Friday 27 August 2010

Men can't help it



Nature hasn't stopped coming up with some very beautiful women.


You see how men are caught.


Friday 20 August 2010

Eidetic Dreaming

Have you ever gone to sleep, dreamed, and recognised that you are dreaming? This is Lucid Dreaming, or Eidetic Dreaming. When it happens, you marvel at the reality of the dream. There is so much incredible detail; you focus on the detail, and it grows in vivid complexity. Could this incredible detail, which surprises you, really have been created by you? Could you be surprising yourself?

No one who experiences this can be a solipsist. Even your own dreams are other.

When you wake up, is your body really you? Do you know exactly what is going on in your own liver? Do you know what is going on in your own kidneys? Your own body is something other than you that needs investigation by you in order to be known (another serious blow to an aspiring solipsist).

Being conscious when you are awake is like knowing that you are dreaming when you are asleep. That is not to say that waking life is the same as dreaming. It isn't. But there is a similarity in that you see everything as extraordinarily vivid and surprising and also you recognise that all creation comes from somewhere else (God). This is the way not to be a zombie! A baby is usually born conscious, and with practice you may well remember what that was like. Being conscious means that you will have an automatic understanding of children.

Saturday 17 July 2010

More on the Living Dead

Ethics can't begin without consciousness. It's no using arguing with a zombie about Tillich or 'the ground of your being' or trying to convince it of the existence of God by some clever Thomist argument. It will just look extremely blank. What use has a zombie for categorical imperatives? Will it lead it to a bigger income or a better house? Will it put food onto its unconscious plate? It will not; so how can we blame the zombie for following its mechanical function? We cannot. To the zombie all these arguments wreak of delayed gratification, and that is not something zombies espouse.

Besides forgiving them 'for they know not what they do', we must also 'leave the dead to bury their own dead'. http://bible.cc/luke/9-60.htm In other words, just let zombies get on with their own business. They belong to the world of shadows.

Saturday 10 July 2010

God

If you are not actually conscious, of course you will not believe in God. But if you are conscious (you really know that you exist) then you will automatically realize that you are in the presence of something completely outside your league. The words something and someone are hopelessly inadequate but if you are conscious you will know what I mean.

The discovery of the mechanism of evolution, or the quasi-electrical circuitry of the brain, has absolutely nothing to do with this question.

Friday 30 April 2010

Science

It is wonderful. It brought us out of the dark ages, sanitised our minds, freed us from hocus-pocus, witches, black magic and all those nightmares that live like maggots in the half light. How did it do it? It did it simply by not believing in the unprovable. Science is therefore directly responsible for cleaning the sheets of our minds and making us nearly pure. A good scientist is what a priest should be: honest, diligent and a searcher-after-truth. How like religion science is! Psychologists are our confessors, social workers our parish priests, physicists our cosmogenists - and all trained in what we call different branches of science.

But let us be careful: you can't arrive at the truth without someone wanting to own it and then make a living out of it. This of course is what happened to Christianity: the great accumulated wealth of the Church and the self-indulgence that followed, brought about the Reformation and gave Luther and Henry VIII (amongst others) something to complain about.

Who then are the Saints of Science? They are the independent workers who stand firm in the presence of the scientific industries (which only want to endorse research that leads to profit). They are the great men and women who manage to keep their physical bodies intact while pursuing an unbiased search for truth.

Is there any way in which Science is an unsatisfying religion? It can satisfy our need to advance towards truth, to find meaning in our lives, to investigate the origins of the world and of the universe, to heal our spiritual malaise, to hand out healing and mind-enhancing drugs, to unite like-minded truth-seekers in social fraternities. What then, can't it do?

There is one place where it might fall a little short. Science, in demanding that experiments must be repeatable, is not very good with one-offs. A lot of our most crucial experiences consist of one-offs.

Secondly, science tends to regard 'outside' as more real than 'inside'. In other words, the visible universe is the bedrock of science and generally considered more 'real' than we are ourselves. So something we glean from electrodes in our brain is considered much more reliable knowledge than something we actually experience directly for ourselves.

It goes without saying that from a scientific point of view when we die, we stop and the world continues, whereas if we put a lot of store by our own consciousness we might well believe that the world stops and we continue; or at least, in the spirit of mature compromise, that both we and the world continue.

Sunday 11 April 2010

Vampires

As I have already said, we have no evidence that everybody is conscious. We can only speak for ourselves. Consciousness is extraordinary. It doesn't tally with an exclusively mechanistic universe. I strongly suspect that people who do not find anything remarkable in it, have not actually experienced it. In other words, Richard Dawkins is partly right: there are people around us who are biological machines, the unconscious product of a mindless and random biological process - they say they have conscious minds, but only because they are programmed to say that.

The only way Jesus Christ was able to forgive his murderers was by recognising that they were in the unconscious category. "They know not what they do."

The people who are conscious are living out a drama set in an ocean of shadows. No wonder they are beset by acts of psychopathic cruelty: the psychopaths are completely unconscious of what they are doing. Resentment or revenge by those who are conscious is completely pointless and forgiveness is easy: you can forgive an insect for biting you because it is merely manifesting its nature.

It may be that people can drift or switch in and out of consciousness.

This is where vampires come in. Unconscious people are the living dead. They cannot be killed because they are dead already. They themselves have no qualms about hurting others, because, being unconscious, they cannot feel sympathy; they can only make a computation about the most opportune behaviour to bring about their own 'survival'. Of course, their survival is not real because they do not actually experience their lives: they are only shadows.

Real consciousness is quite different from the medical definition of consciousness. Someone whose speech or memory is impaired by brain damage (eg as a result of a stroke or Alzheimer's) may be more conscious than someone with a fully functioning brain. A child or even a foetus may be much more conscious than a functioning adult. Real consciousness means knowing that you exist. It is a perpetual state of wonder.

The vampires are dedicated to the 'survival' of their empty shells. This is the process of evolution, the 'survival of the fittest', the relentless sifting and sorting of material nature towards the perfection of a receptacle which may one day shine with real light.

So currently there is a war on between those who are conscious versus the unconscious 'vampires'. Vampire 'survival' amounts merely to genetic survival through a family tree, and ironically enough, survival of the vampire 'culture'. Vampires are programmed to steer themselves to genetic survival - and that means having children.

That doesn't mean all parents are vampires! But it does mean a sort of struggle between those who are conscious and those who are not, about who should spend time with children. Consciousness is an attractive feature and a great threat to vampires. Modern children pretty well always start their lives by being strongly conscious, but as they fall under the influence of the 'living dead' that spontaneous light becomes clouded and polluted. They are, so to speak, 'bitten on the neck' and although those who 'know the light' fight hard to preserve their god-like inner life, politically the vampires are very strong at the moment.

Wednesday 24 March 2010

Good and Evil

Many people think these words do not have a place in the modern world: we are what we are, and what we are is determined by the universe of matter in which we find ourselves. We are helpless trams confined to our rails, and whether we express this fatalism in terms of behaviourism or the new genetic determinism, the fact is that nothing is our fault, and conversely, nothing is to our credit. We are simply the blind product of random physical events, biological evolution being the most recent chapter in this inevitable narrative.

Anyone who knows me well will realise that I don't go along with this. For one thing, we are conscious. Well actually, we don't know that everybody is conscious: we can only speak for ourselves. When Jesus Christ said "Forgive them, for they know not what they do" I take that to mean "Forgive them, because they are not conscious: they are physical machines which function without knowing what they are doing."

Consciousness just doesn't fit in with ancient or modern versions of mechanical fatalism. If we all functioned solely as machines, we would be unaware of it. Then even if a human said, "I am not a machine" she would be like a computer with a voice-recording in her; she wouldn't actually have the slightest idea what she was saying.

If the whole universe were exclusively mechanical, it would function in completely unconscious darkness.

Good is the conscious determination to work for the benefit of the whole picture, not just a selfish part of it.

Evil is the conscious intent to inflict real harm. It seeks self-gratification at the expense of others. It doesn't care about the good of the whole picture. At its very worst, it is like Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost trying to invert the two extremes, expressed in his famous resolution: 'Evil be thou my good'.

If a person isn't conscious, then doing evil is impossible.

Wednesday 17 March 2010

Push for a Golden Age

Usually "pushing" means selfishly advancing one's own career. But here we have a different kind of pushing. Pushing for a golden age means lifting the world up FOR ALL PEOPLE. This means that we can make a tremendous effort without any little corner of ourselves feeling that we shouldn't really be doing it: we can push WITH A TOTALLY CLEAR CONSCIENCE.

Billions of Christians have been dutifully praying the 'Lord's Prayer' secretly believing that it represents no more than an impossible request which God could not conceivably fulfil. 'Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.' How could God possibly make THAT come true? But perhaps they should humour God and Jesus by kneeling and mumbling the words in a very serious holy voice (better in Latin) while secretly thinking how ridiculous these words are.

Now I believe that the world is in a very bad state. But I also believe that it can be transformed. I believe in steady, long-term, improvement, but I also believe in the occasional dramatic turn for the better which can be brought about by KNOWING the right screw to adjust by exactly the right amount - the neat tweak that makes all the good work of the past suddenly come to fruition.

Sunday 14 March 2010

The Neat Tweak

I used to service my own vehicles. There used to be a carburettor and a distributor. If these were not set correctly, the whole vehicle would splutter helplessly without power. In other words, the whole machine, the culmination of thousands of years of research and quite possibly costing a lot of money, would suddenly become a pile of useless junk.

My first vehicle (which I shared with my brother when I was only fifteen) was an old left-hand-drive Willys Jeep. After re boring the cylinders, grinding the valves, putting in new gaskets and spending a great deal of time and love on it, it still wouldn't go properly. It spluttered and stalled and we thought that all the time and effort we had spent on it had been utterly wasted: now it was only fit for the scrap-heap.

That was when we discovered the magic of the NEAT TWEAK. There were two: one was to loosen the distributor and push it clockwise or anti-clockwise. The other was to adjust a little screw in the carburettor that controlled the amount of fuel sent to the cylinders.

These two tiny adjustments made the difference between a pile of junk and an exhilaratingly useful vehicle.

Sometimes a tiny adjustment can bring about a huge and earth-changing result. Certainly steady work and sustained effort by millions of people is indispensable. But sometimes all that work appears to be fruitless and in comes somebody with a tiny screwdriver and puts the whole thing right (probably taking all the glory) with a single NEAT TWEAK.

Saturday 13 March 2010

Crime rate up. Economic downturn. Murders. Knife crime. Kids running riot. Dishonesty. Distrustfulness. Alienation. What is going on?


Given the power, I believe I could put the whole world back on track within fifteen years. I can SEE WHAT THE PROBLEM IS. When you look at the facts you will see just how obvious it is.


Would you like to see the world improve? Would you like order to come back to our cities? Would you like to see our children excel in education? Would you like family life to become stable again? Would you like the streets to be safe? Would you like prosperity to be so common that everyone expects it?

If your answer is yes, follow this blog.