A Pep-talk from Aadi

"It isn't your time. I didn't expect you to ever just visit me! Tell me, dear one, why are you here?"

It had been years since the last time I had been with Aadi, the spirit who had guided me so much along my way toward wholeness. I knew that she didn't live in any particular time. In point of fact, Aadi didn't live in time at all, but in all time, or better put, she lived in no time. But in at least one way, she seemed to be, like me, bound to an existence where bodies and their senses matter, in spite of the way she moved through time and space freely. 

I said out loud, "Aadi, I don't know what you mean by 'It isn't your time'. I've been thinking about you and how you helped me in the past. Is there something we haven't talked about that I need to know right now?"

"You are surrounded and concerned about events that are like a drama that gets more and more tragic. My dear humans, all of you, all of us, are temporarily bound to this world of senses and events, with all of its drama," 

Aadi communicated this (she didn't talk, but I could hear her) and there was such great sadness in that thought. I had to know what else there could be besides worlds of senses and events, and knowing this thought she continued ...

"but you already know that beyond all senses, beyond emotion, desire, loneliness, there is another experience that transcends them all. Because you are human, you have given it a name, love, but you experience it as so much more than any word can convey. You are surrounded by it, always, beyond what you call time. I was expecting that our next encounter would mean you were filled up with that love, prepared to pass beyond the illusion that is this world."

I had always wondered about the nature of the timeless quality that Aadi had which I couldn't experience. Could it be that being bound up by my ego, and my desperate need to use my senses and label things, is what is holding me back from some further transformation that I need? Suddenly the story of Thomas, the Apostle of Jesus, came to mind. Aadi didn't need me to say it. 

"Yes that story of Thomas has been used to bind us more tightly to this world, hasn't it?"

I must have seemed puzzled, so she continued. 

"It is part of our long journey. Along that path we think various things about what is beyond life. We imagine salvation, a reward that we get, like money, for worshipping gods or doing deeds. Then we believe that salvation is what we get when we give up things like sex. Belief in things like sin or violence binds us tighter and tighter to the world, doesn't it? There have been so many stops along the way. Eventually we even doubt that there is anything more than this cycle of living and dying. The story of Doubting Thomas is about the need to find salvation first-hand, in the physical world. That need makes us turn away from an ineffable love that is beyond the physical. Our deepest beliefs either tie us to the world or release us from it."

'Hearing' Aadi say that puzzled me at first but in the context of what she had told me already, that what is true and eternal doesn't live in the physical but in love, I knew that in order to accept what is true and good in the spirit requires much more than actions or faith. It requires that we accept something far simpler than this complex, but temporary, reality that we live in. Thomas might have been wanting more than just evidence of death and resurrection. Perhaps he was hoping to find a way to understand what more there was beyond a broken and painful body. Perhaps the truth about Thomas' doubtful nature was more about experiencing some sort of eternal love. Sadly, religions and histories tend to be mostly about those who create them and write them down. 

"You don't experience existence without time because we are here to learn and grow beyond time and everything else in this ego-centred world. Blessed are all who know love now because they have touched, seen, and, finally, accepted that there is so much more than sensation attached to what seem like actions. When it is your time, you will be prepared to abandon what you call ego. When all that is left is the thing you call love, it will be your time."

I felt overwhelmed and joyful at the same time. 

"Oh, my dear, you are so close. Stay longer. There is more to learn." 

In my mind, I thought how frustrating it must be trying to tell beings, who rely on senses and language, about a reality that cannot be felt or seen. Immediately I heard her voice in my head:

"Think of waking up after a bad dream. Remember the relief of knowing that none of that dream was really true or important - just a dream. It will be your time when you come to me, feeling that way about all of your adventures in the body, but rather than being relieved because it was bad, you accept that all of it was purposeful. It will be your time when you feel nothing but love for all of those versions of yourself, just as I do." 

Being Manipulated

When I was a teenager, a relative whose opinion I respected declared that too many people only have ideas that are put in their head by others. Of course telling me this might simply have been his way of encouraging me to think for myself. 

That relative was fond of good conversation. He would never have suggested that anyone who was part of the gathering should be forced to accept another's ideas. We were expected to listen respectfully before being given a chance to reply with our own thoughts on that subject. This implied that we were expected to have our own thoughts. We were also expected to be able to defend what we thought with facts. 

The art of conversation has changed over the years. The chances for long conversations seem to have become rare. The closest thing for me is a long-distance chat 'online' with a good friend most evenings. But even then, we aren't expected to devote ourselves totally to the chat. 

My relative could never have imagined the internet. He based his judgement on observing people simply regurgitating what they had heard on the news broadcast, or in a newspaper, rather than synthesizing those bits of information into something original. He felt a mindlessness was creeping into our world, in the same way that protesters chant at rallies. 

I bring this up now because it seems more difficult to get information that isn't loaded with bias and judgement. When I pay attention to media, (anti)social or otherwise, it feels less like information and more like manipulation. It isn't even subtle anymore. 

Let's have a discussion. Or at least, have a think, then come to your own conclusions.

Here are three videos at different levels on the topic of manipulation in the modern age.

If you are concerned about the effects of the social media echo chamber, this video might be one to pass along to a school-aged family member:

For someone a bit older, this youth TED talk:

and for the adults in the room, how social media drives extremism.  

Question Things

As a life-long fixer and teacher, I feel that, if I do nothing to try to help the world understand a danger we face, it will haunt me. 

What danger, you say? 

As Brian Klaas wrote in his book Fluke

".... the printing press, newspapers, radio transmission, and TV broadcasts all expanded the number of people who could consume information. The internet is fundamentally different. It's a revolution that has, for the first time in history, created an explosion in who can create widely disseminated information. It's a fundamental shift: from few-to-many communication to many-to-many communication. Ideas, even false ones, spur action, and billions are now being exposed to new ideas at a rate greater than has ever before existed."*

While the internet changed everything, artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating the change. At one time seeing is believing was a good rule. That is no longer true with AI and its ability to create false video and soundtrack. We have the choice to either check the source or risk being mislead. 

I don't know how, but somehow we as a society must sell a new fundamental knowing to ourselves and our children: 

    Truth and reality can only be found in first-hand experiences, and more, that experience cannot be coming through some electronic device. If we read it on our computer, or see it on a screen it could be, likely has been made up, edited, or severely altered by somebody or something. 

George Carlin said: 

"[It’s] not important to get children to read. Children who wanna read are gonna read. Kids who want to learn to read [are] going to learn to read. [It’s] much more important to teach children to QUESTION what they read.

Children should be taught to question everything. To question everything they read, everything they hear. Children should be taught to question authority. Parents never teach their children to question authority because parents are authority figures themselves, and they don’t want to undermine their own bullshit inside the household. So they stroke the kid and the kid strokes them, and they all stroke each other ..."**

Question what you read or see online or in the media. We can change the future, but only if we take time to question things.

*p.103 FLUKE - CHANCE, CHAOS, AND WHY EVERYTHING WE DO MATTERS; Brian Klaas, Scribner, 2024

** It's Bad for Ya (2008)
https://georgecarlin.net/discog/itsbadforya.html

Good Deeds Or?

And now, as they say, for something completely different - a bit of fiction. 

I'm not feeble (yet) but I am getting on, so generally I take my time when walking along a sidewalk. If I have to cross a street, I usually go out of my way to use a traffic light crossing, but not always. 

On this particular day, I wanted to get across at a spot where the nearest traffic light was a bit too far, so I was standing on the sidewalk, clearly waiting to cross when there was a break in the traffic. A small crowd of folks were coming along and when they reached me, a pre-teen in the group asked if she could help me get across the road. Figuring she needed to get her badge or some such thing, I said "sure, that would be lovely". She took my elbow and we started across. I did notice another other person who was also crossing at the same time, but didn't think anything of it until afterward.

The young lady was chatting to me about the day and the weather. Finally we got to the other side and as I was about to say goodbye and carry on in my errand, the adult who had crossed with us, yelled "Cut!" 

No, none of that happened. Yet something similar might have happened to some other older woman, given the recent flood of Good Samaritan videos that are appearing on social media. 

In the latest online example, a chap carrying a backpack and pushing a baby in a stroller is shown trying to get everything up to the top of the stairs in a subway exit. As he is almost t0 the top carrying the backpack and the baby, another chap rushes up the stairs grabs the backpack out of the man's arms and keeps going. "Oh no!" you might think, that guy just stole the backpack, but no, he drops the pack at the top then rushes down to the bottom where he picks up the stroller and carries it up to the street level to re-unite the stroller, parent, baby, and backpack in an "oh-isn't-that-wonderful" moment.

Have we in media-land just witnessed a random act of kindness? Well, yes and no. Clearly the video was not from a security camera. Someone was holding that camera. Well, actually, two someones were holding the cameras. Either that or everyone went back downstairs and they shot the whole thing again from the top of the stairs so that it could all be spliced together into a well-composed vid. What we have really witnessed was a staged good deed. 

In my generous moments, I figure these videos might simply be an attempt to convince us that helping others in need is a good thing. I am not sure, but even though I have a suspicious nature there doesn't seem to be any subversion going on here. It might be, as K suggests, that these things actually happened and these videos are just dramatizing the event to put something good on the internet. There is always lots of bad news. 

In those suspicious moments, I ask "where is the money coming from to produce these very professional looking vignettes?"

For now, I shall file it all under the heading "things that make me say hmm... "

How Many Monkeys?

Almost eleven years ago, in another blog, I introduced several fictional characters to the world. What often amazes me is how characters who we imagine are our creation sometimes turn out to be at least as real as we are. In some senses, they choose us. In the case of one, Aadi, her choice to reveal herself might have saved my life.  

In that post, calling my curiosity an endearing quality (s)he confirmed an idea that I had somehow discovered by intuition - the idea that the world that our consciousness resides in is but one of a seemingly infinite collection. She told me that I should "Stop by and visit again" if I got stuck. I did visit her again, but never with knowledge that physicists are now widely accepting a theory of reality known as the "Many-Worlds Theory of Quantum Mechanics"*. 

The idea proposed, in a paper entitled "The Theory of the Universal Wave Function" by doctoral candidate Hugh Everett in 1957 was an elegant solution to many problems that had bothered the minds of physicists, such as Albert Einstein, among others. Yet, at the time of its publishing, most rejected Everett's thesis.

I recall seeing somewhere the idea that if you had enough monkeys playing with typewriters (yes, it was that long ago) one of them would eventually type out the complete works of Shakespeare. Clearly this sort of mind game requires a very large number of monkeys yet this seems to be the answer to a great number of puzzles in the world. 

For example, we could ask how it could be that an animal could be created that had the ability to fly silently at night, to detect food on the ground below, and to catch it. For a very long time, we reasoned that a god was responsible. There might indeed be a god or goddess at work as well, but a great number of us now believe that a fellow named Charles Darwin got it right with his natural selection theory. Given enough time, creatures 'evolve', because genetic mutations that give them some small or large advantage (like flight or night vision) will tend to breed and pass these advantages along. Given enough time, and small mutations, you end up with an owl. 

Another example is 'the miracle' that is planet Earth. How could we be so lucky as to be placed upon a planet that has all of the advantages of Earth? The simple answer is that if we hadn't been evolving on this planet, but instead on Mars say, we would never have survived. We only exist because we are here. No supernatural force is needed in this explanation. We know very well now that there are billions of other planets circling billions of stars in billions of galaxies (thank you, Carl Sagan). We might be the only 'lucky' ones. But is it really lucky or supernatural that we are here and being here means having life?

I recall a particularly religious family member saying to us "everything happens for a reason". Over the decades since, many of the seemingly religion-associated ideas have managed to turn themselves into ideas that make sense in very different ways from what those family members could have thought. For example, the admonition "Thou Shalt Not Kill" was converted in my mind to "Thou Cannot Kill", a promise that while we have a body that decays (even while we are in it) we are not our body. An essential part of us won't die when that body is no longer able to support us. 

In the case of everything happens for a reason, the fact (strange as it seems) is that everything does happen but we are only conscious of one particular version of the universe. We are blissfully unaware of the others where we are either very different from who we think we are or where we don't exist at all. 

*If you are an avid reader here, you might remember another post on the "Many Worlds Theory". Get entangled here. 

It Actually Is ...

This monologue opens one of my favourite movies. I expect a few others feel the same way. 

“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. 

General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. 

When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love. 

If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love, actually, is all around.” 

No, I don't have my head in the sand. There is so much to be sad about in this world. Still, I believe that no matter where you go, there is love between individuals, too. 

Let's be good to one another. Please. 

Why?

As a child, everything that happened or was expected of me required an answer to that simple question. I was definitely an annoying child but luckily I grew up with loving folks who tolerated my curious (and persistent) nature. Yet, for a very long time, being grown up meant losing my 'why' obsession. I think this had to do with the feeling that life was without purpose. Life seemed for a long time to be something to be endured.

Fortunately, in my mid-thirties, I regained a small share of that childhood curiosity. The documents, transcribed in 2016 beginning here, written in the late 1980s mostly, came about because of an obsession with knowing if life, my life in particular, had a purpose. I cannot imagine my life now without referring to the answer that came to me then and lives inside me.

In the video below Rabbi Simon Jacobson delves into the question of what gives life purpose and gives an answer that I can relate to very strongly. I particularly appreciate that while he approaches his attempt to answer that question from a Biblical scholar and Kabbalist's perspective, he shows great respect for the intelligence and background of his listener. As he quotes in his talk “the God you don't believe in, I don't believe in, too". 

Wisdom comes only when you stop looking for it and start living the life the Creator intended for you. — Hopi proverb