Second Life

In recent years there has been an explosion in 3-D virtual world reality games played on the computer . I quote from the website of one the most popular games Second Life :

        ' Second Life is a 3-D virtual world created by its Residents . Since opening to the public in 2003 , it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by millions of Residents from around the globe .

        From the moment you enter the world you'll discover a vast digital continent , teeming with people , entertainment , experiences and opportunity .Once you've explored a bit , perhaps you'll find a perfect parcel of land to build your house or business.

        You'll also be surrounded by the Creations of your fellow Residents . Because residents retain intellectual property rights in their digital creations , they can buy , sell and trade with other Residents.

        The marketplace currently supports millions of dollars in monthly transactions . This commerce is handled with the inworld unit of trade , the Linden dollar , which can be converted to US dollars at several thriving online dollar exchanges . '

        There was a news report a few weeks back about a couple , Amy and David Taylor who had divorced because of Mr Taylor's adultery with another player in the virtual game . This had not actually happened in real life but Mrs Taylor considered it enough grounds for divorce . In effect she believed that Second Life was real . Their story was on the television and in the newspapers and everyone had a good laugh at them . The problem with this attitude is that if they were stupid to believe in the reality of Second Life , then the whole of the World is just as stupid . Because nothing we see in this world is real – it is only imagined . We are at the controls of a game and have convinced ourselves that this is ' Real Life ' . There is no physical matter .In reality everything is non material and it is our addiction to the physical world that keeps it going and it is only through our Minds do we see what we see . We are not suffering or in pain of any kind unless we think so .

The New World Order

There are a large number of people who believe that there is a world wide conspiracy to create a World government , whose aim is to enslave the global population and create a world similar to Nazi Germany or Stalinist government .In many ways I would agree with this as there appears to be a growing tendency to centralise power far away from the individual with such organisations as the European Union and global corporations who are answerable to no one and can move from one country to another at a moments notice . There is a definite tendency for governments , all over the world , to behave in a more dictatorial way treating their own peoples with suspicion and in some countries as the enemy . The surveillance culture , with the huge number of cameras we now see , and increasing legal powers to spy on e mails and telephone calls are an indication of this paranoid state of mind .

The only real difference I have with the ' conspiracy theorists ' is my belief that the World government has always been with us and that we are only now beginning to see the real picture . A government mind- set has existed since the beginning of this world , with the first example being Moses and the Ten Commandments . In much the same way that we have personal egos , telling us what to do and how to live our lives this government mind-set is a Super Ego which is literally trying to control everything in the world and again like our personal ego , it has nothing to offer us .

This Super Ego has four main planks to its control of the world . Firstly through the various governments and its power over the Legal systems and financial organizations . Through the legal system it dictates what we can and cannot do and through the financial system it ensures that the vast majority of individuals in this world have meagre financial resources , whilst retaining the vast majority of wealth in its own favoured positions such as Banks and Corporations . Secondly it uses the various religions of the world to tell us how to behave . The Ten Commandments are a very good example of this – if Gordon Brown went up a mountain and returned to 10 Downing Street with tablets from God telling us what to do , I hope that we would be mature enough to tell him where to go ! The Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades are perfect illustrations of this religious zeal to dictate to people how to live their spiritual lives . ' No sex before marriage ' has been another way for the various religions to control us . God , Life or The Universe or whatever your take is on the spiritual never tells us how to lives our lives or what to do . It is only the Ego that does this .

The third string to the bow of the Super Ego is Education . Tony Blairs famous calling for ' Education , Education , Education ' , whilst probably coming from a genuine desire for our children to receive decent schooling , shows us the Super Egos desire to instruct our children as to how to think. Many times , I have heard how important education is as it shows children how to live in this world . This is not true – it shows children how it wants them to live in this world . When we are young we are very impressionable and tend to listen to authority figures and trust them to guide us . The problem is that these various authority figures are caught up in the trap and so the same ideas are passed down from one generation to another . Schools and universities are a main propaganda tool to mould and smooth the personalities of the young as how to think and behave . The last system used , is the Media . Via television , the movies and sports it can subliminally put ideas into people . Our subconscious believes everything it sees to be true and it is only our concious mind that filters the visions that we see . However , by continual media messages through the News , films and entertainment programmes our conscious mind will eventually believe what we are meant to . The other advantage that this propaganda means has is, that whilst watching moving pictures on film we are put into a light hypnotic trance in which we are more suggestible than we would normally be and prolonged viewing will eventually slow down our conscious mind and reduce our cognitive abilities to think for ourselves . This has become a main instrument for the Super Ego to implant what it wants to into our minds .

Like our personal ego , the individuals who work for these organisations have no idea how they are being manipulated and in the main probably feel that they are doing a service for humanity . I used to work for a major UK Bank and , with hindsight , it is amazing how easy it is to get sucked into a certain mind-set but what I found is that the higher up the hierarchy people go , the more they get locked in . It is almost like a form of possession where the mind is given up to the wishes and interest of the organisation and are bribed with financial rewards to keep them in line . At the very top of Government ,Banks, Religions , Education and the Media the individuals are almost totally linked into the Super Ego way of thinking and are only there to serve its interests . The recent Presidential victory of Barack Obama will ultimately be disappointing as he too , is only there to continue its control . It is not concerned with you in the slightest and actually hates you . Everything it does is for itself and is only interested in its survival and power , however shiny and alluring it may seem to be . Over the next few years I expect more and more of the Super Ego to reveal itself to us as the governments of the world will attempt to morph into each other and become more brutal and totalitarian as its resistance to the resurgent spiritual energy that is currently radiating across our world will increase . But do not despair – its end is at hand . It is doomed to die and when it accepts its death , it will be reborn as it is actually the sum of our One Mind . Interesting times are ahead .

Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider was switched on today at 8 am. There is tremendous excitement in the media regarding this event , calling it the Second Big Bang and some scientists have suggested that Black holes could be created which would suck the whole universe into them and destroy all matter . The media seems to love ' End of the World ' stories . However the scale and imagination of the project is impressive , whilst completely ununderstandable to lay people like me , who received a U grade in my Physics O Level . I will cheat and quote from today's Times , which attempts to make sense of it :

' In a tunnel buried 100 metres below ground , on the shores of Lake Geneva , scientists will attempt to thread a stream of sub-atomic particles around a 27 km ( 17 mile ) ring without touching the sides . When the protons snake all the way around the circle , and begin to orbit it more than 11000 times a second , a new eye will have been cast on the nature of everything .

Within a few months , the particle accelerator will start to condense its protons into beams a quarter of the diameter of the human hair , and to fling them together at 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light .The resulting collisions will generate energy so intense that such conditions have not existed since a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang , throwing sub-atomic debris into vast detectors .These detectors will track and see new particles and perhaps even new dimensions – structural components of the cosmos about which we have been able to guess , but not to know . '

To the vast majority of the human race , this is gobbledegook and we can only sit back and praise the scientists on their incredible intelligence . But there is a flaw in this grand experiment – namely that there is no physical matter . The world we see is not real . The sun , the stars , the moon and the planets do not exist . The computer screen you are looking at , is not there . Everything we observe is imagined ie. it is in our Mind . In fact the one thing that keeps the physical world real to us is the belief that it is real.

It is just the same with Quantum Physics and all micro physics . The scientists are analysing nothing . Our Ego , which sees itself As 'I', rather than the whole of the Universe which we are , urges us to research and analyse the physical , as this keeps us in the prison of addiction to the world . Life cannot be analysed and researched . Our logical , human brain will attempt to do this , but will always fail . Life just is and the more one philosophises on it , the more you come to understand what a huge waste of time it is trying to explain it . In my opinion , the world we see is a symbolic representation of our Mind but no more than that .The ' discoveries ' that come from the Large Hadron Collider , however interesting , will only be figments of our imagination .

The Holy Grail

The search for the Holy Grail is one of the most enduring spiritual legends and also the subject of one of my favourite films – Monty Python and the Holy Grail. As I understand the story , it was the cup which Jesus used at the Last Supper , but it has become a symbol for the spiritual search.

There is something inside , which pushes us to search for the intangible , which we feel is missing from us .We feel if we could just find it , we would then be complete . The outside world glitters with material wonders and we look to this to fill the hole . Money , relationships and addictions are some of the ' false idols ' we use , but even when these fail we keep on searching .

There is a mistaken idea behind all this searching . There is nothing to search for – Life is the Holy Grail .The world is fine and so is everything within it . Nothing needs changing or adding to – no part of Life is better than the other . You are what you have been searching for and so is everyone else . It may be hard to stomach but your worse enemy is the Holy Grail , even though as they say in Monty Python his mother is a hamster and his father smells of elderberries . You are the end of the search , believe it or not .

Sympathy for The Devil

I have been struggling with my inner Alf Garnett . Alf Garnett was the leading figure in the 1960s sitcom Til Death Do Us Part , who astounded the nation with his racist , mysoginistic and homophobic ways . He was seen as a bigot but was actually a bewildered man who could not cope with change and ranted against a world he did not recognize any more . Close to where I live , there is a Moslem mosque which causes all sorts of parking problems and when my driveway is blocked by one of the Mosque goers , I feel hate for moslems . When I am cut up by a woman driver , who are getting incredibly aggressive , I feel hate for women . When there is a gay guy in front of me ,holding me up in the supermarket I feel hate for gays . But then the guilt hits me – I shouldn't have these feelings .Society says so . The problem is that we all feel hate – the Moslem hates , women hate and gays hate , but we are supposed not to have these thoughts . We even have Thought Police now telling you what you can and cannot think . It won't work –these feelings cannot be denied and the more they are suppressed the worse the final outcome will be.

Sometimes I wish I was the Devil . He can do whatever he wants – if the Devil wants to smoke in a pub , womanise , swear , get drunk he will do it . But the best part is that he never gets punished . I think we can assume that God is ok with this as the Devil has being going since the beginning of time and nothing has been done about him . He appears to have total freedom – death, destruction , murder . Anything goes . He is guiltless and I feel jealous of this . Guilt is the most pernicious of our ' negative ' feelings .It stops us doing what we want to do and leads to repression and eventual frustration in ourselves and the world .The definition of guiltlessness would be innocence , but in our ' Alice in Wonderland ' world it is supposedly God who sees wrong but the Devil who is innocent .I do not believe in either a literal God or Devil .Our beliefs are topsy turvy – where guilt is good and innocence bad . It is Guilt where all the fear , anger and hate come from . Innocence is where Love comes from .

All Our Yesterdays

Everything that we experience through our bodies is the past . Any object that you see takes time to reach your senses through light waves – anything you hear is received by sound waves after a short period of time . This might only take a milli-second for our senses to receive this information , but it is still in the past when your brain decodes this information . This goes for all our senses . We are literally living in the past .

Nostalgia is the sentimental yearning for the past . We mythologise our childhoods and convince ourselves that life was so much better at such and such a time . Again , we are living in the past . Our whole world is in the past . We fantasize about the future , but when we get there it is the past we see .

Philosophers talk about living in the ' Now ' . It is only through our spiritual selves can we actually do this . Our body lives in linear time seeing a past and future , but when we live in the Now , it will push us to think about the future or the past . They do not actually exist . As the old saying goes : Tomorrow never comes . This is most important for our relationships to realise that we are seeing people as they were and not as they are at this moment . We see them through our past experiences and react accordingly . It is only in the present moment , will we be able to see people in their true light and it is only in the present moment will you be able to see your true self.

The Wicker Man

Over the weekend I re-watched the great film The Wicker Man , starring Christopher Lee , Edward Woodward and Britt Ekland . I last saw this sometime in the 1980's when I was not really interested in the religious subplot of the film , but just watched it as a straightforward thriller . On second viewing , it is the spiritual contrast between the Christian policeman and the Pagan inhabitants of the Scottish island which jumped out at me , even though it still remains the capacity to shock and the climax at the end , when the Wicker Man finally appears is still a classic scary movie moment.

For those who have not seen the film I will give a synopsis . A serious , deeply religious christian Scottish police sergeant , Neil Howie receives information that a young girl has gone missing on a remote Scottish island , in an anonymous letter . The sergeant flies to the island , Summerisle, to investigate .He shows a photograph of the missing girl to the locals , but they deny her existence . Howie starts noticing the islanders' bizarre customs and lifestyles with increasing incredulity and anger and eventually meets Lord Summerisle who explains that they are all practicing Pagans , who have rejected Christianity on the grounds that it didn't work . Whilst they practiced Christianity the islanders were forced to eke out a living , but since they forced out the Christian minister and followed a pagan lifestyle ( lots of sex and alcohol ) the island has become abundant and something of a paradise . Howie is deeply offended and accuses them of murdering the girl as part of a bizarre ritual to ensure a bountiful harvest , as the last one had failed .He then attempts to leave the island in order to report to the Chief constable of the West Highland constabulary , but finds that his plane has been sabotaged and he is unable to leave .

Attempting to save the girl , who he has now decided is alive , but is to be sacrificed on May 1^st he finds himself involved in a strange ceremony dressed as Punch .He finds the girl and tries to escape with her , but is drawn back to the islanders and Lord Summerisle who explains that the disappearance of the girl was just a ruse to lure the policeman to the island and that it was him they wanted , as it was their belief that his sacrifice due to his virginal and ' pure ' Christian life will appease their pagan gods and will ensure a good harvest for the island . He is then led to a huge Wicker Man and is duly burnt alive,reciting Psalm 23 , and the film then ends.

One senses that the film makers are firmly on the side of the pagan islanders and their lifestyle seems a hell of a lot more fun than the repressed policeman's life . If I had to choose between the two I would definitely go with the pagans , but without the human sacrifice , as having sex with a young Britt Ekland seems part of the deal . It is also interesting that the island needs no police , implying that repression leads to crime , a view that I concur with . But the two archetypes , Sacrifice and' Death and Rebirth ' are what chiefly interested me .

Firstly , Sacrifice –both the Paganism and Christianity depicted in the film are concerned with sacrifice . With the pagans it is more overt , with their rituals and actual human sacrifice , but with the policeman it is slightly different . In his Christianity he seems to have to give up a part of himself and live a life of deprivation without sex even though it is obvious that his inner stud is crying out for it and a singing , naked Britt Ekland banging on the walls of his hotel does not help matters much . The fact that the islanders seem to be having so much fun also accentuates his discomfort . But in both cases , it implies that God , in the case of Neil Howie and the Gods , with the Pagans , need something from us . Is this true ? – would omnipotent beings want our meagre belongings . This doesn't seem very likely to me and is in fact the projection of our negative ego , which is needy , onto God or the Gods and our view of sacrifice is just a reflection of ourselves . The very belief that the world is not abundant and that we have to give up something of us to a needy Universe is wrong , in my view , and actually causes the problems . The Universe wants to give to us- we are the ones who are trying to take .

The second theme in the film is Death and Rebirth .The pub in the film is called The Green Man , who is a figure who dies and then is reborn .He is often linked to the Green Knight who Sir Gawain fights in the Arthurian legends . Whatever limb Gawain cuts from the Green knight regrows and Gawain finds that he is indestructible . The pagans in the Wicker Man believed that by sacrificing the policeman , he would be reborn in the harvest and simply transform from one state of being to another and the policeman , himself , believed that he would be resurrected in Christ's arms , once he was dead . Actually , the story of Jesus' death is a Death/Rebirth tale so maybe Lord Summerisle and Neil Howie weren't so different after all. All this presupposes that death and birth are real and again I believe that we have got this wrong and that it is only our beliefs that make it so . The pagan's belief in the forces of the Sun and other natural forces for life are erroneous . It is only our bodies that need sustenance and we are not our bodies .

Anyway , I would highly recommend the film to anybody who has not yet seen it .The acting is great especially from Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee and the movie can be enjoyed on different levels . Britt Ekland isn't bad either !