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.

Slosh, Slosh, Slosh!

"John! What's happening to the US economy?" asked Matthew.

"Why do you ask?" replied John, his head still fixed towards the TV in the corner. He was more interested in the basketball game. The world of economics is far too much of a headache to discuss when there are much more exciting things to occupy our minds.

"I have a strange feeling," said Matt, not wishing to end the conversation, but knowing that he had to get his father to focus for a minute on what was concerning him.

John screamed, his face was all smiles, and he laughed, "Yes! Yes! Yes!" The Wizards had just won the game. He turned to his son swivelling his chair around. "I'm all ears."

Matt smiled and grabbed the remote. There as a swift click and the TV fell silent after a few crackles of static showered the room.

Matt resumed his discussion, "Something is not right with the economy. It's serious dad. There is something that is wrong with our economy. We are not being told how dangerous the present situation really is."

John nodded, for he knew that Matt was an intuitive. He knew that Matt could sense that the world that they had come to know might just possibly be in for a very rough ride. How rough John could not imagine since his perspective was focused on the immediate need to save enough for a reasonable living out of his pension.

"The problem is," said Matt, "That many people are like you. They have had an idea that they could save for a reasonable pension and enjoy the fruits of their hard labour over the past forty or more years. You are from the baby boomer age and you expect that you will have a good retirement income much like grandad and grandma did. I don't see it. I am very worried about whether we will have enough jobs and whether inflation will come because of the huges rises in energy prices everywhere."

John's smile had lasted for a long while since he was still ruminating over the Wizard win. He suddenly realized that Matt had a genuine concern, but he did not want to discuss that concern. He did not understand what was happening to the US economy any more that Matt did. "I hear that our exports have picked up and that our trade with the rest of the world isn't as bad as it used to be," said John without thinking very deeply. He neglected to comment that he was finding his weekly pay check did not go as far as it had, and that it was more difficult to set aside the amounts need to add to their pension.

"Dad! Don't you see it?" Matt's voice had gone up a notch and his face revealed his frustration. "You are in a dream world. If the stock market takes many more hits and it is almost certain that it will, then share prices can fall badly, and you lose much of the capital that now represents your pension. People had gone into property after the stock market weakened, then they went into commodities, such as wheat and soy beans. Where will this end? I, for one, am not confident that the stock market will be a sound investment over the next ten years."

Matt was thinking about what he had read in the Wall Street Journal that whether you gain or not on stock prices will be up to how lucky you are. Sure there will be winners, but there will be more losers!

Matt thought aloud, " Dad! If you sell your shares and take the money and put it on deposit with a bank, you are also in a bind because as I see it, we have the emergings of an inflationary period. The interest rate on your deposit will need to keep up with inflation, but what I am seeing is that interest rate on deposits not keeping up with inflation. People don't realize how dangerous inflation can be. People are so used to the Fed keeping things so that inflation does not happen, but the Fed failed on house prices, it failed on energy prices, it failed on the dollar exchange rate, and won't it fail now on interest rates?"

John fell silent, and the two of them just looked through the living room window at the activity going on outside.

Matt continued, "Inflation in China is running pretty high. We have been enjoying all those cheap Chinese imports. What if that ended? With the dollar so weak, we would not be able to buy as much as we have over the last decade. Our economy is turning very slowly, but maybe that turn is too slow. Maybe, we are in for a very long period of adjustment lasting over a decade!"

John thought for a moment and said, "Perhaps, the Fed will raise interest rates. That will help reduce the risk of inflation by reducing the money supply growth. Albeit, house prices will suffer and property will not be such a money winner. Houses will always be a good investment over the longer term and perhaps we can shift back to people buying their own homes, but aware of the interest rate risks. That might not be such a bad thing."

Matt responded, "Well, you are right. If interest rates were to go up, it would help some people, but it could be very hard on business people, who are looking to grow the economy through more sales."

"But, people need to save for their pension years," said John. "It makes sense to raise interest rates. That would make consumption of all the unnecessary junk we buy less attractive."

Matt replied, "You are much older than I, so you see the need for higher interest rates to slow down inflation, but I think that the economy will slow down without the higher rates. Perhaps, we have overdone what needs to be done. People will not buy as much because their houses are not going up in value so rapidly. House prices are even falling. That will slow the spending of some people down. What home owners should be doing is locking in on interest rates that they can afford, so that they can get a handle on their cash flow each month. I am not so sure people will do that. It requires a big shift in attitude, especially for people of my age group, in their thirties. Some lenders are still saying spend, spend, spend. There are many people who are doing well. Do you think most people will be able to figure out a good strategy?"

John wished to answer quickly, but he thought about it. "Matt, my question is whether energy prices are going to make my pension years a nightmare. The Fed has focused on property values and the credit crisis caused by borrowing at risk money rates. When will people realize how luck they are the Fed took action. Things could have been much worse, and the thing is not over yet. The piper has to be paid some time, even if it is in the future."

"Dad! All the signs are there that because of the need to redirect the economy towards lower energy costs, we will see many businesses and divisions of companies based on the older energy-wasting technologies go out of business. My thinking is that if you invest wisely in companies with energy-saving technology, their share prices will do better. The problem is that the failing companies will try to buy their way into such technologies. That may be good, but if you invest then you need to wait until after such takeovers and mergers, then sell."

John answered, "Playing the stock market is a very risky game. People think that they are so intelligent when they experience substantial gains. In reality they are more likely to have been very lucky. The stock market is very risky and is like a form of gambling. I think, however, that you are right. We should all think about reducing our use of energy. That will produce a profit for the whole economy and we may all come out winners."

Matt frowned. He had not expected that the conversation would lead to anything so optimistic. "Dad, we still have the proble that inflation may take hold and interest rates may need to rise in order to stem inflation. Can we live with that?"

I Don't Think You Realize How Big the Universe Is

Two friends are walking through a meadow looking up at the sky and across at the hills beyond. They glance at the blossom of meadow flowers scattered joyfully around them. They watch a brown cow chewing its selection of grass. They hear the sheep in the distance on the slopes nearby. A crow caws in the distance, and a butterfly darts ahead of them through the tall grass.

Says one to the other, "I repeat! I do not think that you realize how big the universe actually is."

She repeats, "That is a statement that I know to be true. You have no idea how big the universe actually is. Well, perhaps, you think that you do, but you really don't. How do I know?"

Continuing she says, "I know that you have no idea how big the universe is because you are a human being thinking with a human brain. Let me tell you that the human brain cannot conceive of the actual size of the universe."

She pauses and looks at her friend who in the silence takes a deep breath and smiles crazily. They hear the crow and look towards the tall forest. They breath deeply and the girl sighs. She takes a deep breath and says, "You don't believe me do you. Ah! You are afraid to admit that you do not grasp what I am getting at. Or, is it that you have never really tried to imagine how big the universe actually is. Let me ask. What is the worst headache that you ever had? Well multiply that by a billion billion times and see if you can imagine the pain."

The young boy again smiles at his friend. He has other things on his mind, but all she can say is, "The fact is that we as humans can in no way imagine the scale of things around us let alone the scales that are involved in the universe. What is truly amazing then is that we have the arrogance to believe that we can use what we think of as powerful machines to tell us what we are made up of. We presently have no idea."

The girl is rather beautiful and the young man knows it. He is willing to tolerate a lot, but this rudeness of his friend is annoying. She won't stop and says, "The fact is that human beings are so ignorant of reality that they do not even know that they are ignorant. Such is bliss as they say. We are in bliss and it is because we are so terribly stupid."

"Who are you calling stupid?" he asks.

"Oops," she says, followed with, " You are terribly smart, you ass ...."

"Can I be honest?" she asks.

"Yes! Well, perhaps," the boy replies trying to be nice.

"No!" the girl says, and adds, "You are fooling yourself. You think that there are things that you can know, but you are fooling yourself. You live with the illusion, delusion, or whatever you wish to call it that you can know. That is a stupid thing to think. The reality is that you are not equiped to know. You think that you are, but your reality is that you are not. What's more, you may never be."

"I don't believe you," he replies. Smiling the boy says with complete confidence, "There are some things, I know, and I know how big the universe actually is. I really do."

"No, you don't," she responds, "You never did, and you never will. You are too stupid to and you always will be too stupid to. The scale of the universe is the scale of what we know to be too big to comprehend. We fool ourselves into thinking that we do understand, but we don't and we never will. For millions of years we will fool ourselves into thinking we can comprehend the scale of the universe, but we never can. It is impossible for us to really understand. We are confined to our part of the universe, that which we can grasp and understand, but that is all. We are complete ass.... when it comes to understanding the scale of the universe. Believe me! That is the truth and we deceive ourselves if we think otherwise."

"Suppose that you are right," the boy replies, "What then?"

"Then we begin to understand something about who we are and how remarkable we are. We begin to understand how remarkable our world really is. We begin to have awe and wonder. We begin to have respect and we begin to understand how truly lucky we are just to even take one breath in our universe."

The Challenge of Our Inner Vision

We might be forgiven, if we did not know better. I have often heard the comment that so-and-so believes such-and-such, or even worse that so-and-so believed such-and-such. Who really knows what they believe when, or what someone else believed when.

History shows that it is best to keep your true beliefs well hidden, and most, perhaps, all people do. The consequences of revealing to the public what you truly believe are enormous. The results are greater than what most people can endure. So it is that many people hide away their true beliefs well within their brain.

You would think that this would be enough to save them from condemnation by others. The reality is very different. One of the truly revolutionary ideas of Jesus of Nasareth and the simple message of Christian teaching was that it did not matter that you believed something that was not part of the existing creed of what you were supposed to believe. The historical Christ took it upon himself to announce that you need not believe in all the mumbo jumbo of what the church of the time was trying to tell you. He was a revolutionary in the art of inner vision and freedom from guilt.

Jesus proclaimed that all you had to have was faith in yourself and that the love you nurtured for yourself would transend all other beliefs and habits. Once you loved yourself, he declared, it is possible to love others. He realized that creating an inner vision of love for oneself rather than fear for what others thought or might do, would transform the way people conducted their daily lives. The results would bring about a world that had respect and purpose. Jesus the man saw that it was possible to create a world in which there was joy and happiness. Jesus the man never said that he was special, but that he had a message of love and a method of building self respect that would lead to joy and happiness, an inner and outer vision, a challenge for the whole community.

So that is how the sermon on the mount stated that all you had to do to be loved was to love yourself, have respect for yourself. Then, with the love that you have for yourself, do unto others what you would do for yourself. What challenges us always is this inner vision that we have of ourselves.

It is very difficult to love another person, if you don't have enough love to respect yourself. Once you lose personal self respect, you lose almost everything that gives joy. If you do not experience joy, then you need to think about your inner vision and how you may change the way you regard or treat yourself. To repair a poor self image, you can follow a simple rule.

The rule that will repair and heal your self image is that of doing something for another person that respects that other person's integrity and self image. By taking that step of helping another person regain their dignity or build their self image, you heal your own self image. This is because to consider another first requires that you change to a giver rather than a taker. The self image of a giver is always higher than that of a taker. This is the challenge of our inner vision.

The Problem with Paradoxes and Coincidences

The problem is that they occur and sometimes coincide. Such was my day. I had been thinking about the pentagon discovered in our universe that some scientists think represents the shape of the forces acting on the microwave background. It would appear that if you leave our universe in a cosmic sense, that you may enter it at the same time. The shape of things is five side and can be conceived in three dimensions, but that is only the start. The dimensions bend themselves around and come back at you in a strange way.

The points I wish to make in this blog are not to discuss the recent discoveries, but to discuss the mathematical coincidence and paradox that has just occured. It would seem that I have been selected to ride a crest of coincidences that I do not understand. You won't either, but here goes.

I was thinking about the large picture and the five sided object because I wanted to illustrate a level of abstraction for the higher organization of the big entity. I swear what happened should not have happened. It would seem that my law of association became operative. Why I do not know. Can you help? Perhaps!

The thing is I was drawing not thinking about mathematics, but my drawing was to conceive of the big everything, which I shall build from the universe. There are many universes that fall into categories of magnaverses and miniverses. These make up the multiverses and all the multiverse make up the omniverse. The College of Light that Wuh attends is located somewhere in the omniverse. Likewise there are pods: unipods, magnapods, minipods, multipods and omnipods. Associated with the universe is a big bang, but there are many big bangs and as I said before many many universes making up the magnaverse and miniverses of the multiverses. Its all very confusing to you perhaps, but makes sense to me! I explain more in my Wuh Lax series of books.

What does a creature of the omniverse look like I asked myself. They exist, but how do you draw one. I am still not sure, and for several hours tried to draw one. I have never seen one though I sense them. Now you think I am being rediculous. Well no more than Zeno, it would appear. I did not know anything about Zeno before an hour ago, but thats the personal mystery. Zeno and I share similar ideas, and these are described in the book by Joseph Mazur entitles 'The Motion Paradox'. I had completely forgotten that I had this book and there is no reason why I should pick it up and start reading it. Some process, perhaps from the College of Light drew me to it and I opened it and started reading it. Let me go back further in time.

Earlier my drawings of the omniverse focused on a five sided figure. I drew one and worked out the angles as being 72 degrees, five adding to 360. But I wanted a three dimensional object so I was playing around with the numbers. If you do, you will find that 72 is divisible by 12 going into 72 exactly 6 times. Now what I had thought would be better would have been a six sided figure, but that is not the way the universe seems to be organized, at least at the microwave background level and what happens to originate from the 'big bang', which I don't think was an event anyways, but that is another story.

My question was how does one get a five sided figure like a cubic. Possibly, our universe is packed tightly together with a host of other universes, or even other 'our universes.' Why five sides. I still don't know, but that has not eliminated six and twelve as we have seen the number 72 can be factored. My preference is for multiples of three. I do not like the metric system very much. Too illogical! Or, is it. We note the five sided figure.

Pressure and number are involved in the resulting five-sided cubics of our universe, or universes. Strange all this. In any event, I must try to close the circle, by saying that I started reading Mazur's book and by page sixteen, I was into a discussion of a pentagon five side figure with 72 degree angles and the like. The cosmic figure that was familiar to the Greeks results in a five pointed star. My earlier questions regarding what the universe may look like are contained in the notion of the mathematics of the cosmic star. I still ask the question, why not six sides, but have a feeling that both five and six are connected to cubic figures density, pressure, mass in a very specific and interesting way.

The coincidence for me was the linking of art, mathematics, science and books into a short time frame. I was surprised that I found page sixteen in Mazur's book and it discussed the very issues I was challenged by in my search for a representaive drawing.

You will recall that I have claimed that light is stationary and everything else is moving. Well Zeno shows that motion is impossible, hense the paradox. We sense that everything is moving, but in reality nothing in our universe moves. As Mazur discusses, the world is either made up of one thing or an infinite number of things.

Horses for Courses, Courses for Horses

A former boss often used the phrase 'horses for courses.' The idea is that not everyone will find that a particular environment or a particular situation suits them. If you find yourself in such a negative or slow paced world, perhaps what is wrong is that you are misplaced in some way.

Moving to another place or situation may improve your ability to perform. Hoever, an alternative to that may be that you need to change your environment in some way so that you perform better, or you are happier. Such a change is 'courses for horses.' You are building a course on which you will have greater chance of winning.

Knowing which type of course, you will find better suited to your skills is often an enormous task. It is increasingly difficult for people to see into the future with confidence that they are following a long term strategy that will lead to success. As the world matures, it is becoming a maze of opportunities and potential dead ends.

One thing is certain and that is the need for balance in one's goals. It is increasingly difficult to pick the horse and the course for that horse. This is because our world increasing requires specificity in processes and goals.

Specificity

In the past, nations and people made mistakes that now seem weird. For example, Germany, Russia, Great Britain, France, and Italy fought the first world war. We look back on this history and find it puzzling.

Why would rational nations do such stupid things?

Why would so-called intelligent human beings go to war and destroy so many lives and so many things that they had worked so hard to achieve?

Was the world so bad that war was necessary?

When we examine the past, it seems that peoples and nations stumbled into destruction. We can't say that wars were productive, we can only say that they happened and that because of them much that was good was destroyed for ever.

We can see that wars and fighting are a consequence of historical events, but we cannot clearly see the processes that led up to the events that produced the wars. We live with the consequences of war and destruction, but we are not free from them.

We may agree that war is bad, that it should not be a solution, but we are very poor at working out a strategy that will avoid war. If ever the mathematical butterfly effect has potency, it seems to be evident in process of moving towards the imbalance that teeters the world into war on a regular basis.

What can we Learn from Our Unnecessary Wars

The first thing that seems to emerge from the experience of war is that it does not lead to a better world relative to what would have been possible without war. War is like the slide. War pushes the world down and makes the climb up more difficult. Although war may change the lists of people active in the world and may change leadership of events, it does not mean that the world overall has improved over what could have been. War leads to a disconnect from the past as if the past did not have a contribution to make.

The alternative to war is housekeeping or reorganizing. In fact, the alternative to war is what Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. It is a realization that humans are creative entities and that they can produce very rapid change for the betterment of all mankind, and they can do it very quickly. What they do not need to produce change and improvement is a destructive war.

Creative destruction is a peaceful process of reorganizing. It produces the change that wars are faught over, but it produces the cahnge more effectively and with less total stress in the world environment. Underlying creative destruction is the notion that all change is a result of disequilibriums in the world arising from its nature. The nature of the world is non-linear and potentially destructive. In order to achieve creative destruction and at the same time positive change, the world needs to understand the role of work and the fuller dynamics of investment.

All people that are born into the world can have a role to play in building 'courses' in which they as 'horses' can run. The thing to realize is that there is enough space and places for everyone should we as a world decide that maintaining our world in balance is our overriding goal. We can all share and live in a greater world, but we need to participate and have an effective role. Where the leaders fail us now, is in not telling all of us that we are important and giving us 'all' the hope that we all need to be significant.

The world needs to have goal setters that will create the dynamics of investment into areas that we think are impossible. We know intiutively that all things are possible, but we need to have investment of time and energy into processes and ways to make all things possible. First of all, we need to raise everyone's level of living, not just the levels of people who are lucky enough to be born into specific communities.

Being Specific About Process and Why Things Fail

We are all guilty of taking shortcuts. It is economy to think that there may be a cheaper way to accomplish something and much to gain if we find that alternative. In our thinking we do the same, we follow a heuristical approach to problem solving using a subset of what we intuitively know is the full process. These acts of economy may have the appearance of being successful, yet at the crucial time fail to satisify all the criteria originally established as the formula for consistent success. Thus, our search for economy can lead to failure. It may mean that we are never successful even though we could be.

Failure as a Weakness in Processing

In life, we set goals that will move us to a different situation level of achievement. For those that would think of themselves as successful those goals are beyond what they have already achieved. Such people ratchet up their goals a knotch to reach a higher level of success from that which would be experienced in the normal course of things under an existing regime. Each time the goals are set higher, the processes needed to reach those goals become ever more specific and additional processes are added to avoid or eliminate failures.

This does mean that some people are very successful almost all of the time. The reason is that they set their goals at a lower level and engage in processes that will have consistent success and involve little risk. Nevertheless, for those willing to set higher goals, there is the possibility of defining goals differently or being more specific as to the quality of outcome that is to be regarded as success. Only by setting more specific goals can one establish the more specific demands on the processes and inputs that are needed to reach the more specific goals.

Longetivity or the Goal of Living to be One hundred Years Old to be a Centinarian

An example, would be the setting of a goal for exercise. One would rarely achieve a higher target of exercise without thinking about how that higher target were to be achieved. The goal of increased exercise may be part of a larger program in which a higher goal might have been set, such as a goal to live to the age of 100 years. Thus, within one goal there may be other goals that are necessary milestone to the success of the overall goal of living longer. The fact is that some people may seem obsessed with minutiae because they have set very high overall goals that others can't even dream of.

We may even poke fun at people because they seem peculiarly fussy about details. What we may not know is that such behaviour is indicative of higher goals, or goals set well above the norm. We may also be aware of people who seem obsessed or distant. Again, we may not be aware that such people are likely to have hidden goals, private goals that they do not discuss with us. Perhaps, such goals are due to an illness that they are struggling with or a fear that they have which dominates their thinking. It is very awkward when we think we understand people, but have no idea od their goals nor the circumstances within which they must struggle.

National and Nationalist Goals

History is full of stories where some nations pursued goals that set them apart from others by being beyond anything that had been previously achieved. When nations behave strangely they engage in specific activities to such an extent that the composition of activies seems biased or specialized. Specialization of a consequence of setting higher goals for achievement. We may ask what the goals are and be suspicious if we are not told. Like in the case of people, nations led by governments set goals. These goals are for the community or for people within the community and may, or may not, be evident to neighbours. In working towards new goals, people and nations establish strategies that they feel will be successful. These strategies may or may not be declared openly.

As a country, we may become aware of strategies when we see evidence of change that seems premeditated. For example, we may assume that a group has adopted a new strategy were we to see increased use of very specific resources that would not normally be used, or when we see greater care being taken to achieve specific goals, such care being evident from new standards or different ways of doing things.

The Science in Religion

All religion contains science, and surprisingly enough even those religions that deny the role of science probably contain a hefty amount of science hidden within them. To determine what the science is within a given religion one has to ask very specific questions. The first is to ask what the purpose of the religion really is. If the religion has no real purpose then it is not a religion. All religions have a purpose. You just have to identify what that purpose is.

The Purpose of a Religion

Generally, a religion has a story about the world that it wishes its participants to understand and to use as a guide for future actions and thought. The story is generally not verifiable in the sense of being scientifically identifiable as some shared peer tested law, but that does not rule out such stories. There may be many stories in a religion. The purpose of a religion is to use its stories as guides for the adherents of the religion in their future thoughts and actions.

Some religions adapt so that the stories can be updated, questioned, peer reviewed, and reshaped in all sorts of ways. Other religions do not allow the story to be revised and strictly forbid a liberalization of the story in light of what is seen and understood by its adherents. In such religions, the story is not open to interpretation, but must be used in a way that continues the methods of the past very specifically.

Why and How Dawkin's Misses the Point about the Existence of Religion

Some writers, such as Richard Dawkins, have the mistaken impression that religion in their lives can be somehow avoided or not used. This is a great misconception of what religion is all about and why everyone uses religion whether they realise it or not. What Dawkins is really saying is that he does not like the story of previous religions, listen to my story and use it as your new religion.

This is a perfectly normal response to hearing a story that you do not believe and you then try to invent your own story. In reality, we all, everyone has their own stories that they extract from their religions and they use a subset of the book of stories as their own religion. Thus, a Christian is not just a Christain, but someone who has looked into the books of Christianity and has selected those stories that form the basis of personal religion. This is human and natural because we have only limited capacity. In fact, for the Christians, it is almost expected. There is only one story that needs to be believed and the others can be used or discarded at will. The Christian story is 'love thy neighbour as thyself.' The other stories are discardable. Thus it is that a youngster can understand Christianity. It is too simple to forget. All the other stories one can dispose of. They are unnecessary to the religion.

Using Science to Create a New Religion

The relevance of Richard Dawkins as a scientist creating a new religion is that he is saying that his religion does not believe in war. It sounds like a great religion to me. Perhaps, if Dawkins told the story a bit better, he might do a lot of good. For example, were he to say that he had a law that would prevent wars for all time, we could all adopt this story as part of our religion and we would be enhanced by it. The problem with scientists that study biology or physics is that they are often not trained in religion and have no idea what religion is. More often they are not trained very well in history either, and is that not the lot of most of us. If Dawkins seems to flounder in his ideas, it is because they are stories that he has yet to develop into a religion that we can admire and add to our own. Why you ask should we?

Anything About the Future is Mythology

If you were able to hold all things constant except for the things that you wish to project into the future and then make a projection about the future, you may came pretty close. Nevertheless, the process of projection is what prophets do. Prophesy is the art of telling a story or stories about the future. All communities have prophets, myth spinners. The best politicians are prophets because they communicate well, the spin a story about the future, and they are credible, at least for now, because they are the best stories in town. When there is huge uncertainty about the stories that the politicians spin, we lose faith and we don't vote for them. We abandon their temporary religion.

This is why some religions are temporary. Many stories or myths arise during extremely uncertain times and in such times the stories are very hard to believe. To believe the mythology of the politician in uncertain times requires a huge amount of faith. Thus, it is that religions rely on faith. That faith may be temporary or long lasting. Faith in the Christian message of 'love thy neighbour' has been more long lasting than many other faiths.

Religions, forecasting, prophesizing, projecting, guiding are all about having a story on which people have faith. The amount of faith that they grant is partially due to their not having alternatives to chose from.

In the modern world, religion is likely to grow by leaps and bounds as life becomes more and more uncertain as more and more alternative stories guiding people into the future about. Out of all this confusion however, the single story of love thy neighbour as much as thyself will survive. Perhaps, man will add to that mythology and ask that one love ones neighbourhood and neighbours and much as one loves oneself and home. The bigger the neighbourhood the better since man needs to love his own world in order to guide and build worlds in the future that take into account the ecology of his environment and the guidence needed to preserve that ecology.

Kings, Poets, Sages, Gods, Prophets and Stars - What Gives?

In our earthly existence, we deal with what we know as best we can with the tools that we are offered to us or that we acquire by whatever means are open to us. We can deal with our world because of our senses and the tools these senses enable us to use. Our challenge comes when we are asked to go beyond our senses and beyond anything that we know how to manipulate with our senses. The temptation is to forgo our individual task of using our own senses and assume that we can gain by assumptions about sensations rather than the actual sensations themselves.

Secure Environments for Learning

This strategy may serve us well when it comes to very dangerous things or aspects of our world that have negative consequences when we try to put ourselves into the role of testing. If some one tells you that you cannot fly, you tend to assume that the statement is correct because if you tried to fly and failed you might end your life. Nevertheless, you might want to test the statement with a safe test where you run no risk.

Much of the extensions of our senses in new worlds is through very safe tests that we design ourselves. Many of our safe tests involve copy cat behaviour. Imitating others is a fairly safe way to extend one's sphere of experience. The problem with copy cat learning is that although it may be fairly safe, it may not represent the best that we can achieve. That depends on who or what we imitate; who or what we put our trust into.

The Leadership That We Acknowledge for Our Non-experience

For the most part our framework of trust comes through our parents and local community. As we mature, we include many more influences in our subjective lists of who and what we trust. Out of the long list of those we respect for their contribution to our understanding, we finally acquire the idea that there are specialists who lead the way in different skills and areas of knowledge. These experts and specialists wax and wane in their influence over people. A number of things stand out.

In our complex world, we do not normally have freedom to choose who we imitate, follow or accept as leaders. Most often these choices are made by others for us and we tend to be pushed, influenced, badgered, or forced into acceptance of the ideas of others whom we have not tested for ourselves.

We tend not to have any freedom of choice yet go about our daily lives as though we did. The majority of people are deluded and live in a fantasy world in which they have no control over anything meaningful in their lives.

Gaining Freedom by Joining a Small Group

This is the great realization of teenagers who for the first time have the courage to face up to the tremendous forces that shape their thoughts and experiences. Lacking any power over their individual actions, they collect together into small groups where their influence and testing can take place independent of the larger community.

Within the small group, there may be some freedom, but again that freedom may also be an illusion and the group be under the influence of an individual or individuals whose fantasies are a delusion.

The Risks of Getting it Wrong

For many the social aspects of belonging to a group outweigh the strategy of getting a valid perspective of one's world. Thus, it is that a mentally deficient child can be persuaded to carry a bomb and blow themselves up, killing many innocent people. Thus, it is that Ben Laden can laugh, or chuckle to himself about those that committed suicide in the September 911 atrocities. While the Koran's original words cannot be reexamined, it is possible for young men to die under the illusion that they will be served maidens when in reality they would receive grapes.