The Great Sleep

The political leaders of North America from rich oil producing regions sleep away on design and implementation of environment, health, and science and technology programs. Look at the cut backs and lack of interest in adequately funding and developing the new fusion technologies. Oil interests rule so completely that speculators, including the oil people themselves, know which commodities to speculate with using US dollars that don't know where else to go. We are witnessing another round of speculation as Bush seeks to grab as much as he can before leaving office. This means that the rest of the world will have to assume a bigger role. Watch British Petroleum try to grab Iraq's oil as the country is trying to stand on its feet. Watch Exxon grab its share and enhance its billions of profits that could be used for non-polluting energy sources and healthier environments for all creatures. Why should beef and petroleum oil win every time when they are so uncool.

China is obviously well placed to become the world's largest economy and its currency may ultimately join the US dollar in a basket of preferred currencies of use as people scramble for security in storing economic value. China will join countries that invest overseas and its influence will spread now more rapidly as America hangs leaderless.

Russia is once again in an economic leadership opportunity and should use its oil resources wisely. America's tactic would be to provoke Russia into another arms race which would mean a squandering of Russia's opportunity to gain the major world leadership spot. Putin is probably the only leading politician worldwide, who can claim to be on the right track despite his stance of refusing to share power, probably wise in view of Russia's history of internal conflict and inability to self govern democratically. Its not that the Russian people are not democratic. They are probably too democratic. Its that they don't now how to organize a parliament that balances forward and backward forces adequately.

Wise use of the revenues of Russian oil, unlike the crazy use by Britain, USA, and Canada of their oil revenues, will give Russia the longed for opportunity to join the big six as world economic powers. What will determine the outcome is whether Putin can engineer or encourage a society of level headed individuals who can see through the American corporate game plans for acquiring dominance in world energy.

Its a question of oil and guns. Will the world buy more guns? Will the world continue in its addiction to oil as its energy source. There are alternatives, but the leaders of the world are not pointing in those directions at all. Just watch and listen to what they say and decide for yourself.

Removing Fences to Give Wild Animals A Chance

We don't usually think about fences as being a sea change in the fight for survival of wild animals. Often it is the barriers that humans use to protect themselves and their domesticated livestock whether animal or foul, which makes older ways of life impossible, especially living with animals that need to roam. I am not a vegetarian, but I do think that if we were too become plant eaters of quality plants rather than genetic rubbish, we could add to the richness and variety of our natural environments, those that are close to home.

More specifically, I remember as a child that in the town where I grew up there were few fences and lots of places for kids to roam and pick fruit of the neighbourhood, but going back there as an adult there were loads of fences and very little in the way of fruit. What have we done to our neighbourhood environments? Have we made them more like fortresses than homes. Do our kids walk out the back door into nature or are they penned up like zoo creatures? Have our cities become human zoos?

I think they have!

LED Lightbulbs with an Almost Infinite Life

They are here in Canada in Walmart stores and you can buy them for about $13 a bulb that runs cold and lasts almost for ever (100,000 hours is an understatement). It is an amazing technological story that has the promise that it can save the earth if we all act now and replace our existing light bulbs with LEDs as they come on stream. The fluorescent replacements to incadescent are a big improvement, but the LEDs are the 'major' leap forward.

The fun thing about LEDs is that they can be programmed with artificial intelligence to assume almost any colour of light imaginable and you don't risk the burning your house down. For pennies a year, you can light your home. Can you imagine how this technology will transform our world!

Those interested in promoting LEDs and LED technology can subscribe to a free magazine.

The Grand Assise

I was once a junior civil servant given the task of doing whatever I was told. It seems strange now to look back on it, but the issue of world debt has been an issue with me for much of my career in government and private industry.

Significantly, I remember an assignment that has a familiar ring about it in the age of American debt. My task was to help the former Prime Minister of Canada, the Honourable Lester B Pearson with a project that he had undertaken to reduce world debt.

My task was to send messages to world leaders inviting them to what Lester referred to as 'The Grand Assise.' This was to be a meeting at which the world experts and leaders on debt was discuss ways to solve the global debt issue. The Pearson Commission and its efforts as it became known was Canada's way of assisting in the process of trying to address the issue of debt.

I remember in particular, that in this period of cold war, the Russians were unwilling to sit at the table.

The pledges made by industrially advanced countries to channel assistance to developing countries has had mixed success. Africa remained debt ridden because industrial nations would not trade with Africa fairly fearful of trade unions and lass of jobs. What we have now is an Africa that is struggling despite the discovery of mineral riches. The industrial nations have not understood the nature of African communities and have in competition between themselves caused more problems for Africa.

While it was possible for many new medicines to be developed for African people, this has not been done because the shareholders of the big pharmaceutical companies do not want lower profit rates even though this would help the dying communities of Africa. Such lack of foresight as to the role of the medicine and medical industries has made Africa the carrier of debt unable to meet its role in a balanced way within the world economy. The Pearson vision of an Africa able to stand positively on its own feet was not realized. Africa has been plundered for profits and its environments and peoples depleted. It is time that the world did something to really end poverty in Africa and it must come though health and educational programs that address the real issues of African politics and way of life. Help!

Debt as a Cause of Wars

Over the past year, I have been engaged in taking the first steps towards making a film of the Wuh Lax stories and "The Cosmic Lantern." This is an enormous challenge and theoretically beyond the budget of the most determined independent film producers.

I suppose the mistake of a film producer would be to underestimate the vision that The Cosmic Lantern contains. This is not just a story but a series of stories with enormous potential. It hits at the heart of western civilization with its emphasis on performance above all else. It challenges the audience with the economics of debt which provide an explanation of why otherwise peaceful communities are drawn into war.

Examine what is happening in United States right now and you will see the destruction of a society from within because of debt. Debt management is the forgotten science that will become our futures and will protect us as we deal with a global environmental crisis. Make no mistake about it, debt is potentially the greatest source of misery historically, and it the bane of our modern society. Debt creation brought about the first and second great wars. It brought about the invasion of Britain in Roman times.

Debt creation and the slave system attached to debt is what will destroy the fragile but false harmony of the post war period. When one examines the causes of the second world war, one sees at the heart of it the demands by France for a repayment of war debts. In the case of the first world war, the countries of Britain and Germany got themselves into so much debt building huge ships to destroy each other in gun boat diplomacy that they lost the delicate balance of peace in a mad rush to eliminate national debts by means of conquest. Yes! Debt is the remarkable destructive engine of war and misery.

So! What does this have to do with "The Cosmic Lantern" and a story that focuses on the period of 50 AD. Well, the story about Wuh and his family is a story about how those driven by debt destroy a happy balanced community forever. It is a story of triumph over a horrible period of genocide and enslavement that has remained hidden outside of history for two thousand years. In the filming thus of "The Cosmic Lantern," there is a desire to make people aware of the forces in the modern world and the potential negative political consequences of debt, which are to destroy all that is valuable and lovable in society.

Debt kills. Debt is a monster process that leads to war, to conquest, to greed, and to ultimate destruction of beauty and peace. Debt is the Anti-Christ, the Armageddon, that threatens to destroy our civilization. If we want to leave in freedom, we must educate our children about the consequences of debt and what it does to societies destroying them from within and destroying everything around them that is wholesome and positive. Being lazy in our attitude about debt will only lead to our own destruction and that of the future of our children and of the earth itself.

Explaining the Wu of Wooh

As readers are undoubtedly aware, the author of this blog, AW Lake, is also the author of the very successful book "Wuh Lax and the Cosmic Lantern." The leading character of the book, which is the first of a series of books featuring a large cast of characters, is Wuh Lax, who is a mythological character. I say mythological, but the irony of it is that Wuh is an archetypal hero with a very great presence. As my stories unfold, the devoted readers of the series will become aware that Wuh, the mythological individual, really does exist on an ethereal plane. This is why the books are aimed at the ethereally challenged. But, I should explained a bit about what is meant by the ethereally challenged?

Most of us are ethereally challenged. Wu-wu is a pre-Taoist state in which there is absolutely nothing. Out of the state of wu-wu comes the Tao. The Cosmic Lantern is a story about the new physics. The ethereally challenged include all those reading in the area of the new physics. Scientists are on the threshold of discovering that the cosmic concept of the big bang has to be re-written through revelation coming from both science and inspiration. In reality the concept of the big bang is as much a mythology of science as it is of religion. In the beginning, God did not create our universe. There is very good reason.

The state of wu, of complete nothingness, is a myth, Similarly while Christian creationism spells the mythology of God creating the universe, the Taoists spell out their mythology which results in Ying and Yang. Both are inspired by man's quest to unveil the mysteries of the universe. I say this knowing that my father was a Christian minister, a missionary, and a devout believer in a personal relationship with Christ. His reality was based on an inner transformation that he very successfully documented in a series of daily writings and readings. He insisted that one could come to know God through inner transformation arising from what one saw and read.

It was the ethereal departure of my father, that brought me to create Wuh and to explore those regions of our existence that are rarely explored because our mythologies about truth get in the way. My father was also a devout student of human nature and knew the secret of dancing with God. This is what wu is all about, dancing with the truth. Our fate is that we will never know the truth of what has happened or what is going to happen. That does not stop us from creating our mythology of what the truth is all about and then believing our mythology, and indeed experiencing it as our reality.

God exists, but God exists in the wu, and is the all pervading essense of being, fullness or emptiness depending on whether your glass is half full or half empty. Wu is all about attitude, about dancing with God, about dancing with the unknowable truth. From where do I get my knowledge?

For many years at Cambridge University in England, I studied the nature of invention and knowledge, how it arose and what happened with it. My studies were focused on knowledge creation as it applied to the science of economics, but that did not stop me from understanding the bigger picture. While a student at Cambridge in the early 1970s , some of my fellow students had a little red book that they carried around with them all the time. They constantly spoke to me about Mao and his words, how important they made them feel. They had purpose and direction. To them Chairman Mao spoke the truth and they were not going to listen to anything that I said concerning that truth. Instead my response was to give them a book about the Tao, which I said contained more truth than Mao's little red book. Gary Zukav in his book, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, wrote that science and religion are only dances, and that those involved in these enterprises might claim to be seeking the truth but their reality is that they as dancers and love to dance.

I invented Wuh, but wu is a magician and a worker of miracles. My task was to let him perform those miracles in the minds of my readers. Aloha and Uweeeee!

America's Economic Prospects for the Longer Term

No one wants to hear the bad news. Everyone puts their head in the sands and waits for the stampede to pass. This time it won't be like that. The process of adjustment for America will be slow and arduous as it has been for countries in the Far East. We once called these countries the economic tigers of Asia. Suddenly, they became devalued and we saw goods appearing on our shelves some 25 to 50 percent lower in cost than before. America went crazy with imports and the goods from Asia flowed in like a dam burst of the ice age. Now, its America's turn. Few would recall that the Asian crisis was a result of firms in Asia locking on to the dollar and borrowing until the cows came home.

What they did not expect then was a sudden uplift in the US dollar that would raise the cost of their borrowing repayment stream. Does anyone think that the low interest charges of the present approach to the credit crisis in America will not lead to further misery down the road. Oh please think again because you have not thought it through. Ask yourself what will happen when the interest rates go up and what will happen when the US dollar appreciates. Then act wisely and cautiously in this mad world of floating exchange rates. Act so that you will not be burned yet again by a failed strategy.

America's Failed Economic and Political Policies

Economic policies of the United States over the years of the Bush administration threaten to push the world economy into severe recession and damage prospects for solution to many of the world's energy problems. Why be optimistic about the prospects for solving the world environmental crises when the United States, which should be leading the world forward, has made such a wonderous mess of things? Most disasterous of all is the way the unfair distribution of incomes has hit intelligent and willing people who are in need of resources to participate more effectively in the modern economic age.

There was a time when the Euro was weaker than the US dollar. The fact that the exchange value of the Euro has reached 1.5 should set off alarm bells that America's economic policies come from the scrap heap of economic thought. The current policies threaten stability in the world economy with a return to the beggar thy neighbour approach to macro economics of the depression era. What we are really talking about is the prospect that American economic policies are pushing the world economy towards a major depression. This is not depression by default, but an engineered depression by design. If one examines the record of the Bush administration with its focus on oil economics and politics that have thrown many progressive countries of the Middle East into an economic wasteland, one has to wonder whether the President and his men read at all. Its no excuse that other economic forces overtook the administrations policies. Its more accurate to say that the policies were deeply flawed from the get go. Lets be honest. The economic record of the past half decade has not been anything like it could have been. Bush's people have failed on science, religion, energy policy, Middle-East politics, housing, disaster recovery, interest rates and genuine home ownership instead of speculative rental ownership, inflation, genetic engineering, the search for alternative energy sources. How can anyone support such a failure of application of policy?

What is American doing now other than implementing beggar thy neighbour economics at the expense of Europe? Have these people lost their senses? Or, have they lost their sense of direction? Is policy now just a mishmash of old ideas from failed individuals, but rich ones working for their own selfish interests. Where are the genuine American statesmen?

Breathing, Longer Life and Better Stomach and Small Intestine Health

As the body ages many of the underlying processes of good health that we taken for granted weaken and even fail. It is important to understand that you can take a proactive stance to slow down your own aging process. Of greatest importance is your ability to breath deeply. Without strong breathing, you weaken for first line of defense against depleted health. Whenever you can, no matter what age, practice breathing. Without oxygen in your lungs to feed your heart, you will find that the body cannot do all the other things it needs to do. Oxygen to the heart keeps you alive, so breath to get the air deeply into your lungs below your diaphragm and into your back area.

It is extremely important to keep your stomach in good health. You need to be under constant vigilance to know whether you have any food allergies. Sometimes you stomach may have ulcers, which are often the result of the helicobacter pylori bacterium. Zinc carnosine is a supplement that is used in Canada and USA to help bring about a balance of the mucosal lining cells of the stomach and small intestine. It is used in Japan, where treatment of stomach ulcers by stronger doses of zinc and carnosine has been very successful. Cranberry juice and licorice are also ways to fight deterioration of the stomach.

Who or What is God? Life and Laws!

You may be asked, "Do you believe in God?"

If someone asks you the question its because they are not sure themselves because if they were sure then the question would be irrelevant, like asking someone if they believed in wind. The existence of wind would be obvious as would the existence of God.

The fact that many people ask the question whether God exists may mean that they are unsure whether they themselves exist.

Is God Dead?

The "God is Dead" discussion in the 1970s was about whether a particular definition of God was acceptable to people because many could not see evidence of God according to that definition. The fear was that the established church would lose adherents if people attending church could not experience a meaningful God, or God did not exist for them.

If we examine the question of whether God exists from what we now know of the scientific process, the religious process, the spiritual process, and the mythological process, we have to say that opinions differ greatly. The fact that people do frequently ask the question and people are nervous about how others will interpret their response means that we have a long way to go as a community of minds.

Did God Create Life?

Everyone believes that life exists and that the basis of their life is really something that should be preserved at all costs. There is within normal healthy people the desire to live and an empathy for life in general. This is to be expected because it is pretty obvious. Even though almost all people believe in life, there are many who would rather skip the notion that life in general is a good thing. Such people take a very narrow view of life and act as though only their selection of life matters.

Almost everyone knows that laws exist. Even though laws exist many people behave as if they don't. Observing other people's behaviour may not be a good way to judge whether they believe in something. Many people will behave as though all the laws do not exist. They will be selective about which laws they will obey because they know that for those laws, there is little escape from punishment if the laws are broken. So the question is whether God is a Law or, a Set of Laws that should not be broken?

Are there Laws About Life that We Cannot Break?

Many people behave as if God is nothing to do with Laws or a Set of Laws. Does this matter?
What we do know is that there exists a set of laws that we cannot break. These are physical laws. Is God the set of physical laws that we cannot break?

Another set of laws has to do with living entities, such as human beings and the laws of life that seem to govern our planet. We as a world community are pretty ignorant, even stupid, when it comes to understanding the laws of life that govern our planet. It is pretty obvious that we have failed miserably in understanding life laws. Most life laws are invisible to us. Could it be that we don't see God even though God may exist and may have some influence on the laws governing life. Are we that stupid?

Probably yes!

Pathways to Revelation or Invention

Revelation or invention are processes whereby a sentient being acquires useful information that is extremely difficult to obtain in normal circumstances. The process is so rare that a community regards such events with extreme respect whether it occurs within religious or scientific community. We often speak of revelation in the context of prophets and prophesy when they state that they have received a message or understood a message from an esoteric or exoteric source. Invention we think of as a secular event, but the process of revelation and invention are almost one in the same.

In the case of invention, the inventor or recipient of the revelation is regarded as the active participant in the revelation process, whereas in the case of revelation, the recipient is a channel through which an exoteric or esoteric entity is the active participant. Revelation is not confined to the religious or spiritually focused community, but is part and parcel of scientific discovery and invention. One might use the term discovery instead of revelation in cases where the person from or to whom a revelation occurs accepts a minor role.

The reality is that it does not require a prophet for the process of revelation to occur. Its not so much the participants in revelation that matters as much as the process and meaning of the revelation to the wider community. Its also quite natural when an amazing revelation occurs to regard this as a supernatural event whether it is supernatural or not.

In any event, the person receiving the revelation, or making a deiscovery, becomes a hero to the community. The fact that a reward is obtained as a result of the revelation process means that many might be tempted to claim a revelation even though the process has not occured.

In ancient communities, the stability of the community often depended on revelations being monopolized by a group of individuals or a single individual who claimed to be responsible for the process of revelation. With the printing press and the age of discovery, the fact that many more people and people outside the monopoly group to which revelations were accepted to occur could claim inventions and revelations. These were feared by the status quo which thought that new ideas or discoveries would destabilize the existing structure of authorities, especially if they ranked highly within these structures.

The monopolization of revelation by a specific group of individuals within a community gave them enormous power to keep authority structures as they were and rather than sharing revelations they would guard them and keep them for themselves. In a very real sense, revelations being new knowledge were power. Inventions were power. Prophesy was power. Those in authority grabbed power by monopolizing the process of revelation.

We now know that revelation is a process that can occur to the least individual in a community, and does not necessarily require an enormous education. Communities that realize this progress far more rapidly in knowledge creation and dissemination thatn communities that don't. In turn, communities that innovate from invention and revelation progress far more rapidly in power than those which don't. Knowledge and invention when applied to innovation grant enormous potential and capacity to communities.

By opening up pathways for revelation, the internet and information spreading technologies can produce genuine democratization of power within communities and this can lead to more even distributions of wealth and authority by means of pluralist politics. The greater sharing of authority is a good thing because it means everyone in the community and the community as a whole can progress and make better decisions. With pluralism everyone potentially is a winner. In game theory it has been shown that cooperating is a much better strategy for a community than outright competition. A mix of competition with cooperation is the way for communities to build pathways to rapid revelation, invention and progress through innovation or creative destruction that moves a community forward and assists in adaptations to complex world environments necessary for the survival of life and living entities.

It follows that free education and liberal education is a very powerful instrument in development. It has been shown that countries that provide low cost education right up to university entrance and beyond progress more rapidly that communities that allow groups to monoplize education processes. This is why people in some countries like the UK and USA are failing economically as their education systerms are inadequate and high cost to the vast majority. It is why people from other countries with better education systems and more liberal attitudes to education will overtake them very rapidly in the new internet age.

Daydreaming Our Way to Better Health

One often dreams while asleep. Dreams very frequently occur just before one wakes up and sunlight is gently caressing the windowsill. We value our dreams because they transport us away from fully integrated awareness.

In dreams, we are only partially integrated. This lack of integration gives dreams a freedom that we do not have in a fully awake state. Some people, however, are lucky enough to be able to create awareness states that are only partially integrated simply by closing their eyes.

I am able to do this. Even better it is possible to lose integrated awareness even when I have my eyes wide upon. We say that people dream walk. Well, some people dream walk through life. They have their eyes wide open. You talk to them and they appear to hear everything you say, but you know that they perpetually live in a dream world in which their brains are not fully integrated. I often ask myself whether this is also the case with myself, and then I am disappointed.

Unfortunately, there are people that are only unintegrated infrequently. Such people are sober. They are rarely intoxicated and they tend to be very serious about everything they say. Sometimes they are so serious and intent that people forget they are serious and when they say or write something that seems strange, the reaction is that of thinking that what was written was written in gest or in a period of insincerity. Nothing could be further from the truth.

People such as myself may write simple, strange, and frequently stupid things with all sincerity. We are actually surprised when we find that people ignore us or think that we are light headed. I have struggled to understand why my brain is like it is and have come to realize that it is because of imperfect memory and logic. In reality, the world frequently throws up information that is contradictory. It tells us two things at once, such as the fact that Australia is below us. We know that this is not the case. Australia is at a similar sea level to what we are. If I ever said that China was beneath me, it is because I was being entirely logical even though my logic to another person does not make any sense whatsoever.

Everyone knows that the English language is a difficult language and much about it is not logical. It follows very definite rules, but these rules are frequently broken and it is difficult to know when they are broken. I understand that this result arose from the 1600 hundreds when the language was being written down and all the nuanaces explored in depth by an increasingly sophisticated, yet divided, community, much of the time drinking gin.

That brings me to another point, which is the sense of humour one has when one is really day dreaming. I sometimes am sitting in a comfortable chair doing nothing in particular but daydreaming. All of a sudden I burst out into laughter. Other people, if they overhear me, think that this is extremely rude. They immediately assume that I am laughing at them, which is rarely true. My mind finds most things amusing and it is only while day dreaming that I lose my inhibitions enough to burst out laughing at the slightest thought. This is why, I feel so good after a good day dream. It's also why I feel so good after a real dream. My dreams are most often really funny because the world is so funny. The world is entirely contradictory in so many ways that it is enough to make one laugh all the time. Good thing I have so much will power and have such a serious nature.

What Can I do to Release Less CO2?

What Can I do?
To release less CO2!

What can I say?
To make global warming go away!

Stop farting.
Eat less.
Don't circle around, but go straight to the point.
Keep calmer.
Sleep longer.
Die or slow down my breathing.
Plant seeds of plants and trees.
Recycle paper or store it away permanently.
Do less.
Travel less.
Don't use chemicals that produce CO2 directly or indirectly.
Stop sheep from farting.
Belch less often and under water.
Grow more hair and keep it permanently longer.
Don't shave.
Buy more books and book shelves and give them to the nation as a permanent endowment.
Yawn less often.
Replace incandescent bulbs with florescent bulbs.
Replace florescent bulbs with LED bulbs.
Buy more efficient batteries.
Replace car tyres.
Pray for rain.
Block up volcanoes.
Put out fires.
Store wood, coal, petrol, oil, and all chemicals that might release CO2.
Create shady areas and grow moss.
Create a canopy garden, plants and flowers, bushes, short trees, bigger trees and very tall trees, and huge humongous trees.
Stop mailing letters and use email.
Use no fertilizer.
Mulch.
Use light driven devices.
Travel in groups and share rides.
Use public transport.
Buy a more energy efficient car.
Insulate house better.
Stop eating wheat and wheat products.
Encourage long living animals and birds to breath less.
No firing of firearms.
Ban bullets.
Use electricity from power plants heat wastage to grow plants living in warm water.
Recycle offal.
Recycle urine.
Recycle glass, paper products, wood products, metal products, plastic products.
Use plastics more.
Spray water everywhere.
Eat less meat.
Exercise less.
Think more often and longer.
Waste time.
Relax.
Use no fertilizer or growth accelerator.
Stick gum under desks.
Clean less often.
Grow weeds.
No smoking and advocate ban on smoking.
Spend less.
... to be continued.

Speculative Understandings About Joy and Mythology

Our paradox is that joy, human joy, is based on a myth. A myth is a vision and feeling that we hold of a reality that is not yet real. Our joy, and almost all joy, is an expectation of something that is not now, but that we experience in the now which says something about the future, which has all the makings of a myth.

A myth is something that does not exist, and since the future does not yet exist, it is a myth. Joy is when we are most harmonious with our myths of what is yet to be. Our experience of the present in a joyful moment is that of complete harmony with what we want to be.

Mythology is a need that we have to be joyful. We are happiest in our mythology because our myths gives us harmony with our wants and desires. Creating myths helps us to be joyful and to move towards harmony with our world.

I created the mythological character of Wuh because I realized the joy that a harmonious character of a highly destructive history could bring.

In the ancient world, there was a tremendous clash of cultures as the Romans' vision and philosophy broke into the harmony of peoples innocent to the coming reality of Roman rule. It is often said that the Romans went about civilizing the communities they conquered. My understanding is very different.

The Roman story as told by the Romans is a form of escapism and a sort of mythology. Caesar was made into a hero by a destructive mythology. Similar mythologies are created by those building empires. They are frequently used when awful people justify their conquest and wide spread damage and once they have destroyed joyful communities. Examples are the Britons, the communities of Gaul, the peoples of Africa, the native communities of North and South America. The so-called conquering heros may not have made our world better, but like those that kill animals in the name of the hunt, perpetuate myths that excuse them from their evil acts and free them from conscience about the massive pain they have caused.

My anti-hero is Julius Caesar himself, a monster. We all know he was a monster because Shakespeare put him as the lead character in one of his most famous plays. The problem is that Shakespeare gave Julius a form that we have grown to love. While everyone around Caesar hated him, the modern reader has fallen in love with Caesar. Caesar is the hero of the modern age. Caesar, who destroyed so much that was harmonious and full of joy, is to be seen because of Shakespeare as a modern hero, and a good guy.

He was nothing of the sort. Caesar was a dispicable individual in debt, a lothsome man with a sickness. Caesar was a truly evil individual, who would stop at nothing for his joyful vision of civilized harmony. Our problem is that we identify Caesar with harmony and joy rather than what he actually represented and the massive pain and subjugation that he caused. The myth of the wicked Gaulite is in and the myth of the conquering hero continues. There were heros is Caesar's time, but he was not one of them. That is why I tell the story of Wuh, the mythological hero that gets the history closer to a joyful harmony.

Genocide would be a kind word for what Caesar did. He was guilty of creating the staging post for multiple genocides. More people died than in all our subsequent history books. Caesar ended the futures of billions of people who might have lived on earth, had he not existed. He is not to be worshipped. He was not a god. He was awful scum, a blight on human life, a sore of human history. The reality of Julius Caesar is that he was probably the darkest most wicked personality in history, yet has become the most loved. Yes! The modern myth of hero worship is complete. Caesar is the hero that kid's worship to their own disgrace. He, nevertheless, was a vile murdering bastard.

What Direction Are You Heading?

Its something that we often forget. Where am I heading? Do I even know where I am going? Why am I going anywhere? Heh! Stop! I want to get off. I don't want to move, do, think, experience, be, act, play, feel, sort, help, hinder, break, build, touch, see. I want to rest.

Within us, we have a heart that, hopefully, pumps and pumps. We get up in the morning, have a feed, do things, have another feed, do things, have another feed, do things and go back to bed. What does it all add up to? It seems that we are going in circles. Our lives are spent moving in endless circles. The one thing we know about where we are going is that we are going where we once went, at least, that is mostly where we are going.

Our world is a world of moving things. Everywhere, there is motion. Even nowhere there is motion even though we cannot sense it. Our sense are based on motion. We could not sense without motion, and so we move in order to sense. Were we to stop moving, we would not sense anything. Once we crash out of life, we stop moving, but everything about us moves. All our being as it once was continues to moving. The difference is that we are not guiding this movement.

When we go for a walk, we are guiding our walk. We have to will ourselves to take each step, and sometimes taking each step is a major accomplishment. When we stop moving, we pass away into a world in which we are no longer in charge of matter. We move to a non-material world. The world we go to is the world where light has gone to, and it is the world in which we have no control over ordinary matter. We may find that we have control over light, which I think is matter. Isn't it matter. Well, it doesn't matter since we have no control over whether we go there or not, or whether the world of light really exists. I am sure it does, but we will never see it in this lifetime.

Merging Reality with Unreality to Produce Novelty

It seems unfair that people have much shorter lives that trees, especially the yew tree. What does man do about that?

Man's reality is his mortality. Man's unreality is his having a life at all. Man's desire is to make life fair and even. Man's actions are to destroy that which reminds him of his own mortality.

Perhaps there is another possibility which is to see one's mortality as immortality since one was never supposed to exist at all, if one thought logically. The inability to think more fully about our existence happens because we have this emotion within us to destroy. Were we instead to think in terms of the preservation of all things, we would not be faced so continuously with the forces of destruction. We can capture the forces of creativity and build novelty into our life and approach to death.

What is missing from man's psyche is the desire to be creatively novel by combining reality with unreality. Novelty that brings the real and unreal together is nevertheless at the heart of our experience. We continuously have feelings and visions of things thrown at us that we cannot deny and yet which are in a very importance sense novel. Combining our feelings with our other sensations allows us to get beyond our traditional habits of thinking. Setting thoughts aside, we can have a doorway to understanding that is neither real nor spiritual, but novel, a combining of both aspects of our passage through time. Novelty can enthrall us and comfort us as well as enlighten us.

Cornerstones of a Healthy Attitude

Its easy to slide into a modern attitude. One of the difficulties is that we are often lazy when it comes to searching for the meaning of life. If we try to put ourselves into the world of our ancestors, we may find that we can escape the three modern attitudes of realism, spiritualism, and perplexism.

What one does is accept that there are many realities and unrealies, that the physical and non-physical worlds really do exist, and that it is also possible to enjoy both without being confused or perplexed. We have been placed into a world that has many facits and attributes. The world is to be enjoyed for what it is, a place that is being revealled to us and one that we can reveal for ourselves.

Our world is a universe of opportunities for self enlightenment about many aspects of an interesting place to be and in which we can continuously grow and develop in wisdom and in appreciation of meaning. Our world is communicating to us and we need to have the insight to accept that we are part of an tremendous exploration of nuances, flavours, motions, feelings, trepedations, understandings, entrallments, excitements, and tragedies. We can experience all the flavours without feeling guilty about how we feel. This alone, however, does not guarantee our morality or whether we live ethically. We can, nevertheless, use the experience of older attitudes to gain an understanding of what it means to be human on a planet circling the sun, in a solar system that is part of the milky way, which is part of a galaxy amidst billions of galaxies that form part of a universe that is part of a world that we will wonder and marvel at.

Modern Myths

In the modern world, we have an attitude. We don't see that we have an attitude, and that is the problem. The attitude comes in three flavours: the realist, the spiritual, and the perplexed.

The realist everyone will recognize because it is the attitude of those that have attended the great universities, taken social science classes, and survived. The survival, however, means that the graduate has an attitude. The attitude is that man will continue to make progress technologically and this will lead to improvements in society and economies. If the world is to be successful, then people need an education that will enable them to see it as it is. Successful people are people who see the world in all its cause and effect glory.

The attitude of the spiritual person, we think that we will all recognize, but its not that easy. The spiritual attitude is one that holds that our world is not inhabited by physical things alone, but that there are forces and realities that we cannot see, hear or touch that occupy our world alongside of our physical reality. An attitude is adopted when the spiritual thinks that awareness of the spiritual world makes a person somewhat special and above those that do not recognize this world. The attitude is that there is something missing from the person who is not party to the spiritual enlightments offered to the person of the 'way', the spiritual way, a way that is not open to all persons.

The third attitude is that of 'the perplexed' individual, perplexism. Such a modern person regards the realist and the spiritualist as somewhat strange beings. The 'perplexist' thinks that it is normal to be confused and to not take sides with either of the realist or spiritualist camps. This attitude is that there is not enough information to decide on the merits of realism or spiritualism, so it is best to just observe and not take either position. The perplexed attitude is that somehow its not an either or proposition. The real and unreal exist, but the attitude is that it is possible to sit on the sidelines and just understand without commitment. The vast majority of people have the perplexed attitude of modern society. They will sometimes be confused with realists or spiritualists, but their world is a world of 'mugwump.'

Art, Mythology, and Novelling

I consider myself rather fortunate to be able to endulge in a world that has all the elements of being real while at the same time is well position in the reality of mythology. To understand my world, read the writing of Karen Armstrong who created a wonderful contribution to our understanding of religion, science or logic, and mythology in history.

My awareness of the importance of myth comes with an experience that I had in an elevator. I was reading a book and heading to the main level when the elevator stopped. I was so interested in the book that I continued to read it, only glancing up when a new passenger coughed. I looked up and there before me was my head of department looking all very serious. He remarked to me, "What is the name of your book?" In surprise, I blurted out, "It is called ' I captured the castle'." The man was silent for only a moment and then said, "I don't read fiction." The elevator landed and he stepped out and quickly disappeared.

The True Myth

Such a phrase seems entirely contradictory, but it has meaning nevertheless. In our Western culture, we are wrapped up in a thought world that tells us to disregard certain aspects of our reality. These aspects have been pushed into a mental box that we label 'unreal.' Because the things and concepts in the thought box are unreal, we think that we can ignore them.

Our problem is that the two worlds of the real and unreal are actually one, and it is increasingly difficult to separate the two.

When we examine why this is so, we find that the more one tries to isolate the 'unreal' world, and put it into a mental box, the more imbalanced our mentation becomes. Rather than embracing the unacceptable, we feel that we can meditate it into nothingness. Rather than dealing with the unreal, we sense that the unreal is something else.

The attempts to box away things as unreal can lead to insanity and as the mind disintegrates the world it sees is all real, but the realness is a delusion. Insanity and realism cannot co-exist because they are at opposite ends of our mind which we have artificially segmented thinking that this somehow allows us to deal with our realities more effectively.

We do not see that the unreal and the real are not separated in reality.