I started recording my observations in blog form ages ago. I can't really get away with talking about this stuff in real life as my ceaseless visions of what it's all about seem a bit "adolescent." Happily though, they don't involve Marilyn Manson or drinking White Lightning at a bus stop.
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Monday 28th July
Just a quick one - I was explaining the nature of reality as I see it to a likeminded friend and thought I may as well repeat myself and post this all in one account of it here. You dig?
Here it is...
"I basically think that after length, breadth, height and time - consciousness is one of the higher dimensions. Consciousness is a dimensional plane in itself and just as your body can occupy the plane of height, for instance, and the plane of time, it occupies a temporal plane of consciousness - but the point is - the body isn't consciousness itself - it's just a thing that's occupying or "trapping" a cross section of it. (As an aside - I think light is similar - it's a wave like the body, and the bit we see light as, is merely a 4 dimensional cross section of some greater phenomenon.)
To put it in human terms (which obviously doesn't really mix with actual reality), the Universe is like an infinite container of water in which all the particles are intelligent, both individually and collectively. OK, so this, I believe you know. Not sure if you agree that the consciousness is an actual physical dimension - but I'm absolutely convinced of this. It's a plane!
The reason that you can visualise things into reality is as follows:
The universe is everything - including all possible futures. (It's the old monkeys and typewriters thing - that a monkey and a typewriter, given eternity will come up with every book every written...an infinite number of times) I believe this because mathematically speaking, if you give an FINITE number of factors, an infinite number of trials, then all possibilities arise over and over again. Thus everything that can happen, will in time, happen. Though I might not marry Trevor McDonald in this life, or indeed this galaxy - the entire galaxy will oneday rearise and at some point, I will be at the alter with the national treasure, not remembering, that previously, I forsaw this event. Just to illustrate.
So if, looking from the "dimension up" from time, (the fifth dimension) all time exists together as one, surely everything that CAN happen is present. Time isn't linear with one future happening after another - the path you take from this moment on is like a bronchial tree (like the lungs of the universe) - every possible "next-moment" branching off from this one - and then their own possible "next-moments" branching off from them in turn.
The thing that you visualise for your ideal future DOES actually exist somewhere out there and in order to move along the right branches, I think you'll agree with me that visualisation helps - but also vibrating in the right frequency does it. I'm sure of this. The body's journey through life must be a kind of car you drive with your emotions. Because, as you've said, what you think and feel, dictates how you vibrate.
Why does your vibration dictate the branch down which you'll move? Well I think it's harmonics. When you play an A string on a guitar (is there one? I can't remember now) - well if there was one, the E string would also vibrate. If you feel happy now, you being happy in the future will also vibrate in resonance and this action is probably what draws that moment into vibration in the present. Something like that - feelings become reality.
Well, I've said my piece. With that I bid you good day."
Kezza xx
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Monday 30th June
Empirical Thinkers
Though I no doubt come across as arrogant, for thinking weird things in the face of consensus reality, I actually think that it's society that's arrogant. The trouble with humanity is that we unashamedly think empirically, the implication being, that despite never having had in the past...we now know almost everything. Therefore we have sufficient hooks of connotation upon which we can hang all concepts. Agriculture's good, technology's progress, God is dead. And...since when has empirical thought ever been a successful tactic? A primitive man would think, going on what he knew about the way a flat surface behaved - that the world was flat too, for how could it be round if things don't adhere to a round surface the way our feet do to the ground? But primitive man was an idiot - thank goodness we're not that stupid...despite being neurologically identical.
Logic is flawed because it's based on a sensory setup that's merely designed to survive in 3 dimensions on planet Earth. That's like a three line programme in True Basic or something. It's someone's GCSE project! That's nothing like reality - that's a glimmer on the crest of a wave. Can you imagine how differently a bee or an ant sees the world, to the way we do? Can you imagine how it thinks without language and feels the laylines of the planet in the same way we see the colour blue? If I can imagine a hundred other possible realities and I've only seen this one - then the likelihood is...there are infathomable amounts out there...So don't shoot the messanger for offering an idea - if a person waded into the fore in the days of the Plague with a theory about germs or "living entities" fighting in your body with your immune system's own tiny soldiers...they'd be laughed at wouldn't they? What's the diffo now then? Oh, it's alright now - I'm sure the past 100 years of evolution have brought us up to date with everything. Get real!
When in doubt - look to the oldest, biggest and least commercially driven thing you can, and then decide. It's not the reserve of teenagers and other deep thinkers - it's your duty to know which ideas will potentially save humanity and which ones will kill it.
So just as a lot of people go down the Richard Dawkins route with religion - I take the same view on meat eating. I think people think I only bang on about it to "look cool" - but I realise there's no quicker way to lose friends and uninfluence people than being a TVP fan. There are people I love and I don't want them to do something that's bad for them. In my opinion, meat is a major cause of cancer and other ailments like Crohns disease, heart disease and alzheimers. If you love someone then you don't want to see them self harm or smoke or jump off a cliff. In fact these things are easier to stand by and allow as at least the person does it by their own free will - they're not just going along with what our flawed culture tells us is right. For what it's worth...
The human anatomy tells us meat consumption's wrong for us because -
Teeth - meat eaters have more canines than molars and their jaws are long and pointy for ripping flesh out of a carcus. We have mainly flat teeth and the canines we do have are the bluntest of all the primates, and that includes vegetarians ones! These teeth are neither serrated nor conical - and they're only really useful for peeling and biting things off trees. Look at some people - their teeth are so blunt, they don't even appear to have canines at all! Wuses. Our faces are flatish, and if you're still not convinced - imagine trying to kill a cow with your teeth. Could you even pierce the skin with them? I don't think even Hugh Fearny Whittingstall will be trying that one any time soon.
Hunting ability - we're rubbish hunters. A carnivorous animal will usually have good night vision, an acute sense of smell for tracking down prey, excellent hearing, speed and agility. I mean - we can't "track" an animal, and even if we can see it, we certainly don't have the speed to catch it with our bare hands. Tools are one thing - but what we're looking at here is weather or not the body's DESIGNED to eat meat, as the digestive system hasn't evolved much anatomically since the invention of tools.
And on that subject - the intestines of a meat eater are very short. So short in fact, they're more or less straight. This is so that food can be eliminated from the system quickly before the animal-fat's absorbed into the carnivore's body. I know that sounds unlikely but look it up if you want. The short straight intestine is also vital so the very dense meat proteins don't get stuck in the pipes and cause problems. It's a straight route through. Because our instestines are about ten times the length of our body - like most other vegetarian animals' intestines, they're not designed to deal with these proteins and as you know - eat too much meat and even mainstream news now admits - you significantly increase your risk of colon cancer. Would that happen if meat was our natural diet?
This is exacerbated by the fact that our stomach's don't have the right enzymes in them to digest meat - Gaviscon's doing alright isn't it? In fact, we, like herbivores have amylase in our saliva - an agent designed to break down starches, not proteins. Neither do we have the right enzymes to kill the bacteria that forms on rotting meat. This is why we don't like the way dead animals smell, but a carnivore does. We have to cook our meat as the raw stuff might even kill us.
The manner in which we eat our food is different too. Because of their really harsh stomach acid, a carnivore tends to tear off big pieces of flesh from a carcus and pretty much swallow it whole - hence the lack of molars. We don't do this and our oesophagus wouldn't allow it, never mind our stomach acid, which, by the way is PH 4 to 5 with food present - like herbivores, not like the PH 1 of carnivores.
Vitamin A - present in animal products is a substance that a herbivorous animal's liver can't detoxify but a carnivorous one can. This is because the vitamin A in plants comes in the form of betacarotene which the herbivores can deal with - but the A in meat - is actually Vitamin A already. Guess what? Our livers can't do it - we need the betacarotene.
We don't have claws. Er - that's it for that one really. Don't give me the argument that we have nails please. Ever tried inflicting fatal wounds to a boar with your nails? Yeah, I know - if you don't try it Sky One will. I can live with that.
We don't have it in us. We don't have the mentality to eat meat. A baby, presented with an apple and a rabbit won't play with the apple and try to kill the rabbit.
Have we evolved to eat meat? No - our culture's evolved to eat it. But our culture's evolved to smoke too - that just serves to show how thick we really are. We've also been doing that for thousands of years.
It's the same as the holocaust. This is the argument presented in the film "Earthlings" which you can watch on google video if you're brave enough. It doesn't mean to diminish the seriousness of the holocaust, it means to highlight the brutality of speciesism that goes on in the world because animals can't fight back. Neither can babies - we wouldn't treat babies the same way, would we?
Factory farming issues include problems of....
Hygeine - animals are cooped up and unhealthy, not ideal food with which to nourish your body. Many pigs don't make it to market as they die on the way of heart attacks - that's how fat they are. They're being fed on diets that aren't natural for them, being kept in conditions that aren't natural for them and therefore vulnerable to disease. This means many animals receive antibiotics to stop them from dying on mass.
When an animal's killed, it's obviously terrified. With nowhere to run, all the adrenalin released into the muscles that would normally facilitate it's escape (were it not hanging from a metal claw on a factory line) stays in the muscle mass. This has been identified as a toxic substance to humans. It's toxicity actually intensifies as the meat's left to age. If you don't buy that - it's probably the reason cats and other carnivores play with their prey before killing it. They're not being cruel, but they need to make the animal move around a bit to burn off the adrenalin which isn't good for them. (And no, I'm not saying an animal "knows" this - it's instinct now - survival of the fittest meant the ones that didn't play with the prey didn't survive.
Factory farming causes deforestation as trees are cleared to graze animals instead.
Factory farming is the massive cause of water pollution as manure from the animals, along with all the chemicals pumped into them gets into the water supplies. It also uses a lot of water - half of all water used in America goes on raising animals.
Methane from cows is a major pollutant to the environment - worse than cars.
If we all ate 10% less meat, we'd have enough grain to feed the entire world. (All the stuff we currently feed to animals.)
It's your moral duty to keep your pain footprint as small as you can while you're on this Earth. 50 billion animals die every year for food. Considering it's also potentially killing you - why the f*** do we do it?
Please argue with me if I'm wrong - if I'm misinformed then I want to know. I just think the evidence is too convincing that humans should be vege.
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Sunday 29th June
What You Can Do For US
I think people underestimate the importance of listening to what your rice crispies are trying to tell you. Whether you're religious, a hippy or just a devout athiest - life is a mirror alright. Everything people say to you, everything you get annoyed by - it all comes from you. Um...anywaysssss, in that spirit - my latest song was more or less written by my new plant, Finbar. He's a "Dragon Plant" and realising, as I do that plants, in the process of transforming sunshine into carbohydrate, the kind on which the entire food chain relies, must in some way know everything we do and more...I decided to think about what Finbar would suggest to my loved ones who're finding life hard. So most people, basically.
So I ended up with this kind of 2 minute "message" saying - just realise your role in other people's lives and don't feel sorry for yourself - because you're servant to the many and the many are servants to you. Who knows. Weird eh?
Unfortunately, the f's have gone on my keyboard so until I get the hammer out (it's alright, I know what I'm doing - managed to get the f's back before) I've been without instruments. Hence this latest recording is all my voice, clicking my fingers, clapping and hitting my collar bone. Yeah, that last one doesn't really work as a bass drum - but it's about as good as I can get at the moment. Dig that South African sound though man - it's good when you don't have instruments!
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Sunday 22nd June
Quotes
I've just put a new tune on the music page about my good friend Simon who can perhaps best be described as "hapless." Freedom of speech dislcaimer - though he does do many impressions and slag off many things in the song - I, and a radio station I used to work at are amongst these so if I can take a joke, hopefully everyone else can too. (I'm the Australian voice he attempts, saying something about the mineral content of tomatoes.) It was recorded at a Wood Green studio where I was trying to record something proper of my own. So this is payback.
I'm in the middle of reading book two of the Anastacia series at the moment. Pretty good, I'm impressed. I don't quite know how to take them, they're quasi fictional I think and almost religious. Basically some guy meets a woman who tells him "what's going on" with the planet, humanity and the rest of it. And you're not sure whether it's made up or whether the author actually does know this woman - but a lot of what she says is bang on. Like she talks about the wisdom of children and how adults shouldn't talk down to them when in fact, they know a lot more than we do. She says you shouldn't bombard them with stupid plastic toys and other crap when they're babies because then they learn to attribute value to those things...when really they'd be better off playing outside in nature. I mean come on - what do they care - they don't know any different do they? Why not give them something to play with and learn about that's real, and not a plastic tea set?
Anyway, some of the parts of the book that my learned friends struggle with, I find fairly believeable...which either means I'm getting somewhere...or just incredibly naive. And even I'm not sure which. But for instance, Anastacia says that your heartbeat affects the environment around you. To me that makes sense. I've laboured the point before, and I'll labour it again - all matter is vibrating energy, the beating of your heart sends out a wave, just like the thinking of your brain does - and frankly - how could that NOT affect your environment? Well, most people would say - alright so it does affect the atmosphere in that it waves it (well most people wouldn't give a f*** - that's probably more realistic) but then most people don't realise that consciousness, like length, bredth, height and time is actually a physical dimension and hence, disturbances and patterns in this bring forth physical events in the four dimensions with which we are acquainted.
I like this quote from the book - "Man's being is not only in the flesh. Man's invisible feelings, aspirations and sensations are immeasurably sharper and greater than what can be discerned by the eye or ear. As in a mirror, they are but partially reflected in the visible material state." Personally I think the visible material state is like a four dimensional cross section of a five + dimensional entity (just like a moment is a three dimensional cross section of four dimensional space time) but what can you do eh?
I like this one as well - a quote from Rasputin, talking about being out in his ship - "The sea is a vast space, but the mind is even more spacious. There is no end to Man's higher wisdom, no philosophy can possibly contain it. Another moment of stupendous beauty comes when the sun sets over the sea and its rays fill the western sky. Who can estimate the beauty of the sun's twilight rays? They warm and caress the soul and offer healing comfort. The sun disappears behind the mountains minute by minute and Man's heart grieves a little at it's amazing twilight rays. And then it grows dark. And oh, what silence falls! Not even the sound of a bird is heard. Lost in thought, Man begins to pace the deck of the ship, involuntarily recalls his childhood and all of life's kerfuffle and begins to compare the silence around him with the bustles of the world, and quietly talks with himself, desiring company to stave off the tedium inflicted upon him by his enemies."
Doesn't that just illustrate so well the fear with which we approach the off-switch on TV or the departing of a beloved person...followed by the relative surprise that ones own mind is a bubbling mass of sound and ideas. I'm always amazed by how unfamiliar people are with their own desires and ambitions. No one seems to know who they are any more. TV and bad company are such a poor immitation of the connection we could have with each other if we would do the work to connect with the right switched on people and also - ourselves!
I like the quote, but if it was me writing it - I wouldn't have taken such a dim view of my own company and would rather have said "And oh what silence falls. Not even the sound of a Morrisson's Van outside the window is heard. The ambience of man's breath grows loud with voices of friends and the spectral dreams in his heart. He finds himself laughing with joy at what possibility lies in existence at that moment and sets down the burden of futile resistance, for now, just for now, there is nothing to fear. Imbued with peace at the quiet of nothingness, man is everything and nothing at once. ...Now Travis. (ha ha).
I mean, apart from your own thoughts, I agree with Anastacia that we do have a so called sixth sense and also get interference from other people's thoughts. I don't think it's supernatural at all - I think that, again, as you could feel air rushing against your skin if someone waved their hand in front of your face, the thinking and feeling waves of the brain and heart respectively, ripple the dimension of consciousness that lies hidden from human view. Like morse code - the person who listens hard enough, will be able to pick this up and decipher it. Not that morse code listens - that was bad grammar. In short - you can see through other people's eyes if you try. I suppose that sounds bizarre.
Like, have you ever had that thing where you're just falling asleep and you wake up again, and you realise, in your thoughts was an immense chain of consequence - a gargantuan array of details, spanning long periods of time; what your motivations were in the dream, your situation, what other people's motivations were, what was about to happen, etc. etc. Your mind, somehow views an entire event in space-time - somehow, it crams temporal details into your awareness, that in waking reality, you'd have accumulated over time. Now that, I think is the mind's eye viewing fragemented facets of the universe. If we can harness this power we SO EVIDENTLY have, but no one seems to care about - perhaps we could evolve to be an altogether more aware race of people. Perhaps we'd no longer be able to hurt and kill things, and in letting go of this misguided idea that our happiness relies upon the control of other people, we'd also be much more fulfilled and laid back. Why can't Jerry Springer ever say THAT at the end of his show? Probably because everyone would think he was a nutter.
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Wednesday 3rd June
Another Tune - "Revelation" on the Music Page
Right well, I'm beginning to see something in a Flowers for Algernon (before) type way. Everything is a wave. I know we already know that - that matter is merely vibrating energy. But this is something else I think. I think that the reason for space and time being merged as they are into space-time is the fact that matter is imbued with the time it took to bring it about - it's history. Matter cannot exist without the time that made it. Furthermore, I assert that Matter is the combination of time and consciousness in a PHYSICAL sense because consciousness actually brings about the creation of matter through ...THE WAVE!
At risk of repeating myself, consciousness is a dimension in itself - and a dimension, I think, is actually also a wave. It's like a metaphorical density. I can't describe it - it's like a direction in which the universe is stretching itself. Consciousness though, uses time to emit a frequency, which in turn solidifies, if you will, into matter. Thoughts become things.
This is why the sun and the moon are the same size. The collective consciousness of the world looking up at the sun and the moon have brought them together so that they both look the same size. Perhaps the collective conscoiusness brought about the conditions for the moon to be 400 times smaller than the sun and 400 times as close to the Earth. Sounds a bit wak, but if you get enough intelligence staring up at something for long enough and sending out that beta-wave asserting a certain condition...you'll attract more of the same! Hard to qualify really, when I think the moon actually was in place before life on Earth but...I don't know. There's a lot more intelligence out there than life as we know it. I mean aliens? Do me a favour! Zeitgeists! (A friend of mine stopped my whittering once by saying "yeah yeah, zeitgeist, shitegeist. I deferred to his superiority.)
I mean - just because something's very very obvious, doesn't mean it's unfeasible - like the moon and the sun being the same size. Like DNA. That's a wave isn't it? And it generates your physical form. Why is it that shape, I wonder? I think it's that shape because the consciousness dimension thought something, that thought was a wave (with the help of time), the wave solidified and from the solid wave, life was generated. I think that adds something to darwinism. I think the theory of evolution is right, for sure - I mean if man was "created" the way he is now - why all the "Junk-dna" which are dormant genes we don't need anymore but used to when we were ameobas and so on? These things make me think the theory of evolution is right. Also I understand that survival of the fittest would bring about and environment in which symbiosis is king. (If only people realised the importance of symbiosis!) But a little Zeitgeist magic would certainly help things come together in the mix. That's what I'm talking about! (*Samuel L Jackson voice.)
When I say help - I mean attract. If thoughts become things - i.e. the combination of time and thought equals matter - then if you think bad thoughts - you're going to get more bad. I'm trying to talk in physics and don't want this to sound like Sabrina the Teen Witch. Although I do actually think - "magic" is as simple as that. Thoughts become things. And you can't therefore "do spells" - because if you're like "I f***ing hate that bastard down the corridor - why can't he just die or move away?" then you're actually asking for more of that feeling to come into your reality tunnel. The result will be that he'll just becomes MORE annoying and you'll be thinking "I hate that bastard even more now."
The only way to get good matter (i.e. a good life and a good environment) into your life is by generating the thoughts and feelings that you already have it. Time allows these thoughts to pulsate and travel out, whereby they solidify into reality. Or so called reality. It's basically "Penny Crayon." you basically just create your own existence.
Why then, aren't I Alan Sugar by now? Well, I've only just worked out the possible science behind this. I heard the whole "think positive" theory before but didn't think it had much kudos. It does though as I can see in a strange abstract way that matter is made of waves, and waves are made of consciousness. The key is to be happy. To really be happy. To feel love. You can do this by focusing on the things that will generate these feelings - focus on the things you love and things that make you happy. If you want love in your life, maybe you have to feel loved already - get a cat! It would certainly explain why people who come from broken homes often repeat the pattern in their own lives, and why people who suffer abuse, end up with more abusers later on. Maybe it's why you never find love when you're looking because when you're looking you actually feel lonely and in doing so attract more loneliness. Well I'm no expert - I haven't found a way to stop my own loneliness but I do think that by valuing your friends, your loneliness won't be able to survive anymore and you'll stop attracting more of it.
Your brain is a wave machine. You don't need drugs to alter you state of consciousness - tribal drumming will do this also. Music conjours up more of a profound memory of a situation than revisiting that situation physically would...I think this is because music is one of the languages of reality itself. I said something similar in a university essay once and my tutor wrote "Steady on!!!" Three exclamation marks. I didn't have the understanding I do now though - that music synchronises your brainwaves like strobing lights do. I don't know if that's been proven yet - but I think it makes itself known when we are transported more vividly to a past situation by music than something visual would. Smell I think is another one - another wave that alters your brainwaves in exactly the same way as it did in a previous space-time nexus. Vision is about now.
I won't say "I sound like a nutter, don't I" becauase that's not really how I see it - why should I patronise people who think it? Thoughts become things. If you cut a leaf off a tree, then take a kirlian photograph of the branch it was previously on, you'll see an energy field in the shape of a leaf is still there. Energy obviously becomes mass. Even after the leaf departs, the tree's design for the leaf to be there remains for a short while. If you think something long enough, it'll happen. But don't think negatively. What you resist, persists. Maybe the universe is just one big lump of plasticine but I think it's been shattered into dimensions of time, consciousness and the other physical dimensions we know and through the fragmentation comes the full spectrum of what is. Plasticine after all always turns brown if all the colours are unified.
PS Gravity's a wave too. One emitted from mass, hence proximity taking precidence over volume.
PPS I should be apologising for my arrogance since I don't "do science", but I can't really, because I think it's just good to write down what makes sense to me. And on that bombshell - Listen to "Revelation" - It's about this rambling thought!
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Saturday 31st May
Wrong Planet
I like what's happening with people like Eugene off Big Brother and Tay Zonda of "Chocolate Rain" fame. (One of my favourite songs of all time!) These people seem to be more than accepted by the general public - but actually revered for their differences. I wonder if there's any need for the Asperger's label nowadays...maybe neurodiversity will just be accepted in future and if a person is more interested in building computers than binge drinking, then they'll just be left to get on with it and not beaten to a pulp physically OR socially. That could be a bit "only gay in the village" of me - but I just feel at times that it's quite rich being criticised for my enzymatic awareness by people who don't even know what atherosclerosis means.
Skirting the fringes of consensus reality, I do have a sufficiently open mind to consider some of it's premises feasible but taking advice from people who've done nothing to educate themselves on the subject they're confuting is a bit like voting Jade Goody for Prime Minister. Obviously such a situation could never arise as she'd merely be pitted against Omid Djalili in the media battle for Labour Leader, that we might choose who would lose against the Tories.
Anyway, in the intrepid quest to facilitate my social integration via the nutritional development of my neural circuit, I forced myself to eat some sea spaghetti the other day. Having spent the afternoon chomping on wild alfalfa, complete with insects' eggs and other detritus (for b12) the notion of consuming sea vegetables had suddenly become a reasonable one, though it was with caution that I sampled the first alien specimen. Bland, rubbery and slightly salty, it was THE perfect substitute for ordinary spaghetti!
Whilst ploughing my way through the simple dish of rehydrated sea-spaghetti, mashed avocado and a cut up tomato I noticed tiny swirls were appearing in my peripheral vision and looking to the window for some light, it seemed my visual field was bluer than normal. The same kind of thing you notice when you fall asleep outside, or on a bus and then wake up again.
Within half an hour of the weird spag-bol, I had a feeling of laughter in my stomach, a faint smile on my lips, my hands were shaking slightly and I felt as though cold blood was moving through my body. Although I was warm, my blood had obviously become infused with something pretty unusual - minerals. Maybe there's a lot of iron in seaweed, or maybe it's iodine that snaps the thyroid into gear, but you don't need nutritional information to know you've been missing something when it arrives to the soundtrack of the 1812 overture.
Needless to say, I didn't hang around. I headed straight for the gym and ran five miles. Having known people who've run the London Marathon, I realise this isn't special - but for me IT IS! I often go to the gym and run three miles and then trudge, with a shambling gait outside again, shamefully out of breath, my gaze averting the ex-cons and assorted crazies of Wood Green. This time I just kept on running, transfixed by the vivid colours of the Music Channel in front of me and breathing slowly as though deep in thought.
Emerging triumphantly through the Virgin-Active doors, it seemed a Stars-in-their-Eyes transformation had occured and I walked home radient, smug and dare I say, with a hint of suaveness. Gliding, unshowered and looking like John McCrirrick on a wet afternoon at Ascott, I met the eyes of passers by with optimistic neutrality and the world no longer scared me. Yes seaweed, ladies and gentlemen, has changed my life. Brain chemistry is after all only brain chemistry and I'm convinced food is the vital element in the continual self improvement for which we all strive. Thank you. (What?)
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Thursday 21st May
Not for Real Idea
It's not something I believe to be evidence of a higher intelligence...but...I was looking at the moon tonight and...what in the world are the odds of the sun and the moon appearing EXACTLY the same size from the perspective of the Earth? When we see a solar eclipse - the sun and the moon are the bloody same size! That's almost enough to make me suspicious. I mean...having said that I think it's just a chance thing...I can't help but see us all in a boardroom one day with Sir Alan shouting at us "Didn't you bloody wonder? What? Did you honestly just think it was a coincidence? You lot haven't got a bloody clue 'av ya?"
Creationists might say that people needed darkness to sleep at night but were provided with a night-sun to offer some visual guidance - and the night-sun would be exactly the same size as the day one. I mean they'd have a hard time explaining the phases of the moon, but I'm sure they'd come up with something. Um here's my anthropological take on our relationship with the moon, for what it's worth. (40p?) The moon's cycle is exactly the same as the average woman's menstrual cycle apparently. If you averaged women out that's what you'd find. (Discovered the cockney rhyme for menstrual cycle in the queue at Borders yesterday - "George Michael". Quite good to know.)
Now that used to make me think that there was something in Astrology since it's the apparent effect of an astral body on people. It seems to me though - we humans were probably always "a bit weird" compared to the other animals and wanted the cover of darkness before we'd set about procreating. Thus maybe natural selection has favoured the women who's cycles were always most fertile round about new moon time, when it was dark enough to have your clandestine affairs. Yeah, yeah, I know - early humans were shameless and apparently didn't care...but...gotto be some reason for that incredible coincidence. And it's either that or Astrology.
I'm pretty sure there's something or other in astrology though - a purely scientific astrology - a maths behind the maths we know. And I'm almost certain that Kepler was right about the Platonic solids. He was looking for a relationship between this bunch of five "perfect" shapes and the orbits of the planets. The five shapes by the way are like, you know - the usual suspects: cube, tetrahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron and an icosahedron. I think he missed a trick not including the sphere as I suspect this is the shape of the membranous wall that separates our present moment in space time from the others...but whatever. I'm not sure what (I reckon) the membrane's made of by the way - it's probably more like a magnetic field - but I do think a sphere would be the obvious choice there.
Anyway, suffice to say, I'm no expert on anything mathematical - I would bother trying but I remember getting as far as "truncated rhombic triacontahedron envelope" before I told myself, "Enough! There's a world out there!" Kepler though - I think he had the right idea about thse platonic shapes, but was applying them in the wrong way. They won't match up to the orbits of the planets - but if you looked behind the scenes, perhaps at the magnetic fields of each planet - the laylines and stuff - then perhaps you'd find things. I don't know - you come across the odd shape at the poles of planets and you wonder, don't you? Have you seen Saturn for instance? Clearest instance of a hexagon at the pole that I've ever seen, though I do remember there being talk of others. There's a maths going on behind the scenes is there not?
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Sunday 15th May
Another New Tune
Another one. They really ARE like buses. I had a very bad joke in here about breakdowns but even I couldn't leave that in. It's on the music page. I'm kind of tiring of sound production value now as it's never really been my thing - I'm more of a tunes enthusiast. That's a disclaimer by the way to explain why I've got midi drums and flute accompanying the piano.
Aaaaanyway, my Dad's attempts to convert me from an agnostic to a complete athiest rarely ease up but he sent me a link the other day that I must admit, I do prefer to old Dick Dawk and his various God Delusions. Hey - even if you're religious, you've got to admit George Carlin rocks, man! http://video.google.co.uk/videosearch?q=george+carlin+&sitesearch=
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Sunday 13th May
Another New Tune
Another new tune man! They're like busses. Bendy. This one's about feeling unfulfilled/ frustrated. I was talking to a friend of mine who said he felt this way and the more we talked the more I felt like that as well. And then when I got off the phone I felt an urgent need to be fulfilled...and knew exactly how! No - not toast and marmite/ men's underwear catalogues/ drink/ drugs/ sex/ tv/ Clive Bull on LBC...I suppose these are like modern medicine - they mask the problem by fixing the symptoms. The underlying cause of your discomfort is still there. So for frustration and lack of fulfillment - I guess you have to do what you're supposed to do - whatever you feel that is. (As long as it doesn't hurt anyone else). But you do have to DO it. And not just thinking vague thoughts about it. And not just think that if you don't have someone there to see you doing it that it doesn't count. And that if no one likes it, it doesn't. It counts more then! It's more noble!
So I've recorded this tune called "Frustration" - it's on the music page. I suppose Simon Cowell, if he knew slightly more about music would say "formless, populistic effluvia" but this "Frustration" tune is my unadulterated feeling - AS IT HAPPENED. I took a Mozart approach and just wrote it without then going back and changing the notes to make them proper.
This technique, whilst problematic, is not a new one - as ideally I try to behave that way as well within the crushing bandwidth of social etiquette. I do find however, that the trouble with having aspergic traits is that the truth as you see it - bursts forth from your shouty head, brazen, incourageable and naked of connotation to those guided mainly by thought-commerce. Society in other words. Passive Consumers of black box brain fodder. Tanorexic squatters in Murdoch's million eyed spectre of planet Earth. G'day mate! If this is consensus reality, I'd rather be conspicuous by my absence than a fully paid up member of the skeptic's society.
I mean it's an unfortunate mindset if you had any hopes of snaring a husband in this town. I think I realised I didn't when I heard a group of media sniffers next to me on the train, saying they only watch Big Brother for the tits and ass. People now mentally SUB Big Brother in their heads to make it more pallatable. It's too heavy, yo.
Word. Weird's good I think. YAY! :D
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Sunday 11th May
New Tune
For the past year, I've been writing tunes but not really recording them. Something had to give though and I recorded a new one at the weekend which is on the music page ("Even Though I"). But listen right - for this one, I've employed some rather sinister tactics by reading up on the principles of binaural recording, and though I don't have a stereo mic - I did attempt to recreate the same effect in Cubase. Basically - what I've done right, is to make certain sounds, slightly off, both pitch-wise and time-wise; too high/early in one ear and too low/late in the other ear. My aim is that you'll find this undetectable because if you don't I've probably hashed it up. If you do find it a normal sounding tune then my plan has worked and what's happened is your brain has bridged the gap between the right and left ear THUS ALSO UNITING THE BRAIN'S HEMISPHERES, moving the evolutionary damage we've sustained in recent left-brain times back 40 millienia! Mind you if the file doesn't stay stereo once it's been uploaded all of the above is void. Well I think it does stay stereo but you never know with html do you? I'll get the handbook out later.
Why bother uniting the brain's hemispheres you ask... According to Tony Wright, the price of moving away from a diet of fruit and leaves is a hell of a decline in plant estrogens that used to regulate our hormones when we were "more primative" monkeys. As a result, testosterone's run riot and made the left-brain take over. This is why humans tend to be unfeasibly thick and do stuff that's going to lead to their untimely demise when it's really obvious and they'd have to be mentally ill to come up with it. There are a few ways of harnessing the old right brain magic and allowing it to work as freely as it used to including the sleep deprivation method. Apparently if you do stay awake for long enough - eventually the left brain shuts down a little bit, and the right brain snaps into gear. I haven't tried it myself but it might be the reason why I used to think I could actually somehow understand Arabic when I was doing nightshifts at the World Service but never in the daytime - the right brain's more socially perceptive.
Despite this being a song about a rather tawdry young pop culture pod who wants to ensnare a married person - I did want it to have a nuerological impact on the listener as I feel that it's important to do what you can to activate right brain hemispheres wherever possible. So JUST employing binaural techniques alone would have been a bit like taking iron pills without B vitamins. Pointless. (Kale Juice for absorbable iron with co-efficients). Thus I read up on some of the "mind machines" that are commercially available. These things use binaural sounds played through headphones alongside pulsating LEDs shone through the closed eyes of the user. I know you're now so bored that you're reading this with the mental voice of David Duchovny but the point is, pulsating lights can produce synchronised brain patterns - in other words when presented with pulsating light, the brainwaves will often mimic that rhythm. If you think this sounds like a right load of crap - then where my friend do you think Cool Edit Pro got the name "Brainwave synchroniser" from? Answer me that!
In fact, if you synchronise those brainwaves enough - you can get your Beta waves into Alpha or even Theta territory, the latter being quite rare for a waking state. Now scientists reckon that light's the best medium for this mind programming thing - but I think sound really must be as well - especially when you close your eyes.
So during the kind of "break downs" after the chorus I've put some aural strobing in in strategic frequencies. This I think works best with white noise as that's one our brain's known since our predessecors got ears - it's in the sound of sea, trees, wind, rivers and so on. I didn't like any of the downloadable white noise so I've used very short bursts of a kettle boiling and, for texture, the fizz of a chewable vitamin C tablet in water. Whilst recording these I knocked a plate against the edge of a glass so I've incorporated that as I couldn't be bothered reboiling the kettle but it really got in the way of the kettle sound's decay time. Don't you hate it when that happens? I found the sound of a car indicator on my harddrive which I thought I may as well throw in as well.
So listen to it through headphones with your eyes closed and then tell me if the experience mimics the effect of strong medication or cures you of hiccups. I'm thinking it'll be a subtle change - the type of thing that makes the inside of your eyelids take on a narnia-wardrobe-of-coats effect. You know what I'm talking about - where your closed eyes suddenly make you feel like you're looking into outer space.
Ignore the words by the way - they're a front. Although they weren't to start with - it's a song in a musical where the main character starts out living her life a bit rubbishly and then improves by the end. It's going to be a sellout, that one.
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Thursday 25th April
Singularity
weird night. I've just woken up at the foot of some mental hill to obscurity here. But as always, won't be able to sleep until I've reached the summit and then looked down, with great hopes onto some kind of Slough-like wasteland. The leviathan paints the universe as a kind of serpent eating it's own tail. It seems, according to this idea I'm getting, that that's what each of us are. Everyone and everything. I know, start the synth strings in the background - this is going to be a Hollywood blockbuster requiring the services of the actor who played Doc in Back to the Future. Oh, put up with my ceaseless dramatisation of seemingly banal thoughts. I don't mean to make them sound grandiose but you know, I think it's good to write them down somehow.
To reach this conclusion that we are all everything, you've got to combine two pretty troubling premises. The first being that monkeys and typewriters thing. If you gave a monkey and a typewriter eternity, then by chance it would accidentally write every book ever written. To me that's a given. Books are a combo of letters, and eternity allows for all combos of letters to occur an infinite number of times, and then some. I don't know if this is right or wrong philosophically but sod that - mathmatically, if you give a finite number of factors and infinite number of trials, all combinations arise. So put that in your pipe and smoke it. Surely then, it's the same for whatever your consciousness is made of. If something's possible, it will occur again and again forever. That's my take on the matter. I've written it down better on the thoughts page. (There are only about five thoughts on there - that speaks volumes.)
The other thing you've got to think in believing that each of us is everything - concerns what happens when you die. Right, I know I'm not exactly a leading voice on the matter but lets look at the evidence here. The fact that the physical body renews every single cell every seven years, rendering the 14 year old you and entirely different physical entity to the 7 year old you - implies that consciousness resides outside the material body. On the other hand, one's thoughts, ideas, and memories appear to be chemical brain states...although we seem reluctant to observe the blatant fact that you don't have neurons in your heart and stomach for nothing. (I think we think with more of our body than our head...but that's another story). (By the way, did you know we have similar cones and rods in our pineal gland to the ones in our eyes? Obviously not just the material world that you're meant to pick up visually! BONZA!)
No wait, I've lost control of the story - where was I? Right yeah, that our material body can't really account for the continuity of consciousness and memory when it keeps renewing itself so that you become a copy of your former self. Yeah, at the same time the body does seem to be the window through which this soul looks. And hence the only way to experience our HUMAN brand of consciousness is through the body. Well it is man, I mean the body's the machine that feeds back every experience to the consciousness, rendering the consciousness entirely human-shaped.
If you believe that consciousness resides outside the body, then it's separation from the body in death begs the question - What is neat consciousness? Well that's the point I'm making here - neat consiousness is like...a million miles away from the body - consciousness. It must be! The way you experience the world is entirely mediated through your senses - senses that are different to the senses of other animals and therefore far from an absolute state of being. I mean, in other lifeforms - who's to say there aren't other senses? Look I know telepathy sounds unlikely, but there's more than one way to skin a cat you know? Neurons in other life forms might actually communicate with each other via radiowaves instead of physical tissue - in which case, you could have immensely accelerated thinking as well as intra-entity thoughts and ideas. It's about as unlikely as the evolution of DNA - and a hell of a lot more efficient! :P
What I'm getting at - is this idea right - that when the soul leaves the body, it won't be human-shaped will it? Why would it be? If you're a secular believer in life after death, consider the fact that the body and environmental material shape the person but death is total freedom from this. Why the hell would the neat consciousness, or energy or whatever it is that powers us - why would that retain it's human shape? It doesn't need to see, hear, smell, touch or taste - those are the constructs of our mundane survival racket. Consciousness is surely as ultimate yet etherial as thought. This concept wouldn't trouble me in terms of losing people you love - as you could say that just as their energy has dissipated into neat consciousness again - the ingredients for them are still present in that consciousness ether. They're still about in a way.
So if you're currently neat consciousness ensnared in the theme park of your spatial-temporal nexus in the universe (your life)...and you're consciousness is going to come back in another spatial-temporal nexus somewhere else - well not only will your consciousness experience everthing possible in the eternity that lies ahead (i.e. every experience that you could possibly have will arise) but also, in believing that neat consciousness constitutes the awareness of every other sentient thing around - each droplet of it will also experience everything possible from every other possible viewpoint that could ever exist. (i.e. in time you will be all things).
Neat consciousness is like the water that passes through every sea on Earth, the bodies of dinosaurs, reptiles, mammals, humans, brita filters, extractor fans. Alright so it hasn't yet - but it would in eternity. The material that constitues your current consciousness is going to pass through every single thing without exception. It has been everything in the past, and will be everything in the future as the passing of time is an illusion when viewed from the next dimension up. And if this idea was right, if time was viewed from above like this, all you'd see is that everything that ever happens, everything that's contained within the entire life of the universe is just one thing. A singularity of neat consciousness. It looks like the folding/ collapse/ shifting/ separation of the fourth dimension of time from the 5th and higher dimensions has been the force that appears to have fragmented the conscious universe into a multitude of subjective facets. But they're all facets of the same object. A subjective object, you understand. But objective in that it encompasses all views.
There's got to be a better way of putting that.
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Thursday 24th April
Mind the Gap
It is said that in Japan that if you're late for work due to public transport, the boss will ask you for a letter from the driver. A laughable concept in this country - that having paid for a service, you expect the one described in the timetable. But it's not the fact that a train scheduled for exactly 16:03 will probably be between 5 and 20 minutes late - hey, that's kind of quaint in a way - no, what riles me these days, is the more recent cult of the announcement.
The London classic of course - the one that gets tourists laughing at us as they look for "Loogabarooga" (or Loughborough, as we would pronounce it) - is the standard, "Please mind the gap between the train and the platform." An obvious lawsuit avoidance tactic - I would have thought a reasonable argument in court for an injured commuter would simply be "What exactly did you expect? Trains with platforms attached?"
This prime example would, I fear, retain its condescension in the face of mass senility, so it comes as a final blow to one's self esteem to have the exact gap specified. Presumably so that you don't get it mixed up with the one between your ears.
Another helpful waste of words is "Please remember to take your belongings WITH you when leaving the train." Oh well thanks for that. I've been getting that one wrong for years. Having said that - at least it's an attempt to be helpful in a motherly sort of way in contrast with the accusatory "Please take your litter with you." (You unclean hoard of furless vermin. Shut the door on your way out and take your muck an’ all.)
Perhaps the least useful announcement, as you watch the platform vanish into the distance is "If you have not purchased a ticket before boarding, you may be eligible for a penalty fare." Eligible? What is it, a competition? Great, I've won a twenty quid fine!
Apart from anything else, what use is this information AFTER you’ve boarded the train? To redeem yourself now you'd actually have to travel back in time to the point at which you were still standing in the station and could buy a ticket. Far be it from me, a filthy, forgetful and feckless commuter to criticise...but I do think it's a bit ambitious to attempt to travel faster than the speed of light, before actually mastering the art of arriving at a designated destination on time!
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Friday 06th April
Yo!
It's been ages man. I've been busy assembling furniture. Apart from a minor bruise sustained when an elevated piece of flatpack fell from a shoddily fixed join onto my face, it's gone ok!
I might have mentioned a few hundred times, that I often get accused of thinking too much, by life's non-array of automatons. Slighly biased account there - but I don't know why in a way, I do maintain a notchalant demeanour most of the time - I mean, how do they even tell? It happened again fairly recently - but this time - YES THIS TIME - I found it inspiring! I KNEW there'd be a break from the grinding self loathing at some point. The person who made this assertion was ex-military, and for the first time...I actually realised the virtue of thinking too much. Yes there's a level of redundancy there, and alright, it CAN sometimes be a chronic waste of time...but at least you end up knowing who you are and what you believe to be right and wrong. You look at the bigger picture and not just at your own gratification. And in my opinion anyway, you're a lot more likely to be amongst those who can see the ground rushing up to hit you before the others have even opened their parachutes. Nae, the others went up in the plane with cocktail umbrellas, drinking red bull and talking about last night's Eastenders.
I used to think I could overlook a few patriotic murders, animal slaughter and a blatant disregard for recycling...but the sad fact is - I'll never be able to. Well I can certainly suspend disapproval whilst awaiting an epiphanal explanation, attractiveness permitting, but predictably enough, one is never forthcoming. I've so far attempted this twice this year and both times...ended up crying in my bath at the thought of the devil with my soul impailed on his pitchfork. Ha ha, in one instance I even had the final indignity of being told my world view's probably bollocks! I mean it might be - but in that case, it was a bit like having Britney Spears give you parenting tips. No, no, you know what it's like...it's like my ardent love for Boris Johnson being laughed at by the same person who says "Oh, I quite fancy Rod Liddle though." WHAT? The man's basically Boris Johnson IN GREY! And Left wing I suppose, but who the hell even cares nowadays?
Swings and Roundabouts. Both get you nowhere and make you sick in the end. I HAVE recently made the acquaintance of a brilliant person with a piercing intellect...but he seems to me to be kind of depressed. I asked him why he got up in the morning and he said "habit." Why are all life's thinkers sad? Is it because society is inherantly designed for non-thinkers. It must be - capitalism relies upon "consumers" and "consumers" don't mind being called "consumers" because that's exactly what "consumers" are. Corporate Batteries. PR-plankton. Bottom Feeding Scum. Bah. (That's the sound we both make but in different contexts.) That said, I received a lovely chopping board from a friend the other day who came to see my flat, and the colours on it made me feel that life can be ok sometimes. Hurrah for John Lewis et al! Sigh.
Hey, I've learned of another brand of thinking this week as well! Factless-thinking! I thought that was what I did, but my factless moments don't really affect other people because they're always about hyperspace.
My friend Jon (the cockney oracle) became very annoyed in a bar the other night when I started chatting to a posh body builder type who'd been to Eton and had the kind of big teeth I always find charming.
"Don't even fackin bovva Kez, Ee's a pillock!," shattered my reverie as I watched teeth-face go to the bar.
"I wasn't bothering - he's got a girlfriend over there. But...where are you getting this from? You haven't even spoken to him..."
"I don't need to facking speak to him. 'Ee's a pillock. It's obvious."
"Why, because he's posh?"
"No, it's just the shoulders...look at the shoulders on him! And the swagger. You're barking up the wrong tree with him Kez, you want someone like that one." And with that he pointed to a man who managed to combine the likenesses of a fat Wayne Rooney, Ian Hislop and Adrian Chiles all at once.
"Jon I just think, you know...you can never tell with people...I mean.."
KLANG! As his glass firmly met the table and he stretched his neck forward, Pat Butcher style. "Ee's a pillock", now pointing a finger, "and SHE'S a fackin' pillock for going aaaat wiv 'im."
An uneasy pause ensued as an inflatable man was thrown in hilarity towards us by a hen-party. I contemplated my JD and soda.
"Mate, I just think you've got a SERIOUS chip on your shoulder."
"Kez, if I 'ad a chip on me shoulder, I'd 'av facking eaten it by now."
Aaaah, death, taxes, and the astute observations of the cockney oracle. :-)
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Friday 15th Feb
Quote
Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that and then you're a player. You don't even want to play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world. Where is THAT at? [applause] Yeah over here.
"Where is THAT at?" You got to love that. Terence Mckenna. I'm not about to go on a psychadelic journey by the way - the one I'm on's enough. I think what he's saying is - don't watch tv, don't read Nuts Magazine, don't look at Pop Bitch - this is YOUR point in the space-time nexus - don't give that away to Paris Hilton and Robbie Williams.
Here's a thought. He reckons he's mapped out an aspect of the structure of time which shows distinct peaks and troughs that do seem to correspond to historical events. i.e. when his graph has a dip in it - you get things like WWII and the Black Death etc. Well - in 2012 it goes off the chart and into infinity. Could this just be the point at which we harness time travel and not a catastrophe after all? It was in the London Lite yesterday that scientists do now say it's possible - but unfortunately the story was confined to a few square centimetres by a miscellany of medicotrity and mind-melding minutia designed to keep us all stupid and terrified. Bummer.
I digress though - what I'm saying is - 2012 is when the timewave goes off the chart and into infinity because after the discovery of time travel - you can't relate the unfolding of time and space in a linear way any more and hence forth it's going to be a logistical nightmare. If it takes 8 months to do engineering works on the Victoria Line - how long is it going to take to stuff the entire universe down a tear in the fabric of space time?
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Wendesday 30th Jan
Gravity
I'm hearing a lot about gravity at the moment and without any scientific knowledge myself, I still would have thought it's fairly obvious what's going on there. New Scientist was talking about "unparticles" to explain the whole thing and although I didn't quite finish that article as I left it in a pub, the idea doesn't really do it for me. All we currently need is an explanation for why it happens - as Newton's law has given us an approximate way to predict it's effects. Well in my opinion space-time is a spatial thing - i.e. time and space both exist like a kind of race-track. You know what I mean - they are both physical things and you can imagine them like a floor or a stretched out bedsheet or what have you.
Yeah, so you might have seen the paradigm involving a stretched out bedsheet and a bowling ball. No? Well you're in for a treat, man. Supposing space-time was the bedsheet and the bowling ball was a planet - when you put the bowling ball in the middle of the stretched bedsheet (space-time) it creates a distortion or dent in it so that if you were to put a smaller ball onto the sheet, it would be drawn towards the bowling ball from the distortion in the sheet's surface. In other words - gravity is a distortion of space-time.
That's true - but the glaring error people seem to make is that they just leave it at that - but you'd be mental to do that. I mean, how COULD you leave it at that - it doesn't even give you the right results - it doesn't concur with Newton's calculations which, admittedly are a bit sketchy but...The point is...there's at least one higher dimension - the 5th one. Rumour has it that the dimensions we don't conceptualise are "curled up" - i.e. the reside in the "stitches" of the ether - if you could get down to the material of space-time and make a hole in it, that would open up a door to the 5th dimension. I like the curled up idea - but it could also be that we're only designed to perceive the 4 dimensional world because it's only really these ones that are vital to our survival on Earth. So the highers ones might not actually be curled up - they might just be bloody difficult to imagine when you're an intellectual minnow.
Using that paradigm though I reckon that gravity is a result of the distortion in space-time created not only by four dimensional matter - but also all the higher dimensional matter that we can't see. (What some scientists might call "Dark Matter") It's my theory that inanimate matter - like a stone, for instance, has a spatial component both in this 4D model that we perceive AND in the higher dimensional model that we don't. In other words - to think a stone is only as voluminous as the volume we can measure in our every day reality, is to see only the tip of the iceberg.
So basically take the bedsheet example. Imagine that the bedsheet is again stretched out by two people - but this time, imagine that it's being stretched out over a basketball hoop so that if you put the bowling ball in the middle so that it falls through the hoop a bit. Now imagine the rim of the basketball hoop is like the event horizon - it marks the end of the fourth dimension and thus the endpoint for human perception. That could be what spacetime's like - all these little basketball hoop pockets through which the fifth dimension is. And if there's any matter that's getting through them a bit - we'll only be able to see the matter that's on our side of the event horizon and we'll assume that's how big the object is. We won't realise that the object has a whole nother material component in the next dimension up. And that's why, the gravitational exertion of some objects seems greater than that of their visible mass. Because they have an invisible mass. Yeah? YEAH!?
So if you're really massive, you'll also distort time a bit. Because space and time are the same. Well not really but - time's made out of space. This is why if you fall into a black hole - the hole in space-time caused by a body so dense that (in my opinion) it's fallen right through the 4th to 5th dimensional doorway - time for you would stop. Why? Because if each moment in time was a picture in a flickbook (so that you can run them all together and create the illusion of movement - as in animation) then space-time is like having all the picture's laid flat on the table. You, in this paradigm are a two dimensional drawing on one of the pictures - you can only travel in two dimensions from one picture to the next and this creates the illusion of time passing. If somehow you discovered the higher dimension (in this case the third dimension of height) and you managed to break the paper's surface and get into the dimension of height - you'd now be outside the two dimensional series of "moments" that makes time. You'd have escaped this 2D model of space time by going into the next dimension up. And so it is in the 4th to 5th dimensional reality.
If, like the drawing - you got into the higher dimension and were outside time - it would mean you could hover over the picture-moments that were laid out on the table and choose the next one you wanted to go to. Well alright, in reality maybe we don't know how to choose which one we want to go to next - but you see what I mean - if we get into the higher dimension, we're looking down on time and space. Stuff in this higher dimension is connected to the stuff we see in our lower dimensions - and this is what dark matter is and dark matter's the thing that creates the secret gravitational pull that actually would make Newton's calculations right in terms of the movements of galaxies.
What do you reckon? Anyone done any maths on the subject? Has anyone proposed this before (they must have) and if so then why is it still a big question in science? What's the sticking point? Is it the fact that we can't measure stuff outside the 4 dimensions?
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Wendesday 9th Jan
Picture
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Monday 26th or so of November
Next Dimension
I was happily leafing through the argos catalogue there when a weird thought began corroding the ceiling so that now, against my better judgement, I'm watching some kind of a spectral mirrorworld. What if love, or the feeling of happiness - whatever you want to call it - what if that actually is the next physical dimension? Not in a 60s way, no, I mean what if happiness/ rightness/ love/ the ultimate positive - what if that IS actually a physical action in an unseen fold of the ether that drives forward creation? Seriously, stick with me on this one...
For example, a kind of creation or at least, expansion is seen in the sequence of dimensions - the unfolding of the point into the line, the unfolding of the line into the square, the unfolding of the square into the cube, the unfolding of the cube into a cube with a history (the forward movement of time that strings an infinite number of cubes together to form a spatial event.) In order to grow any further the cube in space-time needs an agenda or consciousness through which to learn...and crucially this must be a positive consciousness... since it looks as though postivity is the only breeding ground for creation.
I know it's a bit off the wall, but then Who would have put time forward for a spatial entity and yet, without the necessary proof of such, it does look like it is. The bronchial tree of time's possible moments surrounding this one and their own possibilities beyond each of those...this breathes everything new into existence because how could we arrive here in this particular cosmic attic of junk without the fractal branches that have brought us here from the original singularity? It is therefore with a heavy heart, that I put forward a deceptively hippy-like idea that the next dimension is just the next catalyst for creation - one up from time. This is the actual ability to think that takes it's shape in consciousness and furthermore, in positivity.
Should I say that it is not love/positivity that is the next dimension but in fact the way space has folded to form consciousness itself? If you're going to be a pedant about it then yes. But only in the way that a point can be furthered by a one dimensional line that moves forwards or negated by a one dimensional line that moves backwards. Like negative numbers. Y'see if love/positivity really is the next dimension, then it's true what they say after all - the opposite of love - fear - actually IS just an illusion because it's in the same class as negative numbers. Which I don't think can really exist spatially because if you were to venture behind the scenes of the fourth dimension I don't think you'd be imploding into nothingness - I think the way it works is that implosion from the four dimensions would be an explosion in the next ones up. Only these are currently curled up so that implosion is actually the rabbithole into them. I mean obviously - that IS actually where your consciousness is and maybe when you're released from the four dimensional body that holds you here like an aging kebab...that's when you rejoin the Cosmic Consciousness, through the keyhole, as it were.
Who knows eh? It's a bit rad - but then maybe this is why love makes new life possible and the opposite of love destroys it. And maybe it's why love/ happiness feels right and hate/ fear feels wrong. It's not a conceptual theory. It's the idea that love isn't a "chemical reaction" like they say it is - it's a metaphysical one. The physical action of the 6th dimension (or consciousness) unfolding time into an even higher/ bigger ...thing. God, what a let down hey? This is like discovering the machine of the body is actually being driven by the gremlins that are the DNA - you're only here to perpetuate those - nothing you do comes to any good. You're a petry dish for the genes, and they, ruthless and venal, milk you for every feeling you're worth that they might go on. It is perhaps poetic justice then, that they too are pawns in the ceaseless unfolding of creation in the physical laws of dimensional expansion. Those dimensions just can't stop branching out into higher levels.
So in summary..."Point"-"line"-"square"-"cube"-"aging cube"-"thinking, aging cube"-"thinking, aging, loving cube, a cube with a view as well as a birthday"-"more cubes like this one" whatever next? Is consciousness the ultimate dimensional gatepost...or does the dimensional unfolding go higher than consciousness? My guess would be some kind of multifaceted hyperconsiousness. Like a global consciousness. Like the way the consciousness of the brain cells and indeed the whole body have melded to form one person's awareness. Ooooh, that would be interesting. Kind of like looking through the eyes of a fly.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
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Wednesday 16th Aug or something
Dick-Dawk
I know it's not very fashionable to disagree with the self appointed voice of reason, Richard Dawkins and it's something I'm loathe to do when I agree with so much of what he says. I am however left slightly incredulous at the route his current work is taking as it seems to mimick exactly what he stands against.
He doesn't like arrogance, dogma and religion and yet to me - he's an arrogant, dogmatic follower of the manmade religion of science. Let me throw my own cards on the table for what it's worth. I'm not a believer in any of the manmade religions as big chunks of the Quaran, the Bible and the Bhagvad Gita are more or less word for word, the same. Plus before Christ there were no fewer than 16 other dudes with names like "Hesus" who were born of a virgin, claimed to be the son of God, died on the cross at age 30 and were ressurected three days later and if that doesn't p*** on your chips you've got more faith than I do.
Having taken the unusual step of doing some research into the small matter of why we might all be here instead of "picking" the religion that my parents brought me up to believe (which by the way was Athiesm)...it does indeed seem to me that the major religions are based on the zodiac. Not that I think there's necessarily anything real in the zodiac - but it is one of the oldest things around and if you look into the symbolism of the bible, the Virgin, the Ram, the Fish, Aquarius...to be honest - all the star signs - they're all there. Sounds a bit odd, I know - but because I wasn't caught up in too much of a reality tunnel of my own where religion was concerned, I read the books of historians like Jordan Maxwell and it seems to me his arguments make sense. You decide. Just look at the evidence before you do, yeah? I'm not saying you'll know for sure, but by God it helps!
I have views of my own. (see footnotes) But I'm also open to ridicule. I mean I don't argue that you have to agree with me or you're a twat - I just say - what you reckon? And think that's the way to do it. I don't believe in the words of men who seem to have ulterior motives. I, like Dick-Dawk believe in the evidence that science has to offer but I also believe that progress needs insight, imagination and a willingness to be wrong. As I've said before - empirical thinkers don't figure highly on the list of human intellectual advances. The world needs so-called "mavericks" like Einstein and Newton and "lunatics" like David Icke - we don't need another religious figure, albeit it an athiest one to tell you you're stupid. If you've got any sense, you'll probably know that already.
Where Richard Dawkins really annoys me - is that he argues the case for reason? I'm sorry would that be the same human reason that would without education think that the world was flat because flat things behave like the ground? "But we DO have education" Dawkins would argue. But we WOULDN'T if people like you were trying to shut down the weirdos of the world who have an intuitive idea that seems too wacky for the status quo. That's what happened to Galileo. That's what happened to Newton and maybe it's THAT attitude that caused the Dark Ages. Just state your case and shut up. Don't waste your life trying to disprove other people's. It smacks of arrogance and indicates your own views aren't compelling enough to speak for themselves.
I mean fairy tales and superstition might seem weird but how often have they actually been confirmed by science as our knowledge has evolved? How likely would it seem, I wonder to suggest to an 18th century aristocrat that "little creatures" without brains get into your body and make you ill and little creatures in your own body fight them back and then you're well again and good has won the day - you can get back to slaying foxes. It seems a bit...odd really - but of course that's our current understanding of germs. Not to mention the other brainless agents called enzymes that seem to build our entire bodies from scratch without so much as an IKEA pamphlet and a cup of PG Tips.
Yes, we might as well try and climb out of the quadrapod pit of ignorance but as a religious fanatic once said to him "Do so not in arrogance." That dude DID admittedly look like a bug eyed lunatic - but...so does Bill Bailey. And if there IS evidence for God - it's him!
All wars are caused by religion. Says who? I rather think all wars are caused by power hungry apes who want the world to think the way they do and will twist religious texts to bolster their arguments. How highly does "thou shalt not kill" figure in the troubles of Northern Ireland? "Peace be with you" doesn't seem to have taken off much in the Middle East. Wars are politics (monkey fights) with religion tacked on. It's our competative natures, our individualism and our stupidity that causes conflict. Could it even be that religion unites large groups of people in the same world view and if it didn't exist - you'd have much more smaller conflicts amongst people that we now consider to be the same? I mean who knows? We'll find something to fight about. My family spent no less than a decade fighting about the proununciation of "niche" after the write up in an old dictionary said "rhymes with pitch." That's 10 years of my life I won't get back!
So Richard Dawkins has, in my view missed the point. Our problems in the world don't stem from people who have faith - it's people who want to ram their faith down other people's throats that mess the world up. Enter the Dawkins. Another contender in the gladiator arena. An all too emotional one if you ask me. If you're a cold, calculating and rational follower of "fact based" science, why do you season your arguments with bitterness and cynicism? Why do you get so angry? It's not the relgion that's the problem - it's the steamrollerers who want a flat world of plastic pegs. It's those who can't go out on a mental limb and think that really, ANYTHING'S possible! WAKE UP!
For one of your everday Sun reading automatons - one of your average materialists who's happy to be called a consumer as long as s/he can get a steady supply of porn from the same source as their current affairs - for someone like this, such talk would be annoying at worst and food for thought at best. From a man intelligent enough to write "The Selfish Gene" among other brilliant books, this behaviour is nothing less than unforgivable. He hasn't stopped to think about his argument that religion is the culprit behind humanity's dellusions and our wars and hatred...if he had...he might have seen that what you believe isn't the agent - it's how badly you want other people to believe it. If we could have our views and actually follow the repeated doctrines that pervade religions, the world over that "thou shalt not kill" and "peace be with you" and "do unto others what you would have done unto yourself"...then we'd be fine. But we can't. And we can't because we're arrogant. Arrogance is the Cancer of society - not dreams, ideas and theories.
Dawkins is a laugh sometimes - I like him. He made the very astute observation that "If God wanted to forgive us - why didn't he just forgive us? Instead of which he sent himself down to be crucified - to appease...presumabley himself as he is judge and jury../..Barking Mad!" I mean I do agree with Dawkins on this and have to say all the arguments for intelligent design inevitably seem to fall down at the stumbling post of "who designed God" and if he just "came about" - what's to say we didn't then? But at the end of the day no one knows what the f*** is going on. How dare Richard Dawkins suggest that in a desert of believers, he a) isn't one himself and b) knows the right path to take. If THAT'S not dogmatic arrogance...I'd hate to see what is!
Footnote
1) Some thoughts I entertain based on my own hunches: the brain doesn't think alone - the neurons that are in the heart and stomach do some thinking too; thinking sends out vibrations which, like harmonics cause environmental matter to resonate thus attracting relevant things and situations towards you and though I can't understand how it works, I do think it happens (what you think about or visualise, you attract); the fact that all our atoms or components were present together at the big bang or whatever it was means we're still all part of the same thing and have this timeless connection to everything and each other; I make up most of my own reality no matter how real it seems; I am not as clever/ important/ insignificant as I imagine. And then of course I do currently think that all time exists together, you choose the route you want to take like a current on a circuit, monkeys and typewriters dictate we'll all be back and of course, and most importantly - if any man, even George Martin says you should pan a lead vocal hard left, he should probably be stopped. And don't put reverb on a bass guitar.
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Wednesday 25th July
New song - Free Me
This one's not meant to be well orchestrated or sung and it's got a poorly ad libbed middle 8 - plus I suppose no one's going to free you are they - you've got to do it yourself! Like a plaster! Well that's what I tell myself anyway... If anyone needs me - I'm on the same number! No, don't delete it! - When Mad Max DOES happen in 2012 - I've got a plan! GOOD LUCK! xxx
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Sunday 30th June
More of the same really
I've been watching some David Icke stuff today and he really is amazing. He was talking about stuff on his "Robot’s Rebellion" talk that the average person would agree with – it wasn’t so much about the reptile thing or ufos. The reptile thing I understand now I think. Reptile's are our predecessors - dinosaurs etc - part of our own brain is still reptilian. I think the reptilian territorial, carnivourous behaviour is key in the trap jointly set by our intelligence and our desires. Word on the street is if you get stoned or something else equally as unsettling, you might glimpse the genetic projection of what might have been – i.e. your friend might take on a reptilian look. I think the physical form is one frequency of reality that we’re all plugged into and obviously drugs let you see the other layers. But don’t do it – if we were meant to see the other layers we’d be seeing them yeah!
David Icke was saying that there's a difference between cleverness and wisdom and that's our big problem in life – we're clever but not wise. It does irritate me, that - because I think we're cleverer than we behave all the time. He told the story of a woman who always cut the corners off the ham before she fried it until one day her husband asked her why she did it. She said it was just something her mother always did – what'does it matter, etc. etc. But her husband was so intrigued that he made her phone her mum to ask her why she'd done it. And the reason was because her Mum's pan had always been too small for her to fit the ham into. And this is a good metaphor for us being stupid tw*ts for the want of the simple question "why".
As always the big no-no for me is the condemnation of our fellow earthlings to lives of pain and suffering for the sake of economics. I mean for one thing – that's a plan that's never going to work because I can’t remember who said it and what the exact quote was but it was something like "once we’ve cut down the last tree and poisoned the last river we’ll finally realise that you can’t eat money." Yeah, especially when there is no paper money left and it’s all just numbers on Dubya's computer so that if you call him stupid he'll delete your savings. Ahem. God, John Culshaw’s going to be squatting in a derelict shopping mall in Dundee at this rate!
In terms of animals though this really has to be the biggest con in the history of the human race. Regardless of whether it's good for our health or not – meat production is the one thing the aliens would look at and just go "no, let the asteroid get them – they’re a parasite." We individuals aren’t capable of killing animals or ramming them in barns, knee deep in their own sh*t before they’re literally skinned alive while they’re still bleeding to death from having their throats cut. I really think that would put a dampner on anyone’s day. And to be honest – if you knew someone for whom it didn’t – would you want to hang around with them? And yet you condone and encourage it every time you eat meat.
The funny thing is – it's not even good for you. The sole consolation for the poor babies being led to the guillotine must be that – we're killing ourselves by eating them. Sure it might not kill you just like smoking might not. But meat and milk cause various cancers and heart disease – that’s not hippy stuff – it's science fact. You don’t get cholesterol in non animal food and the reason you can’t eat it raw like the animals is that you don’t have the enzymes in your stomach that protect you from the bacteria you get on rotting meat. The animals that do have these actually like the smell of rotting meat. Give a baby a rabbit and a banana – it’ll eat the banana – because it’s a primate. Give a kitten a mouse and a banana – it’ll chase the mouse. And so on and so on.
It’s just that – can you call yourself religious, or can you call yourself a good person if you allow torture of sentient beings and the simple answer is – and you agree with me on this – no. You can’t. It might put a slightly different complexion on things if we humans needed to eat meat. But half of India will tell you – we don’t. The human anatomy clearly states that not only do we not – but it harms us.
I don’t know why I always get onto this – but it’s the one thing that alienates me from other people totally. The sheer unfeeling. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – a lack of intelligence doesn’t mean you feel pain any less. If aliens did come down and they were well versed in metaphysics would that mean it’d be alright for them to farm us and slaughter our children for veal? Because we’re stupid in comparison? I’d say no it wouldn’t if I didn’t think that after a few thousand years of doing the same – we do actually deserve it. It’s seemingly the only way to crystalise reality in the heads of most of the population. Another social triumph for Mr. Popular: Banalysis.
Yeah well. In other news. Bombs everywhere and stuff. It did occur to me that again – it’s a con to think that religion starts all wars because of course at the heart of every religion is love thy neighbour and just as with intensive farming of sentient beings – killing others is purely political and not in fact anything to do with religion or what we need to be happy. Religion always gets slapped on as an afterthought. Well not as an afterthought – as a motivator.
Let’s give up religion man! Look at the facts. We’re all here – we all want to have a good time. That really IS it! Let’s invest all our energy into what actually makes us happy – and remember that is in fact a) not having too much to choose from, b) being famous by virtue of living in close knit communities where everyone knows everyone, c) discovering new things for the benefit of man kind and d) having a laugh.
If you’ve read “the selfish gene” then you’ll know that the other infinite wisdom of evolution is – the animals that cooperate (i.e. work together with nature – or do take from it – but only enough to “keep the heard healthy by encouraging further evolution”) are the ones that live. The others destroy their sustenance. Intelligence doesn’t come into it or dinosaurs wouldn’t have lasted as long as they did whilst we’re hastily destroying our habitat for the sake of plastic.
George Carlin said something funny – maybe the world has actually brought us here for a reason and that reason is – that it wanted plastic. It didn’t have plastic. But it knew that it would like some, so engineered us all so that we’d bring it about. It’s finished with us now so we can leave. I don’t mind, as long as I’m allowed to walk – they’re constantly having bomb scares on public transport and getting caught in political cross fire that my taxes have funded against my own will isn’t how I want to go out.
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Saturday 17th March
Must Try Harder
You know that theory of space-time that I have? It's further down the page on scanned in paper. Well it was just a bit of a laugh really considering I know nothing about the subject but it's interesting to note that in a BBC documentary talking about membrane theory they said something about there being an infinite number of parallel universes and they'd contain every other universe possible - i.e. Elvis is still alive in another of them. A bit egocentric considering elvis and humans aren't exactly the HUB of activitiy in the galaxy, never mind the universe but still, I suppose it gets the point across. This week's New Scientist also states the universe is looking a bit like a fractal at the moment - which is like that "brocolli" section I've got there. I mean for crying out loud people - get with the programme! Can I remind you "We're falling through the curled up 5th dimension into bodies of matter on an axis of PHYSICAL time that masquerades as an axis of transitory experience. Our experience is like the movement of a current on a circuit fractal. We only go down one pathway per life but in eternity we do actually travel them all - although that's a different story."
Yeah, I don't claim this is my idea from scratch - it's just what seems the logical explanation to me when I read about all the different theories there've been so far. I like the fact that I don't know the maths. Maths seems a bit of a human take on nature. It's like the surface of nature visible to the human eye. The real stuff is in the experience and the imagination I reckon. Did you know that there's this tribe in South America who had 17 different varieties of Ahuasca when the Brits only knew of one. Upon asking the difference between these 17 they were like "What? Don't you know ANYTHING about botany? When you drink the juice of the plant during a full moon, different species will sing to you in a different way." Now I know that sounds strange - but I'm inclined to believe them!
I was just reading that last thing I wrote in here and thinking that I might have been a bit hasty...trying to get away from society altogether. Isn't it "Hello? We're living in a SOCIETY!" that George from Seinfeld always shouts when he's trying to get people to cooperate? He obviously thinks it's something worth having...and he is my idol. I've abandoned Lou Carpenter from Neighbours now.
Anyway that last entry was interesting because I don't normally get emails from people but after writing that I got five people telling me they felt the same. A few of them had found the site through wrongplanet.com though...but I wonder if this Aspergers thing is all it's cracked up to be. I mean I might be a candidate because of my inclination to "button up" and just stay away from people...and yet...is it all worth it? The less you talk to people, the more they want to talk to you. If you want people to phone you - throw your phone away. What surprises me more than the fact that your friends won't give up on you even if you ARE a weird b******d is that I'm really happy when they don't!
I've started thinking that Aspergers is a handy workaround for those who want to opt out. And I want to opt out but if you do use it as an excuse (and I know there are loads of "proper" autistic people who have a lot more challenges than a bit of social reluctance and life-blindness) and you therefore get away with being a hermit...maybe you actually do miss out. And I know this sounds obvious - but if you were an Aspie reading this, you'd know exactly what I mean. For instance, I'm inclined to think that I don't miss out by doing my own thing and staying in the house all day because I feel that the Great Work I'm doing won't get walked all over by the interference of other people's lives. The Great Work by the way is drawing pictures whilst watching TED talks on Youtube and drinking kale juice.
So if like me you need to get away from people...I implore you to give them another chance. My flatmate Jon told me that if you're in doubt about whether to do something or not - like go out to a party or not go to it - then do the positive thing because you'll always feel better afterwards if you do. It's so true - all through school, college and university I shunned going out for a life of writing electro in my room...and I have to say, apart from a few radio jobs...it didn't really get me anywhere! I don't know if I'd do that differently now because when you're that age it probably really IS better to stay "off the scene" but when you're an adult, surely the outside world has better things to offer. No?
How does one go about encouraging onesself to go out in the face of gross provocation from the overactive mind and fear of "a bad time?" I don't know, I haven't worked this out. Drink seems to be a great one there but it would be good if you didn't have to rely on mind altering drugs wouldn't it? There must be a way. One idea I have is that as you LEARN over time that you need friends, any physical differences that might distinguish your brain from a neurotypical - like fewer nuerons in the corpus capsullum - might just MELT AWAY! I mean synapses are forging all the time depending on your experience. Maybe if you force yourself to socialise you influence the evolution of your brain and your Asperger's starts fading.
Well the very term "neuro-typical" is indicative of the Aspie desire to protect neuro-diversity in an age where the herd mentality dominates. They argue that a lot of brilliant people had autism, like, I don't know - Newton (who gave his lectures whether anyone turned up or not!) Einstein, Mozart, ...um...Michael Palin..Lisa from the Simpsons. But I mean, if you're blind - your hearing can be very good - or your brain can be excellent at using your ears anyway...does that mean we should stop trying to cure blindness? I don't know, it's a weird one. I've just come to realise that at the end of the day - life's a bitch but you still have to go out regardless. Perhaps if there's a point to life it is that it's a bitch. I mean if everything was perfect, nothing would have any point to it would it? You wouldn't be able to feel happy if you didn't know what sadness was. So for the greater good - in order to get BETTER we need to skim the depths as well. So don't be afraid of a bad time and wasting your life on getting tangled up in the web of "other people" - you might learn something.
Having said that, I'm looking forward to a night at the computer writing a tune about Waitrose! YAY! YAY! YAY! It's called "Waitrose, where the hate grows." I mean, sorry, it's not about the supermarket - it's an unrelated title spelt "Wait Rose". It's about someone calling out to a woman. Or something. The fact it has the line "It's a Guantanamo Bay for the middle class and gay" is just a coincidence.
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Monday 5th March
Listen to "everything is the same" on the Music Page
Believing, as I do in the power of positive thinking, it's unfortunate that I'm currently terrified at the "cancelled eyes" of everyone around me at the moment. I don't know what you're getting, but I'm getting a lot of "Father Jacks (from sit-com Father Ted)", frantically grasping for titillation and everything temporary and pointless. The best way to describe how I feel about socialising with banalysists right now is to liken my life to the image in a pond. You've just got the reflection into focus and it's just becoming clear enough for you to see and get a handle on when other people come over the wall and jump in the water and the picture is all over the shop. You can't work out what anything is because they've walked trampled their garden mud all over the life you were so nearly getting to grips with. Sounds very melodramatic but everything about a person's own life is isn't it?
The point is, what do you want to do in this instance? What do you want to do if your dog is always walking mud on your kitchen floor after you've cleaned it? You want to keep it out. What if you've got a radio signal and every time someone walks around the room, you lose it again? You want to stop people from coming in. That's how I feel about socialising. I don't want to get tangled up in the web of emotions involved with socialising if it's not actually with people I care about. And I'm not talking about people who don't get visions of what the fabric of spacetime is, I mean grasping little f***ers who endlessly strive for more in their lives at the expense of others. It's not because I think I'm better - it's because I think I'm NOT BETTER. They'll drag me into the pit again! Don't let them drag me into the pit!
As fate would have it, I'm currently working in an office where everyone is outstandingly brilliant. I think every one of them would help every other person out. I only realised my aversion to mixing with certain other people when my flatmate suggested we invite some of them over and I felt physically sick. I can't get tangled up in the web of gossip again - it's not because I'm above it - it's because I'M NOT ABOVE IT! I'll get dragged under! Is there anyone not on drugs out there? I love drink as much as the next person but I like to think I'm striving for a life which won't necessitate total and utter dependence on this kind of escapism. People wonder why kids of today get so lost in sex, drugs, celebrity, fast food, crime, gossip and rivalry and I'm telling you - it's hard to stay out of it! It's really hard! This is the alternative. The desire to get really good at living the way you actually want to and not the way everyone else does (because they're all so f***ing UNHAPPY) makes you a complete and utter freak and pretty much alone. Just writing this, just something serious that doesn't have a joke in it about lesbians does make me lament the chances of ever snaring a man in this town. Unless it's Brian Sewell.
I'm finding it really hard. I want to live away from TV and away from marketing tricks and just with good people I know I can trust. And can you find any situation like this in London? I don't even need to answer that. It's not the battle against it that makes me sad, it's the reaction of other people that literally makes me cry. The raw food thing never causes any upset as people are always interested - it's stuff like not watching TV and taking a proper interest in all the religions and all the scientific and philosophical ideas of the day and not wanting to add to the population crisis and not wanting to burn holes in the atmosphere with exhaust fumes? This is reasonable behaviour! This IS reasonable behaviour! Why do you get branded as weird for thinking about the Big Questions? In an age where people must have fun, thinking is seen as an illness. I don't want other people to do it for Christ's sake, I just want them to leave me alone for doing it myself. I must lighten up. I would lighten up...if it didn't make me so absolutely dead inside that I wanted to throw up.
Look, I'm a reasonable bird. I don't want a serious time here. I want the opposite. I just want to avoid the bollocks, you know? My parents will never know what it's like to live in a real zombie nation. I thought about sending them a few copies of "London Lite" just to show them what Londoners are up agains. It's like the Star on steroids. If you're of the older generation then you don't have to deal with it so much and that's the end of it. Are all your contemporaries smoking pot every day and totally unable to retain facts? Are they repeating the same sentences over and over again every ten minutes? Are they sleeping around for kicks and involved in criminal activity because everyone does it? Are they getting their current affairs and pornography from the same source and then telling you not to believe everything you hear because you read an Anton Wilson book? Do they come up with phrases like "Well I'm not a fan of it, but I only watch Big Brother for the cock"? Do they read articles entitled "My husband cut up my ex boyfriend"? Do they have arguments over weather "Titmus" of "ex-girlfriend to accused rapist" fame is fat or if she's more sexy for a little extra weight? Do they allow idle comments of a true IDIOT who thinks chick peas are made of chicken and Birmingham has a seaside, lead to international unease and the burning of effigies in India? Oh yeah...that last one spans all generations...I'm so tired.
STILL THAT SAID IT'S NOT IRAQ IS IT? I'm not dodging bullets and going without food just yet. And on the bright side, here's a fascinating little idea about science stuff. It's jumbled and very possibly wrong but you know - just everyone get their ideas into the public sphere and together we'll work something out eh? I woke up the other night with some thoughts and here's what I typed...
Oh God no, I've just read it actually and it really IS jumbled up. It's basically about that theory that every moment is an entire universe and it's my explanation as to why when you speed up to lightspeed your mass becomes infinite whilst you look so very thin to the people observing you from their standpoint at rest. It centres around this idea that like current and voltage are related - space and time are related. Y'see when you approach the speed of light you get a lot thinner to the observer. You don't get shorter - you only contract in the direction in which you're moving. Now without any scientific knowledge of anything, I think this must surely be because when you travel near the speed of light, time's going to go slower for you than it will for your friends who aren't moving. So you make a journey to a star and back and you've aged one year, whilst they've aged seven years while you were away. Sneaky.
To me this just cries out that time and space - as they've said - really ARE two sides of the same coin. But I'd take it further than that and say the faster you travel, the less distance you actually have to travel over. I'd say that like you get thinner to the observer at rest - the distance you have in front of you actually contracts as well. And I'd say this because I think the more you catch up with time - which I think is actually the same thing as physical speed itself is - the more material is removed from distance - which I think is padded out with physical time. It's hard to explain. I think the faster you travel, the less distance you have to go over. I think a distance looks fat because some of the fabric in it is actually time...but the faster you travel, and the more you catch up with time itself (which i'd say is going at the speed of light) then the more fabric of the distance you remove from your journey. Oh man it was so clear in my head.
I think I know one thing though - why people look thin when they're travelling fast. It's possibly due to the differences in time lapse for you and for the traveller on their journey. You, the person at rest may age seven years during their journey and they'll only age one. Well that must mean that if you're watching the journey happen, you'll see your own perception of how long it takes. And if you can see how fast it's moving, the only way for it to take the seven years it's going to take is maybe for the front of the train that's travelling (let's call it a train) to move backwards so that it doesn't hit it's destination point prematurely in your perception. Y'see if it's actually going to hit it's destination point in a single year, from it's perspective, and it's going to hit that same point in seven years from your perspective, what choice does the vision you're seeing have but to move the front of the train backwards and the back of the train forwards so that the train, in it's diminished volume might actually have a greater relative distance to travel? It makes the train smaller so the distance it has to travel can be stretched out, in relative terms. That way you can see the right speed at which it's going, it's just that it looks faintly ridiculous. Swings and Roundabouts I guess.
I've got to read some more books on the subject man, I've got a Michio Kaku underneath the leg of a table here.
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Saturday 3rd February
Thoughts
Finished with it.
God I'd love a cheese sandwich! Nearly a year raw and no cravings for any of that chemical cosh and the first one after all this time is a cheese sandwich. I have to say I am disappointed.
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Wednesday 3rd January
Why We Always Choose the Stuff That Doesn't Make us Happy
Heard about an interesting study the other day, conducted on Berkley Students. Well apparently the budget wouldn't extend to lab rats. Students enrolled on a photography course were told to pick their two favourite pictures of the ones they'd taken on a field trip. These two were then blown up and framed on condition that the tutor would get to keep one of them and the students could keep the other.
HERE'S THE INTERESTING PART. One group of students was told that once they'd chosen the photograph they liked the best and handed the other one over, THAT WAS IT, there was no turning back. The other group was told that after they'd handed their photo over, they'd have two weeks to change their mind. Or was it five days now? Details. Anyway the point is both groups were studied for how satisfied they felt with their choice of photograph and obviously the group that knew they couldn't have the other one were a lot happier with their choice than the group who still had the option of swapping it for the other one. This is due to the fact that the second group were still not sure about their choice. Why? Because they were still allowed to be not sure.
This is an interesting metaphor for life and WHY the more you have, the more you want. If you told the students before they enrolled that they could either go on the course where they'd have to make a snap decision about which photo to keep or they could choose the course that gave them more time to think about it - they'd obviously pick the latter. However if you look for the course that makes the participants feel happier with their final choice - it's actually the former. So you'd actually volunteer to go on a course that would leave you feeling less satisfied than the other one on offer. We are so out of touch with what actually makes us happy that we constantly pick the things that don't. Neuro-typical!
Get with the programme people - word on the street is that happiness is relative but the actual ability of the human to "synthesise happiness" i.e. experience happiness provoked by virtually nothing is damaged by choice and the DELUSIONAL notion that happiness is an external thing effected by buying endless shoes etc. You buy the shoes, you wonder why they don't make you as happy as they promised they would - you feel the void, tugging at your ankle socks. You are entering the void. You are having your post forwarded to the void.
Here's an ace quote about capitalism. "Capitalism prevents people from satisfying their natural needs, so it offers them things to satisfy needs they don’t really have, but think they do. Once their false needs are satisfied, people are more inclined to put up with the injustices of capitalism." I won't say where that comes from. Alright already, it's from "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Philosophy." Happy now?
Marx always said that commodity fetishism involves people buying things in order to actually disguise the oppression of capitalism by imagining the commodities themselves contained some kind of power. Someone else who's name I forget now called the way this imagined power gets around society "micro-mechanisms" - fake consumer concepts, so ingrained in our environment that we don’t even realise they're there. I like to call them "social critters", "mental litter" or "thought-commerce chainmail." I don't think anyone cares what I like to call them.
One reason I abandoned Buddhism as a viable religion (and that's just me by the way - and I'm someone who can't follow "Mission Impossible") is because a) it seemed to be based on the religion that was already in the Buddha's village, and b) it seemed to be psychotherapy – good only for the person who was doing it, not so good for love and the perpetuation of the human species. I mean Buddha actually left his wife and child in pursuit of enlightenment. He found it - he found a way to be happy, but what of his wife? An intrinsic part of Buddhism is compassion and I realise that if we were all Buddhists, the world would be a better place, but it’s the abandonment of emotion that gets me.
Anyway, the thing about Buddhism and what it teaches us about happiness, is that you might be happier if you cast aside material possessions. So they reckon, don't get attached to people and try not to desire anything. This you'd think would be a living hell. It is, however, bliss for those who attain enlightenment - or for those who realise that internal happiness that resides in all of us.
In light of the facts, how about this for a paradigm... Cast aside your attachment to the pointless things, ESPECIALLY the CRAP they sell you in London Lite and Home Shopping channels but dive headlong into the perpetual turmoil of proper emotional aspects of life. If you get hurt, so what? – it's the only thing that really quantifies the happiness that's coming to you later.
Before the Buddha attained enlightenment, he really had to sit there for a heck of a long time, facing those demons. I take it from that, that he couldn't get to the happiness without understanding the dark side first. That's why I think you should take a piece of the Buddhist pie and cast aside the commodities that get in the way of your synthesised happiness, then GET attached to the important things in life and DAMN the consequences. You'll be more than a boring happy person - you'll be someone who's actually alive! Wouldn't THAT be something? *slams hand on table.*
IMHO, I think you've really can't afford to miss out on life's turmoil but for crying out loud make sure it's the proper turmoil and not the chemical kosh and cardboard superimpositions of Lun Polly and Heat Magazine. Say this to yourself - it IS the proper turmoil I want. No don't. Say this to yourself - I want the good things that reside in proper reality and Captain Subtext Specs to cut through the tabloid jungle.
Then when you're sad about family stuff/ love issues/ career problems etc. you won't feel short changed by life. Well you might but nowadays I don't - I just feel like I've reached a difficult part of a cliff face and I need to find an alternative foothold if I want to get past it. It's like a giant cliff. *I tried climbing up a rope once – gave up after five minutes due to the friction burns.
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Friday 29th December
Christ-mess
Anyone requiring the set for a post apocalyptic film should look no further than the slums of Dundee. If I had a fiver for every pile of abandoned car tyres and assorted gas drums that I saw along the docks, I'd have enough for a soda water in Brixton! Apart from that and the many hours spent contemplating the carpet tiles of ninewells hospital waiting room, Christmas was fabulous!
It was perhaps in answer to my previous entries that I received "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Philosophy", "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and two books on how to stop worrying. Without any hint of irony, these books are all very welcome if only to punctuate the endless Conspiracy based material I seem to be imbibing at a startling rate. I have to say though, one of the books on worrying does fall down slightly on the first page by stating that one shouldn't worry about being worried, thus negating the object of buying the book. I'm always suspicious of a book that shoots down it's r'aison d'etre on page 1. I wish I could actually speak French.
My sister Kim wasn't with us, but she did send us a Chistmas tree decoration in the shape of a cat so we could pretend she was there...and that we'd just all gone stone deaf. Although she didn't say, she definitely got it because it looks exactly like she does. It was always an annoyance of mine that she has the feline beauty of Angelina Jolie whilst I look like Michael Caine in drag. Can't win them all I suppose. She sent us some pictures she'd taken from her last visit. I can't help but worry that Dad always seems to have a glass in his hand - can we really be that dull a family? I pity him. It can't be easy being perfect.
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Tuesday 14th December
Thanks Diana! We Couldn't Hide the Real News (Blair being Questioned) Without You.
God, the past few days have been dull as hell. I've been sick with this unidentifyable illness that's like flu but isn't and so I've been incapacitated. Every time I've gone over to my computer, the flickering of the screen has made me want to throw up, I've got carsick from reading and I've had to turn over in bed slowly to stop the room from spinning. In fact it's been exactly like having a hangover. When I finally got a sore throat and headache I thought "Thank God! It's a proper illness, I'm not just going mad!" Joy! Anyway, I won't start another lecture but I must just state for the record though - this isn't the work of germs but another bout of detox symptoms so if you start the raw vegan diet and have the same thing - this is what it is ok. And yes I AM sure - I know what caused this episode but as I say, I won't go into it because it IS v boring.
Well that was interesting wasn't it? Sorry. Yeah, I think the point of it all though, is that your creativity sky rockets. Your thinking beings a lot louder in your head. And another major thing - you lose your sense of fear! I was just reading something in the lounge the other day and this mouse shot across the carpet and into the kitchen. I'm not sure what my reaction would've been to that last year but this time I just found myself saying "Oh well eh?" Be funny if I now die of something caught off disease carrying vermin wouldn't it? No no, it'll be gone by tomorrow, I've got a humane trap, although I've got to say, I still don't know how they get around. My flatmate tells me it got in through "holes" whereas my theory was it came in through the door like everyone else.
Seriously though, if I got laughed at for thinking that mice must use the lifts to get to the 8th floor where I work (although they can only actually reach the button for the first floor so have to rely on people to press the higher ones) then why is it that people stand on chairs when they see mice? If it really IS true that they can negotiate eight flights of stairs then I don't think a chairleg is going to present much of a problem...if it IS also true that human shin is their favourite food. God the world is still a big mystery to me sometimes. I better never have kids; they'll outquestion me by the time they're five.
Anyway after days of reading "Computer Music" and "New Scientist" I actually found myself craving the Arse Culture Banalysis you can only find in...every women's magazine on the shelf. It's quite sad isn't it that whilst women are universally stupid, if magazines are to be believed, men are at least polarized into Sex Obsessed Gristle Heads and Autistic Vehicle/ Sport/ Gardening/ Fishing/ Computer Game Enthusiasts. I mean that sounds better - I'd much rather be reading "The Kitchen Garden" than looking at the aftermath of cosmetic surgery gone wrong. Damn...well in an ideal world I would.
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Thursday November 30th
The Reasoning Behind The Idea That If Aliens Are Here, They Must Necessarily Be Friendly
I've been thinking about it, and I reckon that just like He-Man, it's actually true that good always wins. I'd like to argue that in order to prevent a species from dying out, that species must in some way cooperate with it's surroundings and with nature itself because if it instead chooses to exploit it's environment it will necessarily come to harm. I know it's arrogant to make a sweeping statement about evolution but so what? As long as you're not surprised or hurt if your theories turn out to be wrong then who cares? I realise it's a big assertion to make but if it IS true that the evolution of species distills and distills the maverick-take-what-you-can-without-giving-back animals out then by the time a group of animals has evolved sufficient intelligence to get off its planet and come round to ours - it must be "good" and "well-meaning". A race that isn't good or well meaning would have been killed by it's own behaviours.
I got this idea from a game invented back in the 80s. A really boring game. I think it was some kind of psychological experiment or something - useful for getting rid of party guests who just won't leave. Yeah, like I ever have THAT problem. What happened was, someone invented this thing based on the "Prisoner's Dilemma". I don't even know what the Prisoner's Dilemma was to be honest, but I assume it was something about the cops trying to get info out of criminals by saying "if you confess and your friend does, we'll reduce your sentence but if he confesses and you don't he'll get a reduced sentence but your sentence goes up." Something like that. You'd be all like "oh shit, if neither of us confess then we could get off scott free but then again, I don't trust him to trust that I'll stay quiet as well...I bet he's already confessed...I don't want a longer spell in jail" and so on. The game looks like this:
The players have two choices - Cooperate or Defect. They sit apart, so that they can't see what the other one chooses. The number in the upper triangle of each pair indicates the payoff for Player B; the lower triangle, Player A. Higher numbers represent greater payoff for the individual. It relates to the dilemma because it's like saying "if you both stick together and deny committing the crime you'd both get 3 points each - the highest sum total points the pair of you can get" - this would equal no sentence for either party. If one of you defects by going against the other and confessing, depending on whether he's confessed you either get 2 points each or you actually come off better with the highest number of points you can score for yourself, 4, while he bombs out with 1 point. i.e. whoever confesses gets a low sentence whilst the other one gets a higher one whereas if you both confess (so that you've both "defected") lowish sentences will be issued to both of you.
This at first glance has all the glamour of a deckchair but when I heard about this experiement they did to see the best strategies for playing this game for over and over again, you can pretty much see that it resonates with the actual laws of nature and how we should be behaving. Some dude invited people to write computer programmes with a set of rules for how they would play this game if they had, say 100 goes at it. The programmes would have to observe the way the opponent was playing and respond accordingly. Say for instance if the opponent always seemed to be defecting, it seems logical that a well written programme would recognise this and always defect as well.
Of the programmes this dude received, he labelled some as "nice" and some as "nasty". Nice means the programme would never be the first to defect and nasty would mean the programme WOULD defect first in order to try and win the 4 points every now and then. To make it fair, the programmes were played against each other. Each programme would play every other in a kind of atari tournament (God who would admit to conducting one of those) and then the scoreboard would hopefully reveal which was the best strategy for success. Some of the programmes were very simple like "always defect" and some would defect and cooperate at random. Some would look for when the other programme was cooperating and THEN defect to try and get the 4 points whilst some would look for cooperation and only then cooperate. Turns out the winner was a programme called "Tit for Tat". No I've never know what "tat" means either but it seems it holds the key to our future survival on the planet and an insight into the benevolence of more intelligent beings out there making a beeline for Earth.
Tit for Tat basically has one rule - cooperate or defect based on the LAST move of the other player and importantly, start with cooperation. This is therefore a "nice" programme - it won't be the first to defect, and when it sees cooperation in the other player, it will effectively forgive the player's past defections and it too will cooperate. Well the scoreboard showed this was the most effective strategy at the game and ALSO showed that the highest scorers were pretty much ALL "nice" programmes. The lesson, which I think can be seen in nature is that if you can, be nice. Only where being nice will harm you should you cease cooperation. This doesn't appear to be our current tac.
But look around - every other animal that's made it to present day has done so by offering something back to the environment from which it takes. The successful predators out there might appear to be taking and giving nothing back, but the SUCCESSFUL ones are those that don't take too many lives from the herd, but in fact take a few of the weakest to in turn, strengthen the herd as a whole. Along with natural disasters and disease, they are one of the major driving forces behind evolution through survival of the fittest. Fruit is designed so that although you eat it, the seeds go through your body undigested and end up somewhere else embedded in...fertilizer. Fruigivores, like the original human (never been proved) would therefore be a species that gave something back, planting a seed for every fruit consumed. If you look at reasons for a species dying out, these would include overhunting your primary food, polluting your environment and being a general arse, constantly fighting the other animals.
Y'see I've always thought that it IS actually necessary to stick to what you're capable of doing physically since this is how you've evolved up to the point of "tool-making-intelligence" and therefore it's the best way to carry on. A cheetah is only fast enough to catch one gazelle when it's hungry - it can't farm them on mass and eat as much as it wants. We tool making humans however have achieved this and by removing our own limitations we've fooled ourselves into thinking our actual intelligence is without limitation. Aminals have a natural drive in them to preserve and protect and therefore it's natural to want to take as much as you can. Before intelligence a suitable limitation on the amount we COULD take from the environment was afforded by our physical stature. After intelligence our protection instinct mutates into greed. It's exactly the same instinct but if you take the lid off, it goes over to the dark side because it's not some hippy mumbo jumbo that if you hurt, you get hurt - it looks like it's nature's law. Hurt the greater environment, hurt the progress of another species, hurt society and you're hurting yourself. You're hurting your future anyway. Which to some doesn't matter I guess because you won't be here to pay the price. Well that cheers me up at least.
It is quite incredible to realise that 9 times out of 10 we knowingly opt for short term benefit at the expense of long term gain. Look at fossil fuels, global warming, genetically modified foods, and look at the media. Along with the good that can be found through the internet, the media has to be the biggest soul selling monster the world has ever seen. In every area of vileness and depravity it leads us blindly to our own demise set by the trap of our intelligence coupled with our desires. I wouldn't mind but as a young person who's actually got to stick it out for the next 50 years, what pisses me off beyond belief is the fact that we ARE actually intelligent enough to see it and therefore our reason for not acting must be total disregard for ourselves, future generations and the other inhabitants of Earth. I would argue that this necessarily leads to a species dying out. The fact that someone invented that game and investigated the effectiveness of different strategies means we have the recognition of how nature works and all we need to do is to act upon it.
I think we're all aware that aliens probably exist. A sweeping statement perhaps, but for me, it's not so much the vastness of space that makes me believe it, more the fact