis' or, when deep, 'psychosis'). In the last decades or two of the nineteenth century, but far more forcefully in the first decades of the twentieth century, it became clear that something about the more mechanical or machine-like view of reality, and also the body and its brain, that a number of assumedly 'modern' thinkers had applied as to their general view of life, human beings and the universe had to be somehow drastically revised. Einstein's contributions turned out to be part of this, but only a part: and a variety of other contributions, loosely tied up in a bundle called, roughly, The Copenhagen Interpretation and then more broadly, Quantum Theory, seemed to be called for. In terms of engineering, these new contributions, and some more numercial and equation-oriented works done since have led to a sense in which even such as the core of all modern electronics have to be explained not quite in classical mechanical terms EVEN IF these indeed are certainly, in all practical sense for us, constituting parts of machines such as cars and PCs and phones. Looking more closely at the clash of ideas behind the perhaps slightly more dull and uniform typical views of physics as presented in textbooks and in popular science magazines, we find that the history of ideas in physics since then and up until now is not only intensely complicated, but, at many extraordinary essential points, entirely without a solution. It runs, by and large, as a ten-volume if not fifty-volume books of a single Sherlock Holmes story where things get more and more mysterious until we reach the point that even the great Holmes have to admit: "I simply don't know. This baffles me. This, Dr Watson, is certainly more than your typical three-pipe problem." (A three-pipe problem is one that can be solved during a meditation which involves the smoking of three pipes in succession without further investigation. Holmes, as is know, solved the mystery of the Red-Headed League in this manner.) One of the four or five most significant contributors to the first ripe form of quantum theory was the french L de Broglie, and it is his name that attaches when one speaks of 'the wave propererties of matter' and one calculates the frequency of "the de Broglie wave". W Heisenberg, who with N Bohr and a few others did the other parts of this early work, mentioned in late-life diaries that the young de Broglie was deeply unhappy with Bohr's notion that matter didn't REALLY have wave features--that these waves were only a reflection of some statistics, and not a key feature of the universe. At this point, Bohr and Einstein agreed, but at almost all other points, they disagreed. After a visit by the young D Bohm to Einstein, Bohm wrote some articles where unusual ideas of quantum theory were exposed. de Broglie found in these a way to rephrase the uneasiness he had with Bohr's view--and indeed with mainstream quantum theory--as a young, and were able to find a harmonious and fairly consistent way of arguing for the reality of the waves after all. This 1950s rebirth of de Broglie's socalled Pilot Wave interpretation wasn't taken further by Bohm, who pursued a related but not as drastic approach in what was first called a Causal Interpretation and then called other things, including 'an interpretation involving a quantum potential' and 'an ontological interpretation'. E Schroedinger, who helped shape some of the formulas indicating how these waves, or this statistics, or whatever it is, shape themselves, didn't exactly participate in the debate on the reality vs the non- reality of these waves. But he did feel that our view of life as a whole somehow ought to be affected, deeply, by these findings. And many later writers who have been highly knowledgable both about physics and about such fields as biology, brain science and psychology have urged that the after all STILL UNSOLVED questions about the underlaying relaties of what the quantum physical equations refer to may have profound implications, once solved, for our understanding both of the flow of consciousness and for the evolution of the physiology and anatomy of the human beings. It goes without saying that this, in turn, reflects how we see art forms including such as dance, photo-modelling, painting, general design, architecture as well as have profound implications for how we should frame our human self-education relative to our steadily more sophisticated machines, and also as to what extent we should ever relegate decision-making in society to what perhaps rather irreflective thinkers claim is "Artificial Intelligence". In what is regarded as mainstream science in 2015 there isn't a single agreed-upon well-documented repeatable type of scientific observations that breaks with the view that human beings and indeed all life on the planet may be, in a way, some sort of machines without any element of soul, spirit or holistic animalistic wave about it or any such thing. But as many theoreticians of science have pointed out, what surfaces in mainstream science as acceptable facts go through many filters some of which are the already-accepted frames or paradigms within which theories are formed. And once one begins to look for cracks in these frames, there's no end to how many 'instances of disconfirmation' one might find: but to each one of these there are alternative forms of explanations. For instance, any so-called 'after death' experience report by someone who is patently a living human being begs the question of whether the experience, which in some cases almost certainly are both real, phenomenal and involves perceptive abilities that are intensely intriguing, cannot somehow have been generated by exceptional and perhaps as-yet-unknown capacities resident in the 'machinery of the brain'. Because of the dual explanation possibilities in all these cases, and the lack of a torrent of convincing demonstrations of any such more obviously hard-to-explain-away pheonomenon as telepathy {or even more sensational phenomena like polstergeist or telekinesis}, the mechanical worldview has come to dominate much of mainstream science. There are --it has to be said--very intensely religious scientists even in the field of physics, some of whom are also highly respectable in terms of mainstream criteria--but these usually have found a way to reserve a portion of their intellectual unfoldment for a more 'mechanical' pursuit, and keep the religious aspect of their life somehow remote; perhaps by means of suggesting that God has an existence in a realm wholly other than matter, which runs rather on its own principles. Then there are some people, highly aware of the possibility of fooling oneself in terms of biased interpretations of experiences in everyday life, and aware also of the complications of going from any view chiseled out in the laboratories of physicists and up and over to everyday life phenomena and so on, find themselves living in what appears to them to be an 'ocean of direct evidence' of such as telepathy and clairvoyance. It is typical of these individuals that those who know them well cannot fail to entertain some belief in the supernatural. Indeed, it can be argued that one of the early legendary physicists, W Pauli, was one such person. And that it was he, perhaps slightly more than C G JUng himself, who came to lead Jung to a faith in the spiritual --and to their rather collaborative notion of the synchronistic as the 'acausal' feature of daily life. It was said that quantum physical experiments carried out at universities had a statistically exceptionally large possibility of showing up with wrong results if the very same Wolfgang Pauli was in the proximity. However --which is nearly always the case with such anecdotes-- one can easily speculate about the psychology of the scientists, knowing about the "Pauli field effect", contributed to making this a more and more self-fulfilling prophesy. Yet, when one experiences that a person is able to handle questions of conceptual complexity in a harmonious manner exceeding this person's knowledge, and does so consistently, if not every day then at least many times pr week, then such an experience goes beyond mere self-fulfilling prophesies of the "Pauli effect" type. These individuals tend to work best, of course, with other individuals who share such abilities. When they team up, whole societies may change. But then, not everybody has met anyone such person, at least not that they know of. And perhaps, by inversive self-fulfilling prophesy, such people as are riding on a fame wave with the sole agenda of pulling apart any hint of indication that the mechanical worldview is all wrong, are perhaps the least likely to even come near being aware of the existence of these individuals. About a hundred years since the explorations of the de Brogle matter waves, or pilot waves if you please, begun, it has to be said that if these waves are real, they are indeed utterly subtle. They do not have a weight, it seems; they do not have any restriction of any known kind in terms of their distance; they do not seem to be restricted by the speed of light; and yet they have a say in the functioning of even the smallest particle in the universe; and there is no planet revolving around any Sun that doesn't obey the whim of these subtle matter waves. Unless we had seen numerous examples of some of the features of some more material forms of these waves in the daily life of those who experience some forms of technology, they could easily have been dismissed as merely a statistical funny feature. Indeed, Einstein seemed to mostly regard the de Broglie waves as such, and yet it is exactly due to the coherent features of some such waves that such phenomena as high-speed trains with super-magnetically elevated rails can exist. This super-magnetism is brought about by a certain type of complex form of chemstry that for not altogether clear reasons is able to bring about a strong quality of wholeness or coherence in the de Broglie waves. As a result, the train lifts up and can shoot forward at near airplane speed without touching the rails. Also, though not suitable for information transfer nor for computation, speed-of-light transcending coherent de Brooglie waves embracing a few particles such as photos or phonons (particles of sound) or electrons have been routinely demonstrated ever since the 1970s. David Bohm, whose mind was influenced by a desire to go beyond mainstream dogma about the mechanical worldview, and whose textbook on Quantum Theory impressed the ageing Einstein sufficiently to invite him for a two-week stay with Einstein, offered the point of view about the possibilities of the supernatural: the supernatual, he proposed, if it does exist, exists by means of something which is having its own presence by analogy with the quantum (or de Broglie) features of reality, but it is not the same features exactly. I had a chance to ask him about such things a couple of times in Birkbeck College and later, and I have also read through most of his publications in various journals as well as most of all his books. His point of view, as I take it, is that the quantum theory, as we know it, deals rather mechanically with the patterns of reality. Even if it is strange, it is not quite connecting to the human consciousness level in any natural manner so that it would seem to be exactly it that is involved in any paranormal situation. He regarded telepathy as a certain form of telekinesis, generalising this to an influence of matter beyond the involvement of material causes, driven somehow by the quality and subtlety of mind--and this led him to explore the concept of "meaning" as a possible key to such possible phenomena. He offered the notion that there is much in common with such as the wave functions in quantum theory and to our own experience of mind and consciousness, but he did not by that postulate any identity. Rather, he suggested that mind constitutes a different level of reality and that while there must be overlapping should such paranormal or supernormal phenomena arise, these are capable of having some degree of independent existence. I mention this also because there is a fairly large number of people who have heard about this legendary physicist David Bohm but who also have the notion that he regarded quantum theory as somehow the great skeleton key to consciousness. He didn't. He was very sober about the lack of far-reachingness of quantum theory. However--and this is at the philosophical level again-- the worldview that quantum theory indicates as more real than what we could be led to if we listen solely to his friend Albert Einstein is one of universal interconnected- ness in which there is a real and highly active hidden, implicit, or "implicate" order. He saw it as natural to regard the manifest reality as somehow more or less like a wave structure on top of an ocean of fantastically powerful energies, each of which have orders of their own. In Bohm's view, then, time doesn't stretch forward nor backward as one or two or n dimensions. Rather, time has to do with a 'depth' dimension, in which all things have a potential for getting entwined. This is essentially how far he got when he died in the early 1990s in his 70s. And, clearly, this is a great work. He has managed to sift through the equations well enough to change the life story of Louis de Broglie, one of the founding fathers of the most significant works in science ever (and which lead de Broglie to be regarded as a total outsider by the remaining members of the Copenhagen Interpretation in the 1950s--see my notes elsewhere about this; and note also that there are unique challenges with de Broglies theory notably connected to the reality of the photon particle). Bohm managed to keep his head calm in dialogues with highly self-aware teachers like Jiddu Krishnamurti and the present Dalai Lama, and insist on the possibility of the scientific attitude of going beyond 'likes and dislikes' as combinable, somehow, with a profound spiritual quest. Instead of making one crazy theory about the universe after another, he settled on refining the expression, together with Basil Hiley and others, of his 1950s work as a solid alternative pathway for quantum theorising, and of clarifying what can be called a 'metaphor over the universe' in terms of the various ideas of the implicate order. In the Copenhagen Institute in the 1990s, one professor there told me that exactly this bit of Bohm's work--the Implicate Order-- could not really be challenged. It was rather what it meant when pulled down to the human level that was a point of discourse and, also, disagreement with Bohm. Those who, like philosopher A Naess, disagreed with the importance of quantum theory on philosophy, usually has what can be called very roughly for an 'empirical' attitude to science. It may not be along the lines of Popper--for instance, Naess disliked the use of the word 'falsification' (arguing that the pathways from theory to empirics and back are too complicated that any theory is ever solidly falsified),--but broadly speaking, this type of 'empiricist' or 'logico-positivist' attitude rarely finds quantum theory an argument for rethinking a more mechanical worldview. And this is, broadly speaking, much what Popper's attitude to science was all about. Though Popper in footnotes and such subscribed positively to the notion of human intuition, and though Popper strongly advocated the notion of theory as something which can be simply formulated by anyone, with ease, even without standing inside a scientific community, Popper's general approach favour non-intuitive observations and has what we can call an atheist-sceptical slant. This led me to suggest that we should perhaps stand on the shoulders of the works of Popper but consciously invite a refined concept of somewhat (by intent) objective and egoless intuition into the concept of science, as a possible stance to take in the field of theory of science. This I have longed called 'neo-popperianism'. It is in attunement with Popper's works that I formulated this approach without looking over my shoulders for how much support I got. I formulated what I think is meaning- ful and then I preceeded to put it to use relative to what I have as a personal 'ocean of empirics' relative to my own daily life experiences, namely, that of using intuition and naturally having as much telepathy as could I ever wish under all circumstances. By taking the advice of Bohm seriously--to intend to go beyond likes and dislikes--I undertook to ask again, and more clearly, as I took it, what would be a more natural worldview--in some detail--after a century with the developments in modern physics, which more or less begun with Einstein and which includes the varities of the rather unexplained (although well-tested) quantum phenomena. In this work, I have been aided by my experience since childhood as a computer programmer. A program is a pattern --with much structure--and yet it doesn't quite exist anywhere in particular. Its most pure shape is in mind. It may get a realisation on a computer, but the program isn't ever identified with any such realisation. And once it is present somewhere, it acts--perhaps rather subtly-- to direct movements such as of a printer, or on the light on a screen, or in some cases of the movements of a robot. Obviously, there's a lot of analogies one can think of between quantum or pilot or de Broglie waves and the various experiences one has of being a programmer, seeing how shapes subtly affect larger structures while them- selves somehow being ultimately more identified with a pureform. I don't mean that they are more than an analogy: but the analogy is fascinatingly close in some cases. It is also the case that such computer programs can affect one another. Some can arrange other programs. This is hard to represent in mathematics, but not hard to do for any skilled programmer using a good programming language such as my own, G15 PMN. It seems to me that when Bohm speculated that mind, or consciousness, could reflect a separate realm with some overlapping in some cases to the more 'material' features of the quantum, he was touching on a division that easily could be argued to be too sharp to fit with my own intuition. So, instead, to accomodate my own personal sense of an ocean of empirics in favour of some forms of the supernatural, I sought to imagine that the waves of the de Broglie type somehow corresponded to a set of programs, upon which--in cases such as telepathy or such-- other programs play. By this, by imagining programs operating upon programs, as some kind of super-programs, and substituting the word model for program, I arrived at the conception of the supra-model or super-model theory, as a metaphor or informal view of what might be a suitable worldview taking the quantum phenomena into account. By additional structuring of these thoughts, I worked through what could be seen as a natural, and compatible, form of some of Einstein's thoughts, visions, and equations by means of related concepts. This fits very easily with an artistic viewpoint, a viewpoint of esthetics. For it is my own experience that when there is a sense of harmonious wholeness of an embracive, even loving kind, with no sense of inner conflict but rather a lucid, and logical clarity as well as inner tranquility, that also the most astounding perceptions of the aforementioned type arise. That fact-- that those who are accustomed to experiencing telepathy usually get such experiences mostly in states of mind associated with natural, fluid meditation and ease of being and such, a dance of the mind in which body isn't detached but not is distracting--could be associated to a concept of coherence by analogy to the coherence found in quantum theory. Coherence, or wholeness, is indeed the pathway for microscopic phenomena tying individual particles together in tiny de Broglie wave functions, to act together as one whole with such startling effects as supermagnets, or any of the other effects associated with such as coherent light, superelectricity, or nonlocality. Yet the fields associated with any normal human brain are too numerous that strong coherence can arise while the brain is still alive (for the energy effects would wreck the brain--think of a thousand or a million small flashlights all shining at the same spot for even one split second). So, while we must agree with Bohm that the brain, as matter, has matter fields that do have a relative autonomy, one can nevertheless theorise about the possibility of just how overlapping takes place: it takes place when the consciousness is sufficiently emptied of noise and sufficiently charged up in an ultra- harmonious way that it reaches fruitful 'tipping-points' in all directions--we can think of the star-like shape. When the brain is so quiet that the pulsation change of even one or a dozen of neurons can make a noticable impact for millions of neurons, and there is, at gradually smaller levels, a similar 'amplification' of smaller motions 'upwards' to brain consciousness, then one can surmise that we reach the point where even individual quantum-steered particles, with quantum-like fluctuations, can have a profound say for manifest consciousness of that person. It is of course the nature of fluctuations that these can go in all directions. However the experience of those who personally have masses of private empirics in such domains as spontaneous telapathy (in a way which has been purified against possibilities of biased interpretations based on likes and dislikes and such), is that sometimes, in suitable states, there are fluctuations that are distinctly meaningful and also useful. It may be imagined that something--something very subtle--sort of 'hooks up' to the quantum field of something a neuron is listening in to. This 'hooking up' may happen over a period and then perhaps there is a relaxation of the connection, in some way (though some may argue that it is easier for the hooking up to take place than the reverse, and this could lead to interesting philosophizing over possible forms of evolutions of consciousness for all humanity by means of the intensity of such experiences). In my own metaphor of the universe, then, it would be natural to propose that one super-program or super-model hooks up to that of another, a lower form of one, one driving the matter in the brain (or in the gut, or whereever). But what would be the criterion for such hooking-up to take place? In doing a sober study of coherence phenomenon found in quantum laboratories, one could suggest that one of the features required is a similarity or a consistent contrast in terms of such as frequencies, form, times and places of connectedness locally, and more such; however the data in this regard have not been very much sorted out in mainstream science. In turning to a neo-popperian approach again, we can rather submit--beyond the question of like and dislike-- the question of such hugely significant "hooking-ups" as may seem to take place in the postulated phenomenon of telpathy--the question to intuition: what is it that leads to a connectedness, a coherence, between these subtle organic rather immaterial 'pilot waves' that may seem to surround and penetrate all existence at all levels? Here, interestingly, a whole host of the ancient and somewhat more modern philosophers, especially those who, like J W von Goethe, concerned themselves with the organic, comes in with a number of interesting proposals. Organically, by means of a kind of 'univeral perception', what is the key gestalt organising principle? But if we make of this principle a machine, it can be manipulated; and as a manipulated machine, it will be subject to questions of what would happen if such a machine started to manipulate itself. These types of themes bring in the works of K Goedel, who showed that it is an essential features of structures that refer to themselves that given adequate complexity and sharpness of these structures, they either fail to be consistent or else fail to refer to themselves completely. We might suggest: a mechanical gestalt principle cannot be self-aware; just as a robot, by virtue of being a machine, must be always trapped in severe incompleteness as regard all forms of its recognition (or 'seeing') possibilities; and, as such, a robot is cut short of any REAL self-awareness as a matter of principle. Fascinatingly, it is a central notion of just that artistic feature of wholeness associated with spending time with--whatever it is, the waves of the ocean, the patterns of own breathing, the fluidity of a dance, the golden ratios of a beautiful painting or photo, or the making of any such 'mandala' or 'yantra' as the eastern traditions of Yoga speak of, that self-awareness reaches a kind of peak just as the notion of 'self' somehow becomes less central. Thus, we find such as the Zen koans and the haiku poems as timeless elements of Japanese culture,--even independent from religion--as indicating the state of light as associated with 'having no self'. Such a state of mind, when created by hard work, by art, by the logic of being friendly with facts and going beyond the falsely hyper-active emotions associated with societal (and often political) structures, can resonate as a whole and provide, as it were, an ocean of open quietness in which any thought is seen as a distinct ripple and where perception can go all around it, three-hundred and sixty degrees, all angles. Finally, this is the bridge to the types of questions indicated in the title of this essay. I wish to start outlining this bridge by stating a question: Can the sexual and the meditative naturally be regarded as one and the same state of mind WHEN ELEVATED, or are they necessarily connected to different parts or aspects or organs somehow of the human being as a whole? The answers vary, depending on which tradition one consults. But in consulting intuition, and even logic, I think the answer pops up simply enough: the whole notion of dividing any part of the body away from the meditative state can only be entertained when the meditation hasn't reached a full state of nondivisive harmony. It is almost true pr definition. When someone is in need of therapy and when meditation is a pathway to this therapy, and the sexual energies are, as Freud pointed out, with some people, highly repressed, then the person might have elements hystera and these may be most amply dealt with by not pressing the issue too fast. But once meditation has properly 'invaded' the mind, at some point it ceases to merely a thing of the head or of this and that part of the body and it is rather a state of mind in which, as Krishnmurti and also many in the Advaita Vedanta tradition pointed beautifully out, 'the observer is the observed'. This dry formulation of what in ancient Sanskrit is written more like Tat Twam Asi--Thou Art That--can be given fiercely exalted descriptions in relgious terms, and Rumi, the poet of the best brand of Islam, and Meister Eckhardt, the medieval poet of the best brand of Christianity, give as it were flames to this cut'n'dried and almost technical definition of meditation. Now it is the human state that the brain cannot be in such a vast state of overriding clarity and fluidity and totality for hours and hours without getting severely exhausted. Rather, it is of great importance that such what we can call spiritual-tantric states of mind (the use of the word 'tantric' is here intended vaguely, by means of our lending of an indian term to indicate the type of sexuality which is felt as permeating the whole body in a healthy and also ripe way), give way to other modes, not just sleep, but modes that perhaps have a deliberate component of the boring in them. We can speak, then of an element of deliberate 'cultivation of boredom' as the necessary complement to an existence in the meditative tantric realm. For someone who finds a meditation also in the best of the best of the best of porn as art, the same applies: get out of it and into business mode, before exhaustion sets in; deliberately focus on the business mode actions for such a long time that the brain can set itself ready, as a battery with two distinct poles intact, to connect to the higher tantric again. It takes but a little browsing of the biographies of the most astounding artists and inventors and scientists of the ages to see that most of them, insofar as their private lifestyles have been accurately indicated, were powerhouses integrating just such features and modes and polaric complementarities of life as just indicated. It is clear, then, at least to me who, as I take it, have managed to find a clarity about these themes, that the experience of beauty admits to easier pathways into meditation; and that beauty is not solely in the eye of the beholder; but that it is a question of resonance and a unique combination of all that should be combined in the moment, as a perhaps surprising sense of overarching harmony. This must fit with laws of a kind that aren't human-made. We're talking of entertaining the notion of a universal esthetics, as a potential source also of ethics. In doing so, we must be aware that the laws we make to keep these societies going here on Earth are, at best, temporary gatherings and not true and universal principles and that they are often forged as a result of much hotheaded debate rather than as a crystallised expression of radical truth emanting by means of a wise process. I am in this essay not concerned with practical implementations but of what we as law-abiding citizens might regard as the deeper laws of meditation and well-being from within, well aware that it is only by restricting the expressions of some of these inclinations we can entertain connectedness to the present perhaps not overly enlightened societies we have. The philosopher Arne Naess, who I have before referred t in this essay, and who I had to fortune of travelling with much when he was in his eighties (generally to his mountain cottage, but also once to San Francisco), had an interesting viewpoint about lying. He regarded lying as not in all circumstances wrong, but he categorised different forms of lying. One was to lie to others and to be aware of this. Another, more serious, was to engage in what he called 'meta-lying': to lie to others, and to lie to oneself about this fact. In other words, if false or biased words are given to others and you tell yourself you are telling the truth, you are doing more than lying double up, you are doing meta-lying, lying at a deeper level of your being. It's better to admit it at once to oneself that a lie is a lie, put bluntly. This point of view is of value in exploring themes of esthetics: if we find as esthetically true, and in some deeper sense also ethically true, something which, if expressed, would offend what seems to be the morals to some others, it may be fruitful to lie to others; but then --to take the naessian point of view--fruitful to tell oneself than one is telling others a lie, rather than double-up the lie at a meta-level. I rarely quote from the christian Bible, but there's a phrase that comes to mind--give the Caesar what belongs to him, and God what belongs to God. Your consciousness deserves perhaps more of the truth than society. And in this way you can keep your job and all that and still be free to explore what is most conscientously the right stance to take at all deeper issues. These should not be determined by the repressed emotions of neurosis or psychosis but by the calm-headed harmonious loving insight brought about by sustained natural inner questioning. The rejuvenating features for the body of somebody engaged in a natural inner exploration of truth of this kind is usually evident, as I see it. Artists of a kind who engage first-hand in an honest exploration of the reality of beauty, of meditation, and the tantric, do find in themselves a torrent of good energies that come in and replenish features of the body that others might find are washed away only too quickly by the tides of time. The exploration of meditation leads a person naturally to ask: what are the key principles of esthetics? What roles do such as the golden ratio have in the experience just prior to peaks of meditation? Though there are some people who offer the point of view that enlightenment glimpses do not have to rely on any factor whatsoever whether outside or within, even these people are often insistent on some form of harmony in their living conditions and, in my own experience, meditation is a luxury of healthy existence that comes as a peak when one has one's house pretty much in order and isn't likely to arise in a chaotic, sloppy form of degenerating existence. Having said as much, it makes a lot of sense to suggest that one must be well aware that meditation as such cannot be a question of fostering new dependencies but rather must be a light that can fit anywhere, at any time. I do not believe in those who say they have total light or imply as much, nor have I seen any evidence that any human lives or has ever lived in total meditation all the time. We may however imagine, and with sanity, as I take it, that the glimpses of such inner light may have better and better, and even vastly better, conditions to flourish when we speak of the coming millenia. Here, we can imagine different societal structures altogether; and we can easily imagine that this can only take place after such a time as somehow nonlocal bridges to distant galaxies do exist without the inconvience of having to spend time in cold outer space. Apart from such perhaps vague and fleeting visions of possible futures, artists and people who are engaged in any form of design or creative work whatsoever, including those lucky enough to give humanity that delight called modern dance, can ask themselves: are there objective criterions of the conditions, including in our environ- ment, in our paintings, in our photoshoots, and so on, that lead more simply to the astoundingly important glimpses of holistic meditation of the tantric and interconnected and telepathic kind? Of course, one may argue that in the present state of affairs as reported by general newsheadlines this is a question for an elite. But then, the elite also consists of real and sensitive individuals, people with feelings, and it can hardly be better for everyone if there was no caring towards those lucky enough not to live in the mud or on the pavement or in a temporary camp. The elite, doing meditation, also requires care. And this care-taking means that the lofty types of philosophizing and meditations come to have positive role, as I see it, also in our present societies here, on this planet as it is. In submitting the above type of questions to my own intuition, and restricting the scope of the answer in this essay in particular to that art form which involves generating the best of the best of the best photos, I have, after weighing them a considerable amount of time, worked out the following postulates. Anyone who has begun at the start of this essay and gone with us all the way to this point will probably now just want the essences and then proceed to work further with them through own heart and head, and so I will not bother to explain much, but just state them: Yes, an affirmative yes, there are general esthetical criterions suitable for harmonious meditative holistic tantric stimuli. Yes, an exploration of the 8:5 (or, far more exactly, 89:55) type of ratio, connected to the notion of having shapes that invites a sense of self-resonance within the shape in a spiralling way, is a key ingredient in all art. It is a fact that such ratios are found both in young adult women in the absolute best of the most meditative photos found of some of the models commonly regarded as the most beautiful. These ratios play along their shapes from tip to toe, from bud to stem, in leg-length versus torso, and in the similarities and contrast also fractically playing in the various facial features. But even with such models, only a very slight permille of the photos taken can be said to match the meditative/ tantric characteristics. One can see such esthetics in all ages, of course, and in a beyond-gender sense, whether as in the queer theory or in other gender-as-performance views. And there is indeed a possibility of the timeless, or the meditative, of arising through absolutely anyone, and not just through the celebrity models--naturally. But what is of matter to those who wish to go far in this quest is that they get actual activation of the whole range of resonant beauty experiences, quickly, and practically so, through daily life. Is there then just one type of female beauty character- istics, of the meditative kind, as exhibited in the elite fraction of the best of the best of photos such as some- times arises eg in fashion circles? Again, going to essences, no, there is not just one essence. The quintessential nothingness meditative-tantric horizon has two poles in it, the CM pole and the YAM pole, as we can call it. In the CM mode, we can speak of a wave that has a free- dom, while in the YAM mode, it is encircled. The wave, or field, we speak of in the child model doesn't have a binding to the body. It is part of the necessary beauty of the young adult model that it is connected deeply to the shape of the anatomy. Bringing in Freud, who spoke of the libido, I wish to intuitively postulate that the libido has a kind of directedness in CM that is rather up, while the libido has a kind of directedness in YAM that is rather forward. These are complementary directions of the tantric force. These can be felt intuitively, by the artist. The intelligent brain relates to both, spontaneously, and yet brings forth, in own body, not both, even though both connect to nothingness. Seen from a different angle, we can say that the CM form of beauty is distinct from the YAM form of beauty,--now speaking of the best of the best of the best of photos as a way to appreciate this meditatively with a few select well-trained harmonious healthy individuals, in a proper contect of such as dance or beauty photography--in that in YAM, the temperament is more sophistically engraved in the skin whereas in CM it is free from intentional specifics (I must necessarily be vague here and use terms that the artist will intuitively pick up if at all). Then, finally, from yet a different angle, we are speaking of anatomically a different set of proper (remember, in each case we are talking of the best of the best, the most harmoniously successful photos for YOU as an observer that, upon seeing it, finds that it is an observer-is-the-observed proper moment of samadhi) golden ratios. *** ********************** Copyright -- redistribution You are granted the right to redistribute any such essay from yoga6d.org/economy.htm without asking on the condition that the context is respectful and that no deletion or addition or change of text takes place, and that this notice is included. *** ***** WHAT ENGLISH IS MOST BEATNIK? In other words, what language most benefits human philosophical development, intelligence, "dance in thinking", as well as meaningful fun? Let me explain the title of this essay. As for the main title, the word 'beatnik' is, I think (despite objections by Allen Ginsberg) better in the long run than the word 'Beat', for the latter word seems to mean too many other things whereas 'beatnik' (Beat + SputNIK) is, many decades later, still without ambiguity. I mean by beatnik the best of the Beat type of poetry and philosophy and have nothing to say in favour for the less noble features of it, of which there were many. As for the subtitle, implying elevation of English: Without claiming to know more than a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of all the spoken languages on this planet, and knowing only a couple of them well at that, I have long felt that some form of English has in it more freedom of shall we say poetic thought than any other language. By this I don't mean to say that the greatest poems necessarily have to have just the word-sounds found in English. It is rather a question of the freedom-bit. English is messy, crazy, wild and rich enough to allow any structure be planted on it. Able in English, you are poised to conquer the world by means of thinking freely about anything and everything. True, there aren't many dozens variations of the concept of "love" in English, as it obviously is in ancient Greek or Sanskrit. But by being apt and diligent about digging into the root meanings of the various English words, and having a context where can begin to define, more or less, your own intended meanings with the word -- not a telegram-sized format, but more the format of a text editor without a spell checker program -- you can, if you have the intent of doing so, wander into just about any avenue of thought. In so doing, you may want to know a bit of grammar, but the type of English you are using must have a great deal of liberty about it; it cannot exactly conform to the dictums of style as defined by Oxford University circles in the mid-20th century; it must go beyond that. It is here where American English has something to offer --and this was perhaps made more clear with such erotic writers as Henry Miller than by poets such as Whitman or the much later beatnik poets--perhaps because all of American English is the result of an expedition away from the British Isles with its monarchy and layers of cemented aristocracy and appropriate language use rules. This also has to do with humor. It isn't enough to saturate the language with irony, as has been too often the tendency with British English. Nor is it enough to saturate the language with sarcasm, as has been too often the tendency with American English. There are innumerable forms of humor and those which subtly (irony) or not so subtly (sarcasm) mock fellow beings are but two of them. When Miller thinks about life, his women, the women of his women, and sees a duck, and writes: "Fuck the duck." Then this is neither irony nor sarcasm. Read in the proper frame of mind, it is laugh-out-loud comment. Humor allows the turning around of perspectives, surprisingly, and with a sense of a fresh connectedness to fact, or to at least a sort of possible fact; and yet with a connotation that this fact is disclaimed at the same time, at least quite possibly. This requires a great deal of mindfulness (to use a buddhistic term). When you notice that somebody isn't laughing, nor even smiling, about something which sort of, at least in your own feeling, ought to be rather objectively funny for all, then it is hard not also to feel that the person is prejudiced if not also in a way hypnotised. One might say, as the old saying goes, that the limits of your humor is equal to the limits of your wisdom. And yet religion comes in and, to varying degrees, cautions against hubris: there may be things which ought to be beyond at least the mocking type of humor. When a wild, rich, nature-and-mind-and-sex loving type of flourishing American English is taken and given a kind of crystallised, technical, political, commercial format, one might get a lot structures, speaking now socially, which are sucking up a bit of intelligence from the language but putting it to egotistical purposes. Yet this is exactly why a portion of the planet has got rather fed up with features of North American politics and business practises. However, such a perhaps just judgement over selfish practises in portions of the North American societies, often centered on California and Washington DC, should not lead to a sense that there's nothing to be gathered from attending to what we can call a rough beatnik type of inspired, explorative, funny, mindful, rich and subtle American English. Let us also appreciate that it is not just a result of travelling over the seas, away from Oxford, and having Whitman's one work under one's pillow, that has led to the evolution of English to this beatnik rough American English--let us call it BRA-english, for instance. Obviously, it is also the influence of the musicality, humor and longleggedness of the african genes; it is the rawness, and willingness to engage in penetrate seeing (and the smoking of peace pipes), of the American Indians; it is also the mixture of religious sects and impulses from every part of the corner taking place in what in the 20th century truly was big melting pot in a positive sense, namely New York, Manhattan. These days, a kind of quasi-clever technologised superficial commerciality are ruling over streets which before saw such giants of human expression as the beatnik poets. There are other places on the planet, such as big cities in Continental Europe, which today have the fire of more bohemian thinking and philosophical freshness, and the honesty of dialogic exploration. Location apart, there is however a need for a proper language, and English is a good one--but not just any English--to produce such philosophical explorations, so important for the development of natural human intelligence and art, also art as that quintessence of culture called "modern dance". The BRA-english meets the requirements--as it did in the last half of the 20th century, and as it can do now. It doesn't have to be put into the frame of Tibetan Buddhism or any other kind of buddhism, nor does it have to be atheistic, or tied up to scientists who are extrapolating wildly from their little studies on Earth to what they (so falsely, in my opinion) are the beginnings and endings of this universe. The language can be an instrument in any kind of dialogue which has a degree of honesty and humor in it, and willingness to shed away too many crude rules. *** ********************** Copyright -- redistribution You are granted the right to redistribute any such essay from yoga6d.org/economy.htm without asking on the condition that the context is respectful and that no deletion or addition or change of text takes place, and that this notice is included. *** ***** THE VALIDITY OF THE HEALING INTENT AND THE LACK OF VALIDITY OF SATANISM -- These themes are perhaps best handled by means of long words, and yet they concern the daily life of many people, and certainly all those involved in any form of art or design or architecture, as well as spirituality in its manyfold forms The title, "the validity of the healing intent and the lack of validity of satanism" sums up what this essay wishes to say. I will first begin by explaining these terms as I see them, and then set about to give certain scientific, philosophical and religious arguments why it may be the way the title says. What I say is in tune with other such little essays found around on the yoga4d.org and yoga6d.org sites, and even in some texts connected to some technology stuff we come with also. I suppose I should say something of my background first, so as to better enable new readers to understand where these sorts of insights, as I take them to be!, are coming from. Perhaps it is right to say that I am a sort of artist and technologist having a healing intent; and behind me, I have a great deal of research and development work which, for the past decade, has taken place in places which has afforded a munk-like solitude to some extent. That doesn't mean that I am in the least trying to be a munk nor that I subscribe to the buddhist idea of abandoning sensuality; indeed, I find many errors with most promiment forms of spirituality and have extracted bits which do make sense when put together in what you might terms a kind of 'christianity with a reincarnation flavour'. However I do not do this according to a guru or a book or a set of books, but according to a process which I call "intuition", and which I have checked in a number of circumstances in life and found to have tremendous and surprisingly good validity. In other words, my religion is my own. I am not subscribing to any teacher, master, buddhistic or christian or otherwise. Nor am I inclined to spell it fully out, unless asked very courteously in real face-to-face meetings in happy harmonious dialogues about a particular point of it. For it would be very voluminous to spell out completely, and even if I did it by means of many volumes, it would just too easily get misinterpreted and made into a formula or method of some rediculous sort. This intuition also concerns bodily healing processes of myself and others, and it touches also upon -- indeed, quite intensely -- how we ought to shape our technology, and also our rooms, houses, artworks, and so on and so forth. However I insist that on each point where there is an intuition on a large number of such general, practical themes, there are also logical, even scientific reasons, which will exist to back them up when you are aware of that possibility. There are cases where I act on intuitions long before I have logical reasons to back these up, but there are few intuitions I've had that haven't come to show themselves meaningful, harmonious and indeed also rational and logic AS TIME GOES BY. And that is the first point I would like to offer as a helpful advice to anyone connected to both spirituality and design: give it time, see how things work out, don't bee too cock-sure about any one point, and see that you are not swathed in the hype around a particular idea of "style", however many millions on this confused planet Earth which may strongly support that style. The path of wisdom is sometimes a lonely one. Eventually, people will come along if it's right. By "healing intent" -- a phrase in the title of this little essay -- I mean something not quite a desire, but more a plan, or a harmoniously held goal, or noble ideal of sorts, held up: and what is intended, or planned for, is that what is done will have effects so as to create harmonious conditions for all that which we generally regard as most meaningful. The word "healing", as used also when somebody calls themselves a "healer", connects of course to its root, as "hale", "hail", and such, going back to words meaning "whole, having integrity, sound, healthy". You see in the word "healthy" that its first four letters are "heal". So for instance, when you create a new school-building and its interior, how can you encourage the fullness of health and happy learning and good development of the best of all the pupils? The HEALING INTENT covers also such in its vast range. To be an artist of a healing intent means that you are not wedded to a commercial attitude; of course you see money as vital, it is in most society-forms made in human history for the past millenia and more, -- but you are not willing to sacrifice the healing intent on the altar of money. You want money which is compatible with this higher, nobler goal. In some cases it may mean that you have to let go of certain quantities of money -- but that will then be a token of your integrity (again, a word which means much the same, ie, wholeness). The healing intent also concerns our communication processes. It also concerns how we relate to each other when we ask each other for help to get something done, whether as informal companions or as a boss asking a an employed person to do something which is part of the job definition. Human beings are deeply affected, as we know, by HOW things are said. It is not necessary for a boss always to command that which the boss have a right to command. The suggestion may be enough, and may be far more a token of respect for the wholeness of the other person; the command voice can be spared for vital situations where it is naturally called for (if that ever rises). Between companions who are not related as a boss to an employee it requires a democratic attitude to collaborate about any common project: one feels through things, and comes up with proposals, but not with commands. So all sorts of things like this goes into the healing intent. As a painter, a lot more understanding of the processes of the human psyche and heart are called for, for what I put on the canvas MUST make sense during the infinitely many life situations which unfold themselves in front of my paintings. The painting must embrace and upheld that which is good and whole, and support creativity and intuition and good reason as well, without imposing its own solutions. I am not terribly interested in those who cultivate satan or in particular twists of their concepts associated with doing so, but I think I understand well why they do it, I hazard to say -- better than they themselves. Just in case you don't know: in one form or another, satanists constitute quite a significant minority of the population on this planet. And perhaps even more significantly, what they do tend to create a lot of shall we say "greyzones" between them and people of more chaotic spiritual leanings, including those who try not to believe in anything spiritual (the so-called "atheists"). A person of -- to use the vocabular of this essay -- a healing intent ought to know about satanism and its symbols, and know why it is important to steer more than a little bit clear of these, even if there is not a bit of belief in any so-called "arch-enemy" or "satan" -- for instance, I have no belief whatsoever there being any reference from these symbols to such a being. And still I know that the healing intent should steer clear of them. This also concerns our language -- that we don't engage in curses. And programmers should steer away from ancient Greek words and such meaning entirely different things but too easily in our subconscioius minds associated with satanism -- such as the word 'daemon' (meaning a subtle being, not necessarily any bad at all); technologists should avoid naming things so that it can be associated with satanism (for instance, hard disk drives of the so-called "Sata" type have obviously a name which doesn't express a vivid healing intent); and advertisers should try and make money without throwing in phrases such as "the devil is in the details" (used a year or two ago in Norway when they advertised on big posters all across the city the coming of a new Mercedes model); and finally musicians should find ways of expressing the free and lovely and sensual life and the variety of feelings without throwing in satanist-leaning symbols for 'emphasis'. Satanism isn't a sort of chili-spice. It is, in contrast, -- to stick to the food-metaphor -- a kind of rotten fish stench, and not something to be added to anything when we work from the healing intent. This is as I see it, and I will try and give some arguments for why this intuition is so strong. I think that when these arguments have been given, it will be possible to see why we should only point five- stars up, and not use them in cases where the topmost point of it is easily turned around; and why we should stay away from giving the appearance of horns or "two things sticking up from a head" in our general design; and why, also, the use of colors leaning towards grey must be moderated by the healing intent. All these themes belong together and it is, I think, somewhat more interesting to see them as one whole 'package' of design ideas (and ideas for other life expressions), which we can work out whole, coherent and beautiful intuitions relative to. First I'd like to give a reason why putting in an element of destructiveness EVEN WHEN UNINTENDED isn't such a smart idea, if you're a religious believer of any sort -- calling on that idea which can be said to be found in EVERY world religion: you get what you deserve. Just that. If you put in something which is associated in the subconscious mind, at least, with destructiveness, in your surroundings, or in your art, or in your talk, or in anything you radiate to the world, then obviously it'll flash back on you and your soul and your luck. You may think that you can control these influences, but YOU GET WHAT YOU DESERVE. That's the religious impulse -- give something golden, something lovely, and you get such; give someone an undeserved pain and it'll mirror back to you, whereas the other will get twice what he or she otherwise would have got of good things. That's pretty much the logical justification, with some important qualifications, you can find in every world religion. But suppose you aren't a believer in a religion in this way, suppose you are half-way between atheism and some form of rather undefined spirituality -- "agnosticism" perhaps, you choose to know that you don't quite know -- or "gnosticism", you hope that by refining your mentality and purifying your emotions you can come to knowing -- then what about the symbols of satanism, can't you simply ignore them? Love all, hate nothing, love and embrace also these symbols, and skulls, and downward-pointing stars, and horns and other such cute things? For in some people's somewhat perhaps superficial spirituality, "loving all" is the only dictum, the only motto, and that offers a kind of lack of resistance to such symbols. "Aha, that looks like horns. Well, so what? We hate nothing. We love all. Let the horns be there, and bless them as much as all the insects, and the rotten apple, and all other things of decay." I am going to suggest what is a more perhaps scientific reason why this isn't a very good path. "Loving all" is a nice theory, but if it implies full democratic embracing of decay, I think that there are some pretty fierce arguments why this path should be left alone. First of all, let us consider that life is a miracle, and that the human being, as the star of nature, the pearl of existence, is a magnificent structure and process immensely and utterly beyond what any laboratory in humankind has come up with, or ever will come up with. Human science can HELP birthing processes, and even, for those who think it is a good idea (I do not) the conception processes, but it cannot itself give birth to the human being. Human science, with all the pride some people give to it, hasn't an inkling as to most of the things which mean most to human living -- what it is to perceive the stars at night, what is the consciousness that tells us of the sense of heat and delicious scent of the passionate girl engaged in sex, and why, indeed, sex is so central to all human beings (as Freud and others pointed out) -- even if only in not-quite-understood "spasms" (again, Freud's word, in connection with a paper where he indicated that the little child relates to all people and things sexually) -- let alone the sense of meditation upon seeing the waves, or the taste of a droplet of cold water when really thirsty. This, and so many more things about the human being, are features of its wholeness, or -- to use this more science-related word (also used in quantum theory, including in my own rerendering of it), -- its coherence. Coherence is about 'hanging together with oneself', put very bluntly. It is the least understood feature of reality, and yet when we endavour to explore how the least energy processes of matter compose larger and larger units of matter, up to, including, for instance our own living bodies, then coherence comes into play. Could it be that in exploring the coherence concept, and its related concepts (such as "nonlocality", or "alocality", -- that which transcends distance, even the socalled "speed of light") -- we are touching upon what could hint upon the true soul concept? Are we indeed touching on the distinction between life and death, beyond a more technical set of symptoms of death? So living human beings, coherent human beings, seeking whole, meaningful, coherent lives -- we are talking here of tender processes, tender flowers as it were. Right? Far more mechanically are the metals of machines, and far more easy it is to burn something to pieces, and rip apart. And so, once we consider this whole picture, and also take into consideration that subconsciously we see a lot more of the art in our surroundings and the art of the body language of each other, and of the implications in what is said and done and so forth, -- is it not clear that it is an ethical duty that we emphasize coherence -- that we emphasize the connection to the constructive and rejuvenating and harmonizing and life-protecting forces in this complex myriad net of phenomena which we call "life". And if this is so -- we do not thereby regard the facts also of decay as nonexisting or something which should be treated with total aversion or blind hate. It is possible to have a powerful emphasis on coherence and life and youth without trying to pretend that decay doesn't take place. One can have a large mind, for -- to bring in the word love in a more refined sense than earlier in this essay -- love is the grander, which can include awareness of that which isn't exactly love for life. This awareness can coexist with an equally aware emphasis on life. In this context, fancy styles emphasizing grayishness should be thought about as styles emphasizing something more machine-like, more metal-like, than the main rejuvenating processes of human life. The existence of such styles may be seen as the expression of an ageing human population desiring to be more loved, desiring symbols of its own decay elevated to a form of high art. However, anyone who is alive will perhaps find it most meaningful to be generous to the most lively features of oneself, and the greatest capacities one has to be harmonious, and generous also to the fullness of young life in young human beings (and this hasn't to do with these "age numbers" people like as constructions placed upon themselves by many societies) -- in order to get a sense of peace within, a peace where one can also listen within, and find out what is harmonious to do. So, to sum up, it is a greedy attitude on behalf of the decaying part of a human being that wishes to project symbols of decay into the surrounding, but this will not be of "selfish benefit" at all to this individual -- it is simply bad manners, and, as I see it, will turn against such an individual and give this individual bad luck. I mentioned that I understood the reasons of satanists pretty well. I think that it is not necessary to go deeply into these reasons here, but for completeness, I'll sketch three reasons very briefly. The first is sexuality, that most conventional religions are rediculously restrictive and this is a way to crave more freedom. The second is aggression against authorities in general, where one takes to any symbol -- any whatsoever -- to indicate a general dissatisfaction with all and everything and perhaps the leaders of society or the flock one has been somehow born into. The third is that some cool people appeared to do it, and one does it to attract these people -- which is not a small portion of those concerned; and they haven't really thought about what these symbols or signs do mean. As for the third point, I'd suggest, all of this is worth thinking and feeling through and learn about as the seasons go by. Sleep on it. As for the second point, aggression against stupid authorities may be in a sense well founded, and certainly there are many stupid societies on Earth! But if you are able to formulate an approach which has some promise of good living inside it without being too damn focussed on knives and horns and so on, you may find that it could have more real force and less self-destructiveness in it -- for you can't control certain fires once they spread. As for the first point, that main religions are silly as for sex -- yes, true, they are; so make better religions, founded on the ONLY TRUE AXIOM, that God, as much as Zeus, just TOTALLY LOVES that thing you know -- sex was put into every human being from birth for it to be a factor we shouldn't fear. There's no justification for those parts of the classical scriptures which refer the origin of sex to something less divine and less holy than God himself. Right? Stick to the thought of revising religion in wise ways so as to make a powerful new room for sex and freedom to unfold it wildly if you are so inclined -- your own conscience and your own intuition will be much more with you if you do it with a sense of penetrating human folly and going beyond old silly cloistre-like illusions, throwing away the fetters of St Augustine and other munks and priests and imams and gurus who have tried to impress themselves or others by denying this part of their nature. This isn't about decay, but about human intelligence and a feature of love. True, there are more features to the religious life than sex, but it is part of it -- tantrically -- and there's ABSOLUTELY no need to relegate ANYTHING of it to some imagined dark and mysterious force in reality. God is mysterious enough -- and it is quite possible, logically (see my other essays) to regard all existence as 'more or less good' in each part, in freedom from the false dichotomy of evil/good. In this view, only God is really totally enlightened, and human beings -- well, obviously, -- pretty far from even the first inkling of a bit of enlightenment (I say this in clear contrast to what some gurus say or imply about themselves at present). As a painter, I feel that what really lifts up daily life of human beings are glimpses of God's own, and absolutely enlightened muse-girls, his sublime etheral beings, and can't we use the freedom of some impressionistic dance of paintbrush upon canvas to sketch what we feel can be part of their free movement in their own deep-space? This is a fresh wind, lifting us up and above human polemics and simplistic comparison and attempts to mimick reality. Of course, we should then look to greatly beautiful model girls if we like to gather inspirations and ideas for these sketches, but, before they are complete, we must endavour to look within more than without to find a touch of perfection to the impressionism. I would argue that we can use strong colors here, rather than on computers; for computers can easily make the human mind and brain somewhat confused, whereas paintings on the wall, with the obvious sense of paint on wood or classical canvas cannot confuse, they are more obviously what they appear to be. They are SUPERFICIAL (thanks to Frans Widerberg, painter, for suggesting several years ago that it could be an idea that I allow myself to be more, indeed, superficial) -- superficial, in the sense that they have a sur-face which makes sense. (I think this 'making sense' and 'being humane' is also much of what painter Odd Nerdrum wanted to emphasize when he sought to reinvent the meaning of the word 'kitsch'.) As the Fluxus art thinker Ken Friedman suggested to Siri Berrefjord and me at a cafe in Oslo (during the time I was co-running "Flux magazine" in Norway) EVERYONE has a very lively subconcious mind picking up a lot more than what may have been consciously intended with any shape out there in reality. This being so, I would suggest that for those who haven't really thought about how much antagonism and decay are associated with an upside-down five-star and with a human being like form whose horns are more prominent than, well, heart and head and eyes, -- well, they have a bit of contemplation to do, and this has nothing to do with any belief in the slightest in any rediculous concept of satan, demon and devil -- all antique illusions in this context of us up and about modern beings doing design and art. Whether there can be a role in mythological pasts to the present via a kind of religious creation story involving certain elements of antagonism to God is a whole other matter: but not one which concerns the present moment AT ALL! And why not? Briefly, because fire -- a symbol of breakdown as such -- has to have something to consume; there isn't any fire 'as such' -- and so what it has to consume is that which is other than fire. That's logical. In other words, to shift metaphor, an apple that is too rotten isn't an apple anymore. In yet other words, that which has wholeness -- and this cosmos obviously has wholeness, when you meditate you know this by heart -- only has elements within it which has something pretty strongly to do with wholeness; and decay is just a falling away into parts that which has before existed together. This decay isn't a very smart process. It is somewhat random. It isn't something to be cultivated. It isn't miraculous, and it is seldom very beautiful. One can understand decay without cultivating it. It is not about suppression to emphasize glowing vitality and uprightness, it is about recognizing the miracle of fresh self-rejuvenating and self-healing life for what it is. The healing intent reflects the awesomeness of the life process, the other is a misplacement of our intelligence and our efforts when overdone. In this light, then, we find that the most holistic approach to life, art, design, painting and even communication involve having the healing intent, that this is what has validity -- and that any other type of intent must be called on only very precisely, and not as symbols and attitudes thrown around recklessly. ********************** Copyright -- redistribution You are granted the right to redistribute any such essay from yoga6d.org/economy.htm without asking on the condition that the context is respectful and that no deletion or addition or change of text takes place, and that this notice is included. ROLE OF THE ARRYTHMIC IN FIELDS SUCH AS PROGRAM AND MACHINE DESIGN, INTERIOR DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE When David Bohm, physicist who contributed to a renewal of an alternative pathway in thinking about quantum physics after spending two weeks with an ageing Einstein, on invitation by Einstein, centered upon the proposal that the world we see, the explicit or, as he phrased it, 'explicate' world, is existing within the higher-order 'implicate' world -- a not visible yet subtle and powerful world -- then he also spanned a series of developments in areas including architecture, music, linguistics, program design, and so on. You may wonder why the worldview of a physicist may influence things in the daily life of most people. But isn't it always so, that the worldview imposes itself on whatever we do or make? Are not the most costly buildings in the world reflecting the worldviews of its makers? After "Wholeness and the Implicate Order" was published in 1980 (three decades after Bohm's visit to Einstein), Bohm came into fashion. A number of also earlier developments was sought to be compared to this worldview of the subtle universe generating and governing and listening in to the manifest universe. Karl Pribram sought to see the activities of consciousness relative to the brain as one somehow akin to that of a hologram, which again could be said to exemplify an implicate order. There was a resurgence of ideas involving religious interpretation possibilities, while such as the organisational doctrine of Peter M Senge's group at MIT wanted to see business life develop according to more organic principles -- aided, explicitly, by Bohm's implicate order also. The computer explorations into what senior researcher at IBM, dr Mandelbrot, called 'fractals', involved finding geometrical patterns which didn't quite repeat themselves. In the 1990s, while these developments in many strands came to a head, personal computers and their networking also came to a vast commercial surge and the programs made on these computers -- not necessarily always in the most enlightened of ways -- came to influence design and art, and many fields besides, at least as much as the above-mentioned philosophy. This intensified with the start of the 21st century. The notion of that which doesn't quite repeat itself-- self-similarity rather than self-identity, we might say, to lend from the vocabulary of Dr Mandelbrot--speaks of a liveliness we see all around us in wild, beautiful nature and in the natural lively activity and shape of the healthy anatomy of the beautiful young girl. True, there are symmetries, but these symmetries are played upon by the natural 'jam session' that the arrythmic involves in any natural posture or dance. Rhythm, when mechanical, becomes pace. Rhythm, when creatively broken, to reflect subtle orders, becomes the arrythmic. The arrythmic involves trusting that order can emerge in spontaneous and new ways when there is a certain anarchistic, or non-control-freak approach to the designs we implement in daily life. In contrast, cheap design involves such as symmetrical- looking 'modules' which are plugged into one another, but each module itself made under a mechanical paradigm, without sensitivity for subtle orders or the arrythmic. Most microchips are fashioned in this way, and the tacky idea of letting 2nd-hand design become as if 1st-hand design in the 'Project Era' of Google's mobile phone computers, exemplify the barreness of the mechanical. Indeed, any use of symmetrical modules in architecture and interior design, or in computer programs, or in machines in general, typically reflect a mechanical worldview, one which lacks the subtle sensitivities involved in having the openness the the Implicate Order view calls for. Now computers are contributing in several ways here, some beneficial to open more for the arrythmic, while some ways narrow the allays to contribute to more of the stale control-freak approach to design. We have already seen Dr Mandelbrot's "fractals" give a new theoretical clout to the arrythmic, by such new phrases as self- similarity. What is 'similar' and what has 'contrast' are a matter of perception. Both require that one doesn't do mindless repetition. When people start to program computers, they may at first be intimated by the whole enterprise, and so, unless the languages and design are thought through really well --as I hope the G15 is---they will easily be forced into what my father Stein Braten termed the "model monopoly" of the people offering these 'solutions'. The latter will, in his terms, be the "model strong" people; learning what they have to offer means giving THEM power, whereas it may be presented as an empowerment of oneself. This can explain why much cheap and mechanical-rhythmic design has implanted itself on all avenues of human society with the advent of the vastly spread personal computers and their mini-versions embedded here and there. At the same time, computers have made photography more widespread, both the action of photography and the means by which photos are spread. This contributes to an increased presence of healthy, good pornography as well as artistic nudes and artistically well-done fashion photos of various kinds. All this, combined with photos of nature and so on also, become an impulse towards the protection of the more natural and more--in a sense--infinite order in real life. Also, we see with some ways of using computers, again I hope that G15 is at the peak of this--that new arrythmic orders come out of creative and easy work with them, for instance in working on photos to do what we can call a rerendering of them, or as novel computer graphics. This in addition to the impulse of the fractals, which of course is a strong one. The key feature of the very many spiritual worldviews which can be fitted into the Implicate Order approach is that of a lively universe, one in which, in most cases, the human being is seen as part of an infinite order. It goes without saying that there is something beyond the machine, beyond the symmetry, beyond the simplistic program, about the human being and the mind of the human being, and this can, in some suitable interpretations, such as the ones I prefer -- with a kind of combination of eastern notions of reincarnation with a prosexual interpretation of eclectic parts of Christianity in my way -- be seen to be beauty-oriented, young girl oriented: indeed the highest orders, the subtle universe, may be envisioned as populated by angelic beings, the muse-girls or muses, and as such human beings have superior ideals by virtue of their sheer existence. In such a worldview, the arrythmic, then, when well-chosen, allows a bridge between the daily life of a human being and the higher, more synchronistic order which it is natural for a human being to attain to. A key point in this is to find the type of design and type of interior and type of architecture, type of machines and types of program that allow the best of the 'explicate' order of our daily lives to connect fruitfully to the highest of the 'implicate order'. And in a spiritual interpretation, we would ask, for instance: what is it with a room that encourages artistic and humorous playfulness of children? Or of the dancer, such as when photographed? Or of the writer, when organising thoughts in a more professional business mode of mind, which nevertheless is listening in to the subtle orders of existence? The arrythmic approach is then to be sought: rather than sterile, mechanical, over-controlled-in-thought approaches to design and architecture that could lead to a sense that human beings are mere small objects, enclosed within a vast scheme of categories. What is to be around one mustn't have the stamp of mere human thought on it. The sense of the infinite must blend with the presented forms. To come to such design, we must go beyond the need for the self-identity in such as sharp corners and monochrome-painted elements; we must go beyond the need for a fixed placement in thought of each thing to be had in our surroundings; and we must go beyond the need for each item to have to have a story associated with it, a quote, a reference to something regarded as 'trendy'. Things must be allowed to exist on their own. This gives them a first-handed-ness, and which allows true and genuine projects -- not the tacky 'project era' of an advertisement/tech firm, but the first-handedness that comes from working with things which aren't chockfull either of microchips or of things manufactured under the model monopoly of a mechanistic and sterile worldview. Whether we speak of cars or computers, cameras or paintings, art as such or interior deisign, architecture or the meeting-points between nature and the human habitat, we must take care, I feel, to always honor the arrythmic and the lively, that which goes beyond the simplistic thought-model and the cultural time-bound reference. Only in this way can our designs contribute to genuine human happiness, which is, after all, what we all want. BEAUTY AND THE QUESTION OF THE TOMORROW -- And notes on the philosopher Berkeley's view of God and the universe Whether beauty as in the glory of a morning sunrise over wild nature and salt water, embraced by a horizon of endless light blue, or beauty through other sensory pathways, or in other forms of human activity -- music, by reading or listening to a story, by meeting people who gives rise to a sense of beauty, or through artworks or photos, or in the atmosphere of a pleasant interior or around a meal, -- in all these cases, the mind may have questions about the tomorrow, about the future, as to wether this beauty, or anything like it, can keep on existing, and whether oneself will be around to experience any of it, and questions of this sort. While the experience of intense and deep beauty in a sense is timeless, a question connected to 'the tomorrow' is a question that brings time -- what is called 'the temporal' -- into the picture, into the mind. This is true no matter the age of the person. Anyone who thinks about the future, and who has concerns about the future -- and, to some extent, all humans do! -- may find themselves thrown into questions about the tomorrow when faced with great beauty. Let us not condemn it, nor regard it as necessary, but it is a fact that in such cases the pure joy of the beauty may be meshed with a sense of potential loss, -- the mind may sour into its ideas of the future, and find that perhaps this beauty isn't there, or fear that it isn't there, and this fear may cause tears, a sadness that can be strong enough and deep enough that it can even be called sorrow. I repeat that this experience can arise even in the youngest of people: all it takes is a mind that can indulge in various pictures of the future, in which the present glory doesn't seem to fit. For instance, a young girl may find herself overpowered with the joy of being with another person -- all sorts of harmonious sensations rise to a peak, and in the midst of the peak, the question may arise: will one be able to be with this person say, a year or two from now? And then the idea arises, -- and more powerfully so if it has been nurtured for a while -- no, perhaps not; -- and suddenly the tears of loss invade the totality of the beauty experience. So if you ever wondered why some people seems to fear beauty, -- right? -- it is really not so complicated. It is the messing about of the temporal into the timeless; it is the invasion of future scenaries into the now. There are some people of a spiritual inclination who, perhaps also for such reasons, have sought to raise the word "now", and similar words, such as "the present", and "in the moment", to a kind of god-like concept; and there are whole books devoted to how one can learn to "live in the moment", as it were; these books cultivate the notion of now and keep on doing it as if the word was a piece of hypnosis, or a formula, or a sort of holy word, or a key to buddhism or to some even greater spirituality. In the wake of such books, dedicated to raising a piece of daily life language into a godhood, we then see megalomaniac over-rich advertisement companies and their associated technology companies make programs and gadgets dedicated to grabbing the now, making the now as it were a trademark of their filthy self-centered ambitions. In the least tasteful of these cases, they mess about with their phoney ideas of 'artificial intelligence' at the same time. Let us avoid any such formula made out of the concept of 'now', if I can point it out. Let us -- in freedom from such bad-taste books and gadgets and programmes -- rather explore a simple question, which is this: Is there a perspective on what is to come -- the tomorrow -- which is both accurate, as far as it goes, and which allows the beauty of the present moment, when the moment does indeed have beauty, to come forth radiantly, and with less sense of overpowering potential loss? The question is simple, although I use many words -- for a simple reason: not all forms of sorrow should be just clipped away in our enquiry; a touch of it may be just what is right in some circumstance to even deepen the beauty experience. What I do question is the need for constantly weeping eyes or similar feelings on any encounter of great beautuy. So, is there a perspective, -- not dependent on psychanalysis or pyschotherapy, and not belonging to somebody who tries to make "Now" into a sort of formula -- which is true enough, and which is so that questions of the tomorrow are gently laid to peace? I think it is. First, I would like to offer the point of view that when an experience of beauty is direct and deep and real, it calls on something within you that is not merely a machine, something which is not mechanical, and not merely a question of chemistry or brain cells, however lofty these brain cells may be in their advanced functioning. Obviously, the brain is part of such an experience, and whatever it does, it must be in a sensitive state to allow the beauty experience to come fully forth. But I do propose that the beauty experience itself is not centered on the brain, nor on the body. Rather, it is something which is at such times capable of communicating with the brain and the body, which is suddenly bursting forth and making itself strong and manifest. Some religions will no doubt call this "soul". Some psychologists, with a spiritual slant -- such as the freudian-turned-spiritualist Carl Gustav Jung -- will call this "self". In any case, it isn't identical to the sense of egotistical self-centeredness, -- it is not the ego. This higher experience you have in such circumstances is self more than ego, or soul more than body and brain. I could go into scientific reasons, and a finer analysis of what the word "coherence" means when it comes to go beyond mere cause-and-effect in the energies in the brain in such moments, and how something going beyond even the most advanced of quantum physics may be called for in order to speak of this relationship -- but I do think that an intuitive sense of it is enough to those who are not cloth-headed enough to call themselves "atheist". For all it takes is an openness to reality. Atheism, of course, is a faith -- a faith in nonpossibilities. And the atheists, it is easy to see, are also the most self-pitying and sentimental of all people, for they have nothing but sorrow when faced with beauty. Their ego is to the atheists all they've got. The books they will read will speak of such rediculous things as "The Virtue of Selifishness", and their main esthetical ideal is easily gray if not also skulls. The atheist has a self, but the ego chatters on about a nonfaith in all but selfcentered existence, and so the brain of the atheist falters in meeting with great beauty. That is why no true great artist ever has been atheist -- is it not so? I suggest that it is so. The self experiences beauty, the ego must be quiet to allow this experience. The soul, in other words, is the energy that comes to the fore, when there is great beauty. All manifest human beings will, as far as their bodies and brains go, wither. There are those, like scientology and others, who think that by endlessly repeating to themselves, and doing various tricks with their bodies, they will find that they live on and on for millenia: they won't. Scientologists are mortal, just like all the other human bodies in manifest humanity. We have however no reason to be sure that the higher self or soul or whatever we call it -- the "it" that witnesses the greatest beauty -- is at all mortal. Why should it be mortal? The soul doesn't eat, it doesn't get sunburned, it probably doesn't even have weight -- why should it not be immortal? I mean, despite the fact that mostly all religions stick to the thought that souls are immortal, isn't it simply -- and intuitively -- the case, that the experiencer of beauty, when the ego is not -- that the not-self-centered experiencer or witness or whatever word we chose, when the now is rich in beauty, -- is something that will be at work to experience just equally intense beauty also a trillion years from now? Why not? The body is mortal, the soul isn't. Combine it with any slant of religion you like, or with a simple act of pushing away the faith in the ego that atheism is all about, and leaving the world-questions all open. Let us then -- trying to avoid making it into a formula that then becomes a computer program and a gadget in this crazy human society we have -- let us then try and spell out a perspective on the future that is true enough, and that puts the future to rest, so to speak, so that the beauty in the present moment can speak fully: Beauty, just like the higher self that experiences beauty, are always there, always in the future. This higher self -- the TRUE sense of "I", which is not merely the little plans you have, but the fullness of feeling of existence in such moments -- that sense is immortal, and it will always go on. Your truest "you" will always go on, and such beauty will always come again and again: with various slants, of course, and with variations in names and forms, to some extent. But beauty, and the soul, are immortal. That is the central fact that one can stick to when overpowered by glorious nature or glorious faces and bodies, muse-like bodies if you wish. So that is the perspective on the future. To go one step further is then tempting, because it then becomes more like a systematic faith, in a positive sense of the word. In other words, one thing is to deny atheism, out of the plain logical scientific reasons to do so. But we can surely go one step further, and outline a faith that includes some view of God and the role of matter. For if beauty is going to be experiencable in all future, then, in some sense, it is meaningful to say that the universe -- or the multiverse, if we wish -- is going to exist forever, and life within it, obviously, also. This is in fact a statement that can make logical sense given certain possible interpretations of astronomical and physical data, but it isn't always the interpretation that appears most "simple" to an atheist brain. What is simple and what is not simple, when it comes to physics, is itself not a simple question, however -- and this point of view has always received a nod when I have questioned even rather atheist-leaning theoreticians of science about it. Some of my readers will know that a philosopher and christian bishop, regarded among the great classical philosophers in Europe, bishop George Berkeley, regarded the manifest universe as a kind of day-dream, thought- invention, by God. The TRUE existence of matter is in some advanced and stable and lovely sense actually within God's mind. That means that whatever patterns and laws of cause and effects, and also of the quantum nonlocal which goes beyond cause-and-effect, and the relativistic gravitational affects on the process of time, are all consciously thought aspects by God. The miracle of matter is then that this process goes on and on, whereas it is extremely easy for God to create sudden changes. God then, has the most "real" body in existence. All other bodies are woven of mental stuff of God. They are as waves in the ocean of God's mind. One can logically adapt such a view and still retain good sense with all of this reality -- it is, in other words, not a madman view. In many religions, there's a question of the "Coming", ie, the coming of God into viewable existence, as one amongst us. In some scifi writers' viewpoints, God may exist without God being human-like; here I will only say that my own sense of it is rather more in alignment with most religions on this point: that humans are God-like. That they are the result of a willed process, not a result of merely this or that coincidental mutation which just happened to work out pretty neatly, survivalwise. This willed process can admit to the existence of a lot of appearant "roots" of the genes, and the existence also of what eppears to be a great, vast past to the universe, going -- or so it looks -- even billions of years back. Why not? If God is the ultimate, well, then, God is the ultimate, and no such appearance should present the slighest difficulty to God. The arguments for them may be, for instance, that the human mind can only persist if it gets a pretty solid faith in cause-and-effect, even if some parts of it are rather illusory in core. So the Coming may be a real thing: God, having a body that is primordial and not of the same stuff that all other bodies are made of -- for all other bodies are made of his mind -- can surely place himself (yes, I would say, "himself", fully aware that the religions mostly tend to this view even while genders aren't exactly as real, perhaps, to a sole creator of all, also of the gender and gender variations, the transsexual, and so on) -- himself, then, in amongst his created beings. It is a mind-twister to see how this can be done. But, after all, do we not all have dreams in which we have dream-bodies more or less looking like our physical bodies? And the dream-body may have the same name as the real body, and interact even in much the same way with other dream-bodies as in the normal, wakeful existence. The Bishop Berkeley point of view, as I choose to interpret it anyway, is that God can maintain a wakeful state with wakeful dreaming, and that inside of this dream, he can also maintain an immortal coming. The coming of himself into his creation. After all -- many would argue -- a reasonable thing for God to do! FIVE CRAZY ADVICES THE THE UPGROWING GENERATION -- Almost every form of activism is implanted upon you; but what are the alternatives? Here's what the schools won't tell you There are many forms of activism, most of them are really a passifism, if that's the right word -- for they are woven by your country's leaders, so as to make it comfortable for them. The facts are presented to you at school, suitably modified, biased, fixed on, so that -- if your young hormones should cause you to want to leap out on the street with big posters, you will at least leave your country's rich and influential people more or less in peace. Most environmentalist activism in wealthy countries has this sort of bias. It is extremely hard to detect for a youth -- it is a matter of hypnosis. (And I am more positive to nature-conservation than most.) To see this, let us first analyse the behavioural patterns of many rich and influential people: * They avoid giving compliments when it matters, for these may cause people to want monetary reward or such * They look for potential accusations around them, gathering them up their sleaves, and throwing them about at random if they themselves are accused * They use their money or influence as a sledgehammer upon society, to implement what they know in their hearts are wrong, by means of a power that most loyal people don't dare challege * Those who are not directly in support of them are quickly labelled anything from 'self-centered' to 'whacky' * They build things and places which, in some cases, may be presented as being so as to bring empowerment to the many, and honoring noble ideals, whereas in fact these are mostly about power to themselves, and about reaping some kind of honor for themselves A handful of these people are in charge of each country, no matter whether it calls itself a dictatorship or a democracy. A democracy is usually the shifting dictatorship between two clans, which share most values, but do so secretly. The schools in each country are shaped by the rich and influential, often directly, but in all cases by means of myriad influences. They know that the youth are of two types: those who are loyal to the old and unethical, and those who want to have a phase where they say to themselves, 'I am no slave; I have high ideals; I work for them, actively; and I love what I do and I'm willing to give all for it' -- or something like that. To the latter, they lay out the map. Here, here, and also here, they say, are places where you may demonstrate and write as many posters as you like without offending us ugly, rich, self-centered, influential and powerful. Why don't you set up a tent? That will make you feel excellent; you won't change anything; and when you grow weary of your padding of the streets like that, you'll settle in and become part of the brickwall of this society, and serve us like all the other loyal slaves in our society. It is part of the layout that some parts of technology is presented as properly "belonging" to the youth. This illusion may be fostered by consciously avoiding propagandizing this technology to an equal extent to the parental class. But behind this technology is the same gang of the powerful, the old, ugly, rich and selfish people. It is their latest trick on the upgrowing classes. There are those who see through this, but who do not know any alternative. For them, there are drugs, prisons, and such psychiatrists as Phillip K. Dick battled with. In one of his science fiction novels, a psychiatrist is a talking suitcase, which a person buys whenever there's a need to get whacky -- such as when drafted for a public service. Alright, so these are the hard, flat facts. No positive thinking was employed in laying them out. I always find positive thinking to make more sense if one has a contact with reality first. What, indeed, can one do if one sees something of all the institutionalised self-centeredness and hypocrisy and mediocrity of our societies, our countries, and one respects life enough, and harmony enough, to want to do something with it, and maintain own healthy and clarity and self-respect? The sects are there, but they offer no solution, only an escape. The sects, whether christian, jewish, islamist, hindu, buddhist, or such as scientology, always have some really charming people with charming voices. These voices speak of their illusions with an hypnotic intonation, as if these were incontrovertible facts, shared by all wise people from time immemorial. These people have nice smiles and offer soothing comfort for those who say 'yes' to the hypnosis. It is, however, the character of hypnosis that it only works with consenting people. If you don't want to get hypnotised, you won't. What would not be a waste? First of all, youth is the ONLY period where anybody really learns anything. Forget life-long education -- it doesn't work. The brain shrinks some decades after you've 27. It calcifies. Middle-aged people are constantly nervous, whether they show it or not. Nothing can be learned, except superficially and slowly, in that state of mind. So the first axiom should be, learn something. But something that isn't nothing. Economy, for instance, is nothing. Market economy is about joing waves of hysteria, it doesn't work rationally; it doesn't respect the principles of the Swedish Nobel Laurate commitee in economy -- it respects only human idiocy. So learn something, rather than nothing. Learn something that can be with you even if you live alone on an island without any society around you -- how to draw or fix a car or build a house, something extremely first- hand and real and not phoney. Your youth may even extend when you are first-hand engaged. Dance, complicated dance, is something that also can be part of you -- worth doing for a girl even if you feel extremely attractive also without dance capacities. For dance teaches you many other things, unlike economy. Second, tend to your cash income, somehow -- but not by grandiose schemes which promises you the wedding of soul and business -- there is no such wedding. Business is soulless, hard, and typically miserable. So find a limited, but working plan. Thirdly, don't believe in humanity all that much. Believe, if you can, in something much grander and nobler than humanity can ever be, -- go find a quiet place within for a sense of the ultimate perfection, the ultimate of goodness and beauty, call it God or what you want, and spend time making yourself less self- centered, and more open to this. It is tough work. It means looking at all hotheaded neurotic ideas and getting relaxed enough to think afresh, through all life, about all the world. Don't overestimate the importance of doing this together with others, because that too easily mean settling into a nice kind of groupy half-sect which doesn't go deep enough. Fourthly, when things are meaningless, don't change all and everything too fast, but wait it out. And in the meantime get all the healthy sex and the wildest porn you legally can get hold of, and build up a capacity to see beauty in the natural, uncultivated anatomy of the human body and spirit also in the sexual act. There's much dance and intuition, tranquility and insight, as well as true empowerment of your hormones in that. Fifth, walk much, exercise much, stay skinny, and sleep much. Sleep long enough that you get brilliant ideas and fantastic energy. For this you need to addict yourself a little to extra vitamins -- and totally avoid all drugs and mostly all alcohol. THE THREE TYPES OF SPIRITUALITY -- The Dante type, the subtle type, and the soup type With all respect (or maybe not) for huge swaths of the belief-system called 'buddhism', I would call it as belonging to what we can call the "soup type" of spirituality. I say this knowing that there are branches of buddhism which are absolutely different. Buddhism has so many branches that, in a sense, you can find most forms of most religions, even violent ones, in some form or another having a happy existence out there on the branch of the vast buddhist tree. There is, simply, no form of religion that there isn't a form of buddhism to embrace, inhale, and blend with. Yet, the dominant forms of buddhism are of the soup type. Let me explain. The 'soup' type of spirituality admits to reincarnation, but has a great difficulty in admitting to very many more principles. True, there's some foggy notion of getting what one deserves, but in the typical buddhist stance, there's no cathedral of higher beings overseeing this, nor some vast spiritual computer residing in a subtle realm of cosmos to handle it justly and fairly. The buddhist approach to life-after-life is that, well, plenty of things happen and you'd better be flexible. Clothed in great many different words, it boils down to pretty much that. We'll put this in contrast to what I call the "subtle" type and the "Dante" type. The Dante type is easier to explain than the subtle type. So I'll have a go at the subtle type, and then finish this little essay with outlining the Dante type of spirituality. The word "subtle" has some roots in clothing -- sub and textere, or texture, as in textiles. Imagine that you are much taken in by a particular piece of knitted or, woven cloth, eg a sweater. You see more obvious patterns in it -- we might say "manifest" patterns, -- coming, again, from the word "mani", relating to "hand", and "fest", as fasten or hold. So there's a pattern you can easily discern from about one meter's distance -- that's the manifest pattern. However, you suspect there's something funny going on with the textile, and you take a closer look at it -- you see the finely woven structures, with their near-invisible warps of fine thread going across the manifest pattern. This is the sub-textile, or the subtle. It is in contrast to tha manifest. And the subtle spiritualist divides the world into the manifest world and the subtle world, and gives the role of the subtle world that it governs the manifest world in great and fair detail, with much attention to beauty. Spirituality in the subtle type assumes reincarnation, or life-after-life, but not 'self-organised', not suspectible to voodoo or mere blunt will-power; rather, a believer in the subtle world assumes that there are far more beings in the subtle world than in the manifest universe, and that these beings are far smarter, wiser, more powerful and more beautiful than anything or anyone in the manifest, and they are enforcing a subtle order -- hard to see, but it's there (synchronicities). And so one must strive to make oneself sensitive enough to be receptive to their impulses, or else one will be taken through a very tough series of events -- just to teach one. The subtle spiritualist is 'sinless' relative to views of sex, like many of the soup spiritualist type: they do not regard sex as a separate category, but one blended with all other actions; but they regard all actions as subject to close scrutiny -- sex is just one type of very many possible actions. In a certain take on the subtle type of spirituality, sexuality is reflecting the beauty ethics, and is a peak form of action, the opposite of what is to be condemned. The Dante -- or dantish, perhaps -- type of spirituality suits those who hate life. Those who hate life won't like either the soup type nor the subtle type of spirituality. (Of course, only one of these types are nearer the truth; and so, in that sense, the truest of the types -- and I myself put my money on the subtle type -- ought to suit everybody.) Dante, of course, was the author who took a degenerated and farmish nonurban dialect of late Latin and elevated it into the symphony and opera that eventually became Italian. Put simply, before him, it was Latin; after him, it was Italian. And he managed to do this because he did it religiously -- thus receiving the blessings of the more or less all-powerful dualist form of christianity existing at that time. Dualist, for it could not but believe in anything other than the end of the world after which the two countries citizens may inhabit are either Heaven or Hell -- and a Limbo just before the advent of the messiah. As is well known, Dante pictures the various compartements of heaven and hell with great and imaginative detail. In Dante's view, life is taking place as if in a house with a high ceiling. Above it, is death: and eternity. The dantish view of spirituality is death-after-life, but not the atheist nothingness after life, rather an instensely architectured and regulated death, it is the structured-death-after-life view. For Dante, there is no return to life. There's only death, and death has tremendously much structure to it, and no fairness at all -- unless one agrees in the narrow- minded ethical code set down by such folks as St Paul and St Augustine, who found it nice to threaten eternal damnation of those who even just desires nonmarital sex. As the logician and professor Lewis Carroll pointed out in an essay, it makes no sense that say that God is compassionate if one at the same time has an ethical code that implies eternal pain for a temporary slip. The notion of a house with a high ceiling is that life -- like the life of an atheist, a nonspiritualist -- can take many forms. What happens after life is sharply divided off from this, although, in the case of a dantish spirituality, it is ruthlessly evaluated by these elaborate beings with their structures occupying the domains of Heaven and Hell. Life, according to the dantish spirituality, is moving from one room with a tall ceiling into another, guided by beings who are sticking to their own idea of ethics, and who really have little interest in life as such. For them, life is just a period during which a human soul gets drafted, so to speak, to apply for citizenship in the beyondness. The 'memento mori' type cum spiritualitist typically is dantish. The dantish spiritualist is therefore critically different from the soup one. But also from the subtle type. The subtle type of spiritualism has no hell in it, and it has an ethical code that is woven together with the view of an immortal soul that somehow -- despite the ideas of some perhaps not extremely clear-headed physicists -- must go together with the notion of a never- ending manifest universe. Literal interpretations of Islam, with its fondness for war, is easily a dantish form of spirituality. DISTINGUISHING BELIEF IN NOTHING FROM ATHEISTOID CULTS Let us use the suffix -oid to mean, here, 'not genuine', 'maybe looking like it, but not the real thing'. I wish to propose that there's a huge distinction -- which every rational person ought to make -- between believing not in God and belonging to what we can call an "atheistoid cult" such as those created in the wakes of books, whether they are called Nietzsche or Dawkins or whatever. These cults may also arise around people of charisma and magnetism, who simply claim that 'all religions are rubbish', 'this wasn't created by anything', 'only atheism makes rational sense'. These people are creating cults around themselves, intentionally or not. Membership in these cults constitute something -- whatever it is -- but what it constitutes is saying hardly nothing about the real worldview of the members. For what is it to not have any belief in God, nor in any such thing as a spiritual realm? What does it mean to not merely have doubt, but a calm, settled attitude that radiates certainty around the point that what we see is all we have, and there's nothing more to existence? Only the latter is atheism. If one is fond of books by someone who claims to be atheist, to the extent that one wishes to say the same, one is a cult member -- maybe not in terms of explicit membership, but in terms of wanting to be with the horde of believers in this thingy, this whatever-it-is-but-it-seems-a-bit-fun, which then is named, and misnamed, "atheism". Obviously, what drives people to roll in for membership in cults is often a sense that one's life needs a bit of added hot chilli, and that it seems to be people out there who have got a following by saying some mumbo-jumbo. In some cases, this mumbo-jumbo is, "I am an atheist". Some seems to get a more interesting life by saying such a thing -- at least for a while. And in this interval, other people may want to imitate them, without further thought. This is then membership in an atheistoid cult. A deep interview would disclose that these members aren't really engaging in thought. They are engaging in cultivation of some people, more or less as in politics or as connected to various sports clubs such as football. For that matter, a deep interview with a cult leader may also reveal that the cult leader of an atheistoid wave isn't, in fact, atheist. This was brought out in the BBC direct transmission of the conversation between the former Archbishop of Canterbury with the Darwin-follower Richard Dawkins. Dawkins could not admit to certainty that God doesn't exist. That means that in that interview, he confessed to agnostisism. And this is probably because Dawkins, by profession a scientist, wants to be honest when faced with direct questions like the ones he got: it is honesty that revealed that the cult leader of the atheistoid cult called "Dawkins-style of atheism" himself isn't atheist. He tried to repair the error a little later by saying, at a cult meeting with fellow charismatic athistoid book writers, that it is important to be arrogant to faith. But this is not a modern thought. Do we not have many kilograms of worthy thoughts going back and forth between openly thinking, rational-seeking philosophers of various slants between the ancient hellenes? Indeed, sceptisism -- for instance as made explicit by the agnostic thinker Arne Naess, involves a rational wonder, a willingness to ask, a willingness to divide complex argments into a set of many simpler propositions and look at each one individually. This isn't atheism. Atheism is a surefooted worldview which has happily closed itself to a vast range of alternatives, sticking to the mantra that it is most rational to be closeminded. All alternatives to this is agnostisism -- and religion. Just for the record: the impulse for the human mind, for mostly any human mind, to look for a central organising principle means that most people look for a leading person -- whether imagined person, or an actual person in the surroundings. Agnostism easily leads to a kind of pantheistic spirituality, and a pantheistic spirituality, at depressing times, easily becomes satanism -- for the same reason as just mentioned, that there's an inclination towards finding an organising principle, even if something as absurdly unphilosophical and low-minded as the satan concept. As is well known, satanists cannot claim that they are atheists, however much they want to claim that. They are religious believers, it is only that for some reason, perhaps associated with personal trauma, they are preferring the somewhat irrational stance that instead of life having a holistic source, there's life and something having a consistently inconsistent radiance towards the rest of life. They partly adopt such a stance for fun, thinking that it cannot hurt, and it is a bit more thought-provoking than a simple, sheer absence of belief in anything spiritual of any sort. Of course, given the muddy low-mindedness of the quasi-logic of satanism, it does hurt. But this is the type of worldview that, in practise, both Nietzsche and, later on, the ignoble writings of Richard Dawkins, often lead to. They do not lead to a belief in nothing, merely to a cementation of sarcasm inside the mind so that it refuses to do the obvious, which is to explore by own intuition. However, let us grant that it is easy to be arrogant against literalism. This includes christian and, even more obviously these days, islam literialism. It includes also a willingness to challenge also such as the Pope in the Vatican, who, despite an obvious liberal-mindedness in himself, refrains from the altogether obvious and rational steps it is to do such things as to embrace full use of prevention in overpopulated areas, and to give full blessings to a freer sexuality than the irrational narrowmindedness of St Augustine. The lack of rationality of the denial of bisexuality and the lack of rationality in denying the sexual life of children were brought forth with great strength in the best parts, eclectically speaking, of Sigmund Freud's works in the earliest decades of the 20th century. The Pope is still steeped in literalism -- a form of extremism. A religious believer, seeking also the honesty that Dawkins would like to associate with science, would, like Dawkins, suggest that the Pope isn't worthy of belief. I do agree. But that is going against the cult of the Vatican, it has nothing to do with worldview directly; nor does it say anything about the existence of God; and, hence, not about atheism or its alternatives either. And just as it is part of the islam literalists to find quotes and passages in their scriptures that condemn jews, and hence, Israel -- despite that, in the very same scriptures, "Israel" is also the name of a muslim angel, -- there are literalists amongst jews who, like islamic literalists, would easily take to violence to defend their faith against insulting practises -- as news have told about. In this regard, it is to be noted that the idea of "judaism" and the idea of "jews" -- a branch of the semittic, just as muslisms in a sense is another branch of the semittic -- is not one cult, but a set of cults. Some of the jewish cults have strongly embraced bisexuality and indeed have done great positive work for increased rationality at this point. The very same cults may, in part, entertain certain traditions associated with the jewish cults, but without the component of religious faith in it. In short, judaism isn't as much a religion as a set of cults, or a set of sects, and a large amount of scriptures, although some -- very few, perhaps, who employ the notion of "jew" -- in fact are engaging in the concept as a worldview and religion. Let us say that just as practising yoga is compatible with being, say, a Buddhist or a Hindi (indeed the Buddha himself did yoga, it is said), it doesn't mean that practising yoga is the same as having belief in buddhism nor in hinduism. One can, like the many catholic nuns who engage in eastern forms of meditation and training, for instance be a christian; and indeed many in the West who do yoga are either christians or agnostic, and some are believers in islam and some in jewish scriptures, -- and there are other variations as well, of course. It is probably the case that in these days -- hopefully soon belonging to the ancient past -- where socalled 'social media' is dominating many people's lives -- a superficiality about worldview fits the makers of these social media. They want, for advertisement and surveillance purposes, to put people in categories. Their as-if statistical studies of the population, doled out to society by means of news stations, invites superficial thinking about worldviews, and assumes that simple statements like "I am atheist" in fact do make sense -- when a deep interview would, in most cases I believe, show with manifest clarity that the statement doesn't have grounding in that person's psyche at all. For most people, the moment of truth, then, will be in the seconds they imagine that the body has had it: it will be the thoughts coming up at this instance that speaks of the true worldview. Most people, unless in such an instance drugged or without brain capacity, would then -- perhaps shamefacedly -- realise that they are, indeed, believers in a God after all. This I submit. For what it is worth, let me also add that after studying mostly all of what has gone on with the more important trends in science since the various inceptions of science and natural philosophy, up to the most advanced physics studies of the present day, it is a perfectly rational thing to be a believer in God; and it is also perfectly rational to refrain from believing that the postulates offered by neo-darwinists go anywhere near in explaining the intelligence of the structure of life (see my comments on the computation of 'randomness' in various essays inside this column and in its archieved pages, for example). /////Quote in this wind RECENTLY OVERHEARD The fight against the twartedness of mind that we may call 'ego' is chiefly a fight against envy and its related forms, as jealousy: and what must be victorious in this fight is generosity, -- not just any generosity, but the generosity that is the victory over envy. And for a young person, life cannot offer a better laboratory of research into generosity than healthy groupsex. *** HOW AN AWAKENED TECH JOURNALIST OUGHT TO REACT WHEN A NERD, OR AN AD MAN, SAYS, "AND THIS HAS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE" Granted, the human mind isn't perfect. But at least, it has the POTENTIAL to grasp a situation, and relate to it intelligently -- every human mind has this capacity. And every computer is forever bound by the rules given to it, no matter how cleverly made rules it has got. There may be rules for how to make new rules; and rules for how to make rules for how to make new rules. But the computer can never step out of itself and ask, "What is it really that I'm doing?" It is forever bound within its non-mindfulness. There's nothing real about the apparent "real-time" of a computer. But that doesn't mean that it isn't possible to fool human minds into believing that the world is sort of consisting not only of natural minds, but also of artificial intelligence minds. This foolery is what every intelligent tech journalist ought to have put behind herself, or himself. It is a foolery that can be cured if one spends time with this simple question: what is it that distunguishes a mind from a machine? A mind, put simply, can put itself in parentheses. It can refer to itself, in a flash, and in that same flash, without use of such artefacts as 'random generators', step outside of itself, and produce an insight into what it is, and what is going on, and what is the intelligent response. This is what minds do all the time say, when driving cars, and other objects do not behave as expected, not even nearly as expected; or when the car itself doesn't behave as expected. Do we not hear nerds and ad men say that more than "ninety percent" of traffic accidents come from what they with glib self-assurance call "human error"? Just think of what they are REALLY saying. They are saying that all the very many thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of percent of accidents that never occurred because humans did just the right thing, is to be ignored and the focus is to be on the cases where drivers were drunk or asleep or texting on their cellular. All the world's great car traffic proceeds as it does, with the ENORMOUS well-being it produces, and the fantastically low rate of incidents, due to the magnificence of the human mind. The statistics is just staggering: compared to the potential number of incidents, the actual number is a tiny fraction of a fraction of a fraction. And this is because the human mind works so fantastically well. We have the experience also from airplanes: it has been shown that when pilots sit behind an over-automated autopilot for airplanes, they gradually get stupider and stupider, and when the errors -- the computer errors -- set in, as they always do, only the pilots that have been constantly trained to take manual control over the air- plane in all sorts of circumstances are well able to handle what is going on and ensure that there won't be an airplane crash. There was some over-enthusiasm on behalf of autopilots in airplanes for as little as five or ten years ago. Then it gradually dawned on the world's airplane makers that human pilots are best when it matters, and that has got to be how all cockpits are constructed: to give the human pilots regular sharpening of their talents and abilities, a refreshing of skills, because the computers won't always do it right. The modern-day struggle between computer and mind is not a real struggle. The mind has won -- logically, conceptually, and absolutely, after there was a quiet academic war in the 1920s and 1930s about this. As for instance Roger Penrose, Oxford mathematician, told in his classic textbook "The Emperor's New Mind", the whole computer concept was wrought in a vain effort by Alan Turing to defeat the result by the German mathematician Kurt Goedel from the beginning of the 1930s -- a result which stated that no mechanical route procedure can ever refer to itself. It gets caught in an infinite loop. Alan Turing wanted explicitly to do away with the need for human intuition -- these are his very words; and in this effort, he conceived of the abstract "Computer" idea, and, as Penrose and many others of reflection and thoughtful consideration have pointed out, Turing only succeeded in strengthening Goedel's original result. In short, the human mind is touching an infinity when it rescues a situation from being at the merce of silly rules. The computer is always at the mercy of silly rules, no matter how much ad folks and nerds may want to cover up this fact and confuse the realities in order to sell in their products. This is what every tech journalist ought to know, so that we get a meaningful development of technology in the human welfare society in the upcoming decades and centuries, as I see it. [[[Technical note: there are some who argues against the interpretation that Goedel's result shows that the human mind is beyond a machine, but most of those who have argued against this interpretation have done it on a mechanist agenda, without proper insight into the potentials unleashed by the worldviews associated with quantum phenomena for what mind can be in this world. It is also safe to say that those who argue that all minds are mechanical probably are cementing their own functionality into a very narrow field: it is to be hoped that such folks never get a foothold in the mainstream, for that could damage the minds of many more. Healthy philosophers and reflective thinkers on the mind/machine questions agree that the human mind is likely to have a huge potential which goes beyond the machine in principle, as well as in praxis. For more about Goedel's incomplete- ness theorems, see for instance my own work at http://www.norskesites.org/fic3/fic3inf3.htm -- the text document which is found there about Goedel.]]] COMMENTS ON THE QUEST FOR THE HOUR OF SOOTHING PHILOSOPHY -- And that which goes beyond the temporary fluctuations of social interest In its roots, the word "philo-sophy" means, of course, the love of knowledge or wisdom, for instance as represented by the ancient Greek muse-being (or "goddess") Sophia. In modern English, as we know, the word "philo-" is also used as a suffix, sometimes playfully, to indicate enthusiasm (a word meaning "God within, en theos") perhaps a hobby or a pleasantly eccentric activity. Thus, for instance, fans of whiskey may perfectly well construct a concept such as whiskeyphile and no eyebrows raised. There are uses in medicine of -phile which signify a reckless, sick enthusiasm, but then even the concept of 'falling in love' has got a place in the diagnostic standard manuals in such as psychiatry and who takes psychiatry seriously anymore after all the nonsense among the professionals in the field revealed through eg famous court cases (eg the one against A Breivik)? Aristotle held that the conquest for knowledge has a value in itself, and not merely a value inasmuch as it can give us more power in the world or make us better at this and that. This quest, he maintained, has its own rewards, its own meaning. While we are physical human beings who must, by virtue of being physical, tend to physical and social reality to some extent even every day, it is part of the life of the philosopher -- as we can call anyone devoted to the love of wisdom for its own sake -- to set aside time and physical working space for this pursuit. The mythologist J Campbell spoke of this as a 'mythic time', or mythic hour, where we so to speak -- or even sometimes literally -- draw a circle around ourselves and seek to go deeper, in contrast to going outwards. Let us consider, in light of such a soothing space of questing for deeper insights into wisdom and myths and branches of philosophy, what it means to partake in social life -- and the quest for fame and fun in the social realm. While some would maintain that the sole purpose of the social is -- especially for those with much testoteron -- solely a subtask under the mastertask of getting laid, there are plenty of others who would speak of the social as a source of meaning. Occasionally one can hear some declaring the social to be the very source of meaning for any human life. I hope that when we hear this, we also take mental exception about this statement: a person who says this probably has very little private space, and would be at the mercy of social fluctuations -- with little initial capacity to cope should the world become indifferent to this person all of a sudden. The world -- the social world, that is -- does fluctuate a lot. It has phases, a somewhat frenetic (and not very enlightened) activity may center around a certain thing or person or set of persons, and may do so in ways which make it seem that just about nothing else matters than being part of the frenzied run. In this frenzied run, in the 20th century, we saw for instance that socialism, in its various forms, come to be one of the social things of frenzy; scientific conferences and publication in journals was another social thing of frenzy; and early in the 21st century certain branches of the internet of computers and phones have become social things of frenzy. Elements of superficial but socially amiable and fun and fest-like living can persist within such frenzy and that part of it can be stimulating for anyone to engage in, philosopher or not. It is when the persistent rushing into something exclusively social becomes a twarted form of fascism and a form of escape from taking life seriously -- and a distraction, a pillow so that one doesn't feel the actuality of how one is working, how one is meditating -- or avoiding to meditate -- how one is eating, or over- eating -- and so on -- it is then a warning finger should be raised. Philosophy is, in a sense, also an 'escape', but it is an escape that may fortify all aspects of one's life, including the social ones -- it is, in a sense, an escape that works. It is a deepening of appreciation of all life, not so that one begins to hate the social (though there are philosophers, such as Shopenhauer, who may have inclined in such a direction), but so that the timeless can get a place in everyday life. And in between the timeless, or eternal, and this day, there are other considerations, such as -- what will your next life look like, if you keep on living like this? -- what, if anything, is the good of what you're doing today seen in a perspective of decades, centuries, millenia -- does it really benefit humanity? These big questions aren't easily solved. And that's part of the reason why philosophy is an infinite pursuit. There's also little doubt that philosophy will, at times, touch on the questions of God, soul, origins, muse-beings, spirituality, intuition, the cosmic meaning of such as the concepts of beauty, love and sex, and other such things. Ultimately, human beings aren't capable of absolute knowledge, only glimpses of such: and there's no logic that can, without illogical ideas at the bottom, declare that life has no meaning or that it is certain that God doesn't exist or stuff like that. Philosophy, just as a 'mythic hour', should meaningfully start with a grand sense of cosmos, in the sense of awe and wonder -- akin to being suddenly exposed to a vivid starnight after many days of cloud or spent in citystreets where electric lights and posters shield the full perception of stars, stars as one can see with shocking clarity on such as a relatively wild beach at a calm night. Just as it makes sense to say that we don't know the stars, but have glimpses of them, so also can we say that we don't know the answers to the greatest questions, but -- by intuition, at lucky moments -- have glimpses of the answers. This is a positive sceptisism, or an open-minded -- and logical -- wonder. When one spends some time doing this, one tends to get back to certain 'tenets', if that's the word I want -- I wouldn't want to say 'axioms', for it is a too pompous word. 'Core ideas' is perhaps a better phrase. In order for a philosophizing hour -- perhaps with elements of writing, reading, music, watching some art and photos, doing some drawings, or the like -- to have good sense, -- in order, then, that such an hour, or couple of hours, to be soothing, some core ideas tend to come in again and again -- not just in my own philosophizing, but in that of a number of writers in the field of philosophy throughout the ages. And these are -- * There is an origin of all that is, * and to this origin such as beauty matters, * and humanity is both part of this beauty process, * and can contribute to it * and related words in this is also: love, joy, goodness and truth * and this conquest goes beyond the existence of merely one particular body, so one shouldn't identify too much with it, but look beyond it * and art, including engaging in use of language as art, make sense within this grand perspective A soothing philosophy hour (or hours), can then build on something very roughly as this, and it can be part of this time to identify some means, however small and anonymous, in which one can contribute to a sense of something beautiful existing -- now, or by sowing a seed somehow, in the future; maybe in the vastly distant future. We can bring in the notion of 'butterfly effects' here: the little effects, the mere change of the flow of air at some place, go into the flow of causes and effects and, the further we go into the future, the greater the implications become. It isn't as if the value of the action diminishes -- in a certain sense, it increases. But it may not contain your name-stamp on it: it can be perfectly anonymous. This should be okay with you: this is exactly how one can see that philosophy can go beyond the dependency on the temporary fluctuations of the social realm. In the social, some things are hot and others aren't; but seen with a philosophical angle, an action can contribute to future beauty and partake in deep meaning. /////Quote in this wind RECENTLY OVERHEARD The easy healthy barefoot gait of the slim longlegged young girl has more power in it than all the careworn scriptures of this world. *** /////Quote in this wind RECENTLY OVERHEARD There are two types of religiosity in this world -- the type that preceeds the transition of "Zeus" into "Deus", and the type that come after it. The type that prceeds it has God -- Zeus -- wildly sensual and sexual and seductive and fun-loving, even while God -- Zeus -- also is a judge, and a harsh judge. The types of religiosity funded on the Latin concept of "Deus" have retained only the 'harsh judge' part of Zeus. *** /////Quote in this wind RECENTLY OVERHEARD Power cannot replace innocence. *** WHAT THE DATA-STORAGE MANIA OF THE PRESENT ERA LOOKS LIKE -- Invoking the worst of metaphors It is said that -- and I think it is credible -- that both big companies and many, or most, states have great fun storing data without perhaps even knowing how to delete any of it. They think, perhaps, they are very clever. They think, perhaps, that they are doing something sound and sane. And there are people -- a growing number in the world -- who think that there is something essentially and deeply wrong about the excessive data storage. That it is, in some way they perhaps aren't quite able to express, part of -- human dignity, societal welfare, and a kind of spiritual upliftedness to let bygones be bygones and not let dust accumulate on records of past deeds of all and everyone. But so far, I haven't seen this expressed in terms of a devastating metaphor. I have heard many descriptions of the practise, and most of them in negative terms, but for all who have provided a poetic image of the activity it hasn't been really bad. We have heard prosaic -- strong, but still just prosaic condemnations of such as Facebook's (and now also Whatsapp, Instagram and such) storing even of what is typed and THEN deleted and re-typed in one of their cooled servers at Iceland or whatever for each of their supposedly trillions of active users. And Google's storing, perhaps quietly with the support of those who are not only in the employment of Google, but in the employment of some too-secret-service-to-mention as well -- everyone's searches, and gmail emails, and Youtube activities, for at least three decades. And it is well known that companies like Apple and Oracle, and even more so Microsoft one can guess, do not even know of any difference between secret services and their own companies. . The frontdoors are the backdoors and the backdoors are the frontdoors. Any service, furthermore, set up in Spooky Silicon Valley, such as PayPal, is probably also having an identity problem relative to such surveillance agencies as NSA. They make people put in private info about themselves in order to bring back forgotten passwords -- and this info is safely tucked into databases which, perhaps, or probably, are stored under the "never forget" slogan, and made available to these agencies which presumably set up some of these services, or at least supported their setting up, just to gain more privacy-offending data, which, in their private reports to themselves, is sometimes called "light". The sum total of this folly is denoted "Intelligence". Russia, China, USA, Britain, and probably most countries in the world all have their share, some worse than others, of practises which contradict the foundations of citizenship, equality under the law, and right to private lives of citizens not guilty of anything. Each of these countries have companies set up by the state to give 'free' services to the public, while in practise being nothing but the filthy arms of the privacy-offending surveillance agencies. Each of these countries censor the net, not just for terrorism but for lack-of-clothes and for just anything that pops into the heads of the leaders as unwanted. Of course, in dictatorships things are generally less liberal than in the states that at least with a modicum of honest can call themselves 'democracies'. In Russia, for instance, any website with a quantity of followers in excess of about one-thousand of a percentage of the population must now register as "Mass Media Outlet" and conform to the rule of not saying anything to the dislike of Kremlin, or have its outlet shut down. We are sure that if Russia could afford it, they would have been much less liberal -- one-thousand of a percentage is, after all, lots of people. Why not simply say, any website opened by as much as ten people during a year or so is "mass media"? Get the weed away. That will mean much less immoral Hooliganism of the type Pussy Riot involved. Singing in a church against the leader! What state of affairs the country has come to! A brisk office woman interviewed on BBC -- one who worked for a supposedly successful 'social media' oriented advertisement company, put it this way: It occurred to people that there was less trouble not deleting the data, rather than deleting it. She seemed quite happy about it, bitch. She even went as far as to compare the use by companies such as hers of the socalled "data exhaust" of individuals using the net to a form of "recirculation", rather like the reuse of Coca-Cola bottles; perhaps she hoped for protection under environmental agency for their privacy-offending behaviour. However, -- and I do this, as you notice, with some caution, -- there is a metaphor. It is, I find, a metaphor of a certain type that I am myself extremely hesitant about using. I writhe in disgust when I hear rappers rhyme over the word, and I think that, by and large, there's too much medical gossip around, and people should reserve talking about bad illnesses for the medical profession and not make it into a headline thing. But since the data storage enthusiasts are going on -- perhaps with some more resistance than before, thanks to the famous snowdenian effects -- they are going on with their own type of passion, and they are still earning money, although perhaps not such vast quantities as before, when 'privacy' wasn't that hot topic -- I have decided to lift into the public eye a certain metaphor of the very worst kind. Again, I wish to say, I do it hesitantly, for I hate medical metaphors. But something has got to be done, and so I serve this metaphor hereby: There was once -- this is reality, by the way -- there was once a famous russian brain researcher named Luria. At least one of his books was translated into English, and his story of a famous case has been mentioned in mostly every university college level psychology introduction book for decades. You can look it up, but I think the pseudonym, chosen by Mr Luria of his case, was "S". This person "S" was, on the face of it, quite fantastic. For a while, "S" worked in some company where it was important to write exact reports of meetings, something he appearantly did, to perfection, some time after the meetings -- without ever using notes. The brain researcher, Mr Luria, explored this person "S", who had come into his attention, partly as a phenomenon, and partly -- as we shall soon see -- as a patient. It turned out, as Mr Luria presented it at least, that "S" never forgot anything. ANYTHING. Everything experienced, visually as well as in terms of exact sequences of words heard and other experiences, was available, ALL THE TIME, in the sense of FULL RECALL. Mr Luria explained however, that on some occasions, "S" found it important to forget things. "S" had invented mental techniques for doing so. They included such mental apparatus as the image of a trashbin. "S" would mentally move thoughts he wanted to forget into his idea of a trashbin, and force his overcooking brain to forget it thereby. So far, so good. But "S", as it turned out, wasn't healthy. It is here we see the transition from phenomenon into patient. He couldn't keep on for long. And it is here we touch upon the promised metaphor. "S" had brain cancer -- a big bad brain tumor. So, that's the metaphor for these big companies and these privacy-offending states -- which includes Britain with its GCHQ, and such databases of sadness as Dun & Bradstreet. Storage without deletion of anything is like the man "S" -- a brain entirely out of order, a brain affected with the worst disease of all, the brain of a person whose life couldn't unfold. It is part of the beauty of life to forget -- and forgive. It is part of the dignity of a state, and of a company, to give people new chances, and leave it to higher authorities than these material institutions to judge over people. It is part of the promise of life to let bygones be bygones, to meet the other without a past, to relate to neighbours without a fixed image of them, and start each day with a fresh sense of freedom from the past, combined with a responsibility that stretches deep into the future. It is this responsibility that we as human beings with very powerful computers now must live up to. Computers, whatever their merit, must be kept in check. We mustn't rely on them too much in any way; we mustn't overprogram them; we mustn't make them into objects of addiction, and we mustn't program them so that they become addictive, not for individuals, not for states, and not for surveillance agencies, who, in a limited and precise sense, do have a right to engage in some computer use, obviously. WHY LONG-TERM LOW-LEVERAGE CURRENCY TRADING MAY MAKE SENSE DESPITE THE LACK OF STRONG REGULATIONS IN THE CURRENCY TRADING MARKET -- A conservative point of view Given the international situation as to the regulations, or lack thereof, concerning the currency market, one must consider certain possibilities in order to be positive to the options of, after all, engaging in currency trading in a meaningful way. Let us first note that legality is, for most institutions, number one premise, under the top-goal of making a profit; but for institutions with a wider group of activities than just one, solidity and trustworthiness come high up on the list of premises. This indicates that one should choose something like a bank rather than a dedicated broker, in order to get a connection to the 'solidity' premise. Let us further note that it is in national interest for most nations, as they define themselves, to make the most of the potentials of secrecy as to the exact currency trading values -- such as dollar vs this or dollar vs that or some other pairs -- so as to contribute to the stability of federal funds, national banks and such. Thus, for instance, you may find, if you look around (e.g. in Wikipedia), that you find links to a statement such as by U.S. Federal institutions as for a 'daily spot price' of the dollar versus major currencies -- but you may also find that this is published only after the day, if not also after the whole week has passed. If you find a link to a place that offers second-by-second update, that place will at once be a power factor in the field, and that power will lead to potentials for making extra profit for those operating that power. Since the prices aren't regulated, you can take it for granted that such changes -- or, if you wish, "manipulations", -- are the order of the day. However, if the institution, as said, is a bank, it has a trustworthiness reputation to tend to. It may be at times tarnished by the activities in certain sections of the bank, but banks, at least those that operate actively in the potentailly vast retail market, must tend to their reputation and must try and repair impressions of any other than top solidity, and this has a moderating influence on the degree to which they would like to engage in legal but very narrowly self-interested movements in the currency market. A big bank with a reputation of solidity may find, indeed, that nothing less than a percentage of the reserve currency capital of a nation is put into an account -- courtesy of the government of that nation (the same nation, or a foreign one). In order to maintain trustworthiness relative to such possibly very wealthy customers, the prices, even in the internationally unregulated and decentralised currency trade market, must make more than a little sense -- even if there is no objective second-by-second text dump of the prices from one objective disinterested tender of the world's currency prices to compare with. Add to that that some banks are headed by people of a faith of a kind which emphasises honesty and brotherly and sisterly love and plenty of thoughts of the hereafter: this may lead to internal regulations being tightened up and followed up to a greater extent than banks devoted to 'carpe diem' types of materialistic philosophies. However this is perhaps not entirely a point to be trusted all the way through. I may have got the facts wrong here, but I do think that the very valuable program MetaTrader, which has a classic version named 'MT4' in today's jargon, is a product of Utah, and presumably then a product by christians of the mormonic slant. This program, as I've said, is valuable. It is pretty good. But it is also the case -- and any trader using it or any other trading program should know this -- that from the point of view of a broker, it offers very cosy opportunities for very advanced manipulation of prices which is so that even people of relatively thin capacities to program may be able to do cunning things with it. Still, MT4 may also perfectly well be used honestly, -- it is, I think, not intrinsically manipulation-oriented; but it is quite limitless, put that way. Let us imagine that you would want to use a trading program like MT4 to handle what amounts to a portion of your wealth. If you then would like to minimize chances of being in a constant state of cyberwar with unknown scripts at the other side of the MT4, why not choose a bank that delivers bad prices instead of a little broker that delivers unbeatable prices? A bank that takes a solid fee by shoring up a solid 'spread' -- ie, buy/sell difference -- is apparently wanting to earn money pr each transaction rather than by funny prices. A broker that pays you money to trade with them is pretty sure that their scripts can't be beaten. They may in turn be a customer with a bank that has much heavier prices. They have got to make up for it, somehow. Let us further imagine that where the justice system isn't pushed around by governments, nor is practically non-existent, you will have companies that think twice before doing things severely the wrong way. That speaks in favour not just of banks, but of banks situated e.g. in the E.U., just to give one example. But still this isn't enough. Whether you want to trade with a thousand dollars, or a million times that much, you are still facing a whole world of fluctuating prices without a common ordering principle to them, without, indeed, any commonly set measurement standard -- for currencies, there is no atomic clock box in a British Museum, there is no laser light determined size of the meter, nor is there, at a more mundane level, any Nasdaq or the like with official prices. There's just money floating around, and banks trying not to float around, and all the rest of us. Add to this, after Turing ill-fated attempt to break with Kurt Goedel's disproof of the notion of the intelligent computer, Turing invented the computer concept and elevated it to a sufficient degree that computers are now everywhere, contributing to the money flow, and, in a certain sense, also polluting it. Turing, who committed suicide, didn't show that artificial intelligence was possible; he didn't disprove the notion that intuition is necessary; but he did imagine that very cunningly made computers could be made -- indeed, computers which could fool (a bit stupid) people into thinking that they were thinking. So in a sense, it is Alan Turing's fault that we have MT4 today, and all the other trading platforms. But this we have to live with. The fact is that this 'turing factor' connected to money amounts to a more or less irresistble impulse to fix on prices which legally can be fixed on, to serve the self-interest of a company or a person. And we have got to be realistic about this: we have got to calculate it into how we plan, so we don't waste our money on meaningless schemes. The further advice then, is this: don't try too much of anything that smacks of 'gambling', due to the turing factor. Rather, think in terms of investment. Don't merely read the long-term predictions by financial news stations. Here, let's bring in what the german thinker Kurt Goedel proved (and what Turing failed to disprove), namely -- intuition (cfr his Second Incomplete- ness Theorem; the portion of the book 'The Emperor's New Mind' by Roger Penrose devoted to the explanation of Goedel is eminent; Penrose was Stephen Hawking's tutor and professor at the University of Oxoford). You must sense how long-term developments are going to go. That requires a lot of capacity within yourself to be sensitive and also to push aside persuasive arguments without substance to them. When you get a sense of how things are going, you must then consider the currencies, and certain relationships, and see if you get a consistent prediction-sense about a major currency there. In such a situation, where you have a portion of money that you do not in any way depend on, but is there for imaginative use -- with gain or loss -- you might then consider a low-leveraged currency trade over a period of, say, half a year to a year. The lower leverage, the more it will be a question of earning percentages (or loosing percentages), rather than looking to any doubling or tripling of wealth. But this is, I think, a necessity for any serious long-term currency investment. The clue, here, is to do as few trades as at all possible, with as little as possible of scripts involved -- whether from your hand, or from the other side of those who operate the trading platform, be it MT4, MT5 or some other platform, or just an HTML internet page -- or even a visit to your bank contact. The fewer things you do with the platform, the fewer things can be manipulated. If you then choose what is supposedly very stable currencies, you will perhaps see it possible not to put in any 'Stop Loss' parameter. Any such parameter would increase the temptation of those in charge of the trading platform to produce a 'spike' in the currency prices in what is for you the wrong direction, at least in such cases as where the company you trade with is weathering your currency bets without itself going further into the Interbank market. So this is an advice also for personal traders. Since I happen to know that a great many of this world's governments gather themselves and call of all other activities whenever I write something, so as to destill new drops of wisdom from my words, I will add some comments for just those governments. At a national level, there's a great amount of pride associated with national currencies, and these are used in order to create local economies. However, time and time again one sees that small national currencies as easily can undo the wealth of a whole generation in that country. It is perhaps naive, but I think it is far more realistic for a small country to get things economically right in the decades to come by officially doing a constant balancing of some three or four currencies and abolishing any tiny national currency. It won't do to have just one currency if it is not one's own -- obviously -- for then one becomes liable to be manipulated by the nation or nations who can move the prices of just this currency. But in having a small handful of currencies, and an imposed differentation between these three throughout the country, with prices typically given in all three for any ware or service sold or bought in that country, that country, by being apt at currency trading at the national level, can handle the future vibrations better than by clinging to one small national currency which may quickly empty itself of content if the nation's main source of income is suddenly powerfully reduced. At least, if I was a dictator, I would have no less than three currencies in my realm. How much more fun than just one! And it would increase the capacity in the population to THINK about money, and CT -- Currency Trading. Footnote For the observation that a solid bank not doing manipulation may be more likely to offer a rather bigger spread in CT pairs I acknowledge comment to me by Ms Antje Wagner, Varengold Bank, Germany. INTERNET, THE SMALL BUSINESSES, AND THE IMPORTANCE OF INTERNATIONAL REGULATION OF CURRENCY DAY-TRADING BROKERS BY MEANS ALSO OF THE DEFINITION OF STP -- Currency trading can be an honorable way to put one's intuition up against the development of the world's currencies -- but then we must have regulations so that the brokers aren't betting against their own customers In California, such as Los Angeles, where, for a large part, the car is King, the car-radios are the advisors in the King's Court. Listen in to such as CBS broadcasting in the L.A. area and you hear NOT 'The dollar is up dot four percent against the Euro' every hour, but more than once every hour, in business hours at least, you'll be reminded which california IT company has the most growth in stock value, and just how much up during the past hour or so. In listening in to CBS L.A., one gets the impression that those who don't trade in stocks are outside of society; by the same measure, those who trade in currencies are oddballs. Why is this so? Why is it that buying and selling stocks of companies in which one has hardly any insight, partaking in those companies ethics -- or lack thereof -- by means of stocks bought and sold -- is so vastly a preferred means of earning money by the many compared to currency trading, which, abstractly, is a far 'cleaner' sport? The answer is twofold: currency day-trading requires more of the trader's intuition than stock trading, for world currencies, especially in active hours of the week, are like oceans compared to the mere ponds and inland seas of the largest stocks -- and so it's a matter of listening more to the voice of the ocean, so to speak, rather than to gossip and to the degree to which a guy like Elon Musk smiled more than reasonably much in the most recent interview at CNN or such. The second part of it is that -- amazingly -- and to the utter surprise of all who are new to the currency trading field -- there's no official value of any currency anywhere. There are only degrees of officiality. The stock value given at Wall Street or similar such places is given in flaming red or green or blue letters for all to read, and for the world -- including such parts of the world as CBS L.A. -- to report. The value of the dollar vs the euro given by any currency trading broker is, amazingly and astoundingly, a matter of that broker relative to that customer. In the most honorable, and, some would say, the most important area of financial trading, there isn't any regulation whatsoever to speak of -- if we exclude attempts to curb the leverage that a currency trader can invoke. Many Western countries have curbed it to a degree of 50, so you'll find, if you consult such as www.who.is as to any broker announcing that it has a Swiss bank account and is backed up by grand legislation, that it is typically registered in countries with country codes you've never heard of. There's a scattering of tiny islands with great governments and just the anarchy that brokers want so that they don't have to live up to the meagre regulations the Western countries have imposed on them. But what's the point of choosing a Western broker when the West hasn't bothered with making currency values official? True, there is such a thing as 'benchmarks' of currencies; equally true, there has recently been fines to various banks for manipulating these benchmarks when pension funds and other supposedly noble institutions have called on them to invest something in a currency. They have waited some minutes to do so, and in just those minutes they jerked the benchmarks a little bit, while doing some private trading in the seconds within those minutes. But even as the West and other parts of the globe move against the largest sharks in the currency trading market, I'm at a loss to understand why they cannot deal with the core issue: why cannot the currencies -- the largest, anyway -- have a standardised value across the planet? What on Earth is preventing governments for agreeing on this entirely simple and foundational principle for making what must be billions of daily currency transactions more fair? In order to see what is at stake here, compare trading in currencies to the type of intuition that a gambler must muster in herself or himself when seated at a casino -- and, yes, let's have no prejudices against that, when done in moderate degrees. Take, for instance, such an instrument in these casionos as a wheel with numbers marked in black or red, a wheel turned by a member of the staff and which stops at a number -- and the betting at such as a right number will lead to income for the better, and loss for the house. At the table, or on the wall, is a record of the recent history, as of the past few hours, of the turning of that wheel. In this way, anyone strolling along to the table where this wheel is operated, can check that history chart for any bias the wheel may have. He or she can ascertain that the wheel both looks and sounds all right, and that IT LOOKS FAIR. If there is, in some houses, a secret extra button that can jerk it away from an otherwise winning number in some cases, that's against the regulations, and one might imagine that the intuitive gambler would steer away from a wheel which is capable of such an illegal and criminal adjustment. Go now over to the area of currency day-trading. You trade, say, on the currency pair of Swiss Franc relative to British Pounds. You bet that, say, Franc is going to go up relative to the Pound in the next day or so. In what is called a Straight-Through Broker, the broker isn't allowed to trade against you. The broker company, the 'house', is going with you, into the socalled Interbank market -- the nearest thing we have to an approximation of objective currency trading values, and connected to the aforementioned 'benchmarks'. The broker faithfully places YOUR money there, increased by a leverage -- what is in praxis a virtual loan, doubling, tripling, or pentupling (leverage=5 in that case) the value -- and next day you either have gained or lost some money, when you 'close' the trade. How does the broker earn money in this case? In the obvious, fair, honest way: by putting in a margin of difference, some points earned 'by the house', on each transaction. In the typical jargon of brokers these days, it's a question of a difference in 'pips', a difference between the 'buy' and the 'sell', between the 'short' and the 'long' trade. In other words, if, miraculously, there is no change at all between the British Pound and the Swiss Franc, there would still be something to be paid to the 'house': a transaction fee, we might say. So that's a Straight-Through Processing broker. But this is not a regulated term. It is just one of several such terms, which may be honestly invoked or not, or -- adding to the confusion -- so may half a dozen other terms meaning more or less the same. The alternative is that there's a bunch of computer programs, and cunning human operators, that change the value of the Swiss Franc and the value of the British Pound AS PRESENTED TO THEIR TRADER in order to ensure that their customer gets less income than he or she deserves. These brokers don't bother about going to the Interbank market except for large orders. Their business idea is to present the illusion of currency trading to people who pay them a hundred or a thousand dollars or so, while ensuring that after a not too long period, there's nothing left of those hundred or thousand dollars. This is -- as a conjecture -- the typical case. And how is one to know? How is one to know, when eg the term Straight-Through Processing isn't regulated? How can a person who is interested in using Internet to faciliate the means of his or her Medium or Small Business Enterprise, or to increase personal wealth, be able to check, and countercheck, currency values which fluctuate perhaps even more than once pr second? The broker is at liberty to delay a second, or more, or less, between the decision of their customer to bet on a CT pair: in this little second, all sorts of things may happen to the price, both at the Interbank benchmark rates, and, significantly, by means of scripts written in Java or whatever which the broker hovers over in order to make life uncomfortable for their traders. It is, for a private trader, a great moment to put in a bet. It isn't likely that a private trader of moderate means -- which is to say, any one of the millions who perhaps could consider currency trading a way to increase own income -- is able to detect, exactly, that the prices received are fixed on so that the 'house' is going to have better odds than their gambling customers. The machinery required is big enough, and the time required to set it up pretty big also, and all these things are likely to interfere with the actual process of betting well. But, anyhow, what's the point of it, when there are no laws against fixing on the currency prices in this way? There's no place one can go to, no authorities in the area to which one can report. One can only, by such a monstreous arrangement required to detect 'fixs', conclude that one has been silly in the first place to roll in as a customer to just this company, and try and get the rest of one's money of them -- which in some cases aren't nearly as easy as to give them money. The solution to all this is NOT for politicians and state institutions to speak of the sadness of the low ethics dominating the currency trading brokers. Nor is it to create new laws limiting this domain of societal economic exploration from being a domain of possible growth and enjoyment and extra income to the many millions who honestly could want such extra income. Rather the right response is to find out what the currency trading customer wants -- and to create sharp laws shaping the companies in the country, and, if possible, also worldwide -- to cohere with these laws. Laws that makes the 'houses' liable to criminal action if they fix on the odds, if the bet and deal against their own customers, and to standardise such terms as Straight-Through Processing so that anyone can consult a list as to just which broker is a licensed STP broker: a list of which companies is willing to be WITH you, rather than against you, when you try your luck connected to the surfing at the world's currencies. There are many societies that have laws and leaderships which proclaim a faith in some sort of spirituality, and some sort of justice according to higher principles. In life, as in facing fairly honest markets, there's the necessary component of some sort of luck -- if that's the name we give it (consult the term 'synchronicity') -- as a supplement to experience, insight and analysis, whether manual analysis by the human mind or the element of support by some digital means. The laws of a country ought to make it easy for this type of 'spontaneous fairness' that a faith in some degree of luck of this perhaps spiritual type should have a capacity to prosper. The participation in the great flows of the great currencies, being able to sense where they are going and to put in bets on them -- not just once every half-year but perhaps many times a week -- ought to be considered within the domain that citizens can meaningfully engage in, and the laws should make it possible for this engagement to happen on meaningful and fair principles. The challenge here belongs both to such institutions as the WTO and the World Bank, and to independent nations as well as union of nations such as the EU, to realise that the Internet has opened up for a new avenue of personal engagement in earning money by the many -- an avenue that, as yet, is extremely lacking in the necessary regulations to make it prosper in the right way. [note: see the article just above on this same archive page, written a little while after this, which takes these points of view into consideration and offers a moderate way out by means of long-term currency betting. srw] MORE ARGUMENTS FOR CONSTRUCTING CAPITALISM AROUND SMALL BUSINESSES EXCLUSIVELY December 12, 2016 by S.R.Weber There are those who say that when one lets egotism rule stuff, then stuff works out pretty well, on the average. Taken into politics, it means, usually, let businesses fight each other out, and let'em grow or vanish, and don't interfere, and it will be pretty good not just for the owners for these businesses, but for the population as well. The simplicity of the thought is ensnaring. And perhaps most of us has seen how the mini-capitalism at, say, a street market of some quality leads to pretty good results --including, for instance, how sellers strive to be extra polite, for politeness is attractive; how they strive to have extra many wares for sale, for diversity is attractive; how they strive to have low prices, for low prices is attractive, and so forth. Let us bring this positive experience of laissez faire capitalism into a meeting with another experience that I think most of us have had: namely that the larger a business is, the more powerful a business is, the more it can afford to overlook the particular needs of the customers and rather work to change the premises of the market it is operating in. For instance, when there is only one bank of importance in a country, then if the owner personally has a dislike of cash, that owner can remove cash and enforce a hasty, cold digitalism across the whole swath of the money system simply by making cash rather inavailable. And if any one tele-operator is so huge that it can pretty much do what it likes, regardless of the hundreds of thousands of customers that depends on it, then it will pretty much do what it likes. It isn't the charming dependency on the positive whims of the potential customers that determines the course of action of the giant business. Rather, it is the distinctly uncharming dependency of the whims of the owners and leaders that decides, say, whether the customers--who have to stick with the giant because it is the only one of importance in the market--should have such and such invoice form or another form; how often the invoices should be sent; and what petty fees should apply to these invoices. One may try, perhaps inspired by the slogan, so intensely false when it comes to giant businesses, that "the customer is always right", to speak to the giant company. One will, with luck, get to speak to a bored, arrogant underling in the company, who is as fed up with the company as everyone else, but more than anything fed up with having to talk to customers about it. This bored underling will inform the customer, politely or impolitely, that everything suggested is impossible and is likely to remain impossible and that this sort of thing cannot be modified. The underling doesn't have to add,-- it is understood--"and anyway I don't care". The giant companies, then, except when they have had a course in how to treat customers--trying to implement a scheme of fanatical politeness, as a thin sugar coating on top of it its supreme arrogance--might as well adopt the slogan, "You have a problem? We don't care!". That's the truth of it. They don't have to care, because they study the statistics over how little that goes on in the country they are in that isn't controlled by them; because the giant company is a sort of bizarre community of thousands or tens of thousands or even more people who put up with the ugliness of being part of the company because it feeds them and dines them and gives them, with luck, a car. If the company pays an advertisement company to advertise for working in that company, one won't see the bored, probably rather overweight, underlings, chewing on some stuff while trying to get customers not to talk to them. Rather, one will see a handful of supremely happy, well-trained, good-looking models who would never have gone a mile within working within the giant company, pretending to chat nicely to customers and enjoying it. "This is us--this is who we are", the ad will tell. And the logo of the giant company will appear, signing the lie the way it signs the invoices that are sent by a machinery nobody has any influence over. The following scientific proposition is hereby made, then: the quantity of arrogance radiating from a company is proportional to the extent it has overtaken the market. This is not news--many people are saying it. And for that reasons, politicians try, half-heartedly, to create measures to 'have some competition'. But it is not merely about 'having some competition'. It's about realizing that a market of individual human beings and small businesses cannot relate, in a face-to-face two-way decent manner to giant companies at all; and that when three giant companies have overtaken the market, that's only marginally better than having a situation than when one giant company has overtaken the market. Therefore, let's add the proposition: a truly small business is never within reach of overtaking the market it's operating within; and when a market has only and exclusively truly small businesses operating in it, then capitalistic freedom provides good results for customers As a conclusion, then, the type of political system that would rescue countries from the continual detoritation that obviously goes on, from one decade to the next of giant-friendly capitalism, is a political system that implements lawful restrictions on sizes of companies, not just vaguely, but fiercely; and so that it strongly encourages small companies in all senses. Part of encouraging small companies is the protection of physical cash and to create rules for which hired labor can be paid by cash without requiring paper work to an exponential degree. Small companies want to pay people fast and giant companies want to have everything put into a system, their system, and so are not friendly towards cash. There is some understanding of the importance of cash in some countries, like Germany; and there is a strong tendency in several countries to let the giant banks and giant companies set the agenda of the day and the same countries (such as Norway) has a fierce cutting- away attitude as to physical cash, that will sooner or later crush the diversity of the small businesses unless there's a voice of change. What sort of law could ensure the existence of a diversity of very small businesses? What sort of political party would embrace it? On the left side, as on the right side, the ideas as to what sort of big companies or institutions that may or may not be right are splintered. We need a new political dimension, a yellow or violet one, or some other color, in which the small-vs-giant element is spoken about without this nessarily done in an angry marxist/atheist tone. One can be optimistic about certain forms of capitalistic games when the rules of the game are good. The challenge is to get the rules good. The solution is obvious for an absolute ruler, for a total dictator: simply forbid companies to exist if they have more than such-and-such number of employees, say, 50 or 150. But for every other type of political system, we have to think step by step. The first step, I believe, is a willingness for those who think compassionately about society to think through when capitalism does work--such as on small markets--and to create new political directions in which this is given a voice heared by the multitude of people. A triangle political dimension, the old socialist-capitalist line on bottom, and a new peak up where the big-small issue is talked about in fresh ways --we want a small enough state, and small enough companies to make capitalism work in a person-friendly way. That's something which requires groundwork amongst future politicians, theoretical work, and work in terms of finding ways to make such themes public. In the long term, this may contribute to a more healthy balanced economy also as regards questions of ecological survival. Small countries like Norway may be, in some ways, infinitely stupid about such themes, but just when the country is small, it may also turn more quickly once they idea gets around; and big countries like Germany or Australia may have some more insight into these themes already, and thus may be able to build on these insights more fruitfully than that which before has been seen e.g. from the new type of green parties. The green parties COULD raise these concerns, but as it is, they typically come forth as being overly concerned with making energy costly and are not seen as intellectually stimulating as regards market economy. If the green parties somehow revolutionised their thinking on markets, they could however be vehicles for a new mini-business-popularity wave and that could pave the way, blaze the trail, for laws, through the democratic election systems, that limit the upper sizes of companies to some civilized norm. [This article, although in the permanent part of archive page 10, has a date since it lashes out a bit strongly against some tendencies in some countries with a reference to how it is when it is written, and with luck things can change for the better.] *** Reproduction of whole unedited essay in educational settings and such is permitted. Contact info to author is in the link above as for reprint permissions. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE RATIONALITY THAT DOESN'T EXIST YET -- And how one might make some progress towards it What is "rationality", exactly? Superficially, it is what reasonable, sane people think, it is common sense boosted by good logic and science. But as the word is, from time to time, used to defend a package of thought as the only one possible, in heated arguments pitting for instance biology against this or that religion, it is, I think, a very rational thing to look at that word, rationality. So we have this word-pair, "rational" and "rationality", and the word-root, "ratio". The ratio of 3 to 5 is about the ratio of 5 to 8 and this is about the so-called golden ratio, a proportion which tends to come up where fine spirals occur in nature -- but not just in nature, but also in art. There is also an ancient use of the word ratio -- reflected in fairy tales, for instance connected to the stories of Askeladden. The idea is that a human being is not merely a result of conditioning, but can suddenly leap "out of the ashes" (askeladd, aske-ladd, the lad in the ashes), and do brave things, perhaps even heroic things. And this, in a word-usage which is rare, but which speaks a lot about the word-root of rationality, was said to reflect that person's "inner ratio". One could say "inner voice", but "inner ratio" lends emphasis to the sense in which there's a seed-like hidden information, latent and deep in the mind, perhaps related to Jung's collective archetypes, and this ratio can come to the surface and take over that person's dominant action-perspective. Now, in looking to the history of science, Isaac Newton has an interesting double role. His most well- known role, perhaps, is that of a founder of a series of postulates about the interaction of mechanical forces, involving push-pull effects, friction, and more such. These postulates he managed to give a numberic form and he polished their expression until they reached a diamond-like sharpness. At the same time, he regarded mind, life and the universe as a whole not subject merely to such mechanical forces. And he was equally ambitious, but not equally successful, in the area of alchemical studies, mixed with theology. In other words, Newton regarded it as good sense, a logical worldview, and, we might say, he regarded it as "rational", to consider that whereas machines work according to mechanical forces, life as such has more subtle laws. But readers of Newton in the years to come -- at least some vocal, dominant readers -- found more inspiration in his mighty expression of mechanical relationships than with his attempts to find alchemical patterns of reality -- and boldly declared that, as a programme, they wished to understand all of life, all of "bio" -- life -- also the living human body -- as a machine. Eventually, as some progress was done in this area, a not insignificant portion of the population came to regard it as rational to take the mechanical point of view, -- also as regards life, the universe and everything -- and this socalled 'mechanical worldview' has in it certain assumptions within which it is rational to think machine-like about human bodies, brains and in some sense also minds, and irrational not to. These people then conceptualised "science" to fit with such a set of assumptions. We can then say that this is a certain set of assumptions, so as to yield certain suggestions "rational" and others "irrational" -- ie, they fit or they don't fit with these assumptions. It is then a question of whether these assumptions are correct or not. Let us then bring in Isaac Newton again, who regarded some of these assumptions as clearly wrong. In other words, the rationality that made Isaac Newton do alchemy sprung out of a different set of assumptions than the rationality that made later thinkers such as Charles Darwin declare that he sees no design in nature, only brutality, coincidence, the struggle for survival, and the evolution over time of the species. The set of assumptions which led to biology was challenged, in part, by Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Louis de Broglie, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schroedinger, Wolfgang Pauli and some others some decades after the progression in biology by Charles Darwin. It isn't that a new set of assumptions were worked out. Rather, the challenge on mechanistic worldviews were raised, and found to be -- as such -- rational challenges in themselves. No doubt Isaac Newton himself would have appreciated this feature of the quantum theoretical challenges worked on, and quarrelled about, in the 1920s and 1930s. These quarrels were never given a commonly agreed-upon solution. Albert Einstein died in complete disagreement with the direction he felt much of physicists had taken. My own conversations with one who met him in his later years, David Bohm, confirmed that Einstein was passionately against the developments of conventional, and by then mainstream quantum theory; but Einstein had his own set of assumptions as to rationality, and was found by Bohm to be inflexible as regards certain other assumptions. Louis de Broglie, on the other hand, who had been helped by Einstein to get his doctorate thesis through on the wave- and particle duality of reality, picked up on some of Bohm's work and while Einstein didn't approve of Bohm's attempt to revise some assumptions, de Broglie found them partially valid, and developed the entirely different interpretation of quantum reality that he himself had played with in his youth, but not succeeded with then. Alas, mainstream physics haven't bothered to seriously investigate the works of de Broglie. I mention these complexities to make this point: it is rational to challenge some of the assumptions within which other people operate; it is rational to take apart the bundle of assumptions within which something is irrational and something else is irrational, and so threaten to turn the whole paradigm around. It may not be easy to challenge assumptions meaningfully, and one may not get other people with one in doing so, but there isn't one set of assumptions in human mainstream thinking that's "untouchable". And this is all part of science, the root of science relating to the root word of "consciousness" and connecting to meanings such as "knowing". Rationality flows out of a set of assumptions, but it isn't irrational to operate with some other sets of assumptions. For instance, let us look at one of the assumptions that mainstream atheist biologists tend to have -- namely, that some hundreds of millions of years of procreation and CHANCELIKE mutations are a sufficient mechanism, given the survival of the more fitter products of this procreation process, and the formation of babies of these fitter products, -- to explain every smart feature of the human body. This is a more generous assumption than what Charles Darwin worked out, and more in tune with what can be called 'neodarwinism'. There are people who have worked much with chancelike changes in permutation cycles spanning billions -- not of years or days, but of computer clock ticks. These people have a completely different relationship to the notion of chancelike, or coincidental, or random patterns than people like Charles Darwin, who lived before the computers started coming around. Most people who live amidst computers don't program them. Those who do program them may have encountered the notion of a (badly named) 'random generator', or more precisely named 'relatively free fluctuation generator', without having worked much with it. Some (like this writer) has done quite a few programming experiments with such processes, RFFG processes as I call it in my programming language, G15 PMN. And it is my feeling that all those who have worked a lot with such processes find it extremely unlikely that some hundreds of millions of years are adequate to come up with the almost unfathomable smart complexity of the human body, starting with some plants, some shrimp-like creatures, some insects, and such. While of course coincidence leaves room open for luck, the computer works with average distributions and can create graphical patterns and other patterns, also such that build on each other in a 'survival of the fittest' kind, and any hotheaded assumption of any marvels to arise from such fluctuations is quickly cooled. Most random stuff is noisy, is to be dumped, has little validity. And it isn't impressive to multiply it by a billion, a trillion or more. We need a whole other range of duration in order to really come up with entirely intelligent products. One of the marvels of the scientific research programme into the human body, in its open-minded sense, is that one has got a beginning of a map of a universe of intelligence built into this body. No doubt Charles Darwin himself would have been surprised about all the stuff biology has worked out to be the fact, the amazing fact, about the human body. Despite lots of talks of genes, and lots of talk of mapping and decoding of genes, the genes and their epigenetical features, and their relationship to such as brain growth, largely remain a mystery which is only in tiny trivial bits unlocked as regarded concrete manipulative features. The whole construction is a marvel, one that defies all construction efforts by mainstream humanity -- a trillion times over, one can safely say. To imagine that a bundle of mutations each time a creature makes an offpspring -- and coincidental mutations at that -- can come up with, even given loads of survival of the fittest reflections, a lot of thinking about interactions between genes and environment, -- something as vastly fantastic as the human body, is indeed requiring a bit of a stretch of thought. Put in other words, it is irrational to assume that it is impossible to challenge the assumption that chancelike mutations coupled with survival of the fittest over some hundred of millions of years brought about the human body. There is, then, a need, when we speak of rationality, to consider what set of assumptions are surrounding or laying underneath that rationality. When we then look to various religions, these cannot normally be considered to be fully good substitutes for science. For science is not merely the following of a mechanistic programme. It is the pursuit, also, of honest reports of observation and interesting objective experiements eg with the nature of light. What can come from studies of empirical reports are interpretation possibilities, and these can give weight to various rationalities, various ratios, we might say. So when we look at a religion, we must distinguish between various sets of assumptions in the various branches of interpretation. These assumptions may then have to be explained in terms of yet more assumptions. By negating even a single one of these assumptions a whole new interpretation of religion may arise. And science can, when one knows how to extract non- mechanistic findings, help one to find out which assumptions it makes more sense to negate. But one cannot regard it as irrational as such to assume that the reality was created 'with a past' all the time one cannot regard it as irrational to doubt that this past could have 'caused' the present in the manner sought to be theorised over in neodarwinism. Most people find that they haven't time to do this thought-work seriously. This easily lead people to seek up some that they regard as gurus or teachers, whether of one kind or another kind, hoping that they have done the job that they themselves don't find time for, or don't believe that they have the capacity to undertake themselves. In order to progress, however, given all the viable alternatives, all the not-yet-created interpretation alternatives of religions and sciences and all in between, and all the pompous self-important caliphs, gurus, messiah-wanna-be's, boddhisattva-wanna-be's, and so on and so forth -- and the same type within neodarwinism and atheistic physics and such -- it may be of value to emphasize the breakdown of sets of assumptions into single assumptions, coupled with development in oneself of a dispassionate attitude that also has in it a calling for a spontaneous sense of the rational, what we may call 'intuition'. /////Quote in this wind RECENTLY OVERHEARD All the classical scriptures -- but none more so than the ancient hebrew and arabic scriptures -- idolize the male, and contain numerous viewpoints to the effect that the role of the female is to produce more male soldiers and more male believers and otherwise shut up. This is entirely consistent with the practise in some dark corners of the world, and dark corners of also most big cities, to clip off the clit, the major control-rod for own sexual satisfaction in the female. It is not religion as such that's irrational, but rather the rediculous idolization of males -- the very same males who are source of most decay in this world. The believers in most religions would have a chance to develop a deeper and more genuine religiosity -- one that doesn't condemn the girl, but rather lifts her to the proper role -- far above males -- by taking, so to say, the book less seriously. Don't face the book, but face life -- and through life, the God that's beyond those learned in the scriptures. *** THE ANSELMIAN VIEW OF GOD -- God can only be disproved if the concepts of God are adequately narrow It is a feature of ancient classical Western philosophy -- consult e.g. the writings of the medieval century Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm, -- to attribute the maximal imaginable (and, indeed, unimaginable) intelligence to God. And all other worthy attributes as well, in equal excess. A kind of trade-off was done between the church theologies and the newly emerging mechanicist 'natural philosophers' (renamed 'science', at some point) in the 18th and 19th centuries: God was given a less resplendent role, while machines a (gradually) bigger one. There can be little doubt that as the attributions to God were diminished, so also did demon exorcists get an easier job to do, missionary-wise. For with God having a remote role, perhaps wise in principle but not with an intelligence carried out everywhere, it was easier to convince people that they need pseudo-doctors like themselves. The present version of catholic christianity seems to have developed no further than the 18th and 19th century as for their views of these things even in the present days, in the earliest decades of the 21st century. They are doing all sorts of attributions of mischief to demons and to the devil, as if God had largely lost control with the world. On the other hand, the machine people, despite the fact that once and for all Kurt Goedel, in the early 1930s, and subsequent follow-up research by Alan Turing, Emil Post and others, made it absolutely clear that machines never can learn for real, they can never deeply perceive, and never really be intelligent, -- the machine-loving people, the people portraying computers and other various entities as possibly very intelligent or smart or whatever word they feel is fashionable and trendy enough to use, these have had a gradually easier time convincing the population that they must have faith in machines. Simultaneously, we find that the development of neodarwinism and its convenient marriage with a certain strand of post-bohr quantum theory bridged in terms of crude equations with some of gravitation theory to form what is pretentiously called 'cosmology', has led to the following postulate: since there is so much evidence that time has passed, what with the discovery of fossils of flying dinosaurs and what not, and a million other hints of a vast past, then surely, if God exists at all, then there seems no reason to imagine that this God has done anything but, at most, preparing some equations and put them in motion. Theology must be all wrong, they say. One cannot have a creation that is new all the time all the evidence points to a long past. One can imagine importing a medieval saint like the thinker Anselm, with his attempt to prove God's existence by an intelligent use of the idea of 'et cetera', and, assuming that he is deeply noncorrupt, making him evaluate all this newfound evidence. He would then probably exclaim: what wonderful intelligence God has! He has certainly put people to the test, with all this evidence slung around to confuse those of lesser faith! And, after all, the anselmian view of God is entirely logical -- and, to some of us who have worked much with relatively free fluctuation generators on computers and who find it unlikely that neodarwinism have got more than a fraction of the truth as to the actual way the human body and nature as a whole came to have the form and the physiological process that they do have -- we have to also say, indeed possibly a far more logical point of view than neodarwinism plus cosmology. The presence of intelligence in the world is not due to machines, but the presence of illusions of intelligence is due also to machines: that is a direct implication of the works of Kurt Goedel, properly understood, as this (and many other) writers see it. What, then, is the source of all intelligence? And given that the anselmian point of view of God makes sense, there is nothing that couldn't have been an elaborate hoax as far as the 'layout and design' of the universe and its life goes. There may be innumerable reasons, or numerable reasons but reasons not given explicit form in any theology as yet, why reality ought to have this flavour of what the ancient indians called 'maya' -- a veil of illusion between appearance and actuality. As for the present-day so-called 'cosmology', it is wedded to a bohrian and neobohrian interpretation of quantum empirics, and Einstein would not have been impressed -- not at all! One of the young members of Niels Bohr's clan, Louis de Broglie, worked out a pilot wave interpretation that has in it seeds of a breaking with the speed of light limit treasured by Einstein and still by and large one of the more or less hidden assumptions in modern cosmology, despite some more or less sincere attempts to break with it. The de Broglie alternative has in it a flavour of possible wedding with such as anselmian and berkeleyan (from George Berkeley's philosophy) views of reality, for it doesn't chop reality up like Niels Bohr did -- in a classical part and a quantum part. Nor does he chop up the equation like David Bohm did -- in a classical potential part and a quantum potential part. So while de Broglie learned from the early 1950s work of Bohm, the pilot wave theory of de Broglie is sharply different than the quantum potential interpretation of Bohm, and the idea of calling this "de Broglie/Bohm" or "Bohm/de Broglie" theory is a statement which can only make sense if one hasn't properly studied the productions of de Broglie from about 1955 and almost for three decades onwards. This is a picture of quantum reality that leaves many questions open but it is intuitively hitting the right points where modern cosmology and self-assure neodarwinists don't ring equally true to this writer. The works done to develop this intuitively and informally -- thus in accordance with Kurt Goedel's proof on the rediculousness of too much formalism -- and to bridge it with a deeper reflection on biology and on gravitation and time and much else besides was done by this writer in 2004, and this 'supermodel theory' offers a genuine alternative for those who aren't impressed by the many twists and turns of mainstream science -- nor by the clans and leagues formed around some of those who have strayed away from mainstream science, and who tend to lump together stuff which ought not to be lumped together. To lump together Bohm's work with that of de Broglie is to miss out on many key points; and about all this, you'll find that by far most physicists, no matter how many titles they may have got, haven't got the first clue about it all. It is in part also this that has led this writer to call for an alternative form of education than the so-called 'universities', which more than anything seems to be a reinforcement of established stupidity. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& WHAT ARE THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE MEANINGS OF THE WORDS "GOD" AND "ALLAH"? -- In the wake of the state condemnation in Malaysia some months ago as to the use of the latter word by christians to designate the same as the former word -- a condemnation regarded as quaint by most scholars across the world, linguistics and semantics must be coupled with intellectual theological thought to thresh out some clarity If by the word "God" we simply mean "the highest, the greatest", and we by the word "Allah" also simply mean "the highest, the greatest", then, by definition, these two are absolutely identical and that's that. But when we look into religious texts associated with christianity and consider the concept of God, or Deus -- which originally derived from the Zeus or Zevs who was the most powerful god of the Olympic Gods -- and contrast these to the religious texts in islam, notably the Quoran, that introduce the concept of Allah, -- do we also then reach an identity in meaning? That is to say, apart from the connotation of priests, apostles, imams, and so on, and apart from the concrete rules involved, and the concrete condemnations involved, -- when we pick out the pearl from the oyster, so to speak, is it the same pearl? Or two different? In order to evaluate this, we must raise above the cloud of words, and get a sense of the overall worldview, as if it were geometrically, and ask: what is it that the word "God", or "Jesus Christ", which in the christian (esp coptic) understanding is one and the same thing, roughly delineate in that context, and what is that "Allah" roughly delineate in the islamic context? And in this pursuit, we must raise against the polemics which especially the Quoran is full of. The Christian bible doesn't argue back because it was made earlier than than the Quoran, so all the polemics has to be simply disregarded for the moment, in order to calmly see the central question and its answer or answers clearly enough. The phrase "Allah Akbar" or, more correctly, "Allahu Akbar", is a combination of the word "Allah" with a certain grammatical inflextion of the word Kabir, or "great", so that it forms what in conventional grammar is called the "elative" and so the phrase literally means "Allah is greater". It is silly to attempt to back-translate this to 'great', for that is not what is being said. The concept of greater means something: since this is the central thesis of the natural submission to the holy sought in islam, we must not try and make a crude translation, but rather see it as a key-point which can shed light on whether the notion of Allah is similar to that of God, or somehow different. For instance, is one a special case of the other? Or is the other a general case including the former? Let that matter rest for a second: it is pretty clear, given a number a statements in the Christian bible, that to christians, God denotes the totally transcendent source of all beings. It has a slant in judaism towards control over all details in daily life, but then it is not certain that this the same concept anymore, as there are different facets of God with different hebrew names when the Torah outlines how to dress, how to wear one's hat, what not to eat and so on. But in Christian thinking, God is the transcendent totality, akin to the Brahman in Hinduism, or the Dao of Lao-Tse, and we find here a notion that the faith relates to residing somewhat peacefully in an immensity that doesn't come around with exact rules in the form of a bible-book. Rather, the rules are to be gathered somehow from more manifest beings, or things, and are not stated except in vague general forms in the Christian bible. However, the bible is clear about the importance of doing things right. Those who do it wrong are punished severely by the higher beings, somehow: even though this bible doesn't say much about what's right and what's wrong except in terms that are extremely wide in interpretative possibilities (for instance, that which in Norwegian is called "bifili", in English "bisexuality", or in Norwegian "homofili", in English "homosexuality", is by some readers of the bible regarded as something that the author named "Paul" appearantly finds fault with -- but others either interpret him differently or else doesn't pay much attention to that writer at all, for he wasn't one of the disciples of the physical Jesus). So all in all, CG -- Christian God -- is the transcendent source. But the islam, or muslim concept of Allah -- let's call it MA -- surely is different. It includes the notion of the transcendent source, that is clear enough from the Allahu Akbar phrase. If MA is what is greater -- greater, that is, than anything thought -- then it is nothing it doesn't include, and hence, by sheer logic, it must include the transcendent source of being, whether that is a quantum ocean of nonlocal energy or a personal being -- and the latter concept is the one preferred by most MA thinkers, as well as most CG thinkers. Paying now attention to the full MA context, we see here something that distinguishes this context sharply from the CG concext: the MA context is as full of rules as a military camp, more or less. It tells what one is to wear, how one is to handle various people, who that possibly deserves their heads chopped off -- you name it, it is all there, like it or not -- and I do not condemn this fact. It is not that MA leads to worse action than CG, but it certainly has a lot more determination about concrete actions in it. CG has its share of blood and MA is possibly bathing in more of it, but this is not the point, we are not trying to do a moral comparison at all here. What we are saying is this: MA is presented in a context of sorting out what's what in daily life to an extent that is almost infinitely greater than the CG context. In other words, whereas CG clearly is the transcendent source of all being, the MA concept is far more inclusive, and includes all sorts of more subtle existence between human living and the transcendent source of all existence. If for the moment we envision the classical greek scene of the Olympic Beings, where Zeus enact the role of the fair, but somewhat (or very) harsh judging God -- when he's not out copulating with pretty females -- then Zeus is more or less CG, whereas THE WHOLE OLYMPIC SCENE INCLUDING ZEUS is more or less MA. So it would make sense for one in the classical greek religious scene to say, thinking of the olympic beings -- they are greater, they are greater, they are greater. It would be the proper humble ode to the vastness they represent, their infinitely greater knowledge, also of the details of human affairs. The Allahu Akbar then means: all the greater, all the supreme beings, all the way up to the infinite source of the totality; whereas when the Christian say "God", the reference is to the top-point of Allah. In that sense, the Malaysian state had got a slight point: there isn't a total identity between the two concepts. God is the higher concept, included in the more comprehensive concept of Allah, which in a certain sense is the more general one, in which God (we might say), is a special case. The Christian, eager with interfaith thoughts, would then say: well that means that Jesus Christ is the top-point of Allah, -- and it is not altogether impossible to see such combination with some statements in some parts of the Quoran (even as others lead themselves to pretty much the opposite). &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& HOW TWITTER CAN MAKE SENSE :=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:***2016::6::24 S.R.Weber One thing has to be absolutely clear: Twitter.com isn't a suitable medium for expression, or treatment, of feelings. It is not a suitable medium on its own for intellectual discourse. One cannot 'think' by means of Twitter. Any such attempt would curb one's natural thought processes. And those who rely on Twitter.com as a medium for communication, should think over what they mean by 'communication'. These things have always been clear to me. But when this is said, there's always a sweetness about limits, when there's an understanding of how to use these limits. The limit of 140-something characters, maybe to be slightly loosened up when it comes to links and such, can be fitted together with an image. On that image, you can type--you can make an image out of text by any such thing as Photoshop or Gimp, and include it in your message. That way you go beyond the limits. You can also maintain such as a website, and include a link to a page in it for "further reading" about any topic you introduce by some keywords, as a slogan, as a Twitter message--or "Tweet", then. By being aware of what Twitter can do--exchange headlines, images, and links--it is possible to consider it a free marketing medium where one doesn't have to render up all details of one's existence to the bosses: one can choose freely a variety of things, and in that sense Twitter is as Tumblr, only that Twitter is populated by the world's strongest media forces. Tumblr.com provides something to the net that other's don't, but its chief strength--it's anarchistic attitude--is marred by a consistently undermanned staff, which have to spend most of its days using the delete button on sites, creating much anger in their attack on what they see as weeds in the Tumblr garden. When it is clear that one cannot communicate whole articles--not even a decent chain of thought--by means of Twitter.com, then one can use Twitter.com without feeling any complications about the limited size. Using this together with having one's own website, or something like a Wordpress-site, supplemented by a couple of emails, at least one of them public, seems to me to be much better than putting up with the quasi-websites of the monopolistic and manipulative social media where the texts can be long and where people submit 'likes' to one another's trivialities so as to create a cosy, lazy, fat sense of imbecile togetherness. For these reasons, it is easy to understand why journalists all over the world are so happy about Twitter. Journalists have other mediums for their expressions of long thoughts, and they are workers, and haven't got time for posting nonsense. They may have time to post a hint and scan some headlines, but they don't rely on Twitter for emotional recreation; they don't try to do self- therapy on it (at least, most don't); and, besides, they aid their business by doing a decent bit of propaganda for their business. If there's one thing that ought to be outlawed--and, in my opinion, this is far more important than to outlaw what Tumblr calls 'NSFW' images from such sites--it is the false pretense built into the algorithms that portray their foolish outputs as to be real human stuff. These algorithms--or 'bots', as they are called--appear to me like poorly destilled homebrew filled up on bottles that says, eg, Scotch Whisky, 12 Yrs, Authentic Recipe. Bloomberg.com once called the bots, in a headline, "The Bots that are Rotting the Internet". There are some companies--I won't mention name, we all know which they are--that propagate bots and claim that bots are the "Next Big Thing". They use finer words and concepts they don't understand themselves, that suit their business interests, including this infernally reductive phrase, "Artificial Intelligence", but in effect, they are wedded to the idea that the human mind is an expendable object, which could and maybe should be exchanged for their miserable products. Politicians shouldn't be impressed. Voters shouldn't be impressed. Laws should come again the mimicking of human minds before we get as stupid as machines, not having alternative perspectives. But that is a different theme--how it is scientifically rationally to work on such as robotics without using concepts like "AI"--I have proposed "FCM" instead, a no-nonse concept of First-hand Computerised Mentality, which is humble to the greatness of human mind, soul, feelings and unique capacity to think--and not the main point in this article. However, the bots that mimick human behaviour ought to be banned, harshly, and fast, before they overwhelm the net and also Twitter completely. They contribute with nothing except at best faintly pleasing increase of counts of followers and such. They are like spam with electric legs. There should be a botfilter, just as every email has a spamfilter. The authors of such bots ought to be subject to the same treatments as the authors of the worst computer viruses: for bots are a form of viruses, and, in the long term, maybe even the worst kind of them. Will Twitter.com survive? They aren't earning much money and like Yahoo's Tumblr, may find themselves being gobbled up by the control freaks who run the monopolies of this world. Let us hope that the anarchism of the World Wide Web will counteract the monopolies and protect Twitter.com and its relative integrity, after all, from the gobblers. Next is the twitter.com account I made a few days ago. If you happen to be human, I suggest you join up to this one as a follower--for already a dozen bots or more have signed up as followers to my account, and I wish to shift the percentage in the direction of humanity ;) twitter.com/avenuege *** ********************** Copyright -- redistribution You are granted the right to redistribute any such essay from yoga6d.org/economy.htm without asking on the condition that the context is respectful and that no deletion or addition or change of text takes place, and that this notice is included. *** ***** /////Quote in this wind ASSOCIATED QUOTE Some eat only that which they love (considering it a blessing to the food that it is so lucky that it is being eaten). Is that not a more worthy attitude than to eat only that which one hates? *** /////Quote in this wind ASSOCIATED QUOTE The observer is the observed. -- J. Krishnamurti. *** &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& THOSE WHO EAT THEIR YOUNG -- and those who despise their young: who is best? ***A personal brief autobiographical series of comments about meetings with masters in physics and philosophy, and a call for the ending of the last of the taboos, moving beyond the quasi-puritanism still existing in USA and United Kingdom; and a quest into an enlightenment transcending the paradigm of such as Jiddu Krishnamurti, bringing in millerian and niinian sexuality*** [As of 1::A::2014::3::7 (morning in terms of GMT hours) Author of this yoga6d.org/economy.htm comment can contacted at h-reusch@frisurf.no] There is a variety of anatomical details that the artist MUST know in order to draw elegant artistic cartoons, such as with our Curveart program. These presuppose skinny healthy girls showing much skin and with muscles well toned, so that various contours can show, exact shades etc. Ballerinas, dancers, all ages, are obviously entirely to the point in order for the artist to meet the greatness of the human body. The human eye deserves such a fiest for artistic inspiration also. The artistic context lifts any action -- ANY action or activity WHATSOEVER (also the erotic or violent) out of what could otherwise be a tacky context and makes it possible for perception to yield, as it were, effortless gold. Ultimately, the artist is a supplier of energy, force (both brute force, and just, as well as elegant and subtle) to the society. Fuel for the mind comes by art: a fuel making drugs unnecessary. It is a dictum that drugs is a (bad) compensation for artistic greatness: therefore, art must never be at the mercy of the market, it must never merely correspond to what people pay for. It must correspond to what gives a glow to the eye, a twinkle, a spark, whether it's the fashion and the law to pay for it or not. Can art in some forms also give money income? Yes, in some forms, it MIGHT, and that is not to be condemned, but warmly approved of -- as long as there is no attempt to identify one's activity in art with what is sold. If need be -- and that need is usually there, for most people who indulge in making art, or surrounding themselves creatively with art and artistically inspiring photogenic girls, -- one supplies, or even completely funds, one's monthly earnings on other things so as to keep that spirit going, for that spirit, as the very core essence of life itself, goes beyond mere birth and death, and has to do with a conscience that's ultimately religious. In all cultures, in all recorded history, some fields of human activity and especially display of human activity in some areas to the wider public have been taboo. But, significantly, what has been taboo in one place has not necessarily been taboo in another place -- or another time, in the same place, or for the same society. The notion of 'taboo' can usually be seen to be regarded not, then, as an absolute insight -- of the type that say that "God is beauty" or "Love is God" -- but rather, taboos can be seen to have a practical function, viz., to steer society outside of a course that by the dominant folks of that society is regarded as unlikely to sustain that society in the long run. In other words, there is a 'societal survival' notion which leads certain taboos to be cultivated as if they were religious standards -- and, in almost all known cases, there have been an attempt to use whatever there is of 'holy texts' or fashionable scientific or philosophical theories to as if 'justify' these taboos. When in much of the world gayism became -- from being a taboo -- and from being illegal -- something regarded as a natural human activity, it reflected a growing understanding that sexuality of human beings (unlike that of animals in general) is an intrinsic part of being human, and female liberation saw to it that female sexuality was getting the upper hand, while male muscular dominance using women rather as slaves incorporated in an institutionalised marriage came more and more to an end in these same societies. This was a time (the 1970s) where technology began knitting together many but not all human societies, and so one can speak of a movement. This is not to say that ancient prejudices in male-dominated religious practises and religious habits of thought automatically got done with in an insightful way. On the contrary, even as lesbians gradually got not only acceptance for public display of their beautiful activity not merely in artist's atelier's in Vienna and Paris {cfr e.g. the ateliers of such folks as Gustav Klimt, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali, and the corresponding writings of Anais Niin and Henry Miller -- Opus Pistorum of the latter, and the writings of how Niin willingly sought up her still young father as an adult girl in order to seduce him, which she successfully and, one must say (despite a lot of heated argument about Niin), with pride and both self-reverence and diginity} -- even as all these cultural and political and philsophical activities unfolded, and legalities were challenging a number of taboos, a counter-reaction set in. The female liberation front began hardening, also as lots of its young and seductive forefront figures began hardening, both in thought and in body, and looked with what in some amounted to rage againt pretty newcomers who, as it were, could dance on the table now that the mice of the old laws and old rules were gone, but without reverence for the tough work these early heroines had put in -- there was, we must say, whether we like it or not, clearly a counter- reaction against the liberated type of sexuality in the very core women liberation movement. What had been a free young dance of the 1970s hippie kind became a hardened elite of tough female thinkers who proclaimed a right to dominate female liberation in a certain way, which included locking girls into lesbian marriages more than announcing young female beauty to be worthy of unashamed reverence and public display. When advertisement business moved in on the scene and began using the new-found freedom to show female genitalia to the public in order to sell more and make their fat bosses even more fat, the female liberation front, now already hard with envy against the lazy pretty newcomers, got even harder. Worse, they turned seriously marxist. They made a powerful hypnosis that said, essentially, if there is going to be female liberation we must have an end to all this cultivation of young sexuality. For this is a men's thing. It is not that they got the pretty lazy and rather nude-happy girls to agree with them, but they got a lot other folks, also dominant folks in society to agree with them. A new taboo, which had existed for a long time in the same societies, which in some sense can be called 'Western' but it is far more than merely european, dominating also Russia, Latin America etc etc -- eventually encompassing China, India, Japan, all the technologised world -- became cultivated by the hardened school of so-called (but now corrupt) 'female liberators': they became aggressive against the very THOUGHT that young splendidness should be cultivated artistically OR sexually. {As with all generalisations over populations of this sort, there are significant minorities, and we find, in addition to the hardened old female liberators, also some -- albeit MUCH more rarely -- pro-nude young female 'compassionately anarchistic' groups here and there which exhibit the 1970s type of political urge to set society free from the fetters of 20th century hierarhicalism.} Worst of all, for these ex-liberators, would perhaps be to go as far as Anaiis Nin and Henry Miller went, where, despite the immense writing capacities of these two (sometimes spending much time together), and the fame they got as authors, one finds that they willingly and strongly and yet with a proper prudent element of tantalising shame describes themselves as children and other children in some of their many sexual adventures. So their manuscript work were even sometimes prepaid -- each erotic adventure page, fantasy or self-documentary or in between, gave them such and such amount of dollars and cent from the publisher, knowing the dangerous stuff would sell well. And it might even sell better if, like Opus Pistorum -- now in 2014 available freely in all major booksellers in non-totalitarian societies like the Western Europe and USA -- and the times of its banning seeming now to belong to the mirky medieval ages of the 20th century -- the book had to be secretly published and sold on the condition of total privacy, with all newspapers agog with feverent condemnation of such intolerable freedom to think about sex. As is known, these authors were in phases able to maintain a rather high life given the circumstances by doing little but writing and, we might assume, engaging in a certain element of what we can call 'sexual services' relative to some wealthy erobelievers. No, such free-wheeling love of the youngest became more taboo than ever, even as in countries like USA and Britain, there were groups associated with the governments exploring, right after gayism became formally legal, whether or not the sexual activity involving children, or children and adults together -- the love, 'phili', as in 'phil-o- sophy' -- the LOVE OF WISDOM -- and 'pedo', as in 'ped-a-gogics', the TEACHING OF CHILDREN, could not became a LEGALISED PEDOPHILE liberation just as LEGALISED GAYISM had become the case. For a while, especially in Great Britain, these groups managed to gather a following. The notion of this being a taboo was understood, but it was also understood that the degree to which it was a taboo was associated with traditional family structures, and what would keep societies glued together, more than in particular science that objectively and apart from what (the Norwegian Supreme Court Lawyer) T E Staff describes as 'society making people sick' by telling them over and over again that they 'ought not to have been experimenting with sex as young'. In an interview in the Norwegian conservative newspaper Aftenposten in February 2014 (with front-page photo of the ageing famous lawyer), he put it plainly: if young folks are experimenting with scientific things, they get a prize from society for brillance, but if they engage in experimentation with sex esp. with adults, they are told that they must regard themselves as victims and that the adults are rapists and that all about it all is sick and that they ought to feel bad about it. So, he proposes, one cannot do objective studies of these things in a society that 'aims to make people sick' if they engage in an activity it wishes to understand. He then drew the line to the female liberation front, and said that their present stance was one of 'bashing sexuality'. Psychologically, as one who enjoys contact with many young women, I notice a tendency in the young adult girls to be actively appreciative relative to other beauties: whereas when the girls mature from being splendidly young adults to adults who must work more to sustain their facial radiance and bodily harmony and firmness and such, there is a series of new attitudes that easily creeps in unless they watch it {but all who I have known intimately have managed fully to stay clear of any corrupt attitude later on}, and it takes a magnificent effort to stay clear of the virus of thought that has infected the female liberation fronts, which says that young beauty is somehow a bit immoral and that anyone adult who cherishes the youngest beauty is anything but beyond all morals. Those who are most philosophical and, one has to say, also most awakened to the truth that there is a tomboy-glamour which girls can awaken in order to truly attract young beauties themselves, even as they age a little, are the most positive to pedophilia of those who are older. But those who have not yet reached such a state of body where they must struggle more to maintain attractiveness typically see it laughingly easy, lazingly lovely: beauty is beauty, beauty is fun, and beauty is experimentative, and what the fuck about ages anyway, it's time to live and girls just wanna have fun. That's an attitude that seems reckless and lazy and unwise and characteristic of the very young and in a way 'spoiled', but it is also matching with the greatest philosophical and religious insights of all times, including some slants of interpretation, at least, of the cultivation of the child divinity concept in hinduism, to which also the surprisingly Jesus-like blue Krishna character has more than a little presence; and a variety of shamanistic societies, including several in Africa, as has been documented but which may no longer exist due to the spread of cities and their technologised standardisations also have elements of various forms of cultivation of this sort. Joseph Campbell explains, in his interviews by Bill Moyers, that a shamanistic tribe had their way with sexual initiation of the youngest, giving a pure young but perhaps indeed willing girl of splendid integrity and radiance a key role to the extent that when she had tantrically opened all the rest, she and her final partner, in a moment of copulation, was instantly and completely killed by an arrangment around them involving the cutting of ropes: after which the remainder of the tribe had a banquet over these youths, cannibalistically devouring them, a blessing for all that these orgiastic young spirits are shared in this long-pig repaste. "You can't beat that!", the late Campbell exclaimed, after laying out the main features of the story to Moyers {The Power of Myth}. I have no formal education in art, but I have had the immense pleasure of having spent considerable discussion and also, to some extent, 'learning' time with masters in their fields, including the fields of painting, philosophy and physics. I have noticed that the twinkle and radiance of artmanship they radiated went along with a whole lot of freedom from conventional taboos: that their humour and psychic nutrition belonged together and shared with me a sense that beauty as such is the Right type of "drug", no matter where your masterliness or tradecraft lies or, as an aspirant, is going to lie. Notably, my three most important mentors, even if I met the latter of the three rarely compared to the other two, is the painter Frans Widerberg, the philosopher Arne Naess, and the physicist/philosopher David Bohm; the two first completely dominant on the national scenes in Norway at the time of their most active careers, while the latter at times a world figure. Bohm, of course, worked under Oppenheimer co-developing the atomic bomb. But this physicist -- who befriended the ageing Einstein and, on his inspiration, opened up for a new era of re-interpretations of quantum theory along the lines of Louis de Broglie by successfully challenging a half-baked impossibility theorem from the 1920s -- this eminent thinker was removed from possibilities of serious job in USA's network of academic institutions once they suspected Bohm for having communist leanings. This led David Bohm, despite being of jewish descent, to leave USA rather permanently. After a period in Argentina, then also in Israel where he met Sarel {who became his wife}, the Bohm's settled eventually in Britain and Bohm got a professorate at Birkbeck College, the University of London and began a long and fruitful collaboration with physicists including Basil Hiley, David J Peat, and inspired people such as Nobel Laurate Ilya Prigogine, who even proposed Bohm for the Physics Nobel Price. {I interviewed Prigogine after Bohm's death just when this russian thinker was going to have a seminar with the Scientific and Medical Network in London, including with Basil Hiley; his views that the statisticality of quantum theory didn't quite go deep enough but still implied a determinism that was too narrow made deep impact on my own thinking which I later crystallised into what I called, and still call, and still feel is The Right approach to to modern physics and to formalisms -- "super model theory".} I think now it is fair to say that Bohm in London after having lost both Princeton professorate and also not gained support whether from Niels Bohr's folks nor from Albert Einstein with his job at opening up for new interpretations, became one who at some subconscious level at least had plenty spite against 'the establishment' -- thus, inspired by a Krishnamurti book Sarel picked out in a library, where she thought it had something to do with quantum physics as it used the words, so often there mentioned, of 'the observer' and 'the observed' -- he sought out the Indian rather pantheist thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti and a number of valuable books were published by them more or less in collaboration, reflecting an intellectual and spiritual friendship spanning decades. Was Bohm indeed communist? Nobody could really tell, as I gather -- for Bohm never talked politics. This, for instance, his collegue Basil Hiley, also physicist, told me durin a visit I made to the University of London after Bohm's death in the early 1990s. But when Bohm got into a well-documented depression due to the 'fall of Krishnamurti' when, after the death of the latter, a child-abortion-rich thick book entitled 'Lives in the Shadows with Krishnamurti' was published, Bohm confided to me that when the Soviet Union fell and became Russia, this increased his depression further; also, Saddam Hussein had just invaded Kuwait and all these world events were jarring at his sleepless nerves (it was against sleeplessness doctors tried, very foolishly in my opinion, no less than electro-shocks on him). I was surprised at this -- it was during a walk around the parking lot and mini-garden around the hospital belonging to King's College, University of London, he said this (which is where he got his drastic treatment a season or two before he died -- I visited him there together with Mr G Wikman, head of the Swedish Herbal Institute in Gotenburg, Sweden.) So I asked David why he would consider it a problem that the Soviet Union was no more. After all, that totalitarian society seemed so radically at odds with the efforts and aspirations of Bohm, I thought, not in the least represented in Oslo during the Dialogue Weekend seminar there {which I helped Sven Bjoerk, Nadia MacLaren and also Henrik B Tschudi to arrange, after I had invited Bohm on behalf of what Bjoerk had coined as his 'Forum 2000', which also regularly invited people like the far-ranging biological thinker and philsopher Rupert Sheldrake and a number of thinkers who contributed to a sense of there being a new time, era or age, something perhaps more experienced by many now than then. I invited Bohm since I had yearly visited him since 1986 anyway.} For in his latter years, Bohm talked ceaselessly about creating a new form of deep Dialogue in all society and with science, religion, philosophy and so on included, with a great emphasis on bringing hidden assumptions into suspension, suspended thought, suspended 'felt' or feelings or emotions, so as to create change. All this amounts to much other than the totalitarianism that Russia then, as now, has too much of to be a totally welcome impulse to the world. So he replied {and it took me much time to figure out that he had a big point} -- he didn't like the new world order because now there is no global big alternative to USA when it comes to power domination. That was the gist if not the exact words of his short reply to me during that little walk, which was the last I saw of him {though I had a couple of phone conversations with him afterwards; last one on the theme of 'suspension', when he told a zen koan about a suspended munk, about to fall down a cliff. As for me, after Bohm's death, Mr H T Tschudi and I put together a magazine in Oslo we called the "Flux Magazine" to deal with all themes of dialogue and rethinking of science and such; we accepted the name after Sonia de Zilwa suggested it, and of course there was Bohm's insistence on the world not only being in flux but being flux itself. During that period, the contact with Naess and Widerberg and also the dancer Monica Emilie Herstad began, as well as contact with a number of other highly interesting people, some masters in their field, and some just almost muse-like in their sweet beauty and suitable for a self-annointed editor-in-chief so as to enable the creativity to flow better. It was, all in all, a period of great, but highly stressful fun, with a sense of much loyality after all to surface trends in order to make the stuff popular enough to sell etc. All this pleasantly culiminated April 17, 1996, in the opening speech I gave that morning inside the Norwegian parliament building Stortinget, in a seminar for parlamentarians and government members -- Gro Harlem Brundtland's government still -- on information technology in the service of the welfare society}. Having done that, and having published, I felt, one too many interviews with Naess and having a sense of having interviewed 'everybody' at least once and so to speak having sucked the national intellectual field dry, I felt it was time to move on to more authentic stuff. I wanted no more 'skimming the surface' but felt I had to write and program, train -- also in yoga -- and get it together anew from within; much travel ensued, and a discovery that, amazingly, I find the sunshine in the morning reflecting on the very tall buildings of Manhattan so beautiful it kept me wanting to be there again and again, months after months, writing intensely -- over-intensely, some claimed, but no, just the right intensity, I say. Anyway, it was a total immersion in the field of more fluid english than I had ever been near to having been exposed to before this. It was a submerging into what appeared to me to be a representation of the collective consciousness of Man at the time: Manhattan. And I was pleased to see that being a nobody with good looks with no money was enough to make one survive for a year in one of the world's most expensive places without ever touching anything even remotely criminal nor acting against one's heart. Good friends and luck kept that process going, and the Manhattan Transformation, as I always had as working title for whatever I wrote, then eventually in 2006 became the Firth platform or OS, which is as wild an operating system as Manhattan was then, in those bohemian days. The main folder, then, is also called BOEHMIAN, a mixture of 'bohemian' and 'bohmian', the latter being a term sometimes used about the type of physics my mentor developed. Firth is as wild as one can get, but having looked it very carefully over after having much experience with entirely other types of platforms of all sorts, including the best of Linux, Ubuntu, I can only say that Firth is, and keeps on being, much better than I think it is. I use it eight percent of the time, and right now bought a new expensive laptop ONLY to run it. But I have let enthusiasm lead me astray. I said that Bohm came with a slightly puzzling statement about how necessary it was for the world to have a counter-balance against USA, even if it lacked many or most of the features one could call 'demo-cratic' or 'people-ruling'. Only later, reflecting over a number of his statements together with the renewed insights into the intense secret collaboration behind closed doors in USA and also in the United Kingdom etc so as to re-render the whole scene as one of COLLUSION, can I see more deeply what he was emotional about. For we are talking of revelations, the well-known 2013 Snowden revelations, which speak of stuff going back a long while in the 20th century. We're talking of, amongst other themes, COLLUSION -- yet another word that Bohm often talked about -- he said one could translate it more or less, at least by means of rhyme and by metaphor to its roots, as 'false play', the wrong type of play, where 'ludere', play, can be a good thing when there is attention in it. I often think that those big advertisement companies that tries to stupify the population so as to sell more -- which often includes endorsing of censorship of taboo activities, and thus a cementation of bygone types of societal impulses; while also, most disgustingly, these companies tries to project the thought that they have intelligence machines -- I often think that these companies engage in 'false play'. And that's worthy to fight, for all. {E.g.: write a big poster and hang it up over a high-way which says: NEXT TIME YOU SEE AN AD ON THE NET YOU WANT TO CLICK ON, DON'T CLICK ON IT, FOR ALL YOU'RE DOING IS FEEDING THE FATTEST BY EACH CLICK. -- I suppose it has to be fewer words, but that should be the gist of what we want to see more of, instead of the advertisement targeting monopolies we have still in 2014.} When we see a country that speaks intensely about free and open market competition but which yet, -- as revealed esp. by E Snowdon's smuggled-out top secret spy papers, published electronically and bravely spread worldwide by UK's the Guardian, but also by New York Times, Washington Post, Spiegel, and several others in 2013 -- which yet engages in massive collusion -- not just between themselves, but wrapped up with their government, then one can understand more of how people can get an almost permanent sense of spite about it all. There are people in USA, we know in 2014 but didn't in 2012, who thinks they have the right to snook in and copy every foreign intellectual's productions and store in their own archives and toss it around between themselves, whether for one reason or for another reason. We're talking of a radical ethical decline in the spy business, it has become a tool for a country to make an impact on the world in all senses, while the ostensive reason is military self-protection. They haev made more or less a govnerment of big USA and more or less a company also of the whole thing, and the propaganda about free market competition something they don't listen to themselves -- except for the always existing exceptions. However true the generalisation is, it is in any case a fair counter-view for people like myself who have been consistently trying to believe in their approach as at least a modicum more enlightened, a glimpse albeit in miniature over the paradise to be of freewheeling Age of Aquarius world. Instead we see now moralists and greedy private fighter jet owning advertisement-slash-search engine owners flying their stuff with Pentagon fuel (consult Fox News for the story about Pentagon -- Google) and with fiber optic cables going between the Secret Services and their very humane, very service-minded product which is 'free for all to use': we see a sleezy side, which may be worse than what is obvious or better than what is suggested in the Snowden papers, which goes all the way to the Edgar J Hoover that Dusko Popov in Spy-Counterspy once and for all made clear was a jerk. A jerky New York, the New Jerk, the USA that is US against Aliens, not the free market world that the movies like to talk about. USA is just a much more successfully propagandised China, but just as much communist as them; yet it has to be said, with much less totalitarianism, which sets them apart also from present-day Russia, which has severe problems with a number of key issues. Some of these issues seem to have their existence in an overdone attempt to be Different. Russia ought to become more eclectic, and not automatically equate everything USA-like with something bad, in its state propaganda, for else the state propaganda, and the mafioso techniques used to subdue to most popular alternatives, becomes more and more heavy, less and less convincing. This is what brought Soviet Union down, and so it should be regarded as an experiment that was carried out, and that failed, and that should not be repeated again. For instance, Russia needs to embrace lesbianism. All else is detoriation and the leaders know this very well indeed. Anyway, the Bohm was probably no less than shocked by the reality of the power structures in USA -- seen from the inside during his Los Alamos Manhattan Project which he had enrolled in on the condition of life-long total secrecy -- despite the fact that these power structures were dominated by people sharing his type of roots in many ways. {'Bohm' was an invented name his german-speaking family took when he immigrated to the United States.} So Mr David Bohm seemed to imply that a totalitarian society would be of greater value than the absence of one such, if it could counter the co-luding USA. It may be that Plato was right in his stark, furious criticism of democracy as a free license for egotists to do egotistical things: but then we need a discussion over just what type of totalitarian society we have to have, for it to be as totally meaningful as can be, and which can yield the true feeling of freedom as Plato wanted people to have. As for Bohm, it seems quite clear that aspects of the physics of Bohm didn't work out to the great popularity he had hoped for, and that Krishnamurti was much less a God and far more a human than he perhaps had secretly wished for: for J.Krishnamurti, though far from ever against free sex, radiated a type of 'being beyond sex' associated with more ascetic forms of hinduism -- however, an hinduism he did not wish to subscribe to in those words. While it appears clear and objective as fact that Krishnamurti (also possibly under his visit to Oslo ca 1930) had an active and flourishing and child- aborting relationship to woman married to Mr Rajagopal, his editor, and possibly to other women, as a hidden -- shadow -- aspect of his life, the book tainted the sense with which Krishnamurti was associated with honesty, effortlessness, simplicity (there was nothing simple about those abortions, if the book 'Lives in the Shadows' is true at those points), freedom from burning desires (he seemed to be just as full of those desires as any other, and yielding to some of them quite much too) -- and it made many people think that e.g. the teacher in India who named himself Osho, and who died the same year after having propagandised free sex for decades, perhaps had more to him than Krishnamurti. To me, this wanted thinking over. The result is that I felt that as for sex, Osho had more to him; but both Osho and Krishnamurti didn't perceive more than half the universe at most, if I can trust my own intuitions on this. To me, pantheism is a phase one can go through if one likes in order to perceive better: but with both, and with Bohm, it was pretty much a hidden dogma, as I view it now, much later. In other words, Krishnamurti wasn't wrong for doing his bit with pretty young ladies in just the right way, but his teaching on spirituality to large crowds should have incorporated his insights into sex and even elaborated on them and the lack of this feature calls into question the authenticity of some other aspects of his spirituality. The claim one heard about Krishnamurti's teachings from some philosophers -- that he made half-truths seem to be the whole truth -- comes to mind. Poetically, it rather worked; but practically, it falls short of matching the totality of existence of the human psyche in its fullness; but it was a noteworthy attempt, however clearly faltering it was as far as enlightenment goes. Indeed, the whole enlightenment context cannot be separated from the view of the universe, or the multiverse as it is better called in the view of many. Only the Krishnamurti of his latter years, after the book 'The Ending of Time', with Bohm, in 1980, had a personal God-like faith element in it, but only weakly, and not tightly integrated at the intellectual level with all the immensity of earlier poems (or talks) about love, life, etc. This brings the whole little essay back to the point of art. For there was a sense of glamorous art about the radiance of young Krishnamurti. {This must be read, then, in the context of knowing that soon after Krishnamurti's death ny cancer in 1986 there was the subsequent publication of the 'Lives in the Shadows' by the daughter of his earlier editor, which spoke with detail and depth, and with photos, about a Krishnamurti entirely at odds with the very much mythic picture he had carefully allowed being built up of him over many years. After a while, a confirmation was published by his british foundation. It said that the Foundation 'had been informed about the relationship' by Krishnamurti some years before he died (booklet published by Brockwood Educational Centre, Hampshire, and given together with their seasonly bulletin, just after the publication of the book. So that was that.} As for this glamour -- a word that means 'secret code' in its etymology -- one can now associate that glamour, that laughter, not merely with the often guru-self-important radiance of pantheism and buddhistic schools of thought -- where there is no higher God making one humble as manifest human to this greatness -- but rather, this laughter, this shine, may have been associated with a rich sexual life and can be seen to associate itself more to such figures as Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso. But there is a crucial difference: Dali, Klimt, Miller, etc etc made women stand forth in their nude splendor as part of their lives' work, whereas for gurus like Krishnamurti who has to appeal to a taboo-rich society, it was a shadowy aspect. This brings us fully back to the point raised in the beginning: that art as beauty as young girl splendor is fuel for the psychic energy of society, all society, -- and all human beings inasmuch as they are able to transcend their own envy. Anyone who claims that some parts of beauty attraction ought not to be sexual should question where they got that assumption from {viz., the hardened old thinkers of the female liberation movement}. And when someone gets depressed with society, is it not rather a depression with one's own contact with the innocence of the future as reflected in the shining faces of the upcoming generation of sensually uplifting faces? And, let's add, BODIES. So we are talking dance, not just dance as ballerina-like flexible dance, but also dance as gymnastic, also dance as wrestling, also dance as martial arts, as fighting -- which brings one into an aspect of living of young women that has yet to reach the popularity it deserves in post-female liberation times -- we are talking also porn, the 'porn mode', the BANQUET OF YOUTH, that the psyche of every soul must have to awaken oneself to that fountain of generosity which according to Baruch de Spinoza (as Naess laid Spinoza out, anyway), characterises FREEDOM. So freedom is not to conform to society, it is to conform to the surprise of the day -- to see that greatness of young beauty never before seen, because beauty is the only thing that is always new: and it can only be seen on this premise, not as an artificial newness, not as the newness brought about by greed, but by the perceptive depth of the skilled observer and sexual interactor, in meeting with the infinity-in-movement that the temple of the beautiful golden-ratio-proportioned slim longlegged young well- trained girl, whether adult or pre-adult, whether teen, post-teen or pre-teen, can exhibit in the mind of those whose capacity to think is so that they dominate and influence their society. Perhaps some would say -- and I dare say, there are some who have at least hinted it earlier on -- should I, as being one who has some influence, much or little, should I spend so much time and energy cultivating such beauty and sexuality, is it "serious" --? They would maybe suggest I should spend more of the energy in 'purer' scientific things, or 'purer' computational things, or 'purer' philsophical or religious things, and give the impression, to at least a mild extent, of some head-shaking; and perhaps some would even go as far as to advice me to look into such as buddhism, or perhaps they are merely informing me that they themselves try to get into the attitude of buddhism and see the fact that I am perfectly happy without it. Yet, as the decades go by, if I can shed a bit of modesty and excell in the opposite for a moment at the completion in this little or logn tale: I, who happen to spend 'too much time' on young beauty and going beyond boundaries and exploring the theme of the erotic happens to also get more things done than anyone else they can point to other things -- including the toughest of programming efforts, including prose stuff, including also staying totally renewed in what I do (in contrast to the typically quickly withering buddhists that seek to repeat to themselves, watching in their little mirrors, that everything is transient, and they too). Buddhism as presented is wrong, I feel, at two points: it doesn't love sex, and it has a pantheism that makes people who indulge in it -- as sometimes with Sufi as well -- try to put themselves up as God. For the human psyche needs God, and if it isn't around, it becomes themselves. This is the typical problem, the typical lack of laughter in Buddhism: it is a cult around people who are seen as demi-gods, by disciples who are there for one reason only, to become themselves cultivated. And so let me conclude by saying, do not think human intelligence can be extracted and put into a sardine box the way some scientists have sought to do. It is not a fruit to be digested in the the cut'n'dried form that some universities -- shame to that name! -- have done when they dabble in their misnamed intelligence measurements -- that misuse of the word 'intelligence' applies to them as well as to the spying communities, who think they have anything going that can be called 'intelligence'. They don't. Neither these folks nor the artificial intelligence folks have any idea what intelligence is. It is not their rapid manipulative perceptiveness that can crack codes that never needed cracking for they were open all the time. Intelligence is what Bach manifest, or Vivaldi, or Haendel -- but also what girls manifest, when they dance, draw, make society shine up with their sweetness, not only when sing with such perfect harmonious skills and deep-felt mature sexuality as what the what the russian pro-lesbian almost preteen group Tattoo did some years ago, in their All The Things She Said, quite possibly one of the most richly harmonious pop songs anyone has ever made. love is beauty, flows from contact with youth, as something holy, or representative, at least, of the holy, of that heavenly kingdom which only belong truly to those who either are children or AS them. And much as God and his muses are infinitely beyond all that is manifest, then surely there is more God and his muses in the youngest and prettiest than in the hardened writings of those who are anti-youth and anti-sex at the same time. And when one lets oneself be reverent to the queens of the female sex, consciousness leaps and sometimes touch with the equal reverence the majestic beings at core of reality have for one another -- and for the future of humankind. THAT's my official non-pantheistic perception, take it or leave it. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& HEISENBERG AND WHY NOT COUNT SOCIAL THINGS -- It is the very attempt to map the social by digital databases that in itself has an incurable wrongness about it. What is the view of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle a thousand years from now? Whatever it is, it will probably not have the same status then as the flat-earth theory has now. It is one of the bits of modern physics, that jigsaw that nobody seems to be able to make into the castle that some physicists like to say that it is. There are regularly reports on the hunts for the building blocks of the universe and all that blah, but physics is a total mess, even a misery. It is a failed science, except when it comes to producing bombs and providing complicated equations for university students. There is not one iota of wholeness about physics theories. The Star Trek like notions of 'dark matter' are no better than the epi-cycles invented to rescue the wrong theory that all heavenly bodies move in perfect circles. They say 'dark' because they themselves are in the dark about how to make it all hang together. But to be that honest about the failed field of physics is not in the economical interests of scientists whose daily bread depends on sustained income from a scientific institution. For this reason, we should trust Einstein on the point that science is best done outside of scientific institutions. He himself was employed at a patent office when he did most things with some enduring significance. But it isn't that one cannot be eclectic. There are pieces. There are, for instance, photons -- a likely name to survive, even with changed meanings in the upcoming millenia, just as the word atom has changed meaning since its inception (meaning indivisible). Photons are the webwork of existence, the flow of a total information beyond human control. Our bodies are more electrons than photons, but photons surround and penetrate everything. Electrons is the matter part of physics, practically speaking; while photons the forever elusive touch of the infinite, the nonlocal. Yet due to a series of studies which can be studied as empirical data -- as honest reports of experience -- beyond theory, beyond theoretical interpretation, it seems pretty clear that also in a thousand years one will admit that there is a fluid wave-like nature to electrons just as there is a particle-like nature to photons. And somehow there may still be something much like the HUP (Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) to weave some of it together in our thoughts and minds. There is a flux to electrons, and there is a fix to photons: this flux-fix complementarity is part of the living pulse of the universe. HUP says: if you fix a lot, off goes the flux. (Conversively, if you flux a lot, off goes the fix.) In contrast to money, which wouldn't exist without at least some degree of fix, social things wouldn't exist without at least some degree of flux. Social things, then, map the metaphor of photons. Money is more like electrons, in the same metaphor. But when the world of San Francisco driven billionaires hire computer programmers to make you part of a fixed machinery of counted likes and counted friends, they are in praxis inviting you to un-flux your social life, even as they promise exact the opposite. And would they know what they are doing themselves? Or is it an invasion of nerds upon the human scene? Nerds are human, granted, but they are more in love with fix than with flux. When they implant their bits and bytes upon the social realm, it may be that there isn't any social realm there. You don't take a military vehicle into the woods to study the flowers. You walk by foot. You must be lightfooted. And there is something both heavy-handed and heavy-footed about counting friends, followers, likes and such. Perhaps, also, the notion that a 'like' is a practical thing which has certain features, and that it is either/or, is itself a drastic attempt to flatten the rich subtle nuances of emotion and feeling that flow through human beings and make human beings into human beings and not androids, not mere digital brains. There are professors trying to develop artificial brains and journalists, having nothing better to do, they think, report on this over and over again, and the professors are very proud of all their little boxes and the wires between them. And as-if philosophers who are mere propagandists for a barren scientificality with no depth and little honesty do a lot of blah-blah on the socalled 'hard question' of whether computers ever can think. There is nothing hard about the question. One must be very soft in the brain to even regard it as a hard question. The answer is, of course, no. And for those who want the answer the hard way, spend a year with Kurt Goedel's second incompleteness theorem and all attempts to disprove it. I know of at least sixteen dimensions to my own emotions, and each one of them allows a scale no less than one to thousand. But would I ever try to map those emotions along those dimensions exactly? Only if I couldn't care less about what those emotions concern. It is an almost autistic thing to try to map emotions on a computer. And yet that seems to be part of the false ideology of the biggest buck-making advertisement companies at present. They seem to co-exist in an hypnosis which rely on the notion that the human pscyhe is mappable in digital terms. They sell each other maps, and so think that they can convince the sellers of REAL things, not fake maps, that by using these maps, these vast databases hosted by whoever, they can more easily get their wares sold to real people with real feelings. At the same time, the global economy is sputtering. Is it strange it is sputtering when the flux is flattened by nerds? And when much of the world's population are letting the nerds hypnotise them to put in those outrageously silly 'counters' of things which any person with any taste at all ought to leave uncounted? The uncountability of the social is -- as I see it -- a direct result of a philosophical metaphorical application of HUP, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, -- on the human psyche. It is not part of hard science to apply HUP on psyches. It is however a meaningful philosophical inspiration to apply something fairly much like a poetic rendering on HUP on psyches and social selves. Whether this ultimately can be shown to have some ground in what will be hard science is not the point right now. Right now it is the point to indicate that this whole paradigm of trusting the flux to be more flux and dance, and avoid the distasteful attempt to count one's social relations, and line up digitally (and with free lines to NSA and other surveillance agencies which have even less taste in their databasing) what one feels like -- the whole paradigm, in other words, of letting the social be social and not social 'media', is in need of encouragement before the social life of too many humans rot into facebookish pieces. In a way, ANYTHING done by any human being is social, and obviously that goes more for things which are available for others -- such as when you publish things on a website -- than when you conceal it. In that sense, all websites are inherently social. No particular TYPE of website should claim ownership to the 'social' concept. There is no eco-system associated with digital phones, -- they are digital, hence not eco-logical, merely part of the pollution of ecology and eco-systems. The whole language is a mess, branded and manipulated, and this stupidity creeps into schools because underpaid hypnotised bored lonely teachers furnish the crap of the times into children. Where has the cry of Pink Floyd -- Teacher! Leave those kids alone! -- gone? Some are apparently imagining that progress involves changing from walking around and socialising by means of pleasant interactions and intuitions and coincidences to sitting hunched over small displays while tapping fingers on these little things and eating cookies at the same time. Facebook follows up by banning the celebration of slimness, removing images of people who celebrate getting into half their previous weight. Fatbook. On the other hand, if only the face shows at their so-called "profile", who cares about the rest of the body anyway? It's a completely wrong paradigm of human interaction: and that goes for most use of phones anyway. And what is wrong and right cannot be reduced to a mere question of counting 'likes'. It is not about making it sick enough that it becomes a virus on something inherently sick like Youtube, and become 'viral'. Rightness and wrongness are psychic insights that depend on a certain dance of mind, a freshness of being, and an uprightness of body that has the meditation of walk and the freedom from unnecessary fixing and unnecessary counting of things which ought to have flux and exist as momentum more than position (to use a language of HUP). It's not merely that the particular maps that the advertisement- and spying- motivated databases have over humanity are wrong. It is the very attempt to map the social by digital databases that in itself has an incurable wrongness about it. It is the wrongness of allowing off-beat nerds to try to connect to the beat; the notion that this connection is innocent; the notion that this beat isn't smarter than that; the notion that one can comfortably build person data databases over people who haven't asked for it without deep consequences at many levels in this reality. Computers can be, and in limited areas have been, a blessing in human society, removing the need for certain definite forms of overly repetitive work. But the only way to regain a sense of healthy progress in the wealthy cities now is by realising -- also at the city-planning level -- that computers have become very much TOO popular. They are damaging people, fattening people, sickening things. One thing is to have a large computer monitor in front of one where one can have a dialogue with oneself such as in a text editor when one writes something. Something else altogether is to find that no place in the city is without digitalism -- the wireless pollution in the air, and the hunched people staring at their little screens and the little texts going hither and tither with little other consequence than making of the social realm more emulation and virtuality than reality. The only way that humanity can get the upper hand again is that societies which have gone into digitalism fully start a self-re-education process, beginning harshly with all schools: these must demand of the kids that they learn how to program the computers, at the same time as the USE of computers are largely prohibited. For we see an era of stupid users of supposedly smart things. What we need is an era of smart interactors and winners over these incurably stupid things that computers are, and always must be, for computers to be a blessing. To learn to program is to learn to mould the dough of computers. They will convince less. It's like learning a little bit of the nuts and bolts of science so as not to be too easily convinced by popularised science. When you learn to program, you can fight other programmers -- and also programs -- and that includes advertisement programmes. You can fight back (both mentally and then also gaining the capacity to have bodily health to find energy in such as martial arts -- something increasing confidence in REAL social interaction, and obviously of enormous importance for girls) -- knowing that you have also a technological strength which isn't dependent on wallowing in a scheme of fake friends and fake counters. It's about programming so to be as properly bored with the digital that we with ease can switch it all off, and make zones free from computing and free from mobile phones all over the cities, so as to switch on the real flux of the social realm, free from the digital fix. 2014: A YEAR OF THE RECOVERY OF CAFEES Anything published, written, said, spoken in any way whatsoever on (or in some cases even near) any type of computing technology might as well be shouted out in a cafe. For it is bound to be available to more people than what you intended, unless you intended just that. Those who have read the news of 2013 with any sentient mind at all, and who have had some freedom to go for leisurely walks and think over what it means, will find it interesting to think about increased use of real-life public spaces in 2014. One might as well, when it appears that the biggest technology companies of the world have collaborated with the biggest governments of this world in shaping a set of tools that do all sorts of things other than what they are said to do, including making a semi-public space out of your private doings with these tools. Governments that we thought were interested in honest competitive free market practises have been found to do all the dirty tricks and cheating at games possible, just because there wasn't a law preventing them from doing so: while apparently being so concerned with fighting terrorism threats, they have had an orgy of snooping while populations all across the globe have had an orgy of SmartPhone use and engagement with browsers with privacy settings and with websites that apparently offers increased security and encryption. And these governments have licensed out these orgies of cheap meaningless surveillance to private companies and, in praxis, operated as mafia-states more than as the human rights dignified institutions they want to appear like. Each government, and each big technology company, has what one could call a Snooping Exhaust. There are those who remember what shock it was to the world when Google.com reported that they in fact store what everbody searches on and intend to keep it to about 2030. This happened in the early years of Google.com. Since then, the Snooping Pollution has just increased, not just from Google.com, but from all sorts of companies and governments that many thought were beyond it. Today, because people are slow to digest new information, statistics don't show enormous changes. People are still imagining that they can have private lives and go around tapping on their little computer-enabled telephones to do all sorts of things. Meanwhile, advertisement companies have learned to collaborate, in a worldwide synergy with the snooping agencies, to come upon ways -- for companies and for governments -- of earning money that has little to do with honest competition or of, in case of govnernments, little to do with the stated goals of national security and such. They pry on the hypnosis that still exist, namely that an up-to-date individual in a fairly affluent part of the world, at least, should upload chunks of one's life to the SmartPhones and the socalled Social Media. Thanks to the heroism of some -- Mr Edward Snowden should in particular be mentioned, of course -- 2013 was the clear beginning of the exit of the just-mentioned hypnosis. The snooping pollution, the surveillance exhaust, of all sorts of companies and agencies are bound to be reduced because people won't sign up as eagerly before and because many people will actively start putting computerised phones to where they really belong (in the fridge, for instance, where Mr Snowden insisted on having them put during his first meetings with people about this in Hong Kong, some news articles would have it), and instead start getting a grip on real-life face-to-face communication again. Some may always have felt that mobile phones are something more likely to damage most people's lives than otherwise, speaking statistically, and giving of course room for those situations of vital need for small units capable of wireless communication. All that was wrong with mobile phones were multiplied as these phones was turned into items for the privacy snoopers, -- and in ways that cannot easily be turned off. One has got to come up with new technology in order to get out of that situation. But the fact is that with all the expenses involved in generating such new technology, it is likely that it is the same old set of bastardly companies and governments doing the making of such new technology, if new technology about this is indeed made. And so it is unlikely that we get out the situation where we simply don't have privacy in the realm of phoning anymore. The same has ALWAYS been said about email, but those who at least have an email not associated with one of the big bad companies having gone to excesses as for snooping exhaustion, the pollution into people's privacy, can possibly get at least some slight relief here. The whole projects of the social medias was to unprivatise people's lives and the net effect has been to make a lot of people's lives less social; and more transparent to all sorts of folks whose interest in other people aren't purely altruistic, put mildly. To draw a line behind all the idiocies, one should regard computers-in-net -- and wireless phones are also computers- in-net -- as a way to talk aloud in a public space and that has a role, just as the famous fruit boxes in Hyde Park that political agitators just to speak from, according to such as P.G. Wodehouse, did have a role. There's is a delightful anarchy in the capacity that internet has in getting things published that otherwise wouldn't easily get published -- and we're talking of much quality stuff, not just stuff under the limit. The net, computers-in-net, is a means of getting things across to a wide section of people. But computers-in-net, including typical phones as of today, aren't a way of getting one's private live sorted out. It isn't a good way to organise one's private contacts. It isn't a good way of creating a party. It isn't a good way of running a business -- or, in the case of the snooping on Angela Merkel's mobile phone -- a good way of running a government. Also, it isn't meaningful to think that when various services switches from http to https or from so many bits encryption to twice as many bits encryption this has ANYTHING to do with privacy AT ALL. It is merely a gimmick. In most cases, https is a gimmick, just as the privacy settings on many browsers is gimmick, and just as the apparent idealism of Google.com is gimmick, when Google.com pays literally hundreds of millions of dollars to browser makers to make privacy settings either more complicated or removed altogether, and to enforce the presence of their own NSA-infested might onto the list of search engines (such as has recently happened with the formerly independent Norwegian search engine Opera, where, once the list of search engines have been edited, up pops Google on top again next time one starts it up -- at least in the present Ubuntu version as of some weeks ago). Mozilla boosts of having 'invented' the 'do not track feature' but they don't at the same place, when this is announced on the front page, announce that there is virtually no effectiveness of this feature. They boost of having a way to scan who is watching what one is doing, but they run away from what they promised, namely to have third-party cookies turned off as the standard setting: all the while Google.com is pumping money into them, just as their love-partner NSA is pumping money into companies giving NSA privileged access to their servers and data, and probably having a bunch of cheap tricks to do away with the profits of the companies that don't succumb to the near-mafia institution that NSA-USA has transmutated into, beginning with the Edgar J Hoover years in FBI. Can President Obama do away with NSA? Obviously not, NSA has everyone in their pockets, and in Britain, GCHQ has everyone in THEIR pockets. A politician will have his or her life mapped more than anyone else in case they dare propose the beginning of fairness and integrity and noble ideals as for the core goals of their institutions dedicated to cheap tricks to further the national economies -- apart from the maybe 10 or 15 percent devoted to anti- terrorism. As a result, both Britain and USA in 2013 have become countries of the past, impotent countries, and their biggest technology companies having enduring question- marks having over them: to what extent are they partners in the mafia-like snooping institution game that many of us perhaps were foolish enough to think belonged primarely to such states as China, Russia and middle-east dictatorships? Which CEO is NOT on NSA's or GCHQ's multi-billion dollar/pound payroll, speaking of the influential technology companies? The economy, then, in 2013 has swung for real: away from USA and away from Great Britain to some extent, because economy in this world is associated with trust. It hasn't gone 'over' to China, because China has always been associated with the type of thing one associates dictatorships with. It has gone over to continental Europe -- not EU -- definitely not EU -- but to the various nations, smaller and not that small, which constitute the perhaps slightly more trustworthy governments with more conventional, and hopefully more stupid surveillance agencies. Agencies where resources are limited, and where the resources are used either on ineffective pursuits, or on things that REALLY connect to national security of some sort that isn't about winning worldwide technology contracts and such by cheap tricks such as spying over industry leaders participating in betting over the same contracts. So, for instance, Brazil buys jets from Sweden instead of from Boeing in USA. That's the type of result the snooping exhaustion has created. That's the type of insightful maneuver that we will see more and more of. It would have been different if a total strong and unconditional apology had been stated by David Cameron of UK and Barack Obama of USA: we'll stop with this shit, this nonsense, we'll close down those damned institution and forever ensure that the budgets are tightly woven up to strictly anti-terrorism measures and nothing but. Instead, the meak meagre sparse comments, with the polished smart words and inflexion of verbs in subtle ways, -- that package has been perceived, worldwide, and certainly in contintental Europe and nowhere more than in Germany -- to be a sheepish response, totally and fully inadequate to meet up with the realities that have been revealed especially by the collaboration between Edward Snowden and the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post and some others. And all this has an apparently trival, almost rediculous effect, compared to the scope of the revelations: Cafees are going to have a good time again. After having been closed down and replaced by those utterly sterile and boring chains which offers fat lunches and wireless connections for people escaping out of office for half an hour, or replaced by enormous sections of streets bought up by investment banks or real estate agents or other such bacteria that infest a deserted city, we will find that cafees are going to open again, they are going to take cities back again. For the one single big threat against cafees have been the over-focus on computers-in-net. By means of computers-in-net, people have been buying things, chatting, and exchanging ideas, creating plans, and doing work. Computers-in-net are lovely but they have now been given a more clarified role: they are tools for making things public in a vague way -- more public than one might think, unless the computer is totally unplugged and used within a box made of solid lead. And the disgust, the natural disgust people have with this -- not fear -- but simply sheer disgust, leads people to leave the SmartPhones and such at home, -- it is bound to -- and to go out in freedom from them, out to where real experiences in a more actual transparent way where the publicity is more obvious, not forced upon one but invited, -- and there meet actual people like oneself. Not merely meet people who sit with bowed heads and flickering restless ideas and tap on things in order to regulate their lives, but to meet people who have raised oneself above the idiocy of such as Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook and Instagram, and such as Apple's iPhone and Google-connected companies' various Android phones, or Microsoft-Nokia's version of the same. This is indeed the beginning of a more meaningful way to use the computer: also outside of net, as a tool for dialogue with oneself, as a tool to sharpen thinking while doing programming. Not always a programming that is net-oriented. But a programming that allows one to express certain features of one's thinking so as to get a feedback from a model that then can run on the computer. So the stand-alone Personal Computer, -- once again more personal, as it is disconnected from the net -- and the stand-alone personal individual, without the Smart-Cum-Idiot-Phone, those are amongst the winners that begin to emerge after the wild surveillance pollution revelations of 2013. We will see a fresh bout of genuineness and small-is-beautiful-ness in 2014 and it will increase for years to come, for there is absolutely no clearing up of the mess without such deep changes by people, and people are obviously extremelly ready for it -- this is more obvious in some countries than in others -- but it is there, in all. ROSWELL: CASE UNCLOSED -- Nothing new has been revealed, except that the report called 'Case Closed' released under Bill Clinton's presidency was written while covering up the existence of the place that figured in the other half of the Roswell rumours The TV public in USA and many across the rest of the planet was charmed by the freshly inaugurated president Bill Clinton in the first half of the 1990s when he responded to a kid asking him, live, Did aliens crash at Roswell and military hide them? He said, "I don't know and I would like to know, too." This evoked a laughter and a sense that a new era has come. If there is a secret, we will be told. The kid's question concerned a larger story, and in the larger story there figured a phrase, "Area 51". The rumours -- cultivated feverently by various cults of conspiracy theorists everywhere, and ground for the X-Files TV series, had it that the initial report by an army officer was right, not wrong -- that some non-human living beings had indeed been found -- and that this or these or the remains then had after some time been transferred to a place not admitted to exist, the Area 51. After Bill Clinton's charming stunt, nothing more was heard, but a great deal of work -- it turned out -- was going on in the background to answer to his live challenge to his own military establishment. The military under president Bill Clinton then released reports (a few years apart): -- www.af.mil/RoswellReport.aspx -- entitled, respectively, The Roswell Report (a much larger and just very slightly more open-minded report), and (since it left a bit too many uncomfortable questions open), The Roswell Report: Case Closed. The full content of both are available another place -- here's the full .pdf loadable, and it is a gigantic sized report: -- contrails.iit.edu/history/roswell/Report/index.html and the 'Case Closed' summary is here: -- contrails.iit.edu/history/roswell/ Prior to the 2nd release, CNN commented the moods and development in various articles e.g.: -- edition.cnn.com/US/9706/18/ufo.report/ Those who review esp. the 2nd military report get a feeling that it is insistent, it is like one side in a court case where the other side is left out. The Case Closed report starts with a conclusion, then provides one instance of another in defense for that conclusion, insisting on one particular interpretation -- which relies mostly on dummies in experimental US-led shoot-ups being mistaken for real life in non-earthian space vehicles. One has the feeling that those who wrote the Case Closed report were not in the position of objective bystanders looking into archives of which they knew nothing. Rather, one gets the feeling that they had a case to make, and were eager to get it done with and get it over with. EVEN SO, Roswell sort of went out of fashion fairly much after that. One got the feeling that Bill Clinton wanted the truth to come out, more or less, right? Though Bill Clinton and also George W Bush on occasion had done the briefest possible mention of some military activities at a "location near Groom Lake", the conspiracy theorists kept on being active talking about Area 51 and they were not convinced about the report. Area 51 was indeed dismissed as 'yet another conspiracy theory'. And, of course, in the past few days it is clear that Bill Clinton wasn't all for getting all the truth out. Area 51 does exist. Parts of what it does is still secret. CBS News: "CIA finally acknowledges Area 51's existence -- It took repeated requests to get the CIA to confirm that the top-secret test site does exist -- but that's all it's saying about it." Here's the link (it's the textual intro on the search links for CBS News connected to the news video with date Aug 16, 2013, time 7:15 PM): -- www.cbsnews.com/1770-5_162-0.html?query=area+51&tag=srch&searchtype=cbsSearch Here's a link that describes something of the recent release, at George Washington University, Washington D.C.: www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB434/ Up until the revelation that Area 51 does exist, one could have gone along with the Case Closed report, lacking clear contrary indications. The fact that a clear-cut cover-up of a full fifty percent of the rumour did happen -- and probably, then, with Bill Clinton's knowing -- since he did speak about the existence of some such location without referring to it as Area 51 -- cfr quote about Clinton and Bush here -- -- www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57598871/area-51s-existence-acknowledged-by-cia-in-declassified-documents/ -- does suggest, coupled with the current sense that a lot is going on that only thanks to whistleblowers or what they are supposed to be characterised as, -- it does suggest, does it not, that there were two sides to the events following the fresh president Bill Clinton's live stunt in the 1990s. One side was the fact that he saw to it that a report was published, one that looked into every of the main accusations concerning the initial part of the Roswell incident. The second side was that he was briefed on something and told not to tell; this something concerned the area not named, but now named, but still only partially described -- namely as a testing ground for such as stealth-like aircrafts. What he didn't tell may well be a great big yawn. It may be that such and such top secret weapons research is going on there. But it is also quite possible that he was told of something that made the whole military establishment feel very, very uncertain about itself and about the universe -- that they would have to wait and see if more of this nature happens. Right? Logically it is within rational possibilities without having to subscribe to a conspiracy sect? After all, in the 1980s we had a president who famously told the world that it makes sense to prepare against an alien invasion: "I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world" -- Ronald Reagan at the United Nations. This quote is found e.g. here: -- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Earth_Stood_Still_%281951_film%29 Now many simply thought Reagan, in that speech, was a bit off his rocker. But he was the president of the United States, one who no doubt, too, had been briefed on that which neither Bill Clinton nor George Bush told, namely that there is an extremely costly site in the middle of nowhere that at least in its earliest use was called, is called Area 51. So can we not, again without subscribing to any conspiracy idiocy, regard this as a possible way for the outspoken Mr Reagan to let off some steam of some secrets he didn't really want to keep secret? Now let me be clear as to what is my own intuition: (1) this universe has lots of planets with oxygen, but the reason no exciting news transmission have been picked up from anyone of them despite the vast programme still going on and initiated by the astronomer Carl Sagan and others is that it's mostly about grass, trees, and maybe a bit of fish. I don't believe in alien civilisations. That's a firm intuition I have. And I tend to have good intuitions. (2) the military might have been scared about something they encountered, and which they thought maybe was some kind of advanced hoax -- and they still haven't figured out what it was, or is -- even though we're speaking of more than half a century of steady study. They were scared -- is my intuition -- and they didn't know whether there would be more of the same to be scared by. Maybe another military somewhere was also scared, likewise. To all apperancies, it may have been something that they concluded, not unlike the first army officer who gave the first Roswell report, that it was some kind of nonhuman intelligent life not quite from Earth. So maybe it was. I don't believe it came from an alien civilisation, that's all. It's also clear that Roswell, thanks to the management or mismanagement of facts and apparent frankness and openness by former president Bill Clinton, is not a 'Case Closed' at all anymore. Bill Clinton covered up something. What he and the presidents before and after him covered up hasn't been told yet. It may be a yawn and it may be very much other than that. CASE UNCLOSED! POSTSCRIPT: SOME EXTRA QUOTES FOUND RIGHT AFTER THE ABOVE LITTLE 'UNCLOSED' ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN /////Quote in this wind RECENTLYOVERHEARDREAD [..] Irving Newton, Major, USAF (Ret), was located and interviewed. [..] In a signed, sworn statement (Atch 30) Newton related that "...I walked into the General's office where this supposed flying saucer was lying all over the floor. As soon as I saw it, I giggled and asked if that was the flying saucer... I told them that this was a balloon and a RAWIN target.." Newton also stated that "...while I was examining the debris, Major Marcel was picking up the pieces of the target sticks and trying to convinece me that some notations on the sticks were alien writings. There were figures on the sticks, lavender or pink in color, appeared to be weather faded markings, with no rhyme or reason [sic]. He did not convince me that these were alien writings." [From the main text of the report; note that Major Marcel was also the official army person who reported the finding and that after he had carried the finding off from its crash site, he still insisted on the interpretation first given -- but met with sceptisism amongst such as Major Newton. The Roswell Report, page 24, pdf page 41] RW: [..] "Marcel would later say that the material was like nothing he had ever seen and the metal was as thin as newsprint and as light as a feather. It was flexible but very strong. [..]" [The Roswell Report, Attachment 18 -- Col Richard L Weaver's interview with Lt Col Sheridan D Cavitt, USAF (Ret), PDF Page 173] The tape was about two or three inches wide and had flower-like designs on it. The 'flowers' were faint, a variety of pastel colors, and reminded me of Japanese paintings in which flowers are not all connected. [Bessie Brazel Schreiber, 14 years old at the time, who lived at the farm where the light material was found. The Roswell Report, page 24, pdf page 41] As a physician I have done personal/private research [..] There has been rumours [.. that ..] 4 alien bodies were recovered [.. ] several miles from the rest of [the] debris. [..] The bodies were described as the body of a small humanoid, tan (or sunburned) in color, approximately the size of a ten-year old [..These were examined..] at a laboratory [..] on 23rd Street in New York City. [..] Reportedly, shortly after the discovery of this vehicle and its occupants -- it prompted then President Harry S. Truman to appoint (on Sept. 18, 1947) a committee of twelve individuals -- called the "Majestic-12" or MJ-12 to secure and study the crashed UFO debris and its occupants. [The Roswell Report, Attachment 6 -- copy of a letter from a private person, a physician, demanding more information about the rumours he mentions, PDF page 41. It is to be noted that the Roswell Report states specifically in the beginning that ONLY Air Force archives have been declassified in the matter. The fact that this letter from a private person is included -- and it contains references to some individuals who supposedly were in that group -- is one of the main reasons, we suppose, why the release of the report gave a sense that the case is not just open, but vastly and entirely open. Still, it was not closed by the report issued a couple years later.] [All quotes from the transcript of the official U.S. Air Force Roswell Report as downloadable 998-page PDF at the University link that after this bracketed comment that we have inserted here. It is to be noted that a couple of years later, the 'Case Closed' report didn't objectively narrow down the interpretations of the quotes above -- which are not the only examples (for instance, the 'script' described as 'disconnected flowers' figure several places and one army observer even tried to reconstruct these). The main bulk of the last sections of the large first Roswell report is devoted to proving that the Air Force did a lot of weather balloon research and it has very beautiful AM transmitter diagrams, and is quite readworthy in many senses, both as entertainment and source of insight. But the quote above indicates that even the sceptical person very well acquianted with all weather balloon research wasn't absolutely sure what to make of the script found, and he wasn't necessarily in a state of total recognition of what he saw. He saw a similarity and has to be honored for that; but he didn't say, 'Oh this is Major so-and-so's experiment 5a in weather balloons.' The second Roswell report, insisting on 'Case Closed', merely argues in favour of the fact that a lot of research, especially from 1949 and onwards, but possibly some before that point also, involved plastic dummy humans stuffed into flying vehicles for various research purposes, some of which were secret. It doesn't close, it merely suggests some interpretations. We repeat our own interpretation: CASE UNCLOSED. It is an open question and must remain so given this US Air Force information (esp. given what all now know in the post-Snowdon/NSA case e.g. of the handling of the material in possession of the british newspaper The Guardian of how people are persecuted if they talk honestly and openly of classified things or merely are in possession of such items). When information is classified, it is illegal not to lie about it. And if there was any substance to such as the physician's claims, and U.S. Major Marcel's interpretation -- which he stuck to -- then it became classified more than anything else has ever been classified, obviously. CASE UNCLOSED!] -- contrails.iit.edu/history/roswell/Report/index.html *** /////Quote in this wind RECENTLYOVERHEARDREAD "For several years, the workers say, they labored in thick, choking clouds of poisonous smoke as hazardous wastes were burned in huge open trenches on the base." -- [R Leiby, Washington Post, July 20, 1997: Area 51: Secrets under the sun, page 2] "Bill Clinton certainly did not kill Wally Kasza, but he has been forced to deal with his angry widow." -- [R Leiby, Washington Post, July 20, 1997: Area 51: Secrets under the sun, page 1] "President Clinton invoked the military and state secrets privilege, specifically exempting [Area 51] from disclosing any pollution reports. [..] Clinton doesn't want these crimes made public, says [George Washington University law professor Jonathan] Turley." -- [R Leiby, Washington Post, July 20, 1997: Area 51: Secrets under the sun, page 5] -- www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/area-51-secrets-under-the-sun/2013/08/16/d9fea198-06b1-11e3-9259-e2aafe5a5f84_story.html "Back in the 1990s, the Clinton administration fought fiercely to prevent the Area 51 workers from going forward with their case. President Bill Clinton signed an order exempting Area 51 from disclosing its pollution records [..] Of course, it was never called Area 51." Richard Leiby, Washington Post, August 16, 2013 -- www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/government-officially-acknowledges-existence-of-area-51-but-not-the-ufos/2013/08/16/ca4feaec-06be-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_story.html *** THEME: HONORING CLASSIC PAPER BOOKS IN PUBLIC LIBRARIES WHAT TYPE OF RULES DOES IT TAKE TO MAKE PUBLIC LIBRARIES DECENT PLACES? I, for one, believe that there's nothing like learning something new while having a stack of books around oneself. I agree with the great Norwegian mysticist and seer of the 20th century, Marcello Haugen, who offered the point of view that "books can be as friends". Also, when you're about to learn something new, what you want is hand-held samples, picked not at random but by gut feeling, to get you going. When you know what you want, the computer is an excellent source of information. When you are endavouring to learn something complex, you'll gain a lot if you can find some friendly books, some books that gives you what Robert Pirsig called 'gumption' -- the good glow of a sense of quality and relationship -- to the physical objects that paper-printed books are. Let me be clear: I love ebooks. I have, like many or most others, also some favourite novels, which I know so well that I can open them more or less at any place and starting reading from there with enjoyment. It is like looking at different spots of a masterpiece of a painting in different lights and in your own different moods. You know the painting, but it still generates something new and fresh for you each time you bother to, so to say, extra-perceive it. Here, too, the computer can be of great help: for an ebook, a book which you have in a textual format inside something like a text editor, doesn't wear out by reading it. The pages don't gradually yellow or get over-thumbed. But when you are setting out to get connected to something new, something which requires a lot from your brain, nothing is like also having the substance of paper with the printed ink of letters on them, bounded in a way that pleases your spirit. Learning can involve a great deal of tension, and we need all the help we can get from making our learning environments friendly. And to select the books that can give your own private learning a peak experience requires something more than merely the digital. It requires the real reality of physical books, working in conjunction with your own intuition. And so, every city in the world, for as long as there has been cities not completely under the sway of literalist priests, but which have had a sense of the secular and of abundance, have offered the public free open libraries. And these free open libraries offer huge stacks of books you'd never knew existed. When you're about to learn something, you can linger in front of row upon row of the stuff, pick something, bring out your loan card, and bring it home with you for further study for some days. As long as you don't throw a cup of coffee on the book, nor actually bath with it, you will be able to make good use of the book and give it back to the library and all is well. Now that is at least the theory. In practise, one cannot enter most public libraries in the cities which exist today without wading through people who think that they live there. There are people making all sorts of smells-- or, if the library has rules against people being smelly-- there are people chatting there about their illnesses, people who have taken their shoes of, who have fallen asleep, who snort and sigh and worse so loudly that it is hard for anyone spending some minutes in there standing in front of a book row to focus on the books. Worse, in going in there another day, or another season, if one has sharp memory one will maybe see exactly the same sick people still living there, sprawled over the same set of chairs, and one can sense the tension between these people who believe the libraries are an extension of their sickbed, and the poor staff, incapable of doing anything -- they don't have enough rules, and even if they did have enough rules, some of the sick people are looking terribly self-important and willing to bully to get their own ways. So what rules, and what enforcement of rules, are necessary to make of public libraries places where the healthy part of the population can get a pleasant access to quality books in a quality way? That is to say, also sick people should be able to borrow books, of course: but they shouldn't be allowed to live there. And they should, like most others, just fetch the books and get outta there -- or, at most, sit very quietly and decently and nonsmellily for some minutes. I can think of nothing else than strict rules to bring such decent public open libraries about. The rules must say -- well, it's free, but each person, who in any case has a loan card tied to the person, can only use the libraries for so and so many minutes pr month, and then most of those minutes standing -- each chair having some kind of loan-card automat inserted into it, to allow it to be used as chair. And if a guard detects as much as a whiff of foul smell, or a too load snort or sigh or bit of medical gossip discussed, it is out -- for the rest of the month, without any complaint possibility. To enforce this, the loan cards, which should be free, should be the automatically minute-counted door-opener to the library as well, and to the free, hygienic, simple restroom facilities any library should offer. Also, a library should be there to honor physical books, in my opinion. Get ALL computers out, put lead inside the ceiling and walls to prevent the noise from the Facebook- and Instagram-dominated little walkie-talkie gadgets so popular amongst the bored part of the population, and make it the total concept of full attention to physical books. Make the loan cards refer to the library physically, rather than something which exists also digitally. By keeping the loancards away from the internet, and connected solely to one person's use of one library, one can add rules ensuring the privacy of the users, a privacy that internet-enabled loancards can never give. The strictness of the rules is supposed to give the majority a greater freedom to associate with quality books, it is not supposed to go along with surveillance. Some might argue that with such strict rules, the public open libraries won't be "open" anymore. Well, openness is not simply one thing, existing in abstraction. They would still be free, not requiring money unless one screws up a book. But they won't be open to misuse. They won't be mistaken for hospitals anymore, and that would be an enormous relief to the vast majority of the population. It would imply a new type of fantastic openness for those thousands and thousands who would never even vaguely think of misusing a library nor would consider them a sort of extension of their own living-room, but who could, given a decency public libraries perhaps never before have attained to, surely think of using these fresh, quiet, cleared-up, quality libraries where real printed quality books about any subject can be borrowed and enjoyed without a cost. It is an application of mindful rules to a necessary component in any society dedicated to the welfare of the majority. A sufficient density of quality free-for-cost libraries, with well-thought, privacy-aware quality rules, super-strictly enforced, is a necessary element in any part of any affluent society, and a foundation for the true meaning of freedom. And this might given inspiration for a whole new class of cafees, for the domain of cafees -- also instrumental for a city to feel like a place of well-being surely have a set of similar, although in some respects milder, challenges of this sort associated with them. THEME: QUANTUM-TOUCHED DESIGN ART AND DESIGN IF WE IMAGINE THAT MY SUPER-MODEL THEORY IS CORRECT IN AN EXTREME & MACROSCOPIC SENSE Super-model theory is a rather detailed and rather complex theory which is so that it lends a visualisation and a set of consistent, imaginable ideas to all the patterns of energy transfers in the known universe, and in a way which is compatible with all essential findings in the various branches of empirical physics. I say 'empirical' in front of physics because although it is a physics theory, it disagrees in most presumptions underlying the theorizing of physics from Einstein and Bohr to the present day. But it is part of the approach of science to be willing to say that for any set of data, an infinite amount of theories are possible, and we are at liberty to construct holistic theories that summarize the data found in nature without paying tribute to past authorities in any field. This according to the vastly dominant science theoretician Karl Popper as of mid twentieth century, and the extended and refined version of this approach as described elsewhere at yoga4d.org, yoga6d.org and associated sites is called 'neo-popperian' science. Super-model theory has in it a number of aspects that however may be correct in a more 'extreme' sense, in which there are aspects of the theory that could lend a non-material but nevertheless real feature to daily life -- which is 'macroscopic' compared to the (sub-)atomic realm. The theory is indicated informally (as is the proper way in neo-popperian science, as the formal -- such as programming -- merely is there to illustrate an aspect of the theory, rather than capturing its core in any way) in other writings here and there at my sites. This little essay takes as starting-point the notion, which will only appeal to the non-sceptic, that the super- model theory is not only correct in replicating empirical findings of mainstream physics through its own informal viewpoints, but that it is correct in launching a paradigm of perspective on human daily life. That's not something earlier emphasized in most of the articles from my hand (although hinted on many places), because we're then into a realm that will simply make no sense at all for mainstream scientists of the type that prefers a mechanistic worldview of some kind. This article then has sentences in it that I would only like to see quoted elsewhere if the title of the article is both included and explained in these terms. For it is not representative of the major bulk of presentations of the S.M. theory. INTRODUCING Q-FIELDS In saying 'introducing' it means, that notion is new to the context of S.M. theory, but it doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of more or less similar concepts around (indeed cfr the acknowledgements in the earlier S.M. writings for the most obvious ones). Let us also be so bold as to say that q-field is a correction to the asian Feng Shui approach. While a super model (or super-model, or supermodel) in the S.M. theory is a very general concept, suitable also for strong fields of quantum resonant entanglement as found e.g. in the molecule, or -- more spectacularly -- at distances such as in the EPR/Aspect experiments -- we here give unique attention to a kind that presumes a number of simultaneously existing fields nudging towards various kinds of wholenesses (or coherencies) of a kind which is very hard to trace by conventional mechanical methods of mechanistically oriented empirical science. These gently modify, or nudge, a level of apparent coincidental fluctuations towards a certain key result (usually in organic and sensitive situations). EXAMPLES: THE Q-FIELDS CONNECTED TO CAR DESIGN Rather than attempting to give formal definitions, I will define the q-fields by example. These examples, as stated in the introduction, only make sense if we assume a that an extreme form of my supermodel theory has been found to be valid, at macroscopic levels of human experience. (In contrast, quantum theory has no generative way of asserting its type of entanglement or quantum coherence at macroscopic levels other than the mechanistic either-or kind that arises from energy processes first being in local contact, and then only under highly specific and noiseless conditions.) The kind of car design associated with late 20th century and early 21st century can be sumsummated under the heading of 'designing cars with the q-field of a drop' -- with some mild and some strong exceptions. The shapes of a drop of water, ethanol or oil are more or less similar while subject to normal planetary gravitation and normal air pressure. These are sharper behind and tend towards the surface of a sphere in front. The lines of the drop, slices of the drop, and permutations of the drop, are all part of the q-field of a drop, and in one way or another, with one mutation or another, most cars after the rectangular Volvo 240 series went out of production can be said to be within the model monopoly of the drop -- this may not always be obvious before you actually put a car entirely outside of this q-field beside a drop-oriented car, and sense the esthetical paradigm break. The kind of car design, on the other hand, associated with such a period as the 1960s, especially for large american cars, is entirely and altogether different. The design perspective was not how to make slight twists over the q-field of the drop, so as to squeeze in an extra milage on a fixed amount of gallons of gasoline or whatever power source the engine has. Rather, the design took as starting-point that the car is a vehicle affecting people outside and inside the car at a psychological and spiritual level, and it was sought an inspirational design, giving a sense of richness of ideas. And indeed, such as in the case perhaps most sensationally with the Lincoln cars at that time, we see that more than there being any particular q-field of an existing structure that associates with these cars, there is instead an association with a series of plates. Not just rectangular plates with straight corners, but plates with also other angles and somewhat other shapes, and indeed also such as semi-parallel lines and elongations. But there isn't a q-field associated with a "plate". A plate forms rather a tentative q-field together with a vast array of other q-fields. You may liken this to how a paragraph in a great literary work of fiction may evoke a vast number of different imaginations, whereas even the greastest possible illustrated work of fiction -- the X-men comics classics of the late 1970s and early 1980s in particular -- can only give rise to a limited number of imaginations, the illustrations 'locking' the association range rather as the late 20th century 'drop' and 'droplet' cars lock the imagination. EXAMPLES: THE Q-FIELDS ASSOCIATED WITH ART ON THE WALL Just as there with lively sea waves aren't found a single straight line, not a single circle in the geometrical, conceptual sense, nor a single square, so also can art on the wall be judged according to its associations at the subtle perceptive level. If it is too repetitive, too simplistic in its shapes, or so deliberately over-messy that it is uniform in its messiness, then the art on the wall forms a q-resonance with but some features of this world. By such limitations, the art on the wall will act to lock thinking and perception into some channels, rather than suggest possibilities. A variety of lines, lines which are not quite lines, and of different lengths, can however form q-fields together with such as human anatomy, which is one of the key vehicles for all perception. Many companies have fallen deeply into the trap of having what they with typical ignorance of the results, and with typical hyped and nonsensical language, call a 'company logo'. If their company presentation was by means of a text, in plain normal font, then the mind could associate to this text quite freely. Instead, fatness inducers in humanity like McDonalds have gone into the fallacy of making logos that look like a fat butt and put it up on the walls around their places of degeneration so as to encourage such locking of thought towards the regarding the fattening body as a kind of norm. But it isn't only companies that often succumb to locking q-fields needlessly much. One of the key features of a photogenic longlegged slender young woman is that her face and body associates richly, not narrowly, because of the many dancing, youthful lines -- not quite straight lines in general -- at various sizes that can suggest nudgings of q-fields without locking the field. But if she's dressed up in a particular manner and displayed without a playing on her angles etc in the environment she must, in her anatomy, carry the burden of opening up the stimuli, even while there is much more space the photograph that could be used to assist the nonlocking openness of the core object or objects. If such a photograph is used over and over again, it becomes a needless focus on person; but if the photo is manipulated (or has such an environment in it that make manipulations unnecessary) so as to play on perceptive possibilities without locking the q-field, it is more art and less the dull concept. EXAMPLES: THE Q-FIELDS ASSOCIATED WITH WEBSITE DESIGN Is the website 'easy to understand', 'obvious how to use', and 'properly commercial looking'? Well then, the wise person would never touch the website unless forced by practical necessity. For the wise person would want a nudging towards possible perception, not a locking into the geometry of spheres, ovals, and squares, and such, that characterise the superficially 'easy to understand' website. It is easy to understand because there is nothing to understand there; in other words, it offers nothing. It's an energy sucker. A website with a variety of nudging towards q-fields doesn't lock the q-field into simple geometry. It rather looks to the range of perceptive possibilities and what percpetions of life is most called for, from the perspective of wholeness. In finding open not manipulative ways, yet also refined and subtle, in encouraging such perception, the technical usefulness of the site may be slightly reduced by its sense of contributing to a sense of liveliness about things is enhanced. EXAMPLES: THE Q-FIELDS ASSOCIATED WITH THINGS MADE OF GOLD A q-field seeks to complete itself, if it is nonwhole. It follows that a q-field which is whole in itself, and yet part of a non-whole larger q-field, is such that the larger q-field seeks to complement the q-field with a contrasting q-field. If you were able to digest this simple fact (which is derived from the PMW principle in S.M. theory when we extend it as indicated by the title of this article), you will see why any news portal that aims only at giving positive news will be complemented by news portals that aims at giving mostly negative news; why people who are unable to point out positive things in reality will find themselves all to often stumbling into people who are of the overly cheery kind, who speaks only of gratefulness to 'what is'; and why those who proclaim mechanist science to be the only truth will find themselves bombarded with non-mechanist non-science. The contrast aspect of q-fields acts so as to create good and meaningful contrasts where the original content q-fields are in themselves meaningful -- a particularly obvious example is in food, where an excellent item of food must sometimes, despite its excellence, be complemented with an absolutely contrasting item of good in order to give a wholesome experience. If all the world was of gold, gold would be trivial. As it is, when gold is rather sparse, its qualities to form q-fields together with such things as sunrise and sun shining in the blondest of blonde hair, and tanned skin healthy from a recent bath on a beach, makes it a token of wealth and health. But wealth and health are themselves aspirational qualities that come easily only giving the simultaneously satisfaction of a vast number of criterions that civilisation only at its very best can offer human beings. So gold is in some cases not only a q-field with some things in the present, but also it can form a q-field with some things people usually are willing to work very hard for, -- it's a q-field, in other words, with the future, the ambition, -- and in terms of wholeness of mind and good feelings about life in general, also spiritually so. EXAMPLES: THE Q-FIELDS ASSOCIATED WITH GOOD SCENTS AND MORE More or less crystalline molecule scents such as caffeine, nicotine and laboratory produced lemon, rum, vanilla, almond and cherry scents are able to form q-fields together with mental states as a whole. This is again significant when the creative worker seeks to enliven herself by reminding herself of certain key learnings and experiences. Let us note that while we can recall some numbers, we do not remind some numbers. We can recall some statistics, but we do not remind some statistics. Thus, a memory is recalled, but rather we remind ourselves of an experience. So the action we call 'to remind' involves our being, while the action we call 'to recall' is more a mechanical action. It is more a brain-thing to recall, and more a mind-thing to remind. Another way of putting this is that when we remind us of whatever it is -- it can be to remind ourselves of the importance of gratefulness and seeing the cheery and uplifting sides of things, and putting words to these, or to remind ourselves to be tranquil and not needlessly upset and such, -- when we remind ourselves, we are engaging more of our organism, possibly of all of it. Merely to recall happens to a larger extent with a portion of our organism. When we've had an insight, we can remind ourselves of it later. Socrates, the ancient greek bohemian philosopher, apparently suggested that all insights ultimately have their foundation in us reminding ourselves (from past lives). A scent, derived from a more or less crystalline molecule -- and crystals have clearer q-fields than more cluttered molecules, obviously -- is in rather direct contact with the molecules of the nose -- in a chemical sense also. This directedness of influence is of key help in order to stop oneself from eating anything rotten just in time. Thus, the sense of smell is far more instantaneous in its effects than most other sensory possibilities that the body offers to the brain and mind. Thus, the crystalline, pure, beautiful scents of coffee, lemon, rum and vanilla involves q-fields -- at the level of reminding, not merely recalling -- together with the healthy experiences and fruitful actions associate with these uplifting scents. But these q-fields are not merely there in their activation through their action on nostrils. Indeed, it is likely to assume that the q-field associated with any crystalline item, whether as scent or as some other things, all the way up to a crystal stone, are active in subtle ways also when untouched, or about to be used in some way. Is there then a way to loosen a q-field? But q-fields are sensitive to such as vibrations. The q-field of a car that has been driven for many hours is entirely and altogether different than the q-field of a car that has just rolled out of a factory. Indeed, one cannot properly 'know' the car without having it exposed to the normal vibrations associated with driving for a good while. Only then it becomes properly its own. It has to be literally 'shaken loose' from the factory and its suppliers. A q-field of a shaken item is so in general freer than a q-field of a non-shaken item. The shaking is a shape all of its own, spread out in the first duration dimension, the fourth dimension, rather than spatially, in the first three dimensions. The shaking must take place then somewhat more than five times if the item is very uniform indeed, and very much more than that if the item is a complex device of engineering. This is then a suitable 'treatment' of wares with unsuitable q-fields. For q-fields may also form q-fields together with some people; and it may be important to loosen these to benefit from the presence of these objects in your environment. EXAMPLES: THE Q-FIELDS ASSOCIATED WITH HOUSE & INTERIORS Of key importance to a house is that the play of lines are so that the house properly belong to itself, in its q-field: that the q-fields are not divided into one area which is gold, another which is entrance, another which is kitchen, another which is working room, another which is toilet, and so on. Of course, there are areas of such subdivisions, but in terms of design, the key and the quest is that there is a lack of locking of the q-field as a whole, while there is a wholeness of the various q-fields composing the house so that the q-field won't seek to change itself so as to make itself whole. But beyond this, there aren't grand design features that must be implemented for the q-field of a house to be good. One can say -- often emphasize the clockwise direction of circulation for most things associated with health and food, but have some contact with the anti-clockwise as well. The clockwise is associated, again, with the fact that reading goes generally from left to right, from heart side of body to the logical writing hand side of body, when on top of the circle that rotates (not just with solar rotation on Earth). The key is to avoid fragmentation into conceptual departements scrubbed clean of the stimuli of not-quite-square corners and not-quite-straight lines. The organic house design isn't easy to construct by a ruler, isn't easy to explain except by metaphors, but it shows itself to work by the creativity and richness of stimuli to the mind. But it is also relatively free from dualism: neither dragons' heads nor the doubleness of pairs of bottles or lights or such are allowed to dominate either interior or exterior, for dualism speaks of an unfulfilled q-field, that will seek towards the unity of such as three, four or five. (The four is more mechanical, like the necessary four wheels of the car, but in its place it's entirely called for.) The colors of the house, interior as exterior, must be seen in connection to surroundings and to functional activity. In general, white signifies nothingness and lack of holding capacity therefore. Black in large quantities may also signify nothingness if we speak walls. To properly hold the q-field in place, some organic color is necessary so that the objects in the interior are not as if floating in nothingness but rather kept there pleasantly. There is, of course, infinitely more to explore about q-fields -- from golden ratio to the beauty of swimming; from sexual perception through porn to the beauty of exquisite cleanliness such as through long baths; from contrast exploration such as feline long skinny legs against the gentle roughness of cut jeans shorts to the deeper understanding of essence number theory; from the austere and somewhat cold elegance of high cheekbones to the sometimes extra exhillerating smiles on the very same face -- etc etc. To be concerned with survival, getting food and getting friends, all belong to the lower levels or what is called 'deficiency mode'. In being or abundancy mode, self-actualisation and deeper questions of fact and truth are what motivates a person. -- the gist of the philosophy of A Maslow ADVERTISEMENT BUYERS: DON'T BELIEVE IT, WHEN THEY SAY "AI" -- Ever since the fallen '5th generation' program of the Japanese, dedicated to rediculous Artificial Intelligence aims, -- and indeed ever since it was proven in 1930 that general intelligence machines cannot exist -- it ought to have been clear that AI is an illusion I'm a great fan of stimulating the brain -- that's not just an intellectual thing, but a sexual thing, as brain science will eagerly tell anyone looking into the matter. The brain is the organ of sensation, an entity situated between the world of matter and the world of consciousness. One doesn't have to apply a mechanistic worldview in order to listen to tidbits of brain science with an eclectic attitude. And one of the things brain science is clear about is that reading and listening to radio is more stimulating to the brain than dumbly watching videos or TV. So listen e.g. to WNYC.org, -- but even this station, which is very free from such desperately negative advertisements as the various CBS radios spews all across internet -- has its share of rediculous sponsors. Currently, we are told that if you go into a site called nothing less than rocketfuel.com you'll find artificial intelligence operating on big data in an advertisement context; at the site, there are papers on such humble themes as Total Economic Impact. Now, one wonders why they don't also say -- which is probably just as true -- that they've got five-dimensional printers that actually creates paying customers of a loyal kind -- or that they offer a free weekend with hanggliding courses in the sweet atmosphere of Jupiter. The difference is, of course, that the lie about artificial intelligence that rocketfuel.com is coming with, is a lie that many others -- including Google.com, Microsoft.com, and Facebook.com like to say or at least imply to the many stupid buyers of their advertisement offers. And it is a lie that is all the better for lack of serious competition. The more these monopolies on advertisements -- worldwide monopolies, not merely in USA -- are saying that AI is powering their spewing of the ad-spam to desiring customers, the less easy it is to disprove this rediculous claim by looking at alternative advertisement data -- for there isn't any data not tainted by the lie of AI. Decades ago, the japanese government spent what amounts of the equivalent of billions of dollars today in what was called a Fifth Generation type of computers chock-full with artificial intelligence. Of course, the only thing that came out of it was some half-working speech recognition bits of software similar to the half-working speech recognition that Apple, Google and so on are offering rather for free these days. Yet since ca 1930 -- see my article on mathematics and Goedel here -- it has been clear that AI is an illusion, and will forever be. It is then fortunate for the sellers in these falsifying advertisement companies that their customers are gullible people without education. For only gullible people without education can be so silly as to pay money for artificial intelligence, five-dimensional printers of paying customers, or hang-gliding tours in Jupiter's gaseous atmosphere. Or perhaps the customers after all have insight and education? That can maybe explain why the earnings report as given today by Google shows by-them-unexpected decline in earnings of the last season, and so a fall in their share prices. THE THREE TYPES OF FEMALES -- PRETEEN, TEEN AND POSTTEEN -- AND THE QUEST FOR A HEALTHY SEXUALITY IN ALL SOCIETY -- And a more appropriate response to the question of how to reduce the quantity of teens and preteens who die while giving birth The past few months have seen a flurry of writing over how to reduce the staggering quantity of teen and preteen girls who every year, on Earth, die while giving birth: and all the most-published writings have centered on such as distribution of condoms and teaching girls to just say no. It should be apparent to anyone who has a little bit sense of how the world and societies at large are developing that such responses to this genuine problem are entirely off the mark. A more fearless and real and less frigid understanding of where the youth in this world is moving is called for. And as background, we must first get a hold on why child sexuality is real thing and not just a thing of some sick people's imagination. So: The photographic difference between a prettily flat-chested, healthily skinny, and proportionally long-limbed female of a post-teen type, the teen type, and the preteen type involves eg. minuscle variations in relative sizes of head and feet to the rest of the body. Some christian church fathers, such as St Augustine, very wrongly called women for 'shortlegged': it shows his lack of experience. It is true, however, that a sporty, exercise-oriented style of living (such as that which characterises RSG girls in Russia) emphasises hormones of the testoteron type that do prolong leg length. The writer Desmond Morris, who has produced works comparing animal and human sexuality behaviour, has conceeded that women can be longlegged but he doesn't seem to realise that they can be proportionally very longlegged before puberty, and so much of his reasoning around sexuality perception in others, seeing the proportion of leg length to torso length, must be considered, at best, highly approximate. Also, there are other characteristics of sexuality, such as having good breasts, good lips, or a shapely rump that come in -- and only as for the breasts, and only as for size of rump, does puberty play a role, speaking photographically. Speaking in terms of behaviour and psychology, sexuality in the earliest years is connected to four challenges, broadly speaking. The first and second challenge is the physical weakness of a child compared to an adult sexual person, and the psychological advantage of the adult mind over the child mind in being usually far more able to manipulate the latter. The third challenge is the readiness of the genitals for any level of advanced sexuality. The fourth challenge is that when a very very young girl gets pregnant, then she sometimes has a size problem, housing and then giving birth to an infant requires ample size. So photographically, it is only a sick mind that can claim that it is sick to see a preteen and not only a teen or a post-teen as a sexual object, for, photographically, the minute proportional diffences are not a question of sickness of but of artistic variations and the modern enlightened pan-sexual woman or girl in this era generally is entirely clear on this issue: the looks of children can be more than sensual, it can be sexual, and it takes a great deal of inner repression and illusion to live in denial of that fact. As Sigmund Freud and many others have pointed out, children are also extremely sexual through and through in psychology and behaviour and bringing up children in denial of this fact is to deny them the right to grow into mature adults. They become hysterical as adults if they are shut off in their sexuality as kids. However, in any society that regards violence against an innocent person as a criminal offence, and especially against an innocent person who is also weak and/or easy to manipulate, there is no doubt that a sexual relationship between an adult and a child can easily become a situation of violence, and hence be criminal. This is not to say that it is any sicker crime than any other crime which involves violence against someone who is innocent and possibly also weak physically and/or can be manipulated easily psychologically. It needn't be exactly rape. Many forms of sexual interest glide into various forms of violence and so where violence is regarded as wrong, then it is not unnatural to regard the area of child sexuality as something that can attract possibilities of violence relative to adult sexual behaviour. Yet with the fact of the intensity of sexuality in not just post-teens and teens but also pre- teens, combined with the fact of the statistics recently produced as for the enormous quantity, in the present anti-child-sex societies on Earth, of very young girls dying while giving birth, indicate that an enlightened approach to the matter should handle the issue with a greater leverage for alternative pathways than those typically given at present (as encapsulated in lawbooks, and how they are interpreted by judges and police, and propagated also by dinosauric journalists and editors in some tabloid-like news stations around the globe; with a very explicit photo-and-name harassment of those adults who have been convicted of inappropriate sexual behaviour relative to children). For there is little doubt that, again as shown by the hard-training gymnasts, the young girl body is enormously able to accomodate a variety of pressures when these are given in small amounts many times a week over several years. The acrobatic capacities of the girl body as revealed in sports is showing what the girl body can do also when it comes to handling enhanced capacity for giving birth to children at an early stage given tremendously accurate and fearless education and regular training. It is part of the condemnation of adult-to-children sexuality around on this planet that leads children to be entirely uncared-for in this regard, apart from fearfully made cartoon-like educational books tossed at them by equally fearful teachers, -- and it is the lack of a proper sexual education of an absolutely intense kind that leads the child to have an entirely undeveloped body if the teen, or preteen, becomes pregnant very early on. There is a genuine thirst for sexuality in quite a few and there is no reason to believe that this thirst is unnatural, nor any reason to believe that this thirst, once unleashed by a naturally enlightened type of environment with rich impulses, can or should be slaked. It is entirely compatible with a focus on a radiance of innocence and virtue, a radiance of childlike golden youth, to also have a sexual activity for a child. Adults who read this have either had such themselves or not: but if they have not, they mustn't think that they have any right to set the norm, for they don't know what they missed. There is a magnitude of focus on sensuality in the child that is reflected in the overall grace of her movements, when she is happy and healthy, and in good shape. This grace is not intoxicated by such peculiarities of this world as condoms. Condoms are an invention by folks whose sexuality is centered on a particular form of genital intercourse; but the pan-sexuality now penetrating humanity more and more finds that particular type of sexual action as but one of very many. Nor does it fail to drastically alter the quality of the sexuality. As some girls of thirteen so aptly put it in the norwegian newspaper Aftenposten some years ago, 'You don't eat the chocolate with the wrapping on it.' What is the case is that a great focus on health and freedom from drugs must go together with a real enlightened teaching on sexuality, for drugs, even of apparently fairly mild types like marihuana or amphetamins, so often tend to lead to states of mind and states of body activity where sexual diseases do spread. Any type of laziness, obesity, over-drinking, indulgence in too-large quantities of sugars, and so on, lead to a degenerate state of the child body so as to lead it far more vulnerable for sexual diseases. The general climate is also such as to not promote measurements for sexual diseases except to those who are way up in their teens, and then only in situations where they are subject to humilitating questions from frightened doctors and nurses, who feel obliged to moralise should the occasion to do such relative to one 'too young to be sexually active' occur. Instead, disease testing equipment should be freely available to all children, alongside free equipment that can train the child to enhance her vagina size e.g. with dildos and vibrators, and make her come across to her own sexuality in a fearless way, without anymore being too easy to manipulate. Should she be intensely lustful for much of the sexual feelings and experiences, it makes only great sense to provide her with all the equipment for her to do so healthy and by herself, instead of depraving children for these means so that they can only satisfy themselves by going to others. Any element of masturbation is an element of disease-preventation; and many elements of masturbation are elements that actively train the genitals of a young girl to handle childbirths better. IS 'CONSCIOUSNESS IS BASED ON A PHYSICAL PROCESS IN THE BRAIN' A SCIENTIFIC STATEMENT? -- Is it even a scientific question? Then it must be checkable; but it isn't. The English language, with some obvious and some not so obvious shortcomings here and there, is, I think, the best language humanity has come up with for clear thinking -- reaching fact -- which also implies doubt -- looking at alternative points of views, weighing them. The diversity of words combined with the capacity of grammar and convention to put together ever-new phrases -- even if not all of these sound as 'natural' as some of the more often-used phrases -- allow a sense of attention to flower hither and thither, without always having to flow in the same channels. All other languages as I have encountered them -- not always in detail but always with a depth- interest -- convey a message. They may speak of the greatness of feeling, or the pride of a nation, or the glory of a particular narrow faith, or of the fluid interconnectedness of absolutely everything with absolutely every other thing, or else of the coming and going of the seasons of wild nature, or of the intricacies of being in the center of a group versus being on its periphery. The languages may convey bits and pieces of beauty and truth in a way that cannot easily be translated, only repoetrised, when conveyed into another language. But common to all other languages than English as far as I can see is that they are not merely an instrument for thinking, but they are an instrument for conveying a hidden or overt form of propaganda and worldview. English has been brutally kicked in the ass by so many conflicting cultures that it has steeled itself to encompass all possible thoughts. No other language has had to do this. All other languages has had a purity maintained by some core group of relaxed winners. These have maintained the clarity of the language against its fallen corrupted states as spoken amongst people far away from this group. English has had an explosion of its centre. It is no longer owned by Oxford, by London, or by the dictionary- makers of USA. It is owned by people, all people, who bother to get an education in it -- and in pure thinking, and cross-cultural, essential and also scientific dialogue. But there is no doubt that as for worldviews, there are few languages with which such ease atheism can be expressed as in English. If someone says, 'Consciousness is based on a physical process in the brain,' as I heard someone recently do, then the language doesn't shout back at the person and calls on the person to correct the grammar or purify the use of the idioms, the phrases. The language doesn't defend any worldview any too strongly. It rather calls on dialogue, on other participants, to come in and do work. And since someone has the crust to utter such a thing as 'Consciousness is based on a physical process in the brain', and even go as far (as this person did) as to say that this is what science has found out, then someone has got to have the crust to look at it and, if need be, challenge it. Science is either just what hotheaded people who for the wrong or right reason has come into a job-position associated with the word "science" has as opinions, or science is a noble ideal, that of checking each statement and looking into each of the assumptions of each statement, and the theory-horizon, and as far as possible also check each of these assumptions; and clarify how these are checked, not merely check them in an esotheric manner not open to others. There are various ways of fine-tuning this statement of what science as a noble ideal is -- the best work I have seen by others, by and large, was written by K R Popper and what I found lacking in this, I have contributed with, and reworked the approach into what I call a 'neopopperian' approach (writings elsewhere on this, in plenty). But in any case, the work by K R Popper, extremely well known and very well appreciated and to a large extent accepted as foundational for the best of science, does say that a theory -- which can also be, informally, such a statement as 'A is based on a physical process in B' -- is only scientifically a proper theory, or is only a scientific statement, if we can also check it. And when it is checked, we will pay attention to instances of confirmation, without saying that the theory has been proved, and we will pay attention to instances of disconfirmation, without falling too easily into the trap of saying that the theory has been 'falsified'. In matters of purer logic, statements of logic about logic, we can more easily appreciate the situation where we have falsified a statement. In the domain of life, it is better to speak of instances that confirm and instances that suggest it is wrong, that it is disconfirmed. (This vocabulary also goes back to Rudolf Carnap and others, and I was taught it by Arne Naess, before I read more about it.) It is perhaps at this point highly valuable to say something about what we can call 'the atheistic worldview'. In this worldview, physical processes are what is, and the rest is just a kind of interplay or complexity phenomenon arising more as an appearance than as a reality. So if we say, 'Consciousness is based on a physical process in the brain', then the atheist will -- if honest -- say: You have merely stated a particular case of my worldview, that A is based on a physical process in B, for with my atheist worldview, this holds for all processes A that they are based on some physical process related to some physical B somehow. But can it be tested? Normally, a whole worldview is hard to put to test. But one can point out that a lot of complications may arise if it is taken seriously, and these complications may be solved if another worldview is adapted, especially if there are many instances of confirmation for the latter and many instances of disconfirmation for the former. When a scientist has a more classic K R Popper point of view, the focus is on what we sense of physical data, ie, physical processes. So we have to look at these and theorise over these. (In my own expanded neopopperian view, we have another, different source in addition.) It is typical for the atheist point of view to take to a classic Popper point of view when it comes to science. But is -- within this horizon -- 'consciousness is a physical process in the brain' -- checkable? Ie, can there be instances of confirmation of this, and can there be instances of disconfirmation of this? Certainly in a vague sense there are instances of confirmation found in the fact of some correlation between some processes reported by people to be consciousness and activity in the area between the ears, as measured by some sensitive apparatus. And those who don't have brains, are in some technical sense dead. But in order to actually test the full proposition that consciousness is BASED on physical processes -- whether in the brain or in the thumb or elsewhere -- we would have to conclude that there is no consciousness possible when there is nothing of the physical process, and, in addition, prove that there are no other types of non-physical processes that are necessary in addition. Neither of these things can be proved. The body is unable to express itself unless the body is intact, and verbal expressions as datum of consciousness requires the presence of a brain. Few would doubt that such is the case, no matter worldview -- at least if we by 'verbal expression' mean the normal thing, ie, talking, sounds with meaning and intelligence and insight coming through vocal chords, tongue movements, lips, breathing, all that, or something at least adequately matching up to that. However, in the more atheist view of reality, which could hold such a statement as the above -- that 'consciousness is a physical process based on the brain' -- there is no way to measure consciousness directly, because by its very definition it is beyond the sensory realm. It is the experiencer, also of the sensory realm, or what in sanskrit was talked of (in some writings) by a root word which can be translated as 'witness'. The witness is not measurable. One can measure talk, but one cannot measure consciousness. One can infer consciousness, but not measure it, and the inference, moreover, might be entirely mistaken. Consciousness is something that is the most intimate to a person, it is the center of being, or more or less at the center of being. So how can anyone ever hope to prove, by looking at statements which refer to measurable things, things measured by the sensory organs -- even if equipped with microscops and telescopes and various electromagnetic and radioactive measuring apparatus -- that consciousness is 'based' on any physical process anywhere? It boils down to the fact that one cannot measure the consciousness of another person. One can ask the person, but the person might be like a tape recorder, answering something without consciousness. It is you yourself who has consciousness and you yourself who must measure, not by looking to any sensory apparatus, but by looking at the looking, feeling the feeling, and experiencing the experience, whether this particular feature can exist without brain or other body elements. You yourself can gather instances of confirmation and instances of disconfirmation, but only in a context of neopopperian science -- where you bring in the immediacy of fine-tuned intuition; and then you may find that consciousness is indeed not merely based on a physical process in the brain. But in turning again to someone who claims that 'consciousness is a physical process based on the brain' within a sensory-organ measurement oriented classic K R Popper framework, we have to say: this statement cannot be checked for you have no element such as 'consciousness' as part of the framework of phenomena that you study. You may work on the correlation between speech utterances and physical processes in the brain, fine. But that is not a study which can mandate you to say what consciousness is 'based' on . It merely mandates you to talk of what a typical expression through the body might be based on. Since consciousness is not a sensory datum, it is not a datum in the scientific investigation of the type that requires sensory data for all significant part of the scientific statements. One may try to define consciousness pr some sensory data, but then this definition can be strongly, and successfully, challenged by looking at it and discussing it from the point of view of various worldviews; it can be shown that it contains hidden assumptions and that the study merely becomes an exercise in circular thinking, having the conclusions reached within the definition of that which one asks a question about. THE BRITTLE STATE OF PHYSICS AND THE BRITTLE STATE OF INVESTMENT BANKING -- an important parallel involving incoherence in two dominant avenues of present human endavour There is, I think, a fairly interesting parallel between two typically considered widely separate human endavours in the 21st century (incl late 20th century): investment banking, and physics. The change in investment banking, or, more precisely, in banking as such, came about around the time when, in the late 20th century, more and more politicians (even slightly to the left of the centre in politics also in Europe) got the idea that money can be an adequate performance monitoring factor, instead of far more subtle and perceptive ways of monitoring activities, e.g. in state-run companies, even in universities. This change in politics was widely announced in dramatic terms which included the big, misleading phrase, "the ideologies are dead". The notion had in it connotations such as a money-oriented society also becomes a more human rights oriented society, and less tyrannic -- for the simple reasons that even dictators need money, and the rules governing monetary transactions are so as to soften even the worst of dictators. Hence, China got membership in WTO, in order to cure China, and every part of societies which earlier prided themselves in stable big state- run phone companies, electricity companies, and banks, converted these items into privately owned companies, so that money could cure them and heal them and make these items work perfectly. This, in turn, meant that banks, which earlier had been founded on the concept which for many years now has been seen as obsolate and antiquated, namely that banks are there to protect the money of the people and companies in a society, now got the assumedly more enlightened function of being just another greed-based instrument to wrest as much money as possible out of society so as to give to its shareholders, whether or not that involved reckless high-risky speculation with the money that innocent people have put into the assumedly safe bank accounts. China, as we know, didn't become a democracy as a result of more money, rather they bought themselves into Africa for instance by giving the dictator of Zimbabwe military jets. There are however features of China which have indeed evolved because of money, and just as with the universities, the introduction of a money- measuring scheme has done things which are not exclusively and entirely negative in all senses. But compared to expectations, money has not acted as a purifier on the world -- rather it has contributed to a sense that nobody who has power has any much ethics, and it is a direct source of the Occupy Wall Street movements and its very very many analogies around the world. In physics, I am not going to argue that money has taken over although I know of a fair number of individuals who are willing to make that case. For instance, I am not going to say that the sole reason the Cern research institute chooses to publish research results via a press conference and invited science celebs rather than via boring, scientifically correct articles in boring, scientifically correct journals is because Cern needs renewed funding; but obviously such an argument can be made. Rather, I am taking money in the sense of metaphor or analogy for the general preoccupation that today's physicists have with numbers and equations. Just as in much of society during the last couple of decades, the assumed 'death of ideologies' led to the introduction of money all over the place -- which is but another ideology, of course -- we see that in much of physics, the enterprise of philosophical physics died amidst the quarrel between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein and, during the last fifty years or so, has been replaced with a number-crunching fixation, as if numbers can cure and heal physics, and as if numbers are free from philosophical problems. But just as the introduction of a money-fixation in many places of society constitute an ideology, so does the number-fixation in physics constitute a particular -- and, as I see it, intensely wrong -- philosophy. For those who have understood something of the intense groundworks being led by Albert Einstein in all of modern physics -- he initiated the impulses which led Louis de Broglie to come up with matter waves, after proposing the notions of photons -- they must also appreciate this fact: not in one single publication from Einstein's hands from the late 1920s until the last published conversations and letters with him in the 1950s did he regard quantum theory as a theory. It wasn't even a bad theory -- it wasn't a theory. It wasn't a theory and it certainly wasn't a fact, it was simply a bundle of incoherent thoughts with associated formulae. He did not directly challenge the numerical elements of these formulae, and some of these formulae Niels Bohr presided over and drunk status from whenever they got confirmed in laboratory experiments, but rather he challenged the thought-form, or the philosophy, indeed, of them. And to Einstein, a theory of physics had to be a theory of reality involving a view, a mental human view, of reality. The lack of content of such thought- elements in quantum theory meant that he did not regard quantum physics as a proper development of physics. He was entirely clear about this and he never diverged from this view. And yet, there would be absolutely nothing of the celebrations done in such bad taste and with such silly summarisations in the mainstream news media -- which are really disvalidating themselves each time they so unquestioning relate what these folks are saying -- unless they had totally disregarded Einstein's view and adopted the point of view that quantum theory is a theory. For there would be no talk of symmetry nor super- symmetry nor standard model nor quarks nor neutrinos nor bosons nor fermions without the bundle of incoherent thoughts, the nontheory, called 'quantum theory'. And if you think I who speak this is in favour of Einstein, be sure to note that I am not at all in favour of many aspects of Einstein's works. I think him stubborn for not being willing to appreciate that the numerical results of quantum physics or what we shall call it involve a 'ghostly action-at-a-distance' (as he called it) that calls for NEW PHILOSOPHICAL THINKING instead of a theorising that aims at removing that component, which much later, in the 1960s, got the now famous name of nonlocality. There are those who think that the philosophical problems e.g. connected to the 'collapse of the wave function' in Niels Bohr's works were more or less 'solved' by later works e.g. by the son of Bohr, Aage Bohr, or by other developments such as those by Richard Feynman. Not so. The problems merely got moved to another location in the numerical crunching of the physics events. There are perhaps some who thinks that since there are so-called 'relativistic' (ie, pertaining to Einstein's theory of special and/or general relativity) effects incorporated in modern quantum theory and in such developments such as string theory and M-theory and also in the so- called standard model of particles, then it means that a bridge between Einstein's theory of physics and the theory of physics by the Copenhagen Bohr institute camp has been forged. Not so. I will try to explain why by means of a metaphor. Imagine a top expert in a company who boasts of how good he is at programming. As anyone knows, a good programmer can program anything at ANY piece of hardware, he or she is not dependent on a particular computer. It is the thought, the logic of the program that matters. As long as the hardware is in top condition, and able to run what Alan Turing called 'the universal idea of computing', then any piece of hardware will do. If this programmer, in order to solve a typical challenge that often comes up in this company, always has to use two widely different computers -- one computer for one program, and another, differently shaped computer, for another program, it means that he has no control over the programming process. He is able to conquest the challenge -- e.g. sorting out a database of numbers -- but he is not engaging in superbly thought high-level programming. Now in physics, its idea ground or philosophy is as its hardware, and the equations is as the programs running on this hardware. When physicists work in the Einstein horizon, they operate with thoughts involving a fixed maximum limits on speed of signals, -- this is one example, but there are several more such. This is used to produce certain results that the physicists studying atomic processes need, especially when they try to go deeper than before, explore unknown particles by particle collisions and the like. When physicists, in contrast, operate on the horizon associated more properly with what (loosely) can be called 'quantum physics', they are using an entirely different piece of philosophy, in which holistic processes are entwined at assumedly infinite speeds across distances, and in which such precision as Einstein's physics requires is no longer allowed for all is subject to Heisenberg's fluctuations, put very simply. So the philosophy of Einstein gives one set of equations. The philosophy from Bohr's group give another set of equations. When the physicsts then focus on getting new results in modern physics merely by focussing on equations and experiments, as is the situation in ninety- nine percent of all mainstream dominant budget- big mass media big foundational physics, they are doing so on the cost of coherence: they are swapping the machinery, the hardware of their minds back and forth, back and forth, between essentially incoherent philosophies, trying to pretend they are doing real coherent science and trying to pretend they have no problem in doing so and trying to pretend that physics is all about making equations, predictions and checking them in the laboratories. In order to conceal the lack of coherence in the underlaying ideas giving a kind of mental substance to the equations, there has been a number of highly erudite mathematically oriented physicists, esp. in USA, who during the last couple of decades have sought to honor themselves with the phrase 'we now have a unified physics' -- while trying to ignore that Einstein would turn in his grave if he heard what fragmented ideas they claim constitute such a "unification" that he himself so often declared that he sought. One cannot cure a lack of coherence between a precise continuum limited by the speed of light with a nonlocal fluctuating self-entwined quantised field by adding more and more dimensions and by inventing obscure ideas that fit with bridge- building equations. It is like trying to make a masterpiece drawing out of a poor drawing by adding more and more elements until one forgets the underlying idiocy. Equations which exists outside of a well-defined area of clear ideas can never be checked as such for coherence, for that would require infinite time on a computer, if not also infinite size of the computer. If by means of formalisms one is able re-produce some or all of the results of a physics which is of the einsteinian type AND ALSO all of the results, the numerical results, of a physics which is of a quantum type, then it merely means that one has succeeded in temporarily obfuscating the issue. One has focussed on how to make two or even more than than two programs, running on two or even more than two widely different computers, seem to be one coherent program running on the universal idea of computing, while in fact it is merely a patchwork of different programs requiring different idea horisons. So, in the metaphor of the programmer boasting of how good he is, while he is not able to make a single program run on a single fast computer to do the job, may be able to make a coordinating program on a third computer that controls the activity of the other two computers as if it is all one big beautiful program, a "unified" program. THIS IS HOW SUPERSTRING THEORY WAS MADE. And all associated attempts of unification of physics are merely extrapolations of Bohr's impulse to take predictions more seriously than thought analysis. Bohr never meant it in such extreme senses that today's physicists seem to often take for granted; but already in Bohr's mild expression of them in the 1920s, he got the blue lights blinking in the foremost physicist of his time, namely Einstein. The focus on numbers and on formalisms begun when Bohr, after coming with a wrong picture of the atom, was able to destill some at the time unexplained 'traffic rules' for some aspects of atoms. These traffic rules were explained by de Broglie's pilot wave theory, but that pilot wave theory was in need of a subtle but radical improvement. Instead of helping de Broglie along with this in the best spirit of scientific collaboration, Bohr saw it as a threat to his programme and brought in other folks to produce a magnanimous impossibility proof concerning ANY theory that allowed a realistic step-by-step picture between measurements. For Bohr knew that if they began tampering with the speed of light, the direct consequence of this would be that, given Einstein's theory, the present of one process could affect the PAST of another process, and vice versa, leading to inconsistencies in what the physicists meant by 'past' versus 'present'. So de Broglie's theory was quenched instead of taken as an interesting suggestion for further thinking. This was done by means of an impossibility proof that many decades later was revealed as merely a proof showing that locality is inconsistent with the numerical predictions of quantum physics, when particles have positions between measurements (hidden variables). So instead of helping de Broglie, Niels Bohr happily extracted de Broglie's equation, ditching the intellectual explanation de Broglie had for that equation in the first place. So what others did to Bohr's theory -- ditching the explanation, extracting the formalism -- Bohr did himself with de Broglie. Then Schroedinger came up with more stuff which could have further propelled a view of real waves, but Bohr did the same there, too. Heisenberg, on the other hand, never seemed to fully realise the enormity of nonlocal effects that in fact underlied his own incertainty relation: so Bohr was instrumental in ensuring that Heisenberg didn't trivialise physics. There is a stupidity surrounding most of Heisenberg's attempts to explain quantum theory that carries over also to Feynman, who was able to skip over nonlocality when he, in his technically brilliant and charismatically humorous way, was giving the stupid masses his lectures on what the essence of quantum theory is all about. Feynman also contributed to the enormity of false self-confidence amongst physicists by saying the utterly false thing that quantum theory, or its slightly extended form in quantum electro- dynamics, had been 'tested' all the way from 'the subatomic' up to 'the galactic'. If he had been a geographer of Earth, he could have said the same, with equal accuracy, if he had mapped some grains of sand at the beaches of Sydney, and also got an idea of how many continents there are, allowing everything in between to be a big blur. For that is how it is: the equations of physics are so overly complicated -- perhaps a bit like the interactions of subprime default swaps and similar such in investment banking, when seen as an interactive whole of global financial idiocy -- that these equations say nil, nada, nothing about any MANIFEST piece of matter, with any NORMAL level of complexity. If you go deeply into what de Broglie did in terms of pilot wave theory three decades later, after learning of the brilliance of nonlocality in its implicit form, you will also see that there are numerous challenges to this theory, but they can each be met. There are, indeed, new questions. The key point that physicists must realise is that as long as their physics theory states little of concrete nature concerning actual things in the human measurable world, then it is also far from a checkable theory; and so the key aspects of the world as indicated by free associations over such as nonlocality experiments in physics involve theorisation which is utterly beyond the rediculously narrow-scoped equations of mainstream modern physics. This also means that a rephrasing of physics which is good is one that LENDS ITSELF towards new physics theorising which BREAKS with physics, after more work, and in a checkable manner. For instance, in de Broglie's revised, post 1955 pilot wave view of quantum phenomena, it is implied not only that light has a particle as well as a wave nature at all times between measurements, and that there is a nonlocal resonance between the particles and the light, but also that this particle has -- despite Einstein's claim -- some, albeit extremely tiny -- mass, in the "rest mass" sense. This is such an absolute clear breaking with the whole idea of bosons in quantum theory as you can get, and one could imagine that if physicists bothered to be serious about the idea level of reality through such novel suggestions over a century, it would lead to a theory that not merely incorporates the best parts of relativity theories and of quantum theory-or-physics-or-what-we-call-it, but which also breaks radically with parts of it, perhaps -- interestingly -- e.g. in the living biological domains such as of DNA molecules where there are some vague indications of coherence that have never received theoretical treatment given the mess that the state of physics is in. And it is here, of course, that I have put in the main trust of my own work, which on intuitive and coherent grounds drawing on ideas which are clear and, though in many ways simple, also complex enough to handle all the diversity of clear-cut measurements so far reported, by and large, in physics, -- and I begin by ascribing a beyond- material real reality to pilot waves and also to waves organising pilot waves in a 'super' or 'hyper' manner, -- changing, in the process, the word 'waves' to 'models', thus arriving at the more fun term 'supermodels'. I claim that the fundamental processes of this world -- the assumed continuum that Einstein theorised about -- is not at all a continuum, but rather a matrix woven of just such supermodels. I claim that there is an organising factor of speed of light, but no clear speed of light limit. I claim that time is beyond the dimensions we can list, and so I change the notion of time as the fourth dimension to 'duration' (cfr H Bergson also) as fourth dimension, as one of several dimensions that organise events without assuming that this organisation matches consistently what we call 'past' and 'present'. In that way, I avoid the inconsistencies with Einstein's theory, -- not by, as Bohr did, concealing nonlocality by clever words, but by refuting the absoluteness that Einstein gave to his own statements as to how everything is relativised around the speed of light. After having developed this supermodel theory, I then explored a meta-philosophical or higher philosophical background that could fit with the views of George Berkeley, and found that this gave it a flavour that meditatively seemed to be entirely what was sought for. The principle underlying the nonlocalities, the Principle of a tendency of Movement towards Wholeness, or PMW as I called it, became, bringing in Berkeley's view, an actual -- and living -- perceptive aspect of the mind of the origin, thus also bridging to the view of the mental underlying the material as Francisco Varela sought (cfr the Norwegian Flux magazine in one of its 1996 numbers, the final issues edited by me and Tschudi together, for this conversation). The bad news for physicists is that my starting- point is that the formalisms they have betted on are not called on in what I call coherent physics, due to the treatment of infinities which is an ingrained part of their integrals, derivatives, and various forms of analytical geometry and calculus, and even probability theory. So another take on the wrong steps of physics is that they got lost in infinities, and at exactly this point, Feynman has indeed said something exactly to the point -- although, at other points, as said, he did the grave mistake of avoiding to pinpoint nonlocality as a key feature of all essentially quantum phenomena. The future of physics, as I see it, lies in closing the shop of physics, closing the book on physics, declare it a big venture of philosophy that got too hotheaded and self-centered and too selfishly oriented towards measurements and, also, noticably, a field that got taken over by the engineers which more or less directly became funded by the military budgets of this world after the atomic bomb scare in 1945. All this physics is poppygock, has little to do with reality, and any person of a rational instinct must drop all further developments of this engineering, numerical, fragmented type of physics, and rather start calling it by its proper names (for instance, 'collision studies for engineers'). On the other hand, humanity must never forget but always renew the sense that nonlocality is, clearly, at the foundation of reality in an even deeper sense than the speed of light is an organising factor for reality; and add to this other such niceties and fun concepts like that of the equivalence of acceleration and gravitation, and the slowing of duration in gravitation. The nature of nonlocality must be understood by means of an openness for a whole avenue of phenomena beyond the possibility of human study, but which involves the notion of resonances between fields at several levels beyond the material. Those who think this too complex now may find it easier to think about another season, after experiencing life more; for physics, in this sense, involves the birth of understanding of reality, and thus is a grand aspect of philosophy -- the two were never separated. In contrast to the time of Aristotle and Plato, we now have the presence of many numerical results on speed of light, on gravitation and also on nonlocality, as well as studies of atoms, and we also have the clarified view of logic as the notion of the algorithm working on not exactly 'the universal idea of computing' but rather on the far more universal idea of 32-bit computing in such as in my own Gamev language. The good news is that not so many take investment bankers and today's professional physicists so seriously anymore. Let me be clear: I am all for money in its proper well- founded ethical forms in society, such as in SMEs, Small and Medium Sized Enterprises. These SMEs deserves stable, boring, state-owned banks, banks so boring they are one fantastic big yawn. They deserve money which is garantueed for by the state. Much, much money. The only type of company that doesn't deserve to make big, big money is, obviously, the banks. And, let's also be sure: I don't regard all that the physicsts are doing in their laboratories as total hoax. Obviously they are touching some phenomena. Only that they haven't got the slightest understanding of what they are touching, nor do they have a proper relaxed credibility in handling the diversity of interpretations of these. They leap on quick results if they fit with their programmes -- that's the opposite of the scientific spirit of proper sceptisism. So, no, Cern has NOT found any new particular particle in physics lately. They have merely celebrated their incoherence. ON MINDS, BRAINS, THE LOCAL, THE NONLOCAL AND WHY BRAIN SCIENCE IS MAKING SUCH EXTREMELY SLOW PROGRESS COMPARED TO EXPECTATIONS IN THE LAST HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY -- And a bit (not too little) on religion as well The best scientist I have ever met was the physicist David Bohm. He had this peculiar combination of exceptional openness and exceptional sceptisism. For instance, in one of my visits to him at his very messy office at Birkbeck College at the Univ. of London, I asked him whether it is not so that the brain is mechanical since it is composed to a large extent of neurons and they behave mechanical. 'But that is an assumption,' he replied, smiling and opening his hands up, as if to suggest you could extract the whole lot of the rest of the answer simply by a bit of open questioning about it. I was doing a bit of psychology studies at the time and began reciting some stuff about synapses being inhibitory or exhibitory or whatever the book said. He replied, 'Nobody really knows what a neuron is.' Again the smile. And the knowing that this guy had worked on the Manhattan Project, had spend some three weeks with the seclusive Einstein on Einstein's special invitation after Bohm's book Quantum Theory, and had been thrown out of his accellerating Princeton career for befriending too many communists, and also upset -- later -- both the Bohr camp and the Einstein camp by injecting a nonremovable component of nonlocality into physics, but to the jubilation of Louis de Broglie, who authored one-fifth of quantum theory in the 1920s -- all this added up to make that little comment quite an enormously grandiose one to me. Anyway. That was decades ago and I have much more now a feeling of 'just starting out' than then. I see features of Bohm's work I didn't see then or didn't want to see then, and I understand more about why Bohm's works were by so many pushed aside, why physicists in mainstream regarded it as a wrong step. There were TWO things they didn't like about Bohm's work: [1] nonlocality, [2] nonelegance. Nonlocality is the principle that at least some (and possibly at essence all) processes in this universe are entwined across distancies (possibly also across duration or timelike spaces) in a way that suggests something such as a mystical union between anything and anything. This principle is almost the exact opposite of the entire scientific programme, and yet, after the work J. S. Bell did in the 1960s on Bohm's work, but with more explicit references to work by 'EPR' -- Einstein/Podolsky/Rosen -- we have had a very large number of confirmations in physical laboratories of a great variety of nonlocal phenomena, first by A. Aspect in the late 1970s. Confusingly, it was announced by some leading news organisations at the time under a heading that said, 'Bohr was right, Einstein wrong, things can go faster than light.' But Bohr never said that things can go faster than light. He merely said that the quantum processes are of a different nature than those that can be analysed in classical terms, and that the speed of light condition applies only where we have those classical terms. That was in the early 1980s. After that, there has been absolutely no official rejection of the nonlocality results. In contrast, they have been extended, albeit not dramatically so. New York Times in 1997 or 1998, in the Science Section (according to Ray Strano, who had read the N.Y.Times just earlier that tuesday, when we were talking about physics while walking up Broadway), could however report that the original A. Aspect experiment on photos some metres apart had been extended by means of a fiber optic cable. They wanted to find out whether they could more accurately determine whether the speed of light limit transcendence was dramatic, or merely moderate. They found that the so-called Bell's inequality feature was the same when the speed of light limit was challenged one thousand times as in the A. Aspect's experiment. So even if nonlocality is possibly not absolutely instantaneous (and in my own works, I have found some theoretical reasons to distinguish between levels of nonlocality, but I do this work as consciously amateur philosopher, ama-teur in the sense of having love for thinking, not as a professional physicist who has learned to repeat all the mistakes of the physicists of the 20th century by passing all the rediculous physics exams at the universities), it is at least reflecting something -- whatever it is, and however elusive it is -- that acts at speeds one thousand times the speeds of light. This, however, is a phenomena that otherwise very carefully edited news articles in news agencies such as Reuters, CNN and BBC completely avoided to mention in the main articles that debated whether or not the Italian research a year ago, about, had or had not made a mistake when a subatomic particle was found to go 'a little bit faster than the speed of light'. Again and again these news articles reflected an understanding that simply revealed either stupid ignorance of the whole tremendous development of nonlocality since the first EPR article up until the experiments involving other particles than photons in the late 20th century, or an aggressiveness against anything that can upset the simplistic mechanistic mainstream view that some atheistically oriented journalists think it is proper to inject into the populace. Whatever it is, it is bad philosophy to avoid reminding the populace of the grand openness surrounding the grand questions. The speed of light limit concerns a class of phenomena while it is firmly established without any official doubt lingering anywhere that nonlocality constitute another class of phenomena. As Bohm, with his friend and collegue over many years, Basil Hiley, pointed out in an article, it is however so that while Einstein's work on the speed of light concerned how fast a signal can be transferred, the statistical nature of the nonlocality work in quantum theory is so that it doesn't allow signal transference. It is merely a question of a correlation that is found to exist after very many experiments have been done, of a type that can be added up. This is the format of the experiments, anyway, as Bell worked them out, when he made the famous 'Bell's inequality'. For background about Bell's attitude to David Bohm's writings, see also Bell's book 'Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Theory.' As Bohm's physicist friend David F Peat wrote in a book giving his highly personal account of some of Bohm's life, Bohm died much earlier -- in his 70ies -- than many had hoped for (he had however had years with heart issues before that), and he had a couple of years of a rather depressive existence involving hospital right before he died, although he also kept on working on that which, in the early 1990ies, became his last book, with B. Hiley. He seemed to suffer from something that touches a certain percentage of young people, namely that the normal balance of energies involving a relaxation of the brain activation during a portion of the night so as to allow deep sleep becomes complicated by a sense of constant over-activation. Some chinese qi gong healers tried to alleviate this but it didn't prevent exhaustion from growing and this possibly triggered a worse heart condition. When a friend of mine and I visited him at King's College Hospital in London and went for an outdoors walk with him, Bohm expressed a sense that after the Oslo seminar (some of us helped arranged a seminar in Oslo where also Donald Factor with wife and Peter Garret with wife, friends of Sarel and David Bohm, attended, around 1990), he had a kind of enthusiasm that led to an over-wakefulness that in turn deprived him of sleep. From this, one thing led to another, bringing him to his present condition. My friend, Georg Wikman, of the Swedish Herbal Institute, who had been friend with the Bohm's for years, suggested that it was as if the focus on nonlocality by Bohm had lead to a nonlocal activation of his brain -- so that it was entwined, beyond his control, with energies of other people. We had to leave it at that, for there were no sure ways of exploring this further, nor helping our master science teacher further. But since then I have encountered several people who has had a certain type of insomnia just after what could be called an overexploration of the meditative arts, possibly in combination with overuse of some herbal stimulants which in more moderate amounts do not act wrongly. One is also reminded of a phrase I found in the brain scientist's Oliver Sacks's book, 'B12 junkie'. Insomnia leads to a gradual fortification of the presence of dream-like and also nightmare- like thoughts impinging on wakeful consciousness. This is not, despite eager psychiatrists, a wrong thing. It is merely cause-and-effect. Sleep and dreams do have a great and radically important purpose. There are activities in mind and/or brain that requires sleep also sleep with dreams. When these are denied over a period, they come anyway -- right in the middle of what is otherwise normal wakefulness. This involves the dream-like intensity of visualisation as a feature that competes with sensory input. It is normal and sane to have such experiences when one has slept little. It is for that reason the use of otherwise healthy stimulants can lead to states of minds which may scare those who are uninformed about this. I have myself done much of my best works by learning of the greatness of mind intensity that some periods of well- controlled sleep deprivation weeks can give, when one lives healthily, exercises much, takes a great variety of vitamins, and avoids all use of alcohol in such a phase. All religions have parts of them where the studies of that which is presumably beyond the material takes place, by deliberately calling forth and honoring also such mental intensities as sleep deprivation can give -- and especially in otherwise enormously healthy young adults without any heart issue nor any tendency towards being depressed. These things are not always working well out -- confer what some indian writers say about 'premature kundalini awakening'. But they are a component in every branch of every religion, and there is little question for those who have had authentic bits of it that it tends to involve a sensory capacity that turns upon extra-sensory perception, or ESP, -- with unusual aptitude to pick up pieces of knowledge that appears to be beyond what both senses and experience and logic and inference from experience can give, and which is more than mere lucky guessing. Indeed, it is a recurrent phenomenon that those who have had harmonious and nondepressive highly intense and even ecstatic meditative experiences possibly with a combination of light sleep deprivation do have a sense of direct connectedness across distances which tends to bear out in at least some well-qualified empirical investigation afterwards. In other words, the word 'nonlocality', but here not applied to Bell's inequality but rather applied in the philosophical sense (which, as my friend Henrik B Tschudi agreed, could be called 'a-local' or 'alocal' so as to make a point of distinguishing from the technical sense of the nonlocal in quantum theory), seems to sum up something of what extraordinarily sensitive mental states is all about. But what then is the brain? Obviously there are features of the brain that allows to some extent, at least, some analysis of the cause-and-effect type. Bohm, alongside very many others, including Stephen Hawking's teacher Roger Penrose, are clear in suggesting that a proper scientist must be willing to concede that brains with their neurons and other types of cells such as glia cells must be regarded as organic entities, entwined with the rest of the body, that possibly harbour characteristics that defies pre-quantum physics and also defies mechanistic chemical analysis. With my girlfriend at the time, in the mid 1990s, Anna Kathinka Dalland Evans, we interviewed Roger Penrose on his views on the neurons on of the brain relative to the possibility of quantum phenomena. He argued with great care, knowing that many brain scientists are ready to attack with verbal intensity anyone who proposes that the brain is not just a machine, albeit a very, very, very complex machine. His arguments had been carefully sorted out during also conversations with Stuart Hameroff, who belongs to those very few who has managed to get mainstream journals to publish quantum thoughts on the brain. One of the things that makes a person exploring the nonlocal in terms of meditation so easily can say things that those not doing such exploration can call 'wacky' is that few has a discipline along the lines that another scientist or philosopher I let myself be much influenced by in the 1990s, Arne Naess, represented: that of avoiding too much exaggerations and rather be intent on spending extra attention and time on getting each formulation, each articulation, even sometimes each sentence, as fitting to exact sensory impressions at at all possible -- without getting overly boring. The notion of 'being friends with facts', taking seriously the attitude that K. R. Popper wrote so much about, which Bohm simply called 'the scientific attitude of preferring facts rather than what one likes or dislikes', is so very necessary the more one explores the enormity of the potential of the nonlocal. Otherwise, we get what we have seen too much of in all religions, also in Tibetan Buddhism: that those who do explore ESP get dogmatic about it, just because the rest of the folks are so altogether ignorant about ESP. I interviewed Francisco Varela in his office at the University of Paris, where, after his work with Umberto Maturana on biological wholeness he had a professorship at cognitive science and regularly attended seminars with the Bohm-friend Dalai Lama. Varela spoke with great intensity about the possibility of a meditative discipline involving great carefulness so as to shape out a methodology in order to sift correct impulses or intuitions from incorrect one, by analogy with the same type of empirical discipline the logical positivists (of which Arne Naess in some sense was one) had relative to pure sensory data. He argued that meditative folks must not think it is any easier just because that discipline has not had much of a following yet, at least not in context of modern science. I think the impulse of Varela in this regard is entirely right: meditation and the exploration of the nonlocal is enormously complicated and yet enormously important, it must be done and one must do it without thinking it is something one can jump into without finetuning of capacities; it is an art, an art that requires the greatest of attentions. Why is it that brain science spoke with such eagerness in portions of the last half of the twentieth century about the possibility of reading or scanning thoughts directly out of the brains, and that they spoke of mapping what areas of the brains do what, and that they spoke of getting to know just how thoughts and feelings arise in the brain with an air of progress and of 'soon being there', while still there is hardly any more results on the table than then? There is a tremendous work on the brain in terms of number of people involved in it, there are all sorts of technological endavours associated with brain science, there are every type of measurement that conventional science can think of. And still it is rediculously little that can be read out of brains. What it boils down to is something very much like this: if you train yourself to jerk a certain muscle so as to trigger a certain signal in a biofeedback-like machine measuring your motions, you can in principle connect this measurement device to some machine and use your jerking motion to control the machine -- AND IN THE SAME WAY FOR THE NEURONS OF THE BRAIN, WHICH INDEED ARE MUSCLE CELLS. This is a point that not many has emphasised as any other than a peculiarity, but it is a fact that muscle cells and neurons are two of a kind, a flip of a kind. Indeed, David Bohm used to explain something of his implicate order concept -- which is a way to illustrate or conceptionalise the grander nonlocality of manifest matter, as he saw it, -- by pointing out that some people who from birth have been deprived of hearing but who have been trained in sign language by hands are engaging in what he called 'thinking with their hands'. They moved their hands in intricate motions communicating with themselves by a motion of the hands when they did thinking. And, as he pointed out, this was not merely external to their thinking, for when they wanted to hide what they were thinking but still go on thinking they could put their hands on their back and go on with their motions there, hiding it from those standing in front of them. I am going to propose that the main reason why there is any activity in the brain at all -- rather than in the hands -- when there is what we call thinking -- is the proximity of the 'muscle cells' of the brain to the lips, the ears, the eyes, and such. There will NEVER be ANY possibility of getting to the root of thinking or feeling by doing any amount of scanning of ANY part of the body incl. the brain, I will further purport -- and I do this not by relying simply on D. Bohm's works, but on leaving Bohm and going instead to Louis de Broglie's works on nonlocality after he had read Bohm's works and published his own first booklet on the subject matter in the 1950s. This is a book that has been ignored by mainstream physicists for too long. In this book, the founding father of the equation leading to the concept of 'matter waves' or 'de Broglie waves' in quantum theory, implies that the way Bohm deals with classical physics relative to quantum potentials in Bohm's post-Einstein-visit paper entitled '..a causal interpretation..[of quantum theory]..[in terms of]..hidden variables' is, indeed -- as most other physicists had said -- nonelegant. This nonelegance compells de Broglie to push aside about half of the work of Bohm. But the other half -- the implicit acceptance of nonlocality, although not yet in those words -- he picks out and uses to combine with the early attempts de Broglie had with trying to imagine the quantum processes by means of what he called a 'pilot wave'. This was at the time not possible to get to work because de Broglie divided the measurement machinery up from that measured on, and so in effect denied nonlocality effects, leading to bad numerical results compared to Heisenberg's, Bohr's, and Schroedinger's model. So for a number of years, which included the devastating use of also quantum theory in making the atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project, the dominant physicists didn't quarrel about the interpretation of quantum theory. However, as Heisenberg, who had clearly turned out to be a Hitler-friend, later revealed in his sometimes critical comments on the dane Niels Bohr after the second World War, de Broglie was never happy with the way Bohr had bullied the young de Broglie to drop his pilot wave attempts. So, a decade after the world war II, and with the dominant older physicsts being obviously too old to revolutionise their thoughts coherently, de Broglie was still young and agile enough in his mind-and-or-brain to learn from what the much younger David Bohm came with. (Bohm himself -- he expressed while in Oslo -- was dismayed that both the Bohr camp and ALSO Einstein didn't like what he did just after meeting Einstein, although his own thought at the time of writing his Hidden Variable thesis was to build a bridge between the Bohr and Einstein camp). Indeed, in published letters between the also significant physicist Max Planck and Albert Einstein, Planck writes that after such and such work by such and such physicist, '..Bohm is dead'. Meanwhile, Bohr confined his comments about Bohm to a sarcasm: it may be that under certain conditions, given certain assumptions, 2+2=5. So Bohm had three errors: he was possibly a communist, he challenged speed of light, and his works were not elegant. Louis de Broglie, however, accepted the challenge of the speed of light and that should have caused front-page news across all the major world's news agencies but it didn't. The only reason I came across the de Broglie works was that the University of Oslo's Physics library gave me free access to their vault of unused physics books in the cellar, where I found that the Bohr fanatics of the University of Oslo had stuffed both the English translation and the French original of de Broglie's mental bombblast alongside tons of works by unknown writers. Thanks to internet, the academic original hierachies of publishing have been fragmented; the universities, which before was the major production centres for the all-dominant scientific journals, no longer have any such function, since no journal in science is all- dominant anymore. Universities worldwide are in a decline for they are now mostly seen as educational centres. However, brain science has not had a revolution in being sceptical about the local, as they ought to have, after the fact that de Broglie produced a version of quantum theory which is so that a more conscious understanding of nonlocality can come into chemistry, and by proper inferences and additional assumptions, also into brain science and indeed into body science, or biological human science. In de Broglie's works, however, there is little more than a reframing of all known quantum physical data. There is not the philosophical groundwork that takes in the whole lot of physics as one shebang and rewrites the tenets of our worldviews. This type of work Bohm did in his latter years something of, but he was, as I see it, hampered by his hidden variable interpretation in its original form. He stuck too much to it, instead of -- as I feel (now) he should have done -- to become a disciple of de Broglie's novel work, where de Broglie made use of about half Bohm's work as I said above. So neither de Broglie nor Bohm made anything like the active model theory, or supermodel theory, that I have spent much philosophical time on the past -- well, almost decade. In this, it is possible to see the role of light in a fresh and clearly rethought angle. I have explained this much elsewhere and it is as complicated as it can get and so I don't have more room in this little piece for elaborate explanations. But suffice to say that in this theory of existence, manifest matter such as that of the neurons of the brain or of the hands, are constantly in interaction by very subtle means, hard to detect and often cloaked in statistical fluctuations which only as an afterthought look "nonlocal", with a kind of hyper-pilot-wave. So it is a theory that takes the point of view of the nobel price winner Louis de Broglie, co-author of quantum theory, more seriously than de Broglie took his own view, namely that pilot waves exists. WHAT IS THE COPTIC CHRIST MODEL? -- Stuff for those ready to break with every tradition Either the universe is full of life or it ain't. If it is full of life either this life came about without any super-organising principle or it came about by some super-organising principle. Science as depicted by some socalled "mainstream" journals doesn't theorise along the lines that grant a super-organising principle as for biology -- although absolutely every wierd feature of sub- atomic physics cannot do without such principles. If there is such a super-organising principle either it is in turn organised by sentient beings, or it is more like an impersonal principle, as if standing on its own -- if that's possible. Around the points just mentioned, you can classify all the world's religions and also other worldviews which are not religious. Let's also add that in the notion that there is a super-organising principle which in turn is organised by sentient beings, there is the possibility that there are many, some or just one sentient being having the rulership -- God. Now, much of science admits to the possibility of life many places in the universe, and in the past few years more than ever before. Religions typically admit to such possibilities as well, some branches of some religions in profusion. Much of the great but unsolved (as far as mainstream goes) conflicts in deep thinking in and around physics in the 20th century up until this day concerns the question of whether the (nonlocal, or much faster than light, or instantaneous in some sense) superorganising principle found operating on the subatomic level all the time can in fact have implications for larger scale phenomena such as human life. However much of mainstream science regards the question as too spiritual and too speculative, since such folks as Niels Bohr and also Albert Einstein both, but in different ways, put forth opinions in favour of keeping such principles out of biology. Others, in many ways just as important, including E Schroedinger and, more and more (as he evolved his own thinking helped by D Bohm's works), L de Broglie, were not so sure biology could be spared from exposure to the new drastic phenomena of nonlocality pervading all of the physics after all at the core of life. But what with enormous complexity at the subatomic level of the mathematics there, and even greater complexity when it comes to making adequate measures of anything very subtle operating at speeds no less than a thousand times the speed of light (as one study of an enhanced A Aspect / EPR experiment found, using photons going along fibers to quite a distance before the correlation was shown), it requires a momentous effort with many scientists working very hard together to come up with real studies that can show any such super-organising principle operating on life. However, it cannot be excluded that some such principle in fact is behind every significant feature of the DNA molecules of Earth's life. That might mean that the universe might be full of DNA life. Not just any type of life, but the same type of life. Even the same type of trees. Then, if this principle operates as if on its own (supposing now, as is the postulate from my own neopopperian enquiries, that this principle do exist -- consult "PMW" in what I call 'supermodel theory' elsewhere on these sites), one might imagine that the life found on Earth, including humans, is also found all sorts of other suitable places in the very vast universe indeed, with so many trillions of inhabitable planets. In the religious or meta-physical point of view, the super-organising principle do exist but it is in turn ruled: by beings, and these super-beings ultimately by God. This is forever beyond what science can work out. It is not illogical. It may in fact be more logical than to suppose that the principle exists on its own. The coptic christ model is to say that there is a particular likeness of God to humans, and a possibility of physical presence -- in some sense -- of God among humans. This is not coptic christianity in its modern form, which has been watered out after the long dispute over the view of christ with the other main branches of christianity. Essentially, the original coptic view was that of a physical nondivisiveness of God and christ. This is not different from those in hinduism who assert that (in some branches) Krishna created the world and then put himself into it. It is of key significance to see that the conflict involved whether God merely 'infused' a human body with a particular God-persona, to make up Christ -- as the catholics wanted it. In the coptic view, something very more drastic is going on: the absolute being beyond all is not merely beyond all, but in amongst all, in physical form, as nonhuman but human-like flesh. This is -- if one meditates over it -- leading to a whole different feel of the shape of christianity and view of the past. (Confer my notes on the past as a kind of simulation at the yoga4d.org long frontpage). The coptic christ model, then, in a way which is abstracted from all the other (more typically christian) notions in coptic christianity as it exhibits itself in Ethiopia and Egypt and so on, but connecting to the root discussions in the 3rd century A.D., and so forth, says that humans are shaped in order to provide the creator with companions. This is a view which implies that there isn't any strong reason why there should be any such thing as human beings on other planets that do have life, because there is no mechanical or automatical process giving rise to humans. The rest of nature is providing humans with an opportunity to live and prosper, and the resources of a planet will be exhausted at some point and so there will be means and ways to find existence elsewhere, in what we can call a planetary nomadic existence. Any such development requires obviously close guidance of a subtle kind that doesn't interfere with that very deep human yearning that humans have for having a sense of self-determination and freedom of will and freedom of action, -- yet nevertheless a guidance that for sure involves a proper transition from the pre-space age, that humanity despite its little experiments is still in, to a space age proper. The notion of nonlocality indicates that the universe is in some way self-entwined and that there is a possibility of some such 'hyperjumps', in one way or another, as I Asimov writes about in the Foundation scifi trilogy. To ensure that humanity makes it over to such an existence is, one can imagine, an enormously complicated task -- especially if this has to be done without anybody really noticing that it is done; confer Matrix scifi movies. Given this complexity, but also the vast entertainment of this complexity, it does not seem an appropriate set-up to have humanity co-created on a number of planets; that would either mean dropping several of these or doing such an enormously complex process several times over, but in different ways each place. The first seems cold while the second seems unnecessary and not so entertaining. The enormity of the universe nonetheless, one cannot escape from the postulate that G Berkeley came with -- some time, by the way, after Anselm published his works on the infinity of God being greater, and more real than, the finiteness of the imaginable -- namely, that God may be the infinite day-dreamer who in his mind uphelds all reality as his ideas. This is metaphysically compatible literally with every religion, and it is a kind of assertion of 'mind over matter' or 'mind as more fundamental than matter' that is highly compatible with some of the most astounding thinkers in all realms. In such a view, there is a relativeness to creation, because of cause-and-effect operating locally to produce a kind of chance and a kind of noise and a kind of freedom, but there is no deep evil, -- in fact, no evil at all!!! Rather, there is an unfoldment, by means of the mind of God and all the higher beings he imagines-slash-creates as prior to the more manifest levels of matter, complete with all the machinery required to handle the very vast amounts of causal interactions. The focus of attention of God must in some sense have a bit of affinity with the focus of attention that any one of us has when reading a novel or short story; humanity comes into being by his 'reading' of the story of -- at present Earth -- and I intuitively feel that it is also rational to assert that it is both highly likely there is life all around in the universe, just as much as there is no intelligent life at the manifest level to match humans, anywhere. ENERGY, WATER, POLLUTION-FREE AIR, AND ELECTRICITY ON EARTH -- WHERE AN ART OF DECISCION-MAKING MUST GO BEYOND MERE SCIENCE -- Intuition, not merely analysis, going beyond traditional opinion-groups, must guide energy decisions in upcoming decades We were just a few seated together over a bit of food and some coffee and such, without any agenda, and with all possibilities of friendly dialogue, when we touched on the point that (and as a major United Nation committee concluded just some weeks ago) within some decades water sparsity can be the major source of conflict on Earth. For instance, Asia has the majority of the world's population, but -- according to U.N. -- less than a third of the available water resources. With all the possibilities of relaxed friendly conversation, and with all the willingness to think openly that we had -- and we did indeed manage to think both in friendly and open and relaxed terms -- within half an hour, we touched on many complexities that came along by logical necessity -- questions of deforestation, oil versus coal versus nuclear versus wind versus solar panels, diesel versus gasoline versus biofuel, electricity consumption saving versus the fact that most people on Earth can only get up to a foundamental level of luxury by vastly increased electricity production -- destillation of sea water -- handling of nuclear waste -- greenpeace fanatism in Germany -- etc. And though we managed to sort of agree on the main solutions, it suddenly appeared to me that the complexities involved are so great it is no wonder that the global conversation on these points is so stale. For instance, since most of Earth consists of sea water, as far as its surface goes, and since it only takes the cooling of the damp of cooked water to produce drinkable unsalt water from sea water, clearly, by increased availability of electricity humanity can regrow forests and also grow food where there today is desert. Also, the thinning and polluted essence rivers of the planet can be replenished with good water in this way. But most Greenpeace groups as they are governed today in Germany and elsewhere are not putting up 'More electricity to all humanity -- indeed, a million times greater electricity production than today' on top of the priorities. Instead, they focus on such as saving a little electricity here and a little there. They focus on wind power, biofuel and solar power. These things are wonderful and would have been adequate, together with such as hydropower (from rivers), if there were some hundred thousand people on this planet, instead of seven thousand millions people -- and counting. What science cannot really easily show, but which one must call on intuition to realise, is that the proportions involved as for the real actual energy requirements for humanity are devastating, unless we are radically increasing the safety and very radically increasing the quantity of nuclear electricity production. Add all wind, solar, hydro, biofuel and so on together -- it is not a third, not a tenth, but more like a millionth of what is necessary, even if vastly extended compared to present production levels -- if we are talking of giving fresh water to all human beings on this planet, and enough air conditioners for all who live in tropical areas, and enough fridges to keep the food fresh, and also seek to have enough destilled seawater available and transported along great pipelines over vast stretches of land to replenish and renew desolate areas and barren rivers. We need an enormity of electricity to combat the literally muddy airs of chinese, indian and other mega-cities, for only electricity in enormous, and free quantities, can drive the machines of factories and the engines of cars without filling the airs up with every sorts of pollution, where CO2 is the least problem. Suppose a more or less former Greenpeace member comes along to our dinner table, and says, 'Alright, I hear. But what of this nuclear power plant activity? It is tremendously dangerous, just look at Fukushima, it makes tons of nuclear waste materials, it is really a thing not belonging to the future.' Then, first of all, I would say, but of course you are right. A million years into the future is there any nuclear plants? Obviously not, humanity has managed to get every life quality element without having to either split nor fuse atoms in dangerous reactors. Then, secondly, I would say -- as I did say -- handling nuclear reactors safely and handling nuclear waste safely is ONLY A MATTER OF COST. We are not talking of absolute safety but of a practical level of safety that is adequate. Our Greenpeace member would perhaps say, 'I don't believe that. This is what the nuke camp always say, that they know how to do it, they have learnt of past mistakes, that Fukushima was previous 'generation' reactors.' But -- and this also came out in our dinner conversation -- is entirely correct -- there IS a nuke camp, pro-nuke experts, who argue just in this manner. And nothing works more against proper use of nuclear power than the pro-nuke viewpoints, as they are presently presented. The pro-nuke people merely want to preserve status quo -- they want to, in other words, keep on doing what they are doing, and gently extend with more and more plants. Thereby, the rediculous low-safety approach of all the reactors in France, China, USA and so on are being continued, and more reactos are being built along the same rediculous safety criterions as at present. These reactos are open to attack, they are vulnerable to various forms of extreme weathers, they are vulnerable to general breakdowns of electricity and/or computer networks, they are vulnerable to the always unpredictable earth quakes and many of them are vulnerable to tsunamis or forest wires, and every one of them are vulnerable to human error as well as computer errors of various kinds. Add up all these vulnerabilities, and the sum total is: SHEER FOLLY. This is why the pro-nuke experts are sealing the opposition against nuclear electricity. They are defending the past of nuclear electricity, not its obvious future development. And Greenpeace, in the past, has been locked into a rediculous opposition against what could have served its purposes more than any other single technological invention. Increase the cost of building nuclear electricity plants vastly, and increase the cost of handling nuclear waste vastly, and we are talking the necessary foundational costs and the necessary foundational technologies for creating a worldwide free electricity enterprise. Every nuclear plant can go wrong. Make it thefore sealed from the start, by drilling it deep into hard mountain rock, rock that can be used to shield against even a full-scaled explosion of the plant, and keep it from touching any underground water and also keep it from ever polluting any river or any nearby air -- no matter what happens, whether in terms of attack or in terms of extreme weather, technological failure or human mishandling, or devastating quakes, tsunamis, whatever. Then use all the space rocket technology so far developed to find a safe deposit route of small explosion-safe containers of radioactive waste. This is only possible given a realisation that only by producing enormous amounts of electricity, an amount that only nuclear power stations can make, can the enormous costs be justified -- by the necessity of protecting humanity as a whole from the onslaught of severe pollution and severe drastic resource-based poverty and consequent wars in the upcoming century. During our conversation, the point was also raised that surely there must be new ways of creating fresh water by now. Indeed there is. But when we talk of producing enormous quantities, it is -- according to my intuition -- nothing that beats sheer destilling. Another point raised was that of CO2. CO2 is one of the natural components of air, alongside oxygen and nitrogen and flavours such as the healthily electron-charged oxygen molecules that arise as a result of the interaction between the sun in the morning and the green electron-rich leaves of trees with roots going deep into the ground. I have long had a self-produced electron-to-air generator in my main working laboratory, to produce good ionized air. We not only need to replenish too much carbon dioxyde with oxygen, but we also need to replenish the machinised air which too often has a lack of electrons with electron-rich air (so-called "negative ions", for historical reasons, although there is nothing negative about them, in this context). So green leaves of trees and plants, due to the enormously complex processes associated with their typical bright-greenness, are able to transmute the energy of the Sun so as to split carbon from oxygen and thus in practise 'chew up' CO2 and release oxygen, complementing the processes of the breathing of human beings and mammals and also complementing the burning processes of combustible engines. CO2, used to create sparkling water in cola and such, is harmless when it is not too much of it. That which makes such as the air in Shanghai 'dirty and muddy', so much so that jogging becomes a hassle, is not CO2 but a whole host of other substancies, and many of these are produced also by the burning of diesel, derived from fossile oil, which propels a vast quantity of the moving vehicles on Earth today. They COULD have been running on electricity given a tremendously costly infrastructure investment which must go along with the also tremendously costly nuclear power electricity investment which together are necessary to ensure a better life for all humanity. But we must keep in mind that electricity, unlike substancies like water, cannot easily be stored for long in any quantities. The electricity that is to be used now, should -- speaking of the vast percentage -- be produced now. Batteries must be recharged all the time and the only working arrangement speaking the big proportion for the oversized cities and all areas, also far away from them, where we want elcars to dominate fully, must have a leasing-approach where one can pick up a new elcar around every corner and leave one's previously leased or loaned elcar just about anywhere, without any much pause and without any heavy price. But to reach these priorities, mere dialogue over the available assumptions and the available empirical data reports are not enough. One must have a responsibility to listen to the very real capacity that the human mind has to relate to intuition, in the finely tuned way that we advice in scientifically oriented ways (see, if you like, the methodology called 'neopopperian science', in our news archive sections as well as some published works). It is this intuition that can say 'no' to the present positions both of the camp of Greenpeace groups as they at present dominate e.g. in Germany, which is shutting out nuclear power without a genuine dialogue on new forms of nuclear power safety, and also 'no' to the present lazy criterions of the pro-nuke experts, and 'yes' to extremely costly but entirely necessary programmes along the lines that are indicated here. Note also that we must then also allow certain debates which have proven to be rather stale, namely on measurements and global production levels of CO2, to simply reside deeply into the shadows; there are far more concrete issues than CO2 to be handled, and far more directly than through any abstract discussion of what humanity has contributed to as for climate changes over the past hundred years. In order to do our best for the next decades for all the billions of human beings on this planet, where at present only a minority has adequate quality of life luxury criterions satisified, we must raise above the camps of fanatical too-easy opinions. We must weigh real proportions and not get stuck in wishful thinking about technologies that won't do the trick. We must weigh real safety criterions and not accept sloppy criterions that cannot possibly have any relevance when a vast expansion of the use of a technology is required. Our dinner conversation finally turned on the question of whether there is any hope that global conversation can become 'intelligent'. The point was raised that occasionally, billionaires can change global conversation at some points, because they can put their money force into promoting a point that otherwise would have been just one point of many. It is perhaps then of validity to point out that for billionaires to start reaching deep into their pockets for idealistic reasons, they must resist the Forbes-magazine-propagated idea that rich people constitute a 'class'. There is nothing classy about a person of low tastes and bad manners and poor health and looks who suddenly has a magnificent sum of money in his bank account. Class is a question of distinction through perception, and anybody who employs even the lowliest standards of perception would not say of any one of the hundreds of people who are classified as top billionaires that they have any much distinction at all. Consequently, there is never any such thing as 'class warefare' when somebody accuses -- as the Occupy Wall Street movement does -- the rich of being selfish. Rather, in contrast, there is the point of view among many whose level of reflection goes deeper than those who like to shout that they are 'atheists', that everyone has a form of narrow egotism or 'ego', put simply, within, and that human dignity and worth involves constantly being at war within one's own psyche against one's own ego. That is the real class of elevation -- to fight own egotism. The class warfare is against the lowly class of overdone egotism within oneself, and this class warefare happens on behalf, we can say, of the higher form of being which is the authentic 'self', or conscience, or spirit, if we follow the terminology, for the moment, of C. G. Jung (who also authoried the 'synchronicity' concept, which many are looking into as a source of inspiration related to the beauty concept -- and beauty, more than anything, and certainly infinitely more than money, truly distinguishes class or higher taste). So within a decade, with luck, a turn-about of global conversation as reflected in mainstream news, on all these issues, can indeed arise; but it begins by each individual reaching deep into own intuition and start challenging typical assumptions as propagated by today's mainstream news on the issues of energy, pollution, nature, poverty, nuclear safety, etc. So, cautiously, let's be optimists. In one way or another, humanity will make it, and in one way or another, there is progress. WHAT CAN SCIENCE REALLY SAY ABOUT SUCH AS: THE BIRTH OF THE UNIVERSE, THE ETHICS OF ABORTION, THE REALITY OF SOUL OR ANGELS? AND NOTES ON WARP-TRAVEL --Science is an ideal of purified wonder, reflection and intuition that is rarely reached even in infinitely more trivial matters When last week, or two weeks ago, who British news media referred to (quoting the mediator of the conversation between present Archbishop of Canterbury and present most-talked-about darwinist or neo- darwinist) 'the most fameous atheist of the world', astounded those present by declaring that he could not honestly remove a component of uncertainty whether God exists -- becoming magically -- and in own words, an "agnostic" instead of head of a horde of angry atheists -- then we saw a glimpse of real dialogue and of the real art of science. It is not a moment, though, that I hail as a true breakthrough of understanding in humanity. I mean, come on, EVERYONE knows that absolute certainty has NEVER had ANYTHING to do with what we call a 'scientific attitude'. And this concerns infinitely more trivial matters than God, soul, angels -- or muses -- and such lofty things of philosophy and theosophy and theology and religion. But, then, all the more so, this uncertainty concerns the greatest things. But I take it that what professor Dawkins really is arguing against is what he referred to as a 'literal' interpretation of the creation story in the christian bible by the present Pope. And, fortunately, the Pope is not the leader of christianity. He is but a leader of an organisation, a business corporation, and a kind of country, possessing vast wealth and which is orchestrating a sometimes not uninterestng and sometimes not un-beautiful and sometimes not un-artistic set of divine rituals. There is a vastness of exploration in humanity, where people may try and declare themselves as leaders of islam, or christianity, or buddhism, or hinduism, or other religions, -- and there are millions, certaintly -- but one must always feel entirely at ease with dividing between these people (with their organisations or networks), and, on the other hand, THE TYPE OF FAITH that they are exhibiting an example of. The mild-manneredness of the present Canterbury Arch-bishop, Mr R Williams, gives him a capacity and flair for dialogue that was not lost on his science debattant. It is the refusal of dialogue that most angers those of a scientific inclination -- if this refusal of dialogue is coupled with insistence of literal interpretations of bygone texts. As for science as a pure ideal of sceptical wonder with a plurality of theories to mount explanations, of sorts, for a very great diversity of data, it is, as said, rarely achieved. And it is this 'fallability' of human thinking that currency trader and physicist George Soros has most emphasized about his teacher Karl Popper, the latter of whom laid the brickstones of pluralistic theory-thinking in early 20th century university science. Going back to Popper, and working on understanding what he said and then reflecting over whether he has been open enough about the capacities for human beings to have intuitions about empirics that go beyond research data, lead me to suggest a number of approaches informally summarised as a 'neo-popperian' approach to science -- and to religion. It is then of importance not to overestimate the word 'necessary', as when physicist Mr S Hawking or biologist Mr R Dawkins say things like, "I don't think God is necessary here" -- referring to the beginning of the universe, or the evolution of life. For the word 'necessary' (meaning ethymologically 'cannot flow otherwise', or something like that) is typically associated with just such absolute certainty as people of such different approaches to science and philosophy as Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper agreed that is not true to the scientific attitude or ideal or norm. The word 'necessary', moreover, is just such a word as those people who are in love with weapons, such as Mr A B Breivik who bombed Oslo and then used semi-automatic rifles on youngsters in summer 2011, tend to use and overuse in their own scribbling to themselves of their reasons to do what they do. If they had contemplated on what physicist David Bohm (in seminary we had with him in Oslo in ca 1990) called 'the concept of the false necessity', or what he (when writing with physicist F David Peat) called 'false play' or 'il ludere', as an inventive translation (not ethymology, if I am to believe my friend H B Tschudi at this point) of the word "illusion" -- they would have dismantled some of the hierarchies of their theories of reality and action. The same applies to those who bombed New York City and some other places with tourist airplanes in 2001. They speak of necessities. They speak also, of course, of literal interpretations -- or rather, they enact certain literal interpreatations of some sentences here and there in the Koran. At school, this Mr A B Breivik had been physically threatened by young angry guys who had an enthusiasm, an angry sick enthusiasm, fostered by the late mr O B Laden. For some years, Mr O B Laden influenced many young people. Young people are now, thank goodness, turning to sufi islam rather than the evil sharia islam, -- if "evil" is the word we want (it probably isn't, as it refers, in my own neo-popperian enquiries, to absolutely nothing at all!!!). Sharia islam is a debasement of the human spirit, of girls, in favour of old and young males whipping their way by means of quasi-ethical courts where the best of islam is totally ignored. One who consciously puts sharia islam to the dustbin, alongside the literal interpretation of ANY religious text as a whole or in excerpts, can perfectly well find in sufi islam or in rumi islam (as is a more open-minded expression, for 'sufi' has been too many times systematised), a full belief in Jesus as son of God and saviour of all humankind and of the human being and prophet Muhammad as one who did a nice job, on behalf of just the same spirit as that which drove other great spiritual teachers to do something -- without at all in any way assuming that Muhammad did everything right or said only right things, and without in any way assuming that neither the jewish Torah or other hebrew texts, nor the Christian greek new testament, nor the arabic Koran or Q'uoran, nor the sanskrit Bhagavad-Gita or Vedas or Upanishads, nor any other such classical text, reflects God's own words except in lucky bits and pieces here and there. Turning to things which are of more intellectual interest to young good thinkers: can science say anything about the birth of the universe? I think it is fair to say that if the universe is of a (much more) recent date than the billions of years typically ascribed to its duration by some dominant present physicists in this early 21st century, then it is not just an artwork, but an artwork that is full of deceptive tricks to an absolutely enormous and staggering extent -- where everything essential about it is, in ways too clever for humans to even begin to understand, wrapped up in false appearancies. And that is, as perhaps you the reader already know, if you have followed my writings during some of the time since I begun after my first meetings with David Bohm as a psychology student back in 1986, at his office in Birkbeck College in London, -- exactly my stance. Or my intuition, call it that way. This is not a novel thought at all. Bertrand Russell was very clear about the possibility (although he hated it). Douglas Adams, scifi author, made it commonplace in the 1970s, with Dr Slartibartfast. It is however not at all the typical interpretation among the typical leaders of the most prominent religious institutions of this day -- and, hence, we find such outbursts as version 1.0 of Richard Dawkins, before his quiet phase -- version 2.0 of Richard Dawkins, results in version 3.0 of Richard Dawkins, professing agnotisism in a direct-transferred conversation across internet and relayed in british media quite faithfully. But in order to shape theories that account for religious reality in such a way -- which, though unusual, is well-known to any extremely well-read mythologist along the lines of the late Mr J Campbell -- cfr for instance ancient sanskrit-written creation stories -- we must first do away with any suggestion that an easy quick version of 'necessity' or any easy quick version of 'simplicity' can be applied when practising either popperian or neo-popperian science. We need an anti-occam's anti-razor, to erect grand alternative approaches of theories, where we reserve a right to look for simplicity and to occasionally use the word necessity but on a meditative, reflective foundation, -- not applied as an instrument of debate and discussion. The problem Mr K Popper repeatedly raises is then: how do we select one metaphysics before another, when these are so full of unrefutabe, un-falsi-fiable things? But we must not -- and I say this to G Soros also -- fall in love with the word 'fallible' or 'refutable' or 'falsifiable'. As also my friend Mr A Naess pointed out, it is very complicated for any theory to become falsified, for the number of assumptions bridging a theory with a concrete piece of sensory observation may be many, and everyone of them may have to be modified. But in contrast to the late Mr A Naess, we mustn't fall in love with the idea that theories can't be falsified either. Mr A Naess shares with mr K Popper a vague but -- as I take it -- as yet immature belief in intuition, which must be refined into a ripe faith in the power of human intuition to partake in an open-minded pluralistic type of falsification and also verification about concrete elements also of big, grand theories such as a metaphysical theory. The key point is then to be eclectic, and honest about this eclectisism, and not try to regard a package of thoughts as holy -- especially if we, as is my intuition, that human beings are not only relatively right, but by a deeper necessity they cannot be absolutely right. This deeper necessity has to do with protecting a level of chaos and fluctuation in the human psyche. If this is reduced too much, and coherence enhanced too much, it blows the human brain out in a negative way (not the positive way of the sense of the ego being pleasantly reduced to allow more generous feelings). So, I take it, it is a coherent set of assumptions to say, yes, my intuition is that God exists, and then why not a whole realm of a subtle pre-matter and pre-space nature, with a whole avenue of God-near beings -- call them angels or, as I think is much better, "muses" -- and that there is an intuition that also says, whatever they have done to create the manifest universe, it certainly is done so as to make them appear to be hardly present for those who go around with lenses, microscopes, telescopes and such to look for them. In contrast, if indeed the billions of years of the past is, for the most part, a complete illusion -- as I intuit that it is -- then it is also the most elaborate cover-up project that anyone has ever conceived. Mere human scientists must then feel a bit pride, since so much work has gone into making appearancies speak of millions of years of slowly evolved life from the dinosaur to the bird, from the fish to the mammal, from the primintive mammal through the apes to the human race as a whole, with all its inner interesting contrasting diversity of skin colors. In other words, if this is a created world, it is a created world where humans are not only allowed to forget God once in a while, but it is called for that they forget God once in a while. Reality allows its participants to get pleasantly confused. It CALLS for it. Turning the to far more mundane questions, but which nevertheless -- somewhat peculiarly -- are among the top three divisive questions in the absolute hottest of american top politics -- is it bad to kill the unborn baby, or not? It is a living little being inside the young pregnant female. She may not be able to support the individual, she wants it gone. Is she therefore a terrible killer? Or a good killer? A fisherman kills fish, a vegetarian kills tomatoes, and abortion doctors kills unborn human beings, and so it is not a question of whether it is a killing or not, but whether it can be considered ethically good. And if ethics derives from a larger worldview, ultimately bringing in the question of God and muses, then by this practical question of abortion, we are in a way voting on religious issues. And this, again, turns on the question of souls and spirits and such. It has often been mentioned that the earliest forms of the christian new testament contained references to 'soul and spirit' that became 'soul' -- by an editing which cannot be said to be done in the same spirit as those who claim every bit of it is God's words. In fact, much of the history of all big religions tend to make priests and gurus and such instruments of providing an easier time to get heavenly goodness to the human being, founded entirely on the idea of the identity between human body and a particular soul. If a human body has ten souls, or a thousand souls, and it has in addition ten spirits, or a thousand spirits, -- as is a logical alternative proposition in a neo-popperian dialogic context -- the whole power-play of the priests and gurus and rabbies and imams and such become more of a question. Still more so if we say: the truth is one of day-incarnation, that one day the human body, you, may exhibit some souls, another day some other souls, and spirits are a more deep level of this, -- and these souls and spirits may partake in several human bodies in plurality -- SEVERAL AT ONCE. If we give such a more complex point of view and say, as I obviously do, that this is what I hold as intuitively correct, the whole power-scheme of priests-to-aid-your- soul falls to the ground with a big bang, a real big bang, unlike the illusory big bang of too-quick non-popperian science. But as all good biologists know, in questions of life, whenever there is a possibility that a complexity exists such that this complexity could account for an ability -- such as seeing, in the formation of the retina -- then this complexity do exist. It is in biology often found that a combination of theories is necessary to account for the appearance of a single phenomena, such as seeing. You may find it interesting to look at the history of biological science in theorising over the structure of the retina of the eye, with its both color-sensitive rods and its b'n'w (black-and-white, or intensity) sensitive rods. The question of souls and spirits relative to the human body is of a nature that involves what we can call a theological or theosophical (not using the word 'theo- sophy' as according to any organisation of theosophy, but in the root sense of 'wisdom of God / Deus / Zevs") expansion of biology, a theosophical biology. The substance matter, put that way, of souls and spirits do not have a proper theoretical ground in the very early, brittle stage of early 21st century mainstream physics and biology, where this physics is, for the most part, little but decimal-comma-modifications of 20th century physics, and the physics called on within biology for the most part reeks of stale 19th century newtonian illusions on causality and chance. The substance matter of souls and spirits requires, as I see it, a theoretical foundation in a completely reworked form of physics, what I informally call 'super- model theory', and which is (cfr works on essence numbers and infinity) a physics of a new kind that cannot be properly formalised as a matter of PRINCIPLE. This is not an attempt to popularise an interpretation of quantum theory, or to make a metaphor over a bridge between einsteinian physics and quantum physics. Rather, it is an attempt to take seriously the need for coherent ideas in the underlaying number logic when coupled with the need to account for the vast diversity of empirical data summarised in the research reports by the physics workers of the 20th century, no matter which theoretical paradigm they worked under -- that of Mr N Bohr, that of A Einstein, or any of the several others. But it is most near to what Mr L d Broglie worked on in his youngest years, and also in his last thirty years after he had accepted the proposition by D Bohm that quantum theory must involve a form of (what Bell called) nonlocality. In this super-model theory, there is a substance to soul and a substance to spirit that is equal in many ways to the substance of the wholeness of the hologram, or the substance of the wholeness of a radio, or the substance of the wholeness of how a planet acts collectively in gravitation to pulls its components back to itself. The fact of the whole, when coupled with an understanding that this whole completely transcends the speed of light -- unlike the informal works of A Einstein, but compatible with (some of his) formal works -- suggests a type of reality akin to what is sometimes called de Broglie waves, or what he in his last thirty years called a 'modified pilot wave theory'. What we also can call nonlocal pilot waves. But this is not to say, unlike Mr F Capra, that it is little more to soul and spirit theory than what is suggested in quantum theory and such. On the contrary, the notion of super-model theory as I extended it after first giving the most complicated notions a book-form in 2004 (available as a.htm in yourtext in Firth platform released in 2006, together with notions there, in scifi form, that the past is a form of simulation, and religiously expanded in texts first produced at yoga4d.org/talks but also available at Norwegian national library along the 2004 book cfr www.bibsys.no on my various pen names) -- this notion of super-model theory suggests that the concrete forms of what David Bohm broadly called, in his seminal 1970s work on the Implicate Order concept, "the enfolded order" or "the implicate order" -- are vastly more complex than any empirical sensory data. In working on an extension of the implicate order concept together with F D Peat in a late 1980s book, called there the 'generative order', they suggest that a computer game monitor is a bit like the manifest explicate order of the world, while the background computer hardware and program AND indeed also the person operating it, altogther constitute an image of a much grander implicate or generative order behind it all. However it is a vast difference between, as Bohm often did, going in a buddhist-pantheistic direction (confer also Bohm's discussions with the buddhist monk Dalai Lama as edited by Ms R Weber and earlier conversations with Bohm in Mr K Wilber's 'The Holographic Paradigm and other paradoxes', and also notes on this in books from same period such as by Marilynn Fergusson e.g. on 'Age of Aquarius' as also sung about in the Hair music) -- and reworking, as I have done, the whole notion of a vast subtle order behind einsteinian and bohrian aspects of the universe towards a (modified) G Berkeley view: God-holding-the-world-within-his-mind-as-daydream. In becoming profoundly a God-believer, all of pantheism becomes of a subset within a much more structured metaphysics. And within this subset, again, we find a place for souls and spirits and ethical orders of a cosmic scheme. We find a place for the question -- is the human girl looking a bit like a shadow of much higher beings, created by the origin directly (and my answer, intuitively, as often stated, is 'yes, naturally') -- and we also find structures (similar but not identical to what buddhists call 'karma'), as I call 'goyon' -- which can be intuitive parameters to judge the objectiveness of beauty, art and the goodness of action. In such a picture, any bible of any world religion must be seen as nothing more complete than, say, a one-page cartoon can be complete when it comes to depicting all healing medicinal practises that do work. And in the bible-as-cartoon view, it should be a relief to appreciate that it may be that human beings are simply not meant to (yes, "meant to", in the sense of theological intent) have absolute certainty or absolute understanding, ever. But still there can be an evolution of relative understanding. Even to some extent "guided", and to some extent "pre-ordained", not as a T Chardin's "omega point", but in the sense of steps of infinity, an infinite progress of relative understandings. More about this elsewhere. But to cook it into its essence on the political thing, abortion, good or not? Grandly, whatever else one's faith about God and angels or muses may be, it is EITHER the case that the human unborn or new-born infant is identical to one, and only one soul, in theological essence, in a unity that is lasting until this human body dies, OR it is so that the soul-situation is other than that. It is not necessary to take the point of view that soul is not. It is intuitively right, I feel, to say that souls are real and that spirits are real and it is also, I feel, intuitively right to say that when the human young infant is finished growing the first structure of the human brain, and the body has enough strength to begin to stand up, THEN the human being enters into the domain of spiritual ethics. I think it is correct, therefore, to say that the human unborn infant is completely without soul and the removal of it is not more wrong nor right than to remove an organ from a living body. After a year of existence in breathing space, at earliest, it is a human being proper, with a brain that has grown to a proper size to be able to begin to accomodate the real complexities of the world. The legs are beginning to be long and walk-worthy. The first words are uttered for real. Before one and a half years, before eighteen months, then, in this spiritual world, the very tiny girl, when she smiles, it is the soul-smile we see, not merely the genetic impulse to attract survival behavioural patterns from the surrounding world. This is my firm intuition. Consequently, I would very strongly caution those who seek to work towards a more spiritually enlightened world to be even slightly against abortion, and this especially in this crazily overpopulated planet that certainly will buckle under before too many centuries unless a handling of over-population takes place. This is, as I take it, also the view of the origin. To the origin, Life is primary, and the coming and going of human bodies is merely a flickering on blades on a tree that is everlasting, and it matters that the blades are neither too few nor too many and that those that do grow, grow well and do so splendidly and as happily as the blades can bear. It is also, I take it, entirely unnecessary for human beings to try to map this universe, of which they know so very little, and -- as I take it -- the present existence of human beings is very much off-center. Most of the universe is absolutely beyond the scope of the strongest telescopes known to man. All calculation on universe sizes, which are necessary in all other calculations on universe durations, are taking too much for granted about the extent to which human beings have managed to map anything of that greatness. It is not infinite, the physical universe, but it has very little do with the particular finitenesses of the physicists of this unenlightened era. Also, while Einstein obviously was completely the fool on nonlocality, human beings won't ever harness the power of nonlocality for warp space travel themselves -- that is my intuition. My scifi writing on warp travel happens, therefore (unlike the hyperspace travel of Isaac Asimoc or similar in the lovely writings of Arthur C Clarke, a knower of beauty), on the premise that warp travel can only begin by a real presence of the origin among human beings, rather along the ideas of a (very modified) coptic version of christianity (which speaks of the flesh of the origin). Confer also holy grain mythologies and fairy tales: they sought a cup of some holy blood in order to get a kind of 'warp' effect to their little lives. The notion that warp must be deriving from an essence, beyond matter, rather than by a technology that human beings themselves can come up with, has evolved in me over a long time, as a neopopperian intuition. This tells me also that while the universe is full of extremely inhabitable planets in plenty, human technology is forever absolutely out of touch with all possibility of getting to even a single one of them. It is here Einstein after all had a point with his blah-blah on the speed of light limit. These planets are so far away that only nonlocality can do the trick but nonlocality is at the essence level and not within human manipulative level except in rather trivial cases. A warp-driven spacecraft transcending any distance in the blink of an eye requires something beyond manifest existence as its core engine, if "engine" is the word I want. It requires, said in cartoon-like terms, a stamp of approval in each case and a certificate authorised by the origin of reality. Without that, the activity will be too incoherent to get anyone to any remote place alive. I also have an intuition about the physics of a solar system, which may or may not be hinted at in some results in present forefront physics, but which I have had for a long time. It is this: the particular coherence that biological living being requires nurtures itself of a form of nonlocality that is sustained within the narrow confines of a solar system. In a word, a "solar system" is the only system that exists. All beings living within a solar system are participant sub-systems. If they put themselves on a rocket set on course outside of a proper solar system realm, they will find their human cells withering away with a devastating speed as if confronted with a radioactivity that they cannot shield themselves from. But it is not radioactivity at all -- plain lead can shield against that. This is a question of the very coherence that distinguishes a living healthy human body from body that is falling apart and that is dead or quickly dying. This coherence is a substantial wholeness which requires a subtle support system, I intuit. This support system, I further intuit, is not at all existing in interstellar realms, nor can it be artificially or technologically induced. So if you cannot reach another inhabitable planet by warp-travel, in a blink, without any tourist-like pausing in interstellar space to take in the grand views, you cannot reach another inhabitable planet at all. But warp-travel without theosophy is pure scifi. If you, however, expand in the spiritual dimension and reach a refined worldview with plenty of room for prayer and intuition as well as logical analysis of the best of science (cfr super-model theory), you will, I am sure, agree with me in this intuition: Human beings are meant not only to survive, but have a more and more splendid, beautiful existence, evolving in beautiful ways forever. And they are not only meant to, but -- rather effortlessly -- this is indeed how it will be. And Earth is just a starting-up station, not meant to be the base for very long. I take it, therefore, that "heaven" in the cartoon-like human-written bibles and korans is merely a metaphor for a universe where warptravel has begun, but in a way that is not controlled by mere human egotism, but somehow authorised directly by the source of existence. This is a view that one can find a rational room for in a theosophy that also calls on eclectic components of first-hand neopopperian science. It is also a view that is necessitating a form of notion of "day-incarnation" idea, where the human girl and her souls and spirits are seen to be subject to a scheme of fairness (in that the soul is the proper experiencer both of the good and the bad). The view of a cosmic fairness is not compatible with a one-soul-pr-body in a fixed way view, when we look very quickly at the news. It is therefore infinitely more logical, consistent and clear to adapt the day-incarnation view, if one is a God-believer, in the sense of God being active and not merely a lazy instigator of a game-like creation in a mechanical sense. WHY TIMING CAN'T BE BOUGHT, WHY OVERDONE LUXURY MAY PREVENT TIMING, AND WHY TIMING IS GOOD SEX -- A prediction relative to the vast future which may help too-tech-happy and also too-rich people to get the spark of sexual timing The prediction relative to the vast future is this: no fuckin' phones. No damn social websites. No bikes, and hardly any jogging. Just dance, walking, swimming, playing, fiesting (not "partying", for it is not divisive), and all such things, and a bit of work and education and voting and contesting and fighting -- and meeting by chance. Something those who always rely on pre-agreed appointments which are then modified incessantly as the time and place approaches by gadets and phones and portable computers and made unsexy by overuse of cars and taxis and limos don't get any much of. You can't buy yourself into great synchronicities: but you can turn off the stuff you have bought, which were meant to make it easier to contact people and rule over your life, when you find that it becomes more clumsy to use these artefacts to contact people. People in cars, biking people, people who constantly phones, or send messages by phones or social networking sites, -- what happens to their timing? It becomes an artefact, a number, like the millions they don't need on their account. But timing is sex. Timing is what gives the perfect dance, the tuned orgasm, the meeting that sparkle with the unknown richness of partaking in a field of duration which has a dimension beyond all technology. WHY ANTI-NIETZSCHE DANCE IS IMPORTANT -- A world of free dialogue and free criticism of all, not just some, macho-fascistic structures and religions must engage beautiful masculine-feminine female dancers to show the weakness of the male fist What is stronger than words? Dance. Nietzsche is but words, but words of a kind that resonate with sharia-islam as well as stalin-fascism, mussolini-fascism and every other kind of macho-fascism including militant anti-islam and hitlerism. Nietzsche is the archpoet of male aggression against God and females, against anything that denies male power from grabbing the uppermost point of the human psyche, in a constant state of greed-with-oneself that he so drastically mistook for enlightenment. Wagner built on this. Nietzsche is exactly opposite in God-view relative to sharia-islam but exactly identical in the rediculous, unsexy constant appraisal of male power. Greater than this is the strength-within-the-beautiful feminine which came across with Naomi Campbell as supermodel in the fashion industry, longlegged and strong yet slim and softlipped, oval-faced yet with an arrogant slant of her young eyes when she in the early 1990s changed the sense of the coverpages of fashion magazines. If Nietzsche had had a sister like Naomi instead of the over-adoring and racially twarted sister he had, he would had praised God for his Greatness in building Females -- or else this sister would have bashed little Nietzsche, before his mind bashed him in self-destruction and he became the perfect autist. What particular form this dance must take is up to the genius of the particular dancer. But the general impulse is vital to combat the tendency to remove creativeness and true pluralism in the cultural dialogue worldwide when militant extremist action takes place. The general impulse is not just for any year but for every year, for every millenium: dance must constantly and in ever-new ways, not as a recipe but as a service to God, combat the staleness of political extremism whether it takes place in a theistic or an atheistic context. It is the duty of any state with respect for life, dignity, the fun and humour of both a shared coherence and a healthy pluralism of culture to support the exhibition of female longlegged feline dancing freedom so as to make the human mind come to peace with itself, and see the littleness of any alternative. Dance must not merely be a reflection of the whims of old people's wish to carry on traditions or whimsically try to prove that everyone, no matter how plump and out of training or out of youth someone is, they can still tap their feet to a rhythm. Youth is not a matter of counting years, for those of few years can be very old if they live wrongly, and those of many more years can be very young if they have the divine spark of selfrenewal for a good while. Dance must biologically reflect the best and most convincing of female strong beauty to combat the tendency in some to cultivate own power. The particular form of the dance will be naturally changed and improvised to reflect the state of awareness and enlightenment beyond any imitation. But it is the task -- the truth-task -- of any state to use very generously of its funds to pump the best of beyond- tradition dance of longlegged skinny females into the consciousness of humankind in the humble opinion of this writer. This dance will not reflect the average body: it will inspire, however, the average to reach new energies in all good forms of work and leisure. It is not a mirror of the turmoil but a greatness which is similar to such infinities as sensed when one is at a wilderness beach. No matter how much favour of voting and a relatively open and sexually free and in some key ways a centrum-political arrangement one is, one must never put dance at a lower level than at the peak level: it is there to kill mediocrity inside the mind by showing to it the importance of such beautiful beyondness as only the best of dance, and most divinely shaped dancers, can reveal to the mind. Instead of putting enormous resources into a painful, over-medicined prolongation of life for everyone, one should instead pump up the enjoyment of the divine spirit through dance, that the dance shows one there is nothing to fear, that all reincarnates, that greater than pain is the enjoyment of the best of dance, by the most golden ratio-loving female proportions set alive to music. WHAT'S IN A BEAUTIFUL FACE -- Why the cultivation of the circle in modern design shouldn't go too far The world economy -- a large part of it, not crude oil and such, but a large part of it -- is spinning around design, in all from cars to computers, food containers and software, toys for kids and industrial fashion design. Take bottles of milk in a fridge. There are two schools of thought: bottles of milk should be round, and bottles of milk should be square. The argument for the former is, I suppose, that it is nice. The argument for the latter school of thought -- viz., the square milk bottle school of thought -- is that you can stack more milk close up that way, for squares touch all the way, don't you know. Square airplanes, on the other hand, seems to be out of fashion. It seems to be a reason for it: air bounces better of a sleek long & oval plane. And though cars of the autobahn kind ought to have something of the aerodynamic finesse of the airplane, city-cars might well be squarish. But in most cases, design is a statement of taste, not of mechanical friction science or storage room science. And there are those of us who question whether the sexy square -- or rectangular, rather -- "open-up" phone of the Matrix movies are really outwitted, in terms of taste, by the rounded-shoulder type of phone which accounts for the greatest income of the phone-maker companies this season. Any vulgar design book will tell you that circles are eternal symbols of union and femininity, while squares represent a kind of hardened mechanical view of the world. They will further suggest that if all peace dialogues took place across oval tables, there would be no more wars, and that squares tend to accentuate conflict and bring about disassociation. And nothing could be further from the truth -- speaking generally. As for tables, though, I grant the point: soften the corners and it might be conducive for harmony. But in terms of esthetics, nothing is more a stopper than a circle. A square provides movement -- a squarish form like a rectangular shape can hold the 3 to 5 or 5 to 8 proportions, more or less like Visa cards and such, which spiral both inwards and outwards in our subconscious perception of them. In contrast to the circle, which is patently two-dimensional, a rectangle invites the visual parts of the brain and mind to play with it. What happens if you e.g. chops off a square? Will the remaining form be interesting? The beauty of the approximate form of 1.618 is that the resulting Visa card, if you cannibal a square of it, is a mini-Visa card (no longer useful if you want to use it, but now we are talking high art and not trivial use). Or add a square to a Visa card, and you get a giant version with still the same proportions. Turn now to the beautiful face. It too, is like the golden ratio, but in infinitely more subtle ways, and in ways that resonate and vary also infinitely. You see how a slight slant of the eyes may play on the chin so as to give a resonance with one part of the lips; and how the lower lips may have the same angle as the jaw; or how the eyes resembles the oval of a part of the face, or again the lips -- and so on and so forth. The beauty you can't get enough of invites a variety of self-similarities, to borrow a word from fractalism, and some of these may again play on the 5:8 golden ratio. Good paintings are not framed, in general, with soft shoulders so as to make them better. Rather, they are put in the proper rectangle, on the assumption that their femininity and circles-within-circles of living forms come better forth in contrast to the frame. If the frame starts taking the role of the content art, it may reduce the clarity of perception of the artwork. So I ask, what happens when computers are getting all circular and softy? Will this enhance, or, in contrast, actually make the content less visible and clear and salient? A circle, geometrically, is static: which is good when it is a table, for the real beings are OUTSIDE of it. But the beings themselves, the femininity and masculinity is an ever-changing infinite question of fine-tuned resonances, which sometimes give the symphony of beauty in the eye of the observer. But then the frames of our technology, the boxes and designs of our containers, must not impose their own static curves on this living interplay. The squarish design is less invasive, and the hard corners sparkle with a playful gist, inviting ever-new perceptions. THE CONTEXTUAL ART THEOREM -- With an aspiration towards the healthy which in young people is motivated by the sexuality of good-looking symmetrical health, and with a sense of the word 'theorem' as defined in terms of yoga4d.org/updated.htm, a new theorem about art is here introduced 1. In this discussion, the notion of brilliant good-lookingness in the sense of a dancer's splendid health -- even if pushed to limits e.g. in BDSM -- is taken as granted as premise in the sense of motivation (i.e., that healthiness is a natural end-goal). 2. While art can be both abstract and nonabstract or what we can call naturalistic, mildly or intensely -- such as in particular in the sketch or sketch-painting or photo of human beings -- it is the naturalistic art which is here discussed (though there are similar lines of reasonings possible about abstract art e.g. abstract mini-sculptures or abstract light shapes on tall street-side buildings at night). 3. The word 'theorem' as defined in yoga4d.org/updated.htm (and published in booklets referred to at yoga4d.org/talks), is not only a proposition or suggestion or guess, but one that has a line of deduction from definitions and some kind of axioms to itself -- however in the sense of there being in fact much too many symbolic logic premises that these can all be spelled out in anything less than very many thick volumes. So we are talking of a vague meaning-oriented (semantic) type of 'proof' and type of 'theorem' though not excluding that a more formal and intensely long deduction of mechanical kind COULD be made. It is then a kind of INTUITIVE deduction. (Sherlock Holmes fiction involves this type of deduction of course.) 4. An axiom here: Art is either re-presentational (what we can also call 'pointer art', in that the art points to something else which is to be imagined by the observer), or self-presentational (what we can also call 'simulation art', in that the art aims at simulating a bit of reality and require less to be imagined). 5. Definition: Contexual art is art whose re-presentational (pointer) meaning is highly dependent on the context in which it is presented, both spatially (e.g. its position in space among things, tales and people, and such) and in terms of duration (when it was made, how long ago, is it still fresh etc). 6. Theorem (Contextual Art Theorem) here introduced: Contextual art more easily conveys health. 7. That contextual art more easily conveys health, as we will indicate by an intuitive deduction from the axiom and definitions, doesn't imply anything derogatative about simulation art -- such as photography -- when done professionally and with superb care. 8. Before we show the Contextal Art Theorem deduction -- in other words, before we 'prove' it -- in a certain sense -- let us dwell on what we can call 'degrees of contextuality'. I am going to propose that you intuit over the following proposition, at this point: Namely that photography when presented on a luminous computer monitor is more contexual than when presented on something solid (what is called 'chemical reflection light', for it is light reflecting e.g. on paper or wooden plate). Also, we will here regard as a branch of photography when somebody tries deliberately by manual pen or paint brush strokes to mimick photographic technology. (Contrast this with such sketch-oriented art, which we can also call 'cartoon-inspired' -- or 'comics-inspired' -- art as talked about in what this writer has introduced as BI Spring or Spring BI art.) 9. For the computer monitor is self-luminous and few objects except light bulbs and sun and stars and such are self-luminous; in particular human beings are not self-lumionous and so when computer monitor luminously (e.g., by radiant light) presents a form, it doesn't seem to be as much a self-presenation as when the same form is transferred to paper or something solid. In other words, the mind incl. the human brain feels and picks up the fact that it is a re-presentation -- a pointer to something which is to be imagined -- when seen on a radiant computer monitor (esp. light green vs. black tonation), but when the same photography is transferred to paper, it is much more claiming to be a piece of reality which then is in effect a simulation of reality, and thus a self-presentation. 10. Having gone this far, let us now relevate the proposed theorem and see if we can, by meaning-deduction, prove it. The theorem goes like this: contextual art more easily conveys health than simulation art. And we have just suggested that contextuality is a question of degrees, going from the re-presentational to the self-presentational. 11. We are speaking art as experienced as part of the reality of young people whose inclination to sex is part of their temperament, their physical, biological (also hormone), and psychological make-up, all naturally. Without the necessity of extra lip-stick-color, they LOOK for health for they look for sex and it is the abundance of this which allows for the exploration of the intensity of BDSM -- or SM -- and such things as allow health to be challenged. It would not make sense to challenge health unless it is exuberantly present. And so in this light we can also understand dance when liberated from stiff ballerina patterns but yet elegant and longlegged, soft and hard and all that -- both rhythmic and arrythmic, both dialogical and trialogical and more, and monolithic at times. 12. And so we can clinch the theorem perceptively -- semantically as follows: the natural inclination for the mind and body rhythm of just this make-up -- the brain patterns, their wavelengths also, one might presume (for the questions of waves is not merely a classical physics question but a coherence supermodel physics agenda) is to tend to interpret towards health what can be interpreted towards health when there is a full openness for it (since, as said, it is sexual to do so). But such openness is greatest exactly when we have to do with re-presentational more than self-presentational art -- in other words with contextual art. It is now proved. Pompeously, let's declare: Quod Erat Demonstratum -- QED -- Latin: This has now been demonstrated. (Of course, see this writers repeated attack in various successful ways on both the notion of how infinity has been attempted to have been 'handled' in the misguided attempts from Euclid through Cantor then Russell and others to engage in deductions over numbers; and also on the imbecility of regarding manifest matter as capable of holding mind.) 13. But this doesn't mean that art which is more self-presentational doesn't allow the exploration of health, only that since it claims more and points less, since it fills out more and is less merely indicative in broad lines, it is far more demanding. 14. We can then speak of the professional photographer, who knows how to delete the vast amount of miscallibrated wrong-shadowy wrong-lighted wrong-colored photos that naturally arise, and retain only the best of the best. EVERYBODY IS AN ENTREPENEUR: PASSION TO MAKE FUN IS THE FACTOR IN WORLD INTERACTIVITY ECONOMY -- NOT AT ALL SUCH AS GREED NOR FEAR -- Passion, also as love, and the enthusiasm for doing something right, and generosity of various kinds -- including but not limited to oneself -- keeps propelling world economy A human being is not merely alive, but passionately, soulfully inspired, enthusiastic, full of glow relative to urges, both hidden and more manifest, to live life in the fullest, to experience love, truth, beauty, goodness, the intensity of various feelings -- the beauty also of some forms of pain -- not excluding sexuality at all. It is only in the decayed state of mind, where nothing seems to matter much anymore -- for a while, prior to any future reincarnation -- that the smaller pleasures and the avoidance of some pains grow into those very temporarily overriding things called desires, greed, anxiety, frustrations, depressions, and fears. It is this state of mind, rather like a cold or a fever can grab the body harmony for a while and twist it out of form, which leads to the decay of empathy so as to lead to mass-murder or just plain criminal cynicism which has no attention to other people's hearts or lives, nor to the future of humanity. We need not concern ourselves with such decayed states of mind other than to understand that they are temporary, in one way or another they will always, for each person, quickly go away. Rather, we must focus on the positive in human living, that which is forever beyond such decayed competition as darwinistic atheists try to set up as the motor in economy. There is a competition also when there is passion, but it has a laughter in it which is the laughter of having fun, of feeling good, of watching beauty, of experiencing wholeness, it is not merely that sad sarcastic laughter of those who have lost their charm and hope to see that others lack charm, too. In wholly other words, there is a tremendous drive in all of us to do things, to buy things, to sell things, to make things and events and processes and adventures which has nothing whatsoever to do with self-pity or egotism. In this which some has called 'the abundance mode' (named so by Abraham Maslow however he did so in a theoretical context which has, as I see it, many errors in it), the brain and the body function at the maximum. Each one of us is, in the abundance mode, entrepeneurs. We make life, we make money, we create the interesting, novel fluctuations that make society tick, that make the world of interactivity economy prosper. To be an entrepeneur is then something completely beyond greed and fear. It is not that such things as greed and fear, also as panic, don't come in at all. For human beings are never absolutely enlightened. But these smaller factors, though they are always there in a latent form, can be constantly harassed within oneself, in what one can call -- lending a word from rumi islam -- a kind of 'inner jidhad', the holy war within oneself against that which is small within oneself, viz., the ego. But this inner war must also be a war against all political mass movements, all hysteria centered around any bible or more modern form human manifest of idiocy. The world of interactivity economy -- this world -- has a dancing, artistic economy which enables humanity to prosper and enjoy, and at times here and there suffer a little bit, when luxury availability is present alongsside with strong leashes on over-use, over-eating, over-travel, over-growth of companies, over-growth of own money. Much as every human being merely by being alive and up-going deserves a house and a monthly income good enough to live in splendour and health, so must a meaningful world economy has in it ALL the rules and regulations to apply the whip, metaphorically, on all excesses. It is in this balance between luxury and limitation that greatness of character is born, that the most beautiful of personalities are fostered. Overdone luxury leads to a spoiled, bored, ungrateful existence; while poverty leads to a constant narrow focus on merely staying alive, on making it still one more week. The abundance mode must exist both with an understanding of the need for limitations -- for 'sanctions', we might say, against greed and also fear and such -- and with a faith in life as such as forever greater than the life of any one individual body -- reincarnation provides a sense of dignity greater than those who believe in the foggy illusion of an afterlife -- so that there is always hope, given wise action, and so that humanity is sensed to be part of an awesome order, infinitely greater than itself. So world economy, the interactivity of all society, is having a natural energy and harmonious unfoldment in something far greater than greed, fear or other such things of the ego, when conditions are right. Nobody therefore can "own" or "possess" or "copyright" the word 'entrepeneur', for entrepeneurship is part of humanship and part of the link between soul/spirit and world interactivity economy. ENSURING STABILITY IN CURRENCIES IN AN INCREASINGLY PARTICIPATIVE WORLD ECONOMY -- Long-term strict rules to avoid storms and rather ensure pleasantly inspiring currency waves When the world economy offers more and more participation as more and more people are online with computers registered as traders, inherent weaknessess about the 20th century style of regulations become more and more obvious and have to be adressed before too long. One must avoid rules which appear to be 'ad hoc' or 'knee-jerk', but at the same time one must have rules that make the games come out as good games, rather than constantly unfolding nightmares founded on the illusions of Adam Smith and others (whose meagre insights must never be generalised to be a foundation of economy, see my comments on the alternative to greedy demand and greed for money as root causes and patterns of interactivity economy in numerous notes elsewhere). One must be as generous as one can to the spark of fun that individuals, also individuals representing companies, want to have in trying to make more money out of some money by good timing and swift intuition and clever logic. But this generosity must be within boundaries or constraints so that it is not self-destructive from the perspective of society as a whole. Here are the rules I intuit as right, and -- sooner or later -- a necessity. Let us be critically aware that psychology of moods must never be able to wreck a city. This means that we must avoid giving credibility to areas of economy where increased participation by all interested individuals in the world means that world economy can be wrecked if the participants -- out of a solar storm, false gossip, hacking, wrong news, whatever -- have a depressed week. The little we have seen of this so far will be very much amplified as the world of computing most righteously and most importantly enable more and more people to be responsible and active players in the form of traders. So, the proposed rules: >>> Absolutely no trace of stock trading anymore. Neither long term nor short term. Those who work in a company partake in its fate. Those who don't work in doesn't partake in its fate through any long-distance ownership. >>> Over some minutes, allow CT (currency transactions) or betting: Short-selling and long betting on CT pairs many times a week are entirely good and right and proper in all ways as long as each individual (or organisation) doing this do this in total independence from all others, without collusion nor any conspiracy to manipulate world prices, and with a quantity of money which is insignificant compared to the total quantity of money available in the currency market. (Remember that short-selling and long betting on currency pairs are technical words relative to how the currency pairs are constructed, and so the meaning of these phrases do not at all have the type of meaning they had with stock trading.) In addition, state-run organisations without private group-orientations can balance the waves. >>> Long-term currency investment must not be ruled out, since any investment of any kind in some sense involves one currency more than another; and this can also include long-term CT. But since we must here allow a larger sum of money, we must also insist that the sum is kept through fluctuations unchanged, with no option to change it often. In other words, long-term CT (whether as short selling or long bet on a currency pair) is acceptable given a freeze of the sum and of the completion day, with only some relatively limited options of extending the completion day before the sum is cashed out. Let us note that this long-term CT must not have any automatic cancelling of the trade even if it involves riding currency curves which temporarily can even reduce the sum to a quarter of its orginal sum. The stability thereby ensured will allow those who trade with smaller sum to have more beautiful curves. >>> To further reduce the possibility of manipulation of currencies, rather inspired by the notion of a state-run lottery, the price at each minute ought to be adjusted, as for each currency pair, according to a computation which involves officially transparent and well-programmed RFFG -- Relatively Free Fluctuation Generators. >>> Finally, going beyond the notion of nationship entirely, and seeing the currencies as simultaneously existing with equal proportions in all places where humans interact, obviously there must be a yearly equalisation of the currencies relative to one another, with a forced closure of all long-term bets not closed already before the year's annual equalisation date. This equalisation doesn't mean a 1:1 relationship but rather a more lively relationship reflecting the natural variations the currencies have at the start. Too small currencies ought to be closed, or the number of currency pairs will be too big, for the latter to be a practical policy; but there must be more than three currencies to have a rich enough fluctuation interaction. There are other natural constraints which must be implemented together with such measures, and this includes the right of each person to handle several currencies and the right of each shop, also, to do so; as well as other instruments of stability and transparency such as combining physical money with digitally registered money, neither allowing full virtuality of money nor merely paper-cash (see other notes on this by same writer). With this wise framework, money can serve the enterprising spirit of all in a generous and income-oriented way, and so that each can find many things to do -- everyone can have, in some senses, jobs. THE GOLDEN MIDDLE WAY TO RELATE TO POPULAR NOT-TOO-SEVERE ADDICTIONS: REGULATE TOWARDS SELF-IMPOSED REGULATIONS --Rather than wait for such traditionally hysterical institutions as the World Health Organisation to put bans on addictive aspects of internet -- as they have done, clumisly, on both cigarettes and cigarillos -- self-censorship is valuable A long time ago, it was understood by advanced smokers that there is an utterly vast distinction to be made between cigarettes, which typically are full of many dozens of sticky, addictive chemical addictions, which leaves the human skin stinking of smoke, and which involves a series of health implications -- and cigarillos, and their larger brothers, cigars, -- which are in many cases made by Indian Tobacco in its pure form, in aromatic blendings. Those of us who find it appropriate to work many hours pr week in rooms as small as some 4 times 2,5 meters, stuffed with machines and cups and monitors and what not, sooner or later come to appreciate cleaning as one of the conditions to do good work. Another is to keep the brain clear and happy -- no alcholic beverages except some gulps, at most, at weekends. Yet another is the preservation of superb atmosphere. In order not to smoke -- which is something I regard as a weekend luxury and then only extremely minialistic -- but to cleanse and purify the working-room, I have learned that getting a cigarillos lighted up, then blown at -- rather than sucked at -- from the outside, towards the glow -- acts miraculously well to cleanse the air. If only cafees, after the hysteria of the W.H.O., had the wisdom to do something similar for their atmosphere, their business would flourish greatly. As it is, however, the W.H.O. mini-empire got its way and has more or less seen to it that even pure tobacco -- which unlike cigarettes doesn't easily leave a stink -- and which are more likely to be applicable in a non-addictive setting -- cannot have a place in many of Earth's cities. I am sure they are very proud, while a whole youth generation are deprived of the atmosphere of meaning. Is that an over-statement? I think not. [[[Note: I advise that you check things out if you follow any advice here given on tobacco and incense. After asking several cigar shops, which all said that cigars and cigarillos only have tobacco, I contacted the danish producers of an inexpensive and widely available cigarillo-type in scandinavia, named Blue Cafe Creme, and got a statement that it contains nothing but many types of tobacco and a neutral tobacco-glue to keep it together. State officials may also help, if you contact them. The Yoga6d dot org search engine will be vastly expanded to cover many such things nearer 2012 or before.]]] In South Korea, the BBC World Service could tell this week, which is generally a technologically advanced society, internet addiction has reached status as a clinical definition. There are pre-addiction weekend camps; there are medical groups dedicating themselves fully to clinical medical treatment of the people who has gone too deep into the mire of internet gaming. There is legislation, after so-and-so o'clock, children are not allowed to do so-and-so with internet, especially concerning local online computer games. Notice, please, the most dramatic lack of nerve to apply concepts of distinction in the above account, which is fairly near the news report. It is not always one speaks of computer game -- one speaks of INTERNET. One doesn't distinguish between games and games: there exists (I know, for I have made one of them, the Yoga4d game, as yoga4d.org/talks which can be started with the language f3 as installed at norskesites.org/f3) games that are made so as to be non-addictive, yet -- over a matter of two or three minutes -- stimulating. And scroll ahead and I wouldn't be surprised, unless we now start a properly anti-W.H.O.-hysteria process, if the W.H.O. doesn't get its maniac ways with Internet also, after some years: Imagine that BBC suddenly reports, 'The W.H.O. has succeded in convincing the governments of the E.U. and the U.S.A. to outlaw all use of internet in public places, and restrict private use of it to three hours, but then only with a warning being displayed as soon as the computer is switched on.' Okay, a bit over-statement, but I think you can see that greater things might be afoot when you look at events, such as in the advanced country of South Korea, and extrapolate them a bit. I find that it is best to be constructive, when one is a bit alarmed. And the way, I think, to be constructive about addictions of the type that are not very severe, is to apply fine distinctions, find the golden middle pathways, and then appeal to producers to apply them in a spirit of self-regulation. At most, politicians then only have to put a ban on those producers who do not engage in self-regulations, instead of clamping down on users. Firstly, I would suggest that any computer site or computer program which is even vaguely near being in some expanded sense a "game" states of itself to what percentage it is a game. Then, I would suggest that it states of itself to what extend it is typically an addictive type of program or site -- and in the case of games, this will be of importance: that a recommended maximum duration is given. Never mind age groups. Children's minds are enormously capable when given a chance and adults' minds are enormously incapable on occasion. This, then, is an ethical framework which would be fruitful for all game producers and all producers of sites which involve game-like features -- including the much-overused type of site which at present calls itself 'social', while very often being in practise exactly the opposite. The sites which involves 'scores' of friends, and such things. The earlier the programmers realise that self-regulation is the way to go, the less hysterical will be the laws in the upcoming decades. And nobody wants hysterical laws. We want a compassionate anarchy, don't we? (If you like, cfr a very early text of mine, some passages of which require a bit of flexible interpretation I have to say -- in any case, it's hand-written while relaxing in some sunny areas and getting a tan, beside a pretty girl-friend of mine -- named The Compassionate Anarchist, -- it is always at yoga4d.org/dialudes). A TRIBUTE TO ABBEY ROAD, BEATLES --The West must find its own raw power in a force which makes fascism seem weak, which sums up something of what was begun in 1969, but left unfinished business Nothing really came of the 1960s except some fantastic elements which were drowned in glossy commercialism -- or in drug use -- and, as it is not allowed to smoke even outdoors in New York -- the rules and regulations commitees all across the world also as driven forth by News Corp., -- added to the drowning of the best of these impulses. But what was unleashed -- here and there with some of the enterprises of 1960s and 1970s -- Bob Marley, of course, and California Dreamin' by Mamas and Papas -- but with an almost desparate urge to get the best expressed of whatever they could express, since Beatles was about to close the shop, -- something here and there in the Abbey Road album by Beatles managed, in some peculiar way, to reach a kind of sexual force and physical force and feminine force greater, I think, than the dark drugged force of the The Doors, and -- if taken seriously to-day -- could point, to the West, a way where the urge for sheer force -- can be harmlessly released. Nietzsche was wrong in putting up the anti-religious fiesting anti-loving force as greater than everything else, but his point -- that priests behind desks, men in robes quoting books they have never lived, never danced -- that point, in isolation, stands. But the West -- indeed every affluent society I know of -- has not managed, for real, to find the greater coherence of a force both tantric and fiesting, both full of awesome sexuality -- bi-sexual girl-singing sexuality also -- and also of the religious. AND SO, we see men no longer in their early twenties, afraid of their own withering, falling in love with weapons, with machines, with fascism. To cover up their own quick decay, they put on medals or fine titles, they write horrific manifests, and utilise technology to show how well the instruments of fascism look when adorning their artificially pumped-up bodies. WE DON'T WANT FASCISM BACK, BUT WE DO WANT SHEER XXX. The XXX that 1969 has, but which the American Family Association doesn't have, is the understanding that love in the religious sense, and love in the fornification sense, must go beyond death and know also the energy of moderated violence, that of BDSM or SM, that of the myth of the vampires -- which can be removed from the rediculous medieval age noncoptic-christian mythology of zoombies without souls. It is about the blood of union, the union as in the church: that of human sexuality with the greatness of going beyond fear of what happens to the body, a sexuality which can, when taught wholeness and true coherence from a revolution within the mind, speak to those who sense that the West must not become desktop-glamorous, uniformed pop, uniformed religious, uniformed non-religious -- it is a theme explored also in films such as by Laura Gemser and Ursula Andress in the same decades (on Cannibalism). 'THOU SHALT NOT MAKE ANY GRAVEN IMAGE OF' GOD AND HIS ANGELS -- BUT WHY THIS COMMANDMENT? -- And what would happen if it is taken more seriously? A background commentary on the quest for beauty There might be two obious reasons why one should not make images of something awesome -- as in the ancient commandment, in King James translation of the old testament translated with such famous words as, 'thou shalt not make any graven image of' -- God and his angels and indeed everything truly important. The first of these obvious reasons is be that the images may fall severely short of the grandour they ought to relay, and so defame what must not be defamed. The second of these obvious reasons is that, on the chance that an image actually got it right, the beauty involved, the ultimate perfection and ecstasy involved, might involve such a consciousness power as that of a laser ray that nobody can be exposed to the image without going completely mad. The Vatican and indeed much of the renaissance art of Italy, and also portions of the pre- and post-renaissance art of Italy, aims strongly at going against the ancient commandment. It is clear that far from creating a dangerous laser ray of too-much beauty, the art of Italy with its plump manly women and its self-righteous, big-nosed, big-jawed, and often thin-lipped angels, arch-angels, Jesus-characters, Maria-characters, God-characters and disciple-characters rather constitute one vast bulk of defamation of everything spiritual. It is this heavy defamation that perhaps explains how the self-righteous Vatican can go on, for century after century, with its corrupt, over-ritualised, circus-clad ways, claiming to have religious power while being little but a clownish demonstration of the worst of corruption of religious intent. THE ANALYSIS OF BEAUTY IS NEVER COMPLETE. On occasions, one finds that some people who have the gall to call themselves 'scientific' claim that such as 'symmetry' is what beauty is about, or who, from a superficial computerised analysis of some Cleopatra sculptures, produce what look like a nightmare version of Cleopatra that they say is the 'true look' of Cleopatra. Cleopatra, surely, -- in what she was, not in how she has so falsely been depicted -- had something of that beauty that makes people's mind go crackers. This chick, who made much of the land of what is now called Italy rather fall and crumple over her radiant, longlegged influence over two of its emperors, who descended from one of the pupils-turned-generals under Aristotle's pupil-turned-emperor, Alexander the Great, through a long series of in-breedings, was described by one of the historicians at the time: "Aristotle said there were only a couple of ways to flirt, but Cleopatra knows a thousand ways to flirt.' For flirt, here, read 'seduce', 'mesmerize', 'control', 'dominate', etc. Enter on the stage, then, some time after Cleopatra and her fatal flirtations, a Jesus who in the coptic tradition was no other than the essence of reality, in a physical form -- not as reincarnation into a human form; who, therefore, would signal the future coming -- in a certain modification of what is now called 'optic' -- of this essence in immortal flesh-form, not human flesh, but as physical presence: not in an etherical heaven, as depicted by da Vinci and Michelangelo and Raphael and other of Vatican's pet artists, but "not so that one can point on it, and say it is here, or it is there, but in between us, and within us." (Again, the latter quote is more or less from the King James translation, this time a quote associated to Jesus himself, in the new testament). The possibility of this Jesus character (though the name was not exactly "Jesus") being absolutely not correctly depicted in any of the graven images, nor in any of the easily re-producable crucifiction linens, must be seriously considered. Not just because some quotes of the obviously much-erroneous christian bible, both its O.T. and its N.T. testaments, indicate that no such image can be appropriate, but also because -- reasonably, if one has any even vague sense of the reality of God at all, the reality of that greatness would be such as to make all humanity go complete crackers -- all off their onions -- absolutely wacko. BEAUTY IS NOT A SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT. Rather, it is the off-spring, or foundationhead, of pure insight. When you look through your intuitions into whatever phenomena is at hand, it is your sense of beauty that tells you to change your opinion, to fine-tune and elevate your perception. Beauty goes beyond symmetry. Beauty goes beyond rhythm. Beauty goes beyond any instrumental ideal. Beauty, indeed, must be relative in the human spheres, and the more one attempts to achieve it in an absolute or systemic or foundational way, the more one looses one's contact with reality. One may look at the activity of the fashion magazines, therefore, such as Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Vanity Fair, Numero, W, and so on -- in free sequence -- and ask oneself: however much one agrees in the utter importance of the extremely important ideal of thinness and fatlippedness and longleggedness, and such, does one agree in the over-colorisation, the over-smoothing, the conceptualisation, the industrial-clothes-fashionizing, and the persistent tendency of these magazines, when on the web, to wrap up their photos in excessive simulation-like graphics programs such as Flash, instead of giving unmodified, unglossy, plain and also more nude images AS IS? In that way, the best of human beauty -- which ought to be claimed to be just that, when it is so -- will not be subject as much to the ego of the editors and the stylists, the photographers and the clothes industry. It will be truer, and it is an important voice to have in a truer form. Proceeding along the same lines, one can also reasonably ask: if graven images of what is the most important should not be made, should one not limit the excessive use of photography -- such as by iPhone -- so as not to create too much of heavy egotism around these images? One thing is to have, at hand, a camera that looks big and bulky, or is part of a computer environment in a way which does not conceal itself, and to use it to take many photos, most of which are immediately discarded as simply way too ugly, and to keep a couple for a while, as a statement of intent of greater beauty in one's life. But another thing is to go on amassing 'evidence' of one's acitvities, tourist-like, as if travelling and meeting people and eating things is all about getting more photo-evidence of it to show off to other people, instead of relishing in the truth of the experience. And so, the same 'graven image' warning extends to computer games -- do not compete so much with reality that reality becomes second-hand -- and to videos and TV and such -- do not overload the brain with sequences of images which purport to show what dance and fun is all about, while in fact it is but a motorised engine reeling of fixed images in quick sequence, making an illusion of movement where there is hardly any movement at all. And to further developments in technology -- if it looks too much like reality, discard it. THE DIMENSIONS ARE WITHIN, AND THEY ARE NOT HIDDEN. These dimensions are open and great and they must be experienced by means of honoring the possibility that the reality of the subtle world beyond the world, the source of the synchronicties and meditations, and prayer-answers of this world, encompasses a beauty that a human being cannot steer into directly, for the beauty would kill. So the real, open dimensions of the human mind, the human heart -- not merely the ego, but including the ego to some extent -- can come forth by being careful about graven images, and by instead learning how to experience the world through also the open-minded creative essential beyond-science concept of beauty. If you have ever read a fantastic fiction story, then forget it. Forget it fast, and deeply, learning only what you have to learn from it, to progress in your overall insight. For then you can re-read it, and re-enjoy. Don't carry the graven images even from that fiction story, for they would clutter your repeat-readings. And by analogy, when you plan your travels, plan also your non-travels: cultivate getting the most out of very similar circumstances for days in row, so that you can come -- perhaps a morning where you have been awake through the night -- to a bit of wilderness, a beach area, and experience the waves as if for a first time. Never mind what size beach -- you don't go carry the images of other images. Rather, the contrast is the beach versus non-beach areas. It will therefore be of great help if you don't build up a photo-archive of the places you have been a tourist to. For the greater the archive, the more complicated it will be to find ANYTHING that acts sufficiently as contrast to what is already in the archive to give you a real experience. Similarly, relative to God and his -- muses, as I think is the correct modern term for angels, though ancient Greek use of the word were, here and there, very different, -- relative, then, to these beings of higher beauty and higher powers and higher understanding than what human beings ever can, or should, fathom -- I feel it is right to say that each human being is ordained to have sudden joyous glimpses of what can be handled of this, every now and then. But a life that is to be lived religiously must be kept, somewhat, in leashes, so that this tendency to be religious in the sense of such ecstatic glimpses does not become a sick craving for what the human mind cannot truly appreciate without loosing its own integrity. So it makes sense to say: keep most days of the week free from too much religious exploration, but nurture a flame, perhaps each Sunday for some long, tough, self-critical, humble, muse-and- God-honoring minutes, -- and then let the flame quietly be there, with intermittent prayers, in the rest of the week. But let go of the too-strong religous impulse, even as one can ecstatically come to such experiences as may be, just about, a bit too much of a good thing. What, then, do you do if you have got a bit too much of such a good thing? What do you do if you have got a glimpse of a beauty that you thought could not possibly exist, and which makes everything else seem, all of a sudden, absolutely insignificant? In ancient India, they called something like this for 'kundalini overblow' (though the concept is slightly different). Many people have got this. They have had a quest that has not only been earnest, but too earnest -- in the sense of TOO successful. They tracked the stream of beauty till they came to the foundationhead, and drunk of it, and found that they could not, unlike Plato's cave story, return to the land of shadows (as it then appears to them). But what with causes and effects, they have to return, all the same. If they survive at all, they will then find themselves perhaps wrapped up in rage, a rage that what was so great just suddenly is not there. Or a frustration, or depression of sorts. Those who see this rage, frustration or depression for what it is -- a post-perital effect of having just had the birth of God-intoxication in them, so to speak, or the hang-over, in more brutal terms, of the drug of seeing a bit more of the muses or even of God than that which is safe and sane for the human mind and heart and brain and body -- may be able to cope somewhat better. They will keep up normal routines, waiting for fog of the hang-over to lift. After, say, a month, with luck, they can even get back into a fresh ecstasy experience of the religious kind. Each such experience is what truly deserves being called a 'birthday', for it is a birth of a kind that scientists as long as they merely deal with logic cannot have, that economists as long as they merely deal with money cannot have, and that has got nothing to do with counting of calendar years since this or that childhood event. WHAT WAYS ARE THERE FOR GARANTEEING EVERYONE A REAL PARTICIPATION IN HUMANITY? -- And what is the role of technology and gadgets in this otherwise highly spiritual quest? If there is one clearly spoken form of passion, or urge, amongst the young generations apparently everywhere, and apparently for as long as there has been people around, then I think it can be neatly summed up in these words: 'I, too, want to participate in humanity, and feel appreciated for what I do and what I am.' With the invention of any new technological gadget that is launched with the claim that it can give just such participation in humanity, and appreciation of what one is, and what one does, again and again one can see some degree of mass-hysteria arise. The gadget becomes the pet of the masses. In these days, that gadget may be not just something one can touch, but it may be a piece of software, or a homepage on the computer network. Still, if something promises participation for everyone, and appreciation for what one is and what one does, it may have a mesmerizing impact. Alas, nothing of gadgets so far produced in humanity has delievered on these promises. Everything so far produced has been a disappointment. Instead of garanteeing participation for everyone, with appreciation of just what one is, no matter what one does, each gadget has in fact come with a fine print, a set of conditions. And though a large percentage of the population in some areas may pretend they are not touched by these conditions, in fact, the conditions always influence all: towards conformity. And this influence towards conformity makes those -- many -- who do not fit with the mainstream condition -- feel even more estranged from the world than ever before. The gadget which promised salvation for everyone and to make everything easier for everyone makes it doubly hard for those who find that the gadget, after all, does not like them. I am sure some of those who read this at this moment would like to say to me: For God's sake, say which gadget you are thinking about! But my main point in this article doesn't concern any gadget or computer network site as of this day. It merely concerns the far more general question, which is: isn't it the case that no technological gadget EVER can deliever on the premise of allowing ALL to participate in humanity in a way that involves appreciation for what one is and what one does? Muse over this -- if I can point it out. And I muse over this, and here is what I come up with, now: any gadget introduced with such a promise as to allow everybody to participate in humanity in a way that is appreciated full, no matter who on is, no matter what one does, is likely to cause a set of very damaging feelings in a whole lot of people -- in fact, it is likely to cause a torrent of emotions in some to just tear as much as possible of mainstream society down. For consider the alternative world: one in which nobody is subjected to the promise of salvation by any gadget. In this more humane, more open world, there is an on-going conversation about what it is to be human and what types of mental contemplation and meaningful actions can elevate the feeling of being alive to something more ecstatic, more often. It is acknowledged that this is not always easy. And it is just in this context that a spiritual enquiry can begin in a way which I call 'neopopperian': it accepts that reason, logic, and checking against experience (the popperian approach, outlined also by K. Popper) is to have a role, in addition to fine-tuned, self-criticial awareness of intuition and synchronicities (the neo- or "new", "novel" approach, leading to neo-popperianism). This, then, can lead to nonfanatical understanding of religious core values. I claim it leads to a kind of coptic christianity expanded with reincarnation thoughts, but it takes many books to explain why this comes about logically, and not just as a leap of faith (though to some extent, some leaps of faith are always necessary -- however guided by personal intuition). I also claim that this religious pursuit, as here outlined, is essentially collective. The quest in humanity for enlightenment is essentially a quest BY humanity, calling on each and everyone, no matter who they are or what they are doing, to contribute in a way which is appropriate to just who one is, and relevant to just what one is normally doing. This enterprise of collectively working (first) to achieve enlightenment, and (successively, in steps which each may involve a time unit no less than what we can call a 'T.M.', as acronym -- one thousand millenia) refinements, stepwise, of this enlightenment ad infinitum, involves an appreciation of everyone, a participation of everyone in humanity, calling on the action of all to be modulated by a sense of what is right or righteous relative to this deeper quest. This deeper quest, then, is not designed around a gadget, not designed even from within humanity; it is rather humanity living up to its inner design, instead of running away from it and dance around the golden calf of a gadget falsely promising salvation. More than once, I have given suggestions vaguely along these lines to individuals over some time, and then the question has been, in earnest, been relayed back to me (by the same people): What you say makes sense, but if so many around are occupied by some kind of mainstream illusion (such as this gadget), then it seems that you are requiring of people that they must stand alone, and this is very tough indeed. They may go on to add that 'life is short' and that they want to 'be a part of the world, now'. I think the easy answer to this is also a rather tough one. No, life is not short. That is a statement of belief -- a wrong belief. Life is infinite, not short. You are already part of a world -- a world in which there is cause and effect of multiple kinds, a world in which souls and spirits exists in human bodies and a world in which these more subtle aspects do not die, but forever participate and always have to take responsibility for their actions, and face the pain of wrong decisions, as well as reaping the joys of right decisions. Life is long, and longer, and indeed -- at the soul-level -- never-ending and infinite. It is horrifically wrong to support illusions which keep people running away from essential questions, which make them go around in a semi-mesmerized state where they think -- due to some gadget or the like -- that they are participating and appreciated when in fact they are opting out and, relative to the essence beings, not appreciated very much. The running-away is creating a hellish pain, and it has got to be met, and it won't be nice to meet. One has got to come into essential reality, free from the propaganda of gadgets, seeing through the illusions which may make a hysteria in the mainstream, and then, only, is one truly participating in the wrold; and appreciated -- if not always by the world of human beings, then at least by the essence level beings -- and THAT is what matters. It may not be easy too see, this deeper fact; not easy to touch; not easy to measure. But then, life is not made to be exactly easy, though it can be joyous, at times, and more and more so -- with each incarnation. So there is a subtle atheism -- or denial of the essence -- in being one of the perhaps at times many who dance around the golden calfs of new gadgets which promise participation in humanity and appreciation for everyone. This denial may give a temporary relief, like a wrongly applied, but temporarily apparently effective drug, but the headaches that will come when the effects of the drug wear off are so severe as to not justify the small, convenient pleasure of the gadget. The person who reads this and says to herself, 'There might be something to this', may then want to make a small list: what type of gadgets or gadget-like illusions are at present the escapist notions of today's mainstream society, if any? And then for each such item on the list, begin to become aware of the negative aspects of them. Then take a stance, to push them enough away that a truer, more religiously authentic spirit in oneself can have a chance to grow. By analogy -- but you don't set yourself up as preacher -- some others may come along, in this deeper dance of more true participation and more true appreciation of what we are, than what technological gadgets can ever give. CHOPPING OFF THE INNER ORGAN OF EMPATHY DOES NOT AMOUNT TO ENLIGHTENMENT -- Rather, it amounts to a falling away of the possibility of enlightenment for that body Numerous people associate -- falsely, in my mind -- the notion of a siddharta or buddha-like enlightenment with the chopping off of the inner organ of empathy. Buddhists have contributed to this idiocy by speaking in high terms of the notion of indifference (rather than, for instance, speaking of the notion of freedom from being easily ruffled). Hermann Hesse did his bad contribution by prescribing seekers of enlightenment to a dose -- a big dose -- of plain hedonism, or pleasure for pleasure's sake. Or, as a poetically inclined friend of mine would have it, intensity for intensity's sake. But the real antithesis of enlightenment, but spoken of in terms which can inject some much-needed testoterone into failing men, are the works of Nietzsche. He very falsely associates the notion of enlightenment for human beings with going above the human condition, and among his incoherent ramblings, he manages to speak in terms of compassion but far more strongly in terms of laughing at weakness and denying all compassion with lower beings -- apes, as he calls those beings not at his level. His level, as historicians can tell, amounted to complete madness, a state of severe insanity and closure from all human beings. Men are not beautiful and the best of men honors women, not other men. But in the tradition created by Nietzsche, we find men cultivating not men, but cultivating men who lacks even the most elemental forms of empathy. For empathy, to them, is a womanly thing. It is part of Nietzsche's tradition to think, therefore, in terms of the higher human being as something other than womanly. This leads girls -- influenced perhaps indirectly by poets who incline to Nietzsche -- to look away from tender femininity and true girl bisexuality and rather make of themselves rough sports types with sun-fried leatherly skins who stick around with testoterone-pumped-up muscle men with little thoughts in their heads. And so, Nietzsche has a dual influence: it leads girls to avoid an essential esthetical education in themselves, avoid cultivating an essential bicuriosity and true sexual instinct for the holism and compassion as embodied by the young, slim, tender, longlimbed girl with massive shining hairs on her head, and rather, she -- with her testoterone-oriented men -- marries into a tradition of cultivating a robotic type of manliness. This robotic type withers away quickly, for it is more sub-human than super-human. Enlightenment, if that word is to be used at all (and I think it should), must mean an exalted condition of being in a constant capacity for atonement, at-one-ment with not just the universe but its God-source. The inner antenna of what is right to do is called "conscience". True strength is to have super-activation of the nerve of conscience -- and this goes beyond fear of death. It is a conscience which by empathy not just with fellow human beings but with the higher beings can engage in all sorts of goodness and all sorts of -- where it is called for, in alignment with the coherence with the depth of being -- also the military-like action of killing. But this cannot happen from an ideological foundation that aims to gain political scores out of such actions. It cannot happen from an inspiration which derives back to such sub-human or insane thinkers as Nietzsche. THE HOLOGRAPHIC NOTION -- A background comment on relationship of brain and such as consciousness in light of supermodel theory A human being, awake to the fact of the inherent sense of mystery about the very fact that we are sentient, sensible, aware, conscious and experiencing, naturally would like to reflect, from time to time, on this research question: -- how can something as convoluted and localised as the brain relate so intimately to something as lofty, sublime, etheral and expanded as consciousness (incl. the subconscious, conscience, souls, spirits, whatever)? Some decades ago, brain researcher Karl Pribram postulated a holographic theory. Bits and features of this are here extracted and reframed. First, though, let's get it said that brain is clearly intertwined with heart, gut, muscles, etc. This includes obviously all sensory activity and to an extreme extent the organs of sex, which ultimately is the whole body. Then, what is a hologram? (The word "holograph" relates to the word "hologram"). Physically, it is a perhaps not all that important photographic technique which involves shining highly consistent light at a certain angle on a plate (transparent or reflective), which evokes wave patterns which, when watched from a certain angle-area, give rise to a 3d-like tight appearance of a whole. The fruitful approach is to regard the holographic notion as a metaphor only, and concerning the research question it applies only to this extent: --consciousness is an appearance, a reflection of a tight whole. As finite numbers are suspended in infinity, by analogy, the brain is suspended in the consciousness process. In the context of supermodel theory, a perception process of a universal kind is pervasive, so there's no question of 'who's watching the appearance'; for watching is natural. The brain is a manifest active model (super-model), and relates to nonmanifest supermodels incl. consciousness, soul, spirit, etc. The nature of the relationship, then, is indicated by the holographic notion. ON THE SHEER, RAW SUPERPOWER OF MORAL FORESIGHT -- Advices for leaders of big companies and nations who, without good reason, sleep too well during the night Advice number 1. Any item -- company or nation inclusive -- is not less vulnerable but more vulnerable when they cease to have moral foresight, and so they hit the ground harder when they fall. Advice number 1 is therefore, let go of notions of moral superiority, and rather focus on what's good -- in the sense of goodness. The Soviet Union was tamed then splintered by the sequel Gorbatchev then Jeltsin. According to Gorbatchev himself (he was quoted about a year ago, if I remember correctly), the whole process began when that which was unthinkable to the most superior nation on Earth, namely a crippling nuclear disaster, did happen -- in 1986. 2. A company or nation's weakness is not contradicted by summing up its strength, but by realising how weak the weakest of the ten (say) legs it stands on are. The advice number 2 is therefore, bask in glory if you don't have any enterprises which involve lack of moral foresight, even if what you are leading is small, but don't get wrapped up into notions of 'greatness' in the sense of being 'big enough to bully', for no item is big enough to bully -- rather, one has to be very small to bully to have any chance (like an ant) to get away with it. Case in point is Murdoch's removal from the upper echelon of the world's most influential people due to one particular tabloid newspaper, despite owning Dow Jones and Wall Street Journal and a dozen other bigness items, including the notorious Fox News. 3. After a while, people aren't fooled. This statement works to contradict a more common view that some leaders appear to have, namely that people can be manipulated to believe and fight for all sorts of things. No, they cannot. After a while, wisdom prevents. So the third advice is, it is more convincing in the long run if you restrict your propagandizing to that which doesn't benefit you very much. A case in point is the gradual withering away of the extent to which Berlusconi is taken seriously the more laws he changes, since a portion of these laws -- which he propagandises for as something which will help Italy forward -- clearly seems to have been shaped with the sole purpose of helping the career of Mr Berlusconi, rather than people at large. 4. People likes better things which do not control very much. In the greed to control, one may loose focus for a while. A dominating item which tries to extent its dominance beyond its righteous borders, will get clipped off here and there until they learn. Advice number 4 is therefore, keep remembering that this world is not made so as to allow the existence of big control-freaks. In this completing advice, I will give two examples of items -- one company and one nation -- which have had its existence butted on so as to lead to, in one case, a kind of necessary taming of ambitions, while in the other, the process is right now going on but it looks like the view of the historicians, in the future, will be that they, too, had to have their ambitions tamed. The first example is the clipping of Microsoft's agenda to dominate the world of computing completely by the justice departement actions under the government of Mr Bill Clinton. This lead to a somewhat more humble, somewhat more -- edible, let's say -- company -- than that which appears to have been originally outlined in those years by its then-leader Mr Bill Gates. Today, though, I am sure Mr Clinton and Mr Gates easily can enjoy a (quick) lunch together. The second example, of course, is China, which, after Mr George W Bush led China into full WTO-membership and thus total freedom to trade for a while looked like the brightest new nation on the planet, in the eye of many investors. The intensity of the clipping away of voices of dissent to the "all-loved" communist party is so intense, so disgusting and so revolting that nobody today can invest anything in China without thinking thrice; this is all due to the vision of a total dominance by the leaders of this (otherwise) great nation. They are being tamed by inflation, by redicule, and by the bad fortune of the poorly thought-through Tepco nuclear industry in a neighbouring country, which has put a new type of fear into the region. They are likely to become tamed at the very best, or dissolved like the Soviet Union, but at present they are little but a Burma multiplied by a million in terms of size and by a thousand in terms of prosperity. The party plans of China seems, at the very best, to be not quite in touch with realities. The title refers to the sheer, raw superpower of moral foresight. The word 'superpower', at Earth, really have no concrete reference. No item along the lines here discussed -- any typical big company or nation -- is a superpower. The real superpower is that uncontrollable force of meaningful concidences, what Jung called "synchronicities", which have an enormously happy tendency to teach the lessons that have to be taught to those that need it. Moral foresight makes one DESERVE synchronicities -- which doesn't necessarily mean anything along the lines of the goals set by small companies to become big then disgustingly big, and which has for years, and for too long, been advocated by the likes of Wall Street Journal and the Let-All-Industries-Grow-Fat-It's-Spring attitude of the so-called "christian" (but in praxis valueless) conservative right in the U.S.A. As I see it, christians should not censor sex, but they should censor too-big industries: they should not mimick the likes of St Paul (so-called "Saint"), but rather, like president Abraham Lincoln, compile a resume of digestible quotes by Jesus himself, and throw the rest to the dustbin. Out of this small booklet, one will find much which is along the lines of Schumacher, the philosopher, and little which goes along the peculiar lack of willingness to impose ethical schemes on industries such as that Fox News like to champion. It is probably correct to say that the hard core of the conservative christian right in the U.S.A. really are atheists with a bluff, just as many dictators in the Middle East, while holding the book of Muhammad, really are atheists carrying out a big bluff. Then it gets much more easy to understand how intense they can be in their willingness to avoid thinking moral implications of what they are doing. WHY, DESPITE 'THE HOPE FOR PANTHEISM', PANTHEISM CAN SO EASILY BECOME EGOISM -- An attack on guruism I define 'guruism' to be that branch of egoism which is full of attachments to the idea of having spiritual power over followers. In my own seeing of the facts connected to several such cases of guruism, guruism is revolting to the extent it can be said to be almost the exact opposite of beauty. (I say 'almost', for in this world of so subtle an order, beauty is an encompassing concept.) The human mind is quick to make power evaluation hierarchies within itself. It is not 'landscape'- oriented unless the top-point of the hierarchy -- now speaking spiritual might of glory -- is assigned to somewhere else. In other words, the human being who tries to have the view of godhood as spread around everywhere, has a problem. The problem for spreading around godhood everywhere is that, when pantheism is regarded as a goal in itself rather than as a bridge to greater insight, some see (and agree) to such a worldview more than others. In particular, those who try to spread such a worldview will, due to their passion, naturally regard themselves as more prominent in having successfully implemented it in themselves than others. And in that way, this form of pantheism effectively reverses itself: it becomes a virtual attribution of godhood to the pantheist preacher. In other words, it becomes guruism. For when pantheism is not merely an encompassing view of the material existence as hinging upon the spiritual existence, -- with what there is of higher beings, higher than human beings, the muses in other words (in a cerain vocabulary), and God on top -- but rather taken to be the primary form of understanding, there is no clear God to fear and be humble towards. So those who have a foggy, vague view of God and his ruling beings, beyond and above human beings completely, but a clear view in favour of pantheism, can become, very easily, the worst egotists. This, then, is due to the natural capacity of the human mind to look for hierarchies, where no obvious hierarchies present themselves at first. THE HISTORY OF THE COMPUTER, AND THE HISTORY OF THE PRINCIPAL LIMITATIONS OF THE COMPUTER RELATIVE TO HUMAN INTELLIGENCE -- A brief comment on beginnings (Goedel, Turing) and on why the digital computer is limited, unable to touch fully on the natural (quantum) infiniteness of the human mind Once upon a time, there was natural language and logic and machinery but no digital machinery, in other words no computers. But there were attempts to imagine that instead of mind, we can simply develop and refine logic to be a kind of master equation, a formula to answer all -- secretly, the great fictional narratives about Sherlock Holmes inspired this attitude to deductions and logic. Leaping over many developments, before and after, we come then to Kurt Goedel, who in the years between WWI and WWII in the 20th century, showed that there are limitations in principle to what logic machinery -- whether imagined or implemented in the form of an electronic box -- can do. He showed this without changing the premises of the present-day logic (which to my mind need modifications, but still the general type of result that Goedel produced holds, in an important sense). Goedel imagined logic in a very wholesome way, described it more like a machine than his predecessors, and, though thinkers about such machines and even bits and pieces of experimentative machinery of such a kind had been seen for millenia earlier on, his work created a surprising avalanche of new thinking -- and led to depressions among those who had had false ambitions. Alan Turing wanted to disprove Goedel, and Turing went even further than Goedel, building on Goedel, in imagining and describing and even partaking in building an electronic computer. But he did not disprove Goedel. Goedel's most important result involves showing that certain types of logic machinery which involves statements such as 'for all values of the variable x, there is a value of the variable v, so that a particular relationship between x and v holds -- which we describe with such and such formal symbols' -- this is a very broad and abstract description indeed, and it fits indeed with what one might easily describe as a 'programming language' of sorts -- for all such logic machineries, there is an infinity of true but un-producable and un-provable statements of the above-mentioned sort. Roger Penrose, a professor at Oxford University (who with Stephen Hawking worked out certain implications of believing in what this writer does not believe in, namely singularities or 'breaks' in the field imagined by Albert Einstein to underlie matter and energy), has made a visualisation of this (his book The Emperor's New Mind is worth the while in showing someone who is more subtle about thinking about mind than Stephen Hawking, and contains Penrose's unique take on this). In Penrose's visualisation, he draws a kind of fractal island (hinting on infinity) of what is 'provable', and a fractal island outside of that, containing the former, of that which is 'true', and a yet larger fractal island, containing both former, of that which is 'sayable'. Turing thought that Goedel's worked showed that human beings can't do without intuition, and, for personal reasons, he regretted that point of view, and -- as Penrose describes, and I quite agree with him, Turing only succeeded in strengthening Goedel's original result the more he tried to disprove Goedel. Turing tried to make a computer program describe another computer program, so as to get around the lack of capacity a computer has for self-reference. Self-reference, or instant understanding of the whole which includes the understander, is intuitively acknowledged to be an essential ingredient in all real mindful understanding of anything at all by humans, in an essentially alive way. There have been many who have tried to argue that anything looking like real infinity about the human mind is a mere illusion, and that whatever Goedel found to apply on limits of computers, that must apply on human minds as well. Of course, these thinkers, the more they believe this self-narrowing thought, are nothing less than doing a senilification of themselves. They are making themselves more into machines than they have to be, and in so doing, fulfilling their own narrow premises. They will look into themselves only in a fragmented way, and as such get a certain invalid type of quasi-confirmation of their limiting view of human intelligence. However, they may be very clever computer programmers, and clever also about marketing, and one must watch out for the implicit belief about mind and machine that people put out on the market place -- for these have grave ethical consequences. In my own further studies (what I take to be further studies) of what Goedel and Turing worked on, I have come to regard the result that Goedel achieved as something, while essentially correct, being reached in unnecessarily complex ways. Before I spell this out here in a fairly simple way, let me however mention at this stage what some people have -- mistakenly, as I see it -- thought to be a way out of the dilemma that Turing was wrapped up into. For some people think that a new type of not-quite-digital computer, namely a 'quantum computer', is going to have less limitations than a digital one. It is the feature of all reality when it is not heavily concentrated into eletronic channels such as the case for the typical essential digital computer components such as transistors, capacitors, coils and switches, that this reality involves a kind of uncontrollable infinity of finely woven fluctuations, also called, sometimes, quantum fluctuations. These have a nature that is not merely that of chancelike coincidence, for they sometimes act orderly, and in some sense these fluctuations are so steadily waving around that they act as a kind of 'glue' for all the molecules of life. In other words, the foundation of reality is something extremely rich in movement and order, and deeper studies reveals many dimensions of organisation: in fact, as scientists such as Richard Feynman has pointed out, many years ago, these quantum phenomena are so peculiar that one can pretty much affirm that any person who says that she has understood these phenomena certainly cannot have understood them at all! Also, Feynman noted that the logic, the arithmetic, keeps getting 'unwanted infinities' that has to be constantly 'renormalised' in a way that in itself is not logical but is the only thing that so far tends to work in the tested situations. He also stated many other things which are not scientifically correct, to my mind, such that quantum theory has been tested on every level from the picoscopic to the gigascopic -- but in fact quantum theory only really lends itself to testing in the conventional form when the conditions for testing are extremely artificial, put bluntly. The real and actual movements of the subtle quantum fluctuations of the living human brain have not been truly investigated in the true living context: rather, bits and pieces in isolated cases have been studied, such as in Alain Aspect's experiments in the 1970s and 1980s, to show that quantum phenomena are well capable to hold situations which involve a full transcendence of the speed of light. It is this latter feature, combined with the marvels and mystique of the quantum fluctuations in their apparently spontaneously intelligent behaviour, that is hoped to be harnessed in what is called 'quantum computer'. But apart from some isolated experiments, it is clear that human manipulation capacity of these fluctuations is at a breaking-point. They are doing what they are doing but they don't necessarily -- like dolphins -- do what humans command them to do 'unless they want to'. And this brings me back to the work which I think has some relevance to the understanding of essential reality, which includes quantum phenomena and fluctuations in every sense, without being limited to this. For throughout 20th century, when quantum theory was built up, and with the little bit that has been added in the early 21st century to it, the type of logic machinery that has the principal problem that Goedel showed has been used many times over -- as if Goedel never did his work. And when one looks at the question of infinity as used in the number variables -- cfr the phrase used above, 'for any value of the variable x' and so on -- it is clear that it is taken for granted that the human mind is doing and good and clear and meaningful and wholesome and coherent thing when it visualises variables which can hold any finite number as deriven from an ocean of only finite numbers, but all finite numbers, and nothing but finite numbers. In other words, all through Godel, through Turing, and through quantum, we find 'the infinity of all finite numbers' to be an idea used without question. What Godel showed, and Turing contributed to showing, making the digital computer as a kind of side-product while showing it, is that most big type of logic machines can never 'understand themselves fully'. They can only produce a limited set of results, which is infinitely short of all the results that ought to be produced -- within the same framework. But my analysis of the essential quality of numbers involved shows me that the confusion begins as soon as we in thought begin to blend the notion of the finite and the infinite carelessly, such as when we say, 'here's a variable that drinks of the ocean of the infinity of all finite numbers'. Such a thought is sloppy, and it is shown by a very simple argument, which can be given several various forms, and which on its own acts to give a much purer result: A digital computer is only well thought about if we consistently think of it within a well-defined range of numbers. Further, -- this reality need not be founded on such well-defined ranges of finite numbers. Rather, the foundation may well be a kind of living infinity, within which finite structures -- such as computers -- arise as if by a 'friction' within the infinity. This led me to call the computer language, which eventually became named (for the most part) Lisa GJ2 FIC3, for "Uncomputer" -- and implement in it a command, also called 'uncomputer' -- which is where human attention is called on the essential structure of a program in order to go beyond it. (This is both part of the MYWEBOOK.TXT linked to at the front of yoga4d.org and also part of the first version of programming language Firth Lisa as still exists in the 2006 & 2007 version listed at yoga4d.org/download; the MYWEBOOK goes back still earlier, for the most part, and also has the famous rejected exam thesis of mine reproduced in full original text with a short Java program to discuss -- in early form -- the problem with the idea of the infinite collection of all finite numbers, delivered to the University of Oslo in 2003 and, I am proud to say, formally rejected there -- telling me to rethink the foundations for the scientific activities going on in the loyalist camps called 'universities' quite seriously, as I have done since -- however the essential point contained therein has not been doubted by those professors that looked into it, even at the very same institute, and nobody has later on come up with any other than agreement to the simple proof-work done there, when reproduced in some more elegant ways.) What I am driving it this: the quantum fluctuations in their very apparently uncontrollable yet orderly infinity are NOT merely another set of finite numbers permuted through some kind of as yet undechiphered logic machine born as if of nature in the quantum energy. Rather, the different type of numbers we must cultivate in our primary understanding as underlying even arithmetic must involve an irreducible infinity involving, as a capacity, to create within it finite-ness as a kind of appearance, or illusion, or friction -- depending on metaphor. I saying that the quantum fluctuations proper ARE such essence numbers of the infinite type, and that the 20th century brand of mathematics has no chance of touching on them except in superficial manifestations, and then only in artificial situations. And this also shows why the notion of 'quantum computer' is not really ringing very true. First of all, the digital computer -- not as visualised, a bit clumsily, by Turing, for he spoke carelessly about infinite aspects of it -- but as manifest, is always finite in every sense. Nothing about a digital computer in isolation and in abstraction is infinite. Then, the quantum field of fluctuations is a field of extremely well-organised mystery, with many dimensions and in which the faster-than-light aspects are, likely as not, masking themselves and not at all within any easy reach of any human device, except by after-calculation over the statistics of many experiments repeated thousands of times. If there is any equation that a digital computer can solve, that some kind of quantum field can solve faster, it doesn't mean that one has got a 'quantum computer'. It merely means that one more of the infinitely many mysterious properties of the sub-world or super-world of the quantum has been touch upon, but human beings are still as far as before from HARNESSING the quantum phenomena. These phenomena are not like radio waves (though they underlie them, too, of course -- just like everything else), which we can fine-tune and adjust. They are of a nature that simply has not opened to even the best of the most eager minds of human beings since they begun to unfold at the very completion of the 19th century for real. However, to take a step towards our real living interacting reality, full of delicious synchronicities and with human beings, some of whom are NEITHER belonging to the republican party of the U.S.A., NOR believing in the theology of darwinism (which the most fat-headed believers speak arrogantly about not as a theory, but simply Evolution, with capital E, as if that random-order-wedded mechanistic poorly thought scientific theory of Charles Darwin and his latter-day priests and elaborators, such as Richard Dawkins is the only way anyone in any universe can think about this very broad, lovely, wide, rich, real and deep concept of evolution) -- in this real reality, then, full of living coincidences, of impulses from a deeper order within us -- from conscience, from intuitions, from feelings, from ego, from what people say, and so on -- from muses, right? -- we include all possibilities, then we are calling on digital computers in such a rich context that this context AS A WHOLE is infinite. Right? As a whole, the context of the living organic world including digital computers within it is not in itself a digital machine, nor a logic machine, nor a finite machine. Rather, the fluctuations -- such as the fluctuations involved when you call on the Yoga6d dot org look engine on a keyword or a set of keywords -- involve something about your own sense of timing, your own gut in the moment to type this rather than that, and as a whole, we are speaking of infinities, then. This means that a digital computer made by a person who is sensitively aware of the importance of the human mind not making any much blunder about finiteness and infinities, is a digital computer which works more holistically. COMPUTERS HAVE REACHED THE ORDER OF THE PEAK OF THEIR MAXIMUM SPEED -- Personal computing, in whatever forms it takes in the future, must see its future as essetially different from its past We have heard it over and over again: every so and so many years, computational speed is multiplied so and so much. Now hear this: the speed is of an order -- a general level -- which contains within it the fulfilled maximum of human technology in this century. It is a very simple proposal, and it is simple to see that it is true. The universe has a subtlety which allows for infinite variation. But human beings are able to harness only a level of scale of it with any sophistication. That level has been pushed a lot, driven by commerce, put simply. By being clever about what has already been done, one can do a little more. Just as, by being clever about how quickly or how lightly one can ascend a certain mountain range, a human can do it a little bit quicker, or with a little less equipment, but the ORDER of the peak effort has been achieved. The same thing can be said, barring a change of rule to allow jet-engine implants in one's running shoes, for runners in the 100-meter field. They talk of nanotechnology, those economically oriented enthusiasts who are without much knowledge of science. But 'nano' -- the level above 'pico', among small things, just as 'tera' is the level above 'giga', among big things -- is a name for an area that in fact has been touched on throughout the 20th century subatomic physics. And the more the field has been touched on, whether by public decent scientists or by those with a scientific education who lurks in the military corridors of the secret billion-dollar budget buildings of all big nations to try and assemble some scifi idea they call a 'quantum computer' -- the more it has become vividly clear that this is a field that defies human manipulation. What Heisenberg dubbed the indeterminacy or uncertainty principle -- though a few philosophically interesting specks of light has come forth on the issue since the early 20th century by some empirical studies -- this principle is still making a mess of all human attempts to mess about with subatomic stuff for real. All things small enough fluctuate in ways transistors are not allowed to. So the computer is a machine, only as long as it is not made smaller than a certain size. When it is gets too small, it becomes a wave on an ocean of fluctuating near-real pilot waves that interlink statistically in ways which transcend all speed measurements, though not so as to allow point-to-point signal transmission. In short, reality is not a machine, -- and biological matter need not to be AT ALL mechanical, seen through the glasses of coherence dancing on the oceanic field of fluctuations in the electron level of our bodies and brains -- but computers, which must be a machine, need to have a clunky enough size to override these fluctuations. As metaphor, try to imagine that you cut up ice in smaller and smaller bits, because you are, at a certain vaguely cold temperature, building a kind of structure out of ice. But then imagine that, by applying microscopic or even nanoscopic knives on that ice, while watching in microscopes, the ice, when cut, simply refuses to stay icy. It melts. For ice is a structure which requires more than some bits of water, which coldly clings on each other in a crystalline format (the chemical truth is somewhat other, though). Software makers should stop growing too-big programs, programs made to work on computers which they imagine will come, but which only works on particularly expensive computers in the present, which by very many fans, and much program put in hardcore form to pump up the speed with a little bit turbo injection into what is otherwise the same-sized cyllinders as everyone else is using, because the future may be more like the present than what they have grown used to think. SCIENCE AS OPEN PROCESS, OPEN FOR ALL -- Science, in the 21st century, must be seen -- also in light of the foundational arguments within the institutions which have called themselves 'scientific', -- as open process of research, not as profession It is a perhaps charming feature of most institutions which call themselves 'scientific' -- those that usher papers to people to tell them that they have done some pieces in science, and/or give people jobs to make them do more science, that these institutions generally and typically declare such approaches to science as taken in The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl R Popper as foundational. For, just as a friend of K R Popper, Albert Einstein, suggested -- if you want to science, you better stay away from scientific institutions. A person (Popper used Freud as an example, but see my comments on Freud relative to sexuality elsewhere) who has papers from institutions claiming that this person can do science, may not do science after all: science is not a profession, but it is rather the quality of a certain process as encapsulated in a certain piece of work. This is relevant to world economy, as when -- after the food poisoning (as it is assumed that it was) in Germany and elsewhere, to some extent, which led to causalities, had people with their papers in order, ushering words in the name of science that turned out to be not just guesswork, but bad guesswork at that. As a result of this bad guesswork, Spain has lost a considerable source of income for a while -- its green exports. For news media tend to influence people's minds in ways which are not always easy to correct quickly, when mistakes about something potentially very serious are spread. If the people who produced the bad guesswork in the name of science had been people outside of the rather meaningless definition area called 'science as profession', their utterances would not have been regarded as scientific, and that would have been the correct view. A Norwegian thinker with a voice in academic philosophy throughout much of the 20th century, Arne Naess, didn't reach nearly as clear and intelligent views on science as Popper, in my own estimates now -- though, before I had studied Popper's works more seriously, I was particularly drawn to a distinction Naess argued strongly for (I have had numerous conversation with him in various contexts, a small portion of it led to some published magazine-interviews). He proposed that whereas science typically refers more to the social realm -- in other words, more to the profession -- the word "research" is such that anyone can contribute to research. I have seen works by Rupert Sheldrake which argue strongly in favour of the notion of contribution to research by anyone, in order to break with prevailing dogmas (Sheldrake disagrees much with darwinism and neodarwinism in his particular way). And Naess published a book, printed, if I remember correctly, by the University Press of the University of Oslo, where he not only summarises 'ten great accusations against science', but also speaks pretty much in favour of every one of these accusations. (I published, aided by my co-editor Henrik Tschudi, a work-through of all these ten points in a Norwegian magazine we were running -- in 1995, if I remember correctly.) However, Naess makes a scientific theory be defined by means of so many criterions that few things pass through that filter. Popper has a more meaning-oriented and less formalistically inclined view of the essential stuff that science is made of, and is clearly far more drastically oriented towards the Open Society. And then, as said, Popper's texts are regarded as far more influential and foundational than the texts of my late friend Naess. Science has empirics, openness in sharing -- not wanting to put patents on ideas, not trying to give people a submission to loyality or secrecy vows -- and honesty in clear-minded formulation, no more complex nor any more difficult than necessary, as well as good meaningful informal theory making and, where suitable, illustrations of some features of these theories by formal motors -- I would suggest the f3 formalism or computer language as infinitely more coherent than mathematics -- as the nuts and bolts of science. Those who produce a piece of research -- the example that Naess came with, often, was that anyone can do research on butterflies, and produce honest reports of value, real research -- or, as another example, when J. S. Bell used arithmetic and clear thinking over an argument that von Neumann had produced some decades earlier to try to work out why, as he wrote, Bohm had managed to do what von Neumann had proved impossible -- these people who do research, who do contribute to the open process of science, they are thriving in a field of shared open meaning. [[[Bell, by the way, showed that von Neumann had been too quick and included a hidden assumption which precluded faster-than-light connections. The analysis that Bell did over a certain thought experiment which went all the way back to Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen led to absolutely ground-breaking further results. His work with arithmetic led to a series of empirical studies decades later which once and for all showed that faster-than-light connections are an intrinsic feature of all quantum phenomena, though it is not at all easy to pinpoint. This feature is, obviously, what is called nonlocality, and when it is pervasive, it leads to what is called coherence. Coherence is a word that must not be defined in a smallish manner to satisfy the purposes of consultancy groups when they want to maximalise profits of some companies they work for -- it is rather in essence infinite and indefinable except in a very broad, vague, pantheistic and meditative way.]]] The inclination for people to contribute en masse to science does however involve the question of what quantity can do to quality. I asked several people who had just finished or recently finished a full-blown boring standard university education in physics whether they made sense of any paragraph pointed to at random in any of the most normal journals of their profession. Generally, hardly anything of hardly any paragraph made any sense to any one of them. In this view, science as profession can be sarcastically suggested to be the profession of people who do not understand science. More than once, I have had to spend time with highly educated people moving through the essentials of theory-building and confirmation and instances of disconfirmation, the role of the formal (if any), and the necessity of cautioning the overuse of the formal not only after the work by Goedel in the 20th century, but also from the evaluations I have done myself over the questions of whether the infinite set of all numbers is properly dealt with in what is broadly called 'mathematics'. And more than once, I have had to go through the essentials of what led to the concept of nonlocality, with people who has had many years doing physics, also teaching of physics, at very serious scientific institutions indeed, at least judging by the standards that those who have had science as profession have liked to employ. I have tried, in each such case, not to show my embarassment. But more and more, I have come to see it that it is an important point of view to make proudly entirely public, namely that in the evolved society with internet, with computer programming avaiable to all who bothers to read programming tutorials and type stuff in, line by line, and try and vary programs, -- indeed, in all societies where there is affluence and abundance enough to allow some leisure time for intellectual pursuits, then science is ONLY an open process and NOT AT ALL primarely defined by the papers or job offered by particular institutions. This is the way out of the fragmentation seen with the enormoush quantity of over-technical and over-specialised works seen, and which is a world of diminished meaning in science compared to the meaningfulness which pervaded the scientific jouranlists in the first half of the 20th century, where the global conversation over the big themes had a sense of being overviewable and many important parts of it -- indeed most -- having informal features of philosophical discussion. Science is primarely an open process of high quality, high integrity, a sharing of checkable propositions, and a sharing of data which might be relevant to such propositions, in a spirit of being open-minded about bias and about fakes and about bad guesses, also such that hide themselves in what Bohm called hidden assumptions, and also a sharing of what formal works -- notably, a limited-number formalism (rather than unlimited number size as in integrals, differentials or continuity theorems as, with not any much coherence, have pervaded all the branches of general relativity physics and of quantum theory and without which, the Big Bang theories and the black hole theories would be nought and nil and void, and that goes also for super-string theories, M theories and more such, produced in the name of a unification of physics -- by sloppy ideas and a lot of equation-crunching without thinking through foundations). The primary limited number formalism is Lisa GJ2 Fic3, for it is the only big working formalism made entirely on the foundation of the insights into the dangers of trying to formalise the limitless in the ways that have earlier been done in such excesses, and it is the simplest way of doing it, as well. And the coherent view of the whole universe and its essential levels are the proper area of physics, when kept at an informal level, and that is found, as I see it, only by means of the works which I have created in what I call super-model theory -- at any rate, it has not been fully ripe, not nearly so, anywhere else before this. But as several great thinkers in physics in the first half of the 20th century asserted, after WWII, we cannot anymore believe in Aristotle who argued that knowledge is a good for its own sake -- not when it comes to physics. Any further specific instrumental formalised bit of knowledge in physics can led to new risks in human self-destruction, beyond even atomic bombs and such by far. The call of ethics must not go out only after the WWII, with its Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The call must be kept vivid: no more deep energy physics. Cern and such should close their stations and see the risks involved -- one of the founders of early string theory, professor Holger Bech Nielsen at the Niels Bohr Institute, has a broad range of almost sci-fi-ish logical arguments showing implications of taking the view that time indeed IS the fourth dimension seriously (a view I think is wrong, but it is not uninteresting to see the implications of this view so eminently logically spelled out as Nielsen does it). It is enough to say that Nielsen regards it within the realm of physics not just to remove a small portion of the manifest universe, such as one planet, but indeed also all of it, more or less. I think that this is not correct, and the reason is that I have a completely different theory of the universe at the level that matters, namely the informal level, where no such thing is possible. But I do completely agree that physics of deep energy kind, and also nanotechnology works, are unethical in the extreme and should be cancelled from any state sponsoring entirely, if it were up to me. And whatever views Nielsen has on Cern -- I do not know whether or not he has any view on Cern in general, though I read with interest some of his views as spelled out in a newspaper about a recent experiment some time ago -- I know that there are quite a few of us who very easily share this view with me. Those who do not have a professionalistic motive or hidden agenda usually completely agrees that many forms of science ought to be closed down. If I remember correctly, the leader of Sun Microsystems at the time Sun Microsystems was, so to speak, in the Sun, and Java language was fresh and young and f3 didn't exist yet, and all such things, and they were not bought-slash-saved by Oracle db makers, Mr Bill Joy, pronounced that certain types of scientific activities and related technology types including nanotechnology could create an all-out destruction for all humanity. A related danger is that when the formerly enthusiastic persona of the now more power-oriented Steve Jobs figure, who tries to portray himself as a kind of messiah of computing, moves alongside other people whose motivation is just as shallow and unethical as that of himself, and works towards putting Personal Computers away in favour of centralised 1984 Orwellian control by their own central mainframes, 1960-style. Apple has become an aping, it is no longer innovating. And the "i" they put in front of their "iCloud" no longer signifies uniqueness or personal fun, but rather that the I or the ego of greed has overtaken. There is a bit more ethics to how Microsoft does some of its things than how Apple, Inc is trying to deliver its rotten apples to humanity. However, when it comes to more moderate forms of science, with less militaristic potentials, -- such as light inorganic chemistry, first-hand electronics, organic crop cultivation alternatives, and aspects of machine-making which touch also on inventions or innovations in robot technology, it is, when done with ethical awareness and not in excesses, also not in excesses relative to the publication intensity, science is an open process which clearly is a benediction to humanity. For the sake of the diversity of the activities and the need of pluralistic stimuli of the minds and hearts of people who also contribute to open science as a process (and see my points about how to do science in the moscowsites.org/fic3 section), science ought simply not to be a full-time profession. Nobody is artistic all the time in every sense, nobody is -- let's hope not, that would be terrible! -- scientific all the time in every sense -- nor is anyone formalistic, thank God, all the time -- rather, the need for diversity in daily professional duties is essential, just as much as the need for diversity in complementing duties with free time devoted to whatever one pleases to do, which is legal enough, and which appeals for one reason or another, or is just entertaining to be part of. So I suggest that it is part of a meaningful evolution of our thinking about society that we learn how to recognise whether a piece of work which professes itself to be worthy of being seen as a contribution to science do seem to live up to the criteria that I have given (as a summary of the best and most wise parts of the popperian teachings with some extensions leading to the neopopperian approach to science). THEME: TRUE SPIRITUALITY AND THE "PORN-AGAIN" CHRISTIAN: SPIRITUALITY IS ANTI-GREED-ISM, NOT ANTI-GAYISM -- The so-called 'christian conservatives' have no right to try to make a package out of a retarded view on sexuality mixed in with their over-belief in St Paul The christians are supposed to believe in Christ, not in anything lesser: and much in the christian bible is obviously lesser -- and it is made even more petty by overindulging in a hateful interpretation of the very human person, very much in err, compared to the Christ, who, in some of his "letters", speak of the importance of not engaging in "unnatural sex" or the like. This person, with his "letters", did not have first-hand knowledge of his master. But since there is so much easier to indulge in reading the very voluminous and at times poetic language of the human Paul, rather than sticking to the much more complicated practise of improvising prayers to Christ, and trying to listen -- also very complicated -- the petty, retarded "christian conservatives" try to trademark religion as something which is heavy-handedly anti-gay. Whereas, religion proper, is anti-greed. One can become fat in spirit with belief in small human prophets like St Paul, instead of being poor enough to say: I really don't know, I have to enquire. And those who enquire into the deep aspects of Christianity with all they have of heart and soul, will find that the true immortal notion penetrating those teachings involve the transcendence of smaller desires, going beyond smaller desires, smaller things, going beyond a mere flame of the senses, in order to come to the grand passion, beyond all greed -- which William James in his Varities of the Religious Experience (cfr. www.gutenberg.org) speak of as a flame of the soul. This flame of the soul burns away the attempt to reach God by means of identifying some particular ITEMS of desire. It is not that this or that desire is particularly wrong, it is not -- for instance -- that there is anything inherently wrong with money, again in contrast to what the human, erring human being St Paul wrote. But this part it appears that christian conservatives have figured out a bit better than the other part of his condemnations. It is rather to be corruptly set on earning money before anything else that is wrong, not because it is money but because one is corruptly set on it, and because it is put BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE, in other words, before the spiritual quest. A person who indulgates in food before anything else has a BIG challenge. So also with a person who indulges in sex before anything else, with whatever of the available genders. It is not the object in the sensory world which a person of nervous, strong, reckless, corrupting greed do crave that is to be blamed. Naturally, is the greed-as-dominance that a person must go beyond. But to go beyond this greed must happen in a spirit of gratitude to the beauty of this world. For the world, according to the Christian faith, is created, and -- as the founders of www.quietgarden.org pointed out in a BBC radio shortwave program some seasons ago, -- God made the world and saw that it was good, and it is through the natural world that one meets God, more than at the Tesco supermarket, however beneficial Tesco and other places are for those who need cheap food. The natural world includes also the beauty of young people, and both -- or all, to be more modern -- genders have a tendency to agree in a worldwide, trans-cultural sense that female beauty is immortal in itself, although all humans, also believers in scientology and in Maharishi and Harold Camping and Maya, are mortal. The beauty of the natural world, moreover, is so that it lifts the gaze from smaller pleasures and allows a spiritual dimension of gratefulness to suffuse a person. It is not the human body but the human soul that is immortal, and the soul is composed of something which one must go to a more subtle physics worldview than either that of Albert Einstein or that of Niels Bohr or any of the many proposed ornamentations, elaborations, modifications and embellishments of views of this essentially mechanistic kind that have been produced. (See my notes on neopopperian approach to science and to time.) It is not the higher, loftier aspects of the souls or spirits that has an issue with envy and jealousy relative to those whose obvious features of splendid radiant health, mobility, purity and symmetry and capacity to dance in suave ways, enlisting musical and artistic harmonies for all around them. Rather, it is the ego that tries to live without humility relative to the origin, without a view of time as infinite, as the time also to face up to the effects of one's actions as infinite -- I myself intuit that the approach each must learn to take is that of trusting reincarnation, not just the classical interpretation of a God in a western sense -- -- it is the ego, not the essence of the human being, that has an issue with jealousy and envy relative to beauty. But when you suffuse yourself with the humility that beauty, objective beauty, belongs first and foremost to that which is beyond matter, ie, to God and his higher beings or muses, as I think they should be called, then you will feel a participation in the wholeness of existence which is so that you in some sense drink of this fountain of beauty -- and, you know that you need to be reminded of it, to awake your senses to the flowers of this world each day anew. When you do this with humility not just to the essence, but to beauty as a flow and flux of meditation, you transcend something of your own ego, and that is the true 'poorness' of spirit that involves glimpses of the joys of enlightenment. In contrast, the approach of fat-headed marxism has been to say that all that could cause the ego to become envious, ought to be removed, -- meaning that marxism involves a materialism of a kind that has no true vision of an infinite time or future, no vision that can allow a meaningfulness to be spurred within one from the approach of the beauty of Nature, and of children, and of bikini models, to wash away smaller desires from your being, your soul. It is the fundamentalist sharia-like interpretation whether of hebrew texts, greek new testament christian texts, or other bibles such as the koran, the Bhagavad-Gita, the yoga sutras, and so forth, that matches up with marxism in attempt to blindfold the human beings it preaches to so as to close their eyes to young hair and skin which speaks of the sun and of a glowing health that could make each day happier for ALL, not just for the possessors of this beauty. Is it not easier to pretend that 'everyone is ugly and beauty is entirely subjective'? Only for one whose whole psyche is eaten up with going on drugs and living on food, not on truth. Where we find those who go beyond drugs, we must allow girls to indulge with girls -- we don't have to speak of gay marriage but when the Pope announces that after all his decades of praying that is the quintessence of what he thinks is real christianity, he is making a clown of himself, with all due respect for bits of his teachings -- his denial of gay marriage is, just as his sloppy willingness to work against overpopulation rather than making a physical conception event as holy as the health of born walking human beings -- and so on -- all this shows that a thousand years of steady thinking in one organisation may amount to sheer senility, rather than truth. Abandon the catholic church, is the suggestion I would make to all people in it. Abandon all churches, for they are but power-houses of poor stale thought, and rather unleash the power of beauty- and flower-loving naturist thinking, grounding oneself in prayer and in a love of coherent thinking, rather than the love of dusty books that do not stand up even to a half enquiry. The problem of conventional christianity is that it has no convincing interpretation of the past that would stand up to the desire for a coherent view of the existence of an appearance of billions of years gone by. Another problem for conventional christianity is that the bible seems to be full of hints that the heaven to come is just around the corner, so much so that it appears that it speaks with conviction that those alive at the time of its production were supposed to see it while still bodily alive. This leads to a number of partly fantastic interpretations that are then brushed under the carpet, leading a large number of people who call themselves 'atheists' but who are more properly called 'unconvinced' consider this religion belonging to a broad clownish category of 'irrationality'. Their concern is a real one. The answers that can be given must be as tentatitive as they must be, but they cannot speak of something which is poorly thought through -- as the Pope's so-called 'Catholic' interpretation is, and as the other types of teachings, whether of mormonism or the socalled 'Angelic' communities or any brand of conservative christianity will have it. One must start with a real concern for wholeness in thinking, and add to that the type of patience for deep enquiry which doesn't characterise those who think it is fun to call themselves 'darwinists' or 'evolutionary biologists' have. What the mechanical-oriented people have in common with traditional and also charismatic christians is lack of humility for the greatness of cosmos. They are politicizing a field which ought to be considered too important for being handled along the same line as what policy would lead to the least increase of food prices. Once we grant that the questions are real, and that any answers -- also such attempts to get a glimpse into the possible reality of the Infinite as one may, in a wise and meditative mood, grant that Anselm tried to convey (see my own notes on essence numbers for a more coherent bold approach to Infinity as real relative to numbers), -- any answers must be capable of being looked at by a coherent, rational mind that doesn't look back to quotes from a bible -- then it is also possible to say: it may be that it is important to accept, for one reason or another, that the totality of reality is not QUITE to be understood by the human mind. Even at the level of essential intent -- speaking now of the intent of that which is underlaying reality, and which I do think it is genuinely possible for every sensitive meditative undrugged person with a young clear brain and eager heart to explore with her own inner dynamics of questing for truth. And among the questions that are really tough to answer will be the ones that will be asked about fairness of it all, with the appearance of so much misery on Earth. Right? And also here, it may be possible to get insights -- see my notes on the more flexible view of reincarnation (as something that happens within the life-span of a human body) that I have argued for elsewhere (also front-page www.yoga4d.org). Put very briefly, it may be that a person in her most sensitive moods, where the feeler of pain -- the soul -- is most acutely present, is also experiencing the greatest goodness of reality; in other words that insensitivity is acutely necessary when material conditions are so as to expose a certain number to a very large stress. This insensitivity is naturally beginning when a person experiences little beauty, and beauty is associated not just with health, but also with splendid architecture, well-cared gardens and unpolluted well-tended beaches and so on. The key questions on fairness must however ultimately be submitted to an intuition that may report things which are tentative as far as logical explanations go -- for the mentioned reason that it is perhaps necessary that the human mind doesn't try the hubris- like thing it is to grasp the quintessence of existence. That would amount to absolute enlightenment and I maintain that the approach humanity must take is that of approaching, then deepening, relative enlightenment, and this collectively -- it is not a matter of finding an enlightened guru for there isn't any. In this view, the exploration of beauty must be said to be natural for all healthy young people and in this light, such as girl lesbianism ought to be entirely strongly approved by all who has any ambition whatsoever to anchor themselves in a coherently well-thought version of Christianity. All other forms of Christianity is an abomination of faith. A moderate but regular dose of porn is also something people who want to dampen greed but experience beauty as background for more intelligent and aspiring work must allow themselves without in any way feeling that they are doing any degrading. And those who are running the governments of this world ought therefore to ask themselves what on Earth they think they are doing when they, in the name of some kind of clownish dignity, try to censor the presence of healthy nudity of those who are most displayable in the sense of health, in favour of throwing an "XXX" label on it all and making only worn-out over-mature porn available to its population. It is a beauty starvation they are instigating, and every government and every police departement has a responsibility to think afresh over what true alternatives the population has to indulging in over-eating and overuse of drugs, and not do censorship merely because it is so easy or because this follows the dictums of the old priests they had at school. Grow up, let nudity of a healthy and also sexual kind free, and speak of matters of true ethics, not the quasi-ethics of such as these letters of the bullying St Paul are dominating the christian bible with. Christ was infinitely better than St Paul, was and is. No human can represent Christ. THEME: TECHNOLOGY TYPES WHY ANALOG STUFF -- SUCH AS CONVENTIONAL RADIOS -- IS AT AT LEAST MUCH "THE FUTURE" AS DIGITAL STUFF, SUCH AS DAB RADIOS The future -- let us affirm, and hope -- is for people, and for machines honoring people, helping people, doing nasty tasks such as spraying toxic paint on car components and cleansing up in polluted areas. The future is for people, and people engages machines, uses radios, computers, phones etc, in a way that benefits people, not merely the richest of the richest, sitting on top of their advertisement-or-whatever-it-is empires, mining data about people in order to hypnotise them into buying meaningless products. The future, then, let us hope, has a fairness about it. It is in this picture that the conventional, also called "analog" radio, has an obvious role. This type of radio can stand solar storms of a type that would wipe out chips as easy as dewdrops dampens away in hot weather. This type of radio, such as the AM with the medium and short waves, and the FM, can be made of simple, inexpensive components and work all over the world, tying the world together also through eminent broadcasters who, like DeutschlandFunk and BBC, engage shortwaves, medium waves and FM alike to keep up the debate between the nations, between the ethnic groups, between the religions, and which are promoting culture and reflection about both global and local themes. Some of the time, these radios cross national boundaries, despite the attempts by some nations to block the radio waves. One cannot count the number of Nobel Peace Price laurates on one hand who have had the analog radio as a primary source of strength during periods of political oppression. And when big electricity grids breaks down, perhaps due to some form of catastrophic weather, digital equipment, and their centrals stations and servers, even satellites, have a tendency to be swapped out of function -- but conventional radios, which has been with us throughout much of the 20th century, require but a little local battery electricity and can still roam the world and pick up the transmissions from afar which are still going on. It is as natural as for a country to have a capacity of self-defence that they also have classic analog radios and radio transmitters in a pervasive manner. It must be tempting for prime ministers and presidents who want the support of digital empire bosses to yield to the pressure of pushing aside all analog, privacy- friendly, safe, stable radio types, and go for such nonsense as DAB digital radios instead. It must be tempting to put chips which can only be programmed by the international empires into the homes of every person by means of the pressure of national law: a law that says, "we don't want analog radios anymore, they are forbidden." It is bad enough that TV has gone down this commerical drain in many countries. Now all responsible folks must stand up and protect the radios from going the same pathway. The forces of stupidity are upon us: now intelligence must awaken in the population, and embrace the solid analog devices, including the radios and declare their everlasting presence into the future, against the oppression of those who have never read "1984" by George Orwell except as light entertainment. Only analog radios have privacy-friendliness and obvious duration. The firmware chips in digital radios are brittle, controllable, unreliable -- and, without exception either over-commercialised or ruled over by totalitarian governments with an absoluteness that only the digital can give. STATEMENT OF INTUITION --Throwing the bibles away and redoing the concepts of "Father", "Holy Spirit" and "Son" Aristo Tacoma I myself am a believer in the human capacity to make grand and true philosophies. Not just grand--true, too. Because, this follows from my belief in human intuition. It is an intuition that can span cosmos. It can penetrate, go beyond. It can encompass the wholeness, the totality of existence. It may require a lot of fine-tuning and so on and so forth; and I also admit that most of what has been produced of metaphysics in the name of intuition is sheer gibberish. But I do believe in the capacity that we all have, as living beings--not machines, not computers, not merely clever, not merely political, not socialist or capitalist or whatever--but as beings with a deep sense of awareness of existence, and in that awareness, capacities to reach inward, turn within, and touch realities entirely beyond what the human body can sense by means of its sensory organs. In this sense, then, I do believe Kant was wrong, if he meant to push away metaphysics except the lonely metaphysics of the person who is unable to connect to the world except through sensory organs and their implanted conditions and categories. I believe Marx was wrong, in trying to convince people that everything that smacks of religion is but a drug, and has no truth content to it. Obviously, to go into religion, so as to find truth rather than merely to join a group to recite a worn-out scripture we need an intuition that can tell us whether there's a creator, or whether it's all a soup, or both a creator AND a soup, and if there's a soup, what kind of soup. So to me, religion has nothing whatsoever to do with literalism. Literalism is the attitude that says of Bhagavad-Gita, Dhammapada, Quoran, Torah or the Christian Bible that nothing was written by human hands, that it is all a dictate of absolute truth and if it has been edited then that editing was by means of absolute truth as well. (In this list, Dhammapada is the least assertative of its own origin, and the most pleasingly open to intuition.) Literalism isn't intuition: it's quite the opposite. The only thing that literalism has in common with religion is that both concern that which is beyond the sensory organs, and supposed at the root and core of all being, in essence. But religion, as I see it, is actual contact with reality. Literalism is an attempt to hypnotise oneself because the world of human beings seems so rediculous. In this hypnosis, by endless repetition of a certain text, one gets into a foggy state of mind in which there's something a little bit looking like happiness on occasion. But the mind is as fearful and incapable of relating to the fullness of reality as ever, despite prayers and speaking tongues and dancing with the dervishes and doing the voodoo drums. To get into intuition, as I see it, can only take place when the mind is doing many powerful generous actions to the world and yet not getting exhausted by it; it has an order to itself, and in this order a sense of abundance, and, as a luxury, almost uninvited, come intuitions, and one has a skill in separating illusions or guesses from intuitions coming from all the practical activities in daily life that do require (a more mundane) intuition. All this is the background for the following postulate (I offer it in the spirit, "is it not so?" -- and, "why no check for yourself, go around the corner and have a look for yourself".): God is not one but three. For purposes of simplicity, I will use words typically used in some religion or other, but intending to refer to perception--not to faith as a hypnosis. The three are organised so that there's a deepest level. It's the essence of the essence of God. It is the being whose dream-thought is everything that is, in addition to this being. It is a personal being and can meaningfully be called male--and so also for the other two levels to God. To meet this level of God in one's own mind is no more easy than for a human body to visit the core of a star without any protection. It is an instant burn. At the second level, we proceed from--borrowing freely from this or that bible--from the Father to the Holy Spirit. There's some degree of innocence in the Holy Spirit as regards creation--for the Holy Spirit is created by the Father. And as such, is inside creation, and not therefore at all times possessing total knowledge of everything. This is a most interesting development for God, for in order to experience something, an experience must have a component of surprise, and surprise can only come to someone who doesn't know abosolutely everything in all details. The Holy Spirit looks like the Father, is a personal God, held by the Father. Still sticking to this vocabulary, we proceed to the third level, the manifest level, the Son. Also looking like the Holy Spirit and the Father, the Son has even less knowledge about the totality of existence, and, as such, can experience even more of its dynamic unfoldment with genuine surprise and all the feelings associated with that. As is in the Greek (the ancient Greek) scenario, God-- at all three levels--are in love with girls. The supreme beings we can call, of course, the Muses. These have contact with God at all three levels. (Even they must apply care when visiting the essence of the essence level, of course.) This, as I see it, is the Olympic pleroma, creating the levels that eventually become the manifest universe with us chickens in it. *** ********************** Copyright -- redistribution You are granted the right to redistribute any such essay from yoga6d.org/economy.htm without asking on the condition that the context is respectful and that no deletion or addition or change of text takes place, and that this notice is included. *** ***** * * * * * COMPLETION OF THE TENTH ARCHIVE PAGE of yoga6d.org/economy.htm