jack oughton - incessant typing

Incessant Typing // Jack Oughton http://jackoughtonwriter.info // https://www.facebook.com/jack.oughton.writer //

2013: CC BY-NC-SA // Wanna chat? Tweet @koukouvaya

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“The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.” ~ Hubert H. Humphrey

About this book / Preface: Hi there. I'm going to try and put you into a box (not literally of course) You can be placed into two categories. In the first, you've read my stuff before and presumably have found a reason for coming back. If this is the case, hello again and thanks for returning. I look forward to your responses to my ongoing attempt to stir up controversies and new understandings in your consciousness. The second category, you've not read any of the stuff I have written and you've somehow come across this book. If so, hello, and welcome. I'll give you an outline of what to expect from it… This book contains all the stuff that is just too weird to go anywhere that'll pay me to write about it. But it's the stuff that I want to write. Maybe there are some gems in here for you. I hope so… I wrote these pieces as things for ‘seekers’ and ‘freethinkers’. And, that said, this is probably not the kind of book that is going to get a publisher. But that’s OK, this book was completely written in the spirit of ‘fuck it, let’s see what happens’. Or as a more…well spoken writer might term it, ‘embracing serendipity’… It's also another experiment in self-publishing. Will I get more readers if I present my work in book format and give it away? Who knows…? So lets see what happens. Also, hyperlinks embedded in the document look like this.

What does the book contain?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink



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Well, it's a series of essays off of Demysticism, my ‘wisdom blog’ /

‘esoteric’ writings. Since they're written for the web, the essays are usually short. Which is good for you, the reader. Y’all (understandably) hate long tracts, right? The words are an attempt to distill and purify some the most insightful moments and important lessons that I’ve learned so far. And then sharing with others These writings are an attempt at continual reunderstanding and reinterpretation of what is taken for 'reality'. Challenging assumptions and rebuilding and improving upon the Zeitgeist.

What to do with the writings Whatever you want. I’d suggest that you eat it with your brain. It's licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA license. So share far and wide and tell people if you want. Or don't if you don't want to. Whatever works for you. If you liked it, or you had any powerful insights please buy me a

coffee. Or don't if you don't want to do that either. I thought I'd just put it out there.

What can you expect to gain from the book? New ideas presented in the old way and old ideas presented in a new way. And everything inbetween. And probably some stuff that’s completely wrong and bollocks. And perhaps a few ‘Aha’ moments. Subjects touched upon include science, sociology, futurism, psychology, ‘metaphysics’, spirituality and I suppose what some call ‘self improvement’ (though I’m of the opinion you can turn anything you read into self improvement if you find a way to apply it…). Anyway, I don’t claim to be an expert on any of these subjects, I’m just a curious person.

http://demysticism.co.uk/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=HTPX5HNTXVAVY

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=HTPX5HNTXVAVY



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Most books have a unifying theme. It took me a while to figure out this one. What I think I’ve arrived at is what the great Alan Watts referred to as 'philosophical entertainment'. Philosophy is often seen as an ‘ivory tower’ discipline. When we think of it, we often think of stuffy old Greek dudes with beards, or people writing massive tracts about nothing in particular. Impractical stuff. But IMHO philosophy should be something that can be internalised, applied and lived. Not more junk information. So this is what I’m trying to write for you. After some inspection, you might think that it is all shit. This is fine. As long as it makes you think something. This is the goal. That's all this book is. One giant invitation to think about stuff. One giant game trying to be played with your feeling and reasoning faculties. Hopefully one that you enjoy as well. So, are you gonna play or are you gonna sit it out…?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts



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Part I: The Philosophy

•§• I

“Too much philosophy makes men mad.” ~ Alan Judd, The Noonday Devil

The first part of this book deals with the slightly longer and free flowing pieces I’ve loosely defined here as philosophy. They touch upon a variety of topics. There is no real unifying subject…



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We Drew The Short Straws

Compared to the history of human life leading up to this point, you

and I are quite lucky.

In fact, if time and circumstances of birth into the world where part

of a competition set in some ethereal kingdom outside of the

physical universe, you and I picked the short straws.

We won.

For a start, we’re alive during a time in history when (for most of

us) human advancement has allowed us to meet all of our basic

survival needs…

Food is an obvious and excellent example…

No more having to chase down a mammoth in the wilderness with

a spear, or to spend hours digging for tubers just to get dinner and

not die.

No more having to even kill our own food, or conceptualise that

for you to be eating that burger, a cow had to have it’s brains

blown out with a mechanical bolt. Thump, splat. Or that chicken to

have it’s head mechanically severed, a few seconds after the

chicken before it in the ‘production line’ suffered the same fate.

Cluck, silence.



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You can eat chicken exclusively until you are completely stuffed,

every day for the rest of your life, and you don’t even have to think

about the grisly scenario.

For some prior generations, meat was the rarest of delicacies. But

you can gorge yourself on chicken daily and it probably won’t take

too large a portion of your salary.

(And no, this is not a rant for vegetarianism/veganism/etc. – I am

trying to make a point about material abundance)

Anyway, in some particularly ridiculous cases, there’s no more

need to know what an actual potato, or tomato looks like, when the

menu is all processed foods coming in abnormal colours.

Disclaimer: I was one of these people when younger.

Isn’t life easy for us?

We are affluent enough to have an excess of calories to worry

about. Instead of starving, many of us are now choosing to dig our

own graves with forks and spoons.

With an absence of real problems, we invent our own, and they

become real problems. No longer in danger of starving, now CHD

or diabetes will bury us instead.



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I say ‘invent’, but I don’t mean to downplay the many causes that

often lead people to such a lifestyle.

That’s another article entirely…

Theory of Constraints

Because we now have the problem and the paradox of choice! Yes,

now we get to choose! Instead of a monodiet of potatoes or

something similarly bland (think 17th century Irish farmers), the

potato lovers amongst us can enjoy hundreds and hundreds of

varieties of spuds. And those who enjoy monodieting can indulge

themselves anyway, nobody is going to stop them. Fruitarians are

cool with us too.

More and more we have the freedom to choose. But what have we

chosen?

As human power over the environment has increased, we have

individually and collectively become more powerful. You, me,

your neighbours, powerful beings all. I mean this literally and

figuratively. We now have access to and use more power than any

other generation before us. We entertain ourselves with a myriad

of electronic devices, do business globally via electronic means,

and carry energy guzzling things wherever we go (think iPhones).

We’re used to them, and it’s a fact of life that energy consumption

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruitarianism



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is just a biproduct of being a modern human.

And we’ve all got access to far more stuff than anyone else has

ever had. And with that stuff we can do things.

A Little Knowledge…

With the net we’ve all got access to knowledge that can teach us to

kill a human with our bare hands, or build an atomic bomb. Or to

grow petunias and play the violin. It’s all there – we don’t even

need to enrol in school or bother finding a book on it. And with

Google growing increasingly more clever, we don’t even have to

make much effort in finding the information anymore.

I love Google.

And, in the basic sense, we have access to more raw units of

energy (thanks to the generation and more efficient harnessing of

energy) and we also have access to better technological leverage to

use this energy, as our technology becomes more and more

efficient.

A Little Choice…

We have more choice than ever before; improvements in

manufacturing mean that we can have goods brought to us from

lands we’ve never seen, with next to no cost. My distant ancestors

didn’t even know what China was, but today I can buy goods from



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China that are cheaper than ones made in the UK. The miracle of

capital allocation and a relatively efficient global logistics system

has allowed that.

And, in the developed world, even the poorest people can go away

and visit foreign lands on a budget tour. Or choose not to work at

all and slide by on benefit payments. Todays serfs are the

overworked, high tax bracket middle class, who have willingly

chosen their own enslavement and 60 hour work weeks and to

carry the rest of the society on their very tired shoulders (at least

economically). But they’ve chosen the ‘career path’ and at any

time can walk away from the job, if they’re willing to face the

consequences.

And whatever the consequences are, it’s unlikely anyone’s going

to starve or be killed.

We are indeed living in miraculous times.

Yes there’s a lot of freedom now. And a lot of choice. Perhaps too

much for many of us.

We won the lottery, and invented a whole new set of problems.

Cos if everything was easy and serene, it’d be boring.

And we’d hate that…



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THE LITTLE THINGS

Something for you to ponder as you go about your day to day…

A river is comprised of droplets, A desert is comprised of grains, A song is comprised of musical notes, A painting is comprised of brush strokes A book is comprised of words,

Lasting romance is comprised of individual loving actions,

And your life is comprised of every action you ever take.

So, break formidable and lengthy tasks down into their smaller

parts,

And don’t forget to do the little things daily…



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Have People Forgotten What Freedom Is?

Disclaimer: I can do this stuff as well. I’m not preaching, merely

commenting.

All possessions are temporary

Life is precious. Time is precious. Time is the currency of life.

When time’s up, life’s up.

Chasing paper…

But money’s acquisition needs not be tied to hours spent.

That is to say many people have worked out how to generate

income out of increasingly less amounts of time working. It’s a bit

of a challenge for many of us to adjust to.

Some people refer to it as ‘passive income‘ – and the opportunity

to obtain it is part of the reason why so many people take to

alternative means of money making, such multi-level-marketing

(MLM) and internet businesses. Though it doesn’t always work,

these things provide the opportunity to decouple one’s time from

one’s money making. Or ‘retire’.

And with that, hopefully spend time on the important things.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_income

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing



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Afterall this is not the industrial age anymore. Technology has

changed how we create and distribute value. It’s even changed

what value is. Now we can make money out of ideas, and we can

automate much of the manual labour that was once done by hand.

The game has new rules, though many people have either

neglected to learn or refuse to play by them.

Acquiring stuff vs. acquiring freedom…

Your jewelry, widescreen TV, sports car, trendy haircut, vogue

clothing will not endure when you die.

Your competitive urge to have more does not make you more than

anyone else. It does not provide an authentic feeling of happiness.

‘Keeping up with the Jones’ is a superfluous system of keeping

score that will take away your time and by extension, your

freedom.

If you chase money solely to acquire these fine things, then when

you expire, that time chasing will have been wasted.

What the fuck does it matter if you are gunning for a promotion at

work and working like a zombie if you are never around to see

your children grow up? When you are on your deathbed you won’t

give a damn about the hours you missed at the office. You’ll regret

the hobbies you didn’t take up or the friendships that you let fade

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_up_with_the_Joneses



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away, or the girls you never asked out.

There’s an exercise called the ’deathbed exercise’. It encourages

you to really think about your life from the perspective of your

older self, nearing death. If you really get into it, it can be an

utterly harrowing experience. I’ve tried it a few times and it helps

put things in a brutal perspective.

I think it also made me a little more compassionate.

“How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never

happened.” ~ Thomas Jefferson

And this is why it is important to distance your thinking from

the work time/free time mindset. Trading time for money and

possessions is like slicing bits off of your life (which is all you

have) to obtain physical materials. What kind of tradeoff is that?

It can’t last forever. You can’t last forever.

Of course, if you accept that you are hiding from family life in

your job, at least there is intellectual honesty there, and room for

change. But if you work like a bastard every week for a family you

never see, examine your situation.

Doesn’t it defeat the point?

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2rQJOASlkFkC&pg=PA16&lpg=PA16&dq=death+bed+exercise&source=bl&ots=y_4wpkX9R2&sig=pz06bWIChbXWyte6dsi-rb5c1s0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=EMaDUcuWLYaZ0AWo44GYBg&ved=0CEYQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=death%20bed%20exercise&f=false



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And what about all these toys you buy? Perhaps you enjoy them

for a while, but how much do they really satisfy you, and if so,

how long does that feeling last?

How many thousands hours of your precious life do you have to

spend to get things that will soon bore you. Is it a worthy tradeoff?

This is all personal choice of course.

But there’s a reason why some people cut themselves and some

people throw themselves off of bridges with rope attached to their

ankles. They want to feel more life. More adrenaline.

It’s also the reason why people who work in jobs that they like,

regardless of how wealthy they are, are often content. They do the

work for the work’s sake.

For them, it’s not about trading time. It’s about where the time is

spent.

Think about it…

To me it seems that to be happy with work (and you may disagree)

you need to either

1. Do the thing that you love to do,

2. Get so good at leveraging your time that you need to work



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very, very little time at a job you dislike.

Because internal satisfaction can’t be gained from external things.

We all know this. They’re just a panacea that keep you chasing

more. But we forget. I forget. Maybe you forget?

And for those who feel themselves bound to ‘wage slavery’,

perhaps you need to be more frugal with your money and more

extravagant with your time.



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Dumb Luck

“I've been lucky. I'll be lucky again.” ~ Bette Davis

Definition: I use luck to describe the outcomes of situations or things, either known or unknown to us. To those who believe that dumb luck is a myth, or that we

‘manufacture’ all of our own luck, I disagree with you…

There is luck, dumb or cruel, and you cannot discount the random

hand of fate, or the effects of the unknown. Just because you don’t

believe in chance, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Take for example the lottery winner. Or the man who takes the day

off and avoids the train crash.

Luck’s clearest examples are often the cruelest things. What of the

innocent woman who is shot at random by the sniper on a crowded

street?

There’s little any of these people could have done to either stack

the odds in their favour or have even known what to do. They were

unaware.

Dumb luck.



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Self Determination

Some say what and where we are in life is the result of what we

have thought and done. This true, to some extent. But nurture does

not undo every facet of nature…

Example, if I have a genetic condition that destroys both my

eyesight and my chances at being a fighter pilot, was it my fault?

What if I want to play professional basketball, but never grew past

5’9″?

Surely not…

We are all ‘dealt a deck of cards’ at birth…

Self determination is limited by probability and the unknown. But

to advocate all accountability to luck is insane and disempowering

to the extreme, and I doubt many actually do. Self determination,

self belief, these are obviously good things to believe and live by.

But you put too much stock in your own ‘personal power‘ if you

think they’re the complete arbiter of your life.

The only person to ‘determine’ everything without luck or fate or

probability would have godlike powers.

Timing

But timing is everything. Take Justin Bieber – worshiped and



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despised in equal measure.

I have nothing against Justin, but I think he is a magnificent

example of dumb luck. He’s clearly a good singer and entertains

millions. But, there are hundreds of thousands of vocalists and

entertainers, probably equal or better to him in talent. So why is he

the big shot?

His Mum was uploading videos of his performances at the right

time for someone with the power to make him a star to see. That

guy, Scooter Braun, was also ballsy enough to take a few

commercial risks and make the right introductions. Very astute.

But again, probably a stroke of dumb luck for Justin.

Of course you can manufacture your own luck by arranging things

as best as possible and letting the cards fall as they please. By

knowing how to set things up in a certain way you minimise your

risk or ‘bad luck’. You stack the decks in your favour. Probabilities

improve. You are likely to be more lucky.

But you cannot stack every deck, improve every probability, or

even know everything you need to be stacking. Life has too many

variables.

Thus your luck will fluctuate.



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Think about the woman killed by the sniper. Perhaps the thought

may have crossed her mind a few times in her lifetime that she

could get shot at by a sniper. Perhaps the idea came to her briefly

after watching Phone Booth or Enemy At The Gates. But is it her

fault because she was unprepared this time?

Nobody would say that.

So, for those who beat themselves up for every failure, you can

blame luck sometimes. Or call it fate, or call it responsibility.

It’s never all your fault, or your credit. Just don’t blame luck

for everything.



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“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.” ~ Pema Chödrön



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On Acting, Roleplay and The Persona

This is an article exploring role and acting, onstage and off. I claim

to be no expert, and am coming from the perspective of someone

who has done a small amount of theatre, and been an extra on a

few TV shows (which isn’t really acting).

I wrote this because I wanted to explore how acting can help

improve our intuitive, feeling skills and in how we express

ourselves. I’ve no doubt that it also improves upon one’s self

confidence and gives people the mental tools to put ourselves into

new frames of mind and modes of experiencing the world.

“Acting deals with very delicate emotions. It is not putting up a

mask. Each time an actor acts he does not hide; he exposes

himself.” ~ Rodney Dangerfield

Thinking about acting is useful to us as it provokes a different look into the question of what authentic identity really is.

We are all acting at least some of the time. Authentic identity is the

spiritual indescribable at the core of who we are.

But how many of us are completely ourselves all the time?



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I think it is the same reason why the man climbing the corporate

ladder goes out on a Friday night to get wasted and have sex with

someone he’s just met. It’s not that his true persona is a ‘sex mad

alcoholic’, it’s that his work persona has not allowed him to

express this part of himself, and he needs to ‘play a different role’

every now and then.

And I’m not talking of multiple personalities, which I think is

quite different, probably maladaptive and describes a belief in one

person believing that they are many.

I instead speak of all the different ways that the self can be whilst remaining intact.

So, off I go…

If you have ever spent too long in an environment where you feel

you have had to repress aspects of your self, then you know how ill

fitting a persona can be. Especially if the scene has carried on for

too long…

(OK, so I had to stretch the metaphor a bit…)

The ‘Hollywood Set’

Professional actors fascinate me because I still feel I don’t at all

understand how they do what they do.



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Consider the prestigious ‘Hollywood set‘. They’re famous as

much for who they are than what they have done, but the fact that

they are extremely famous doesn’t detract from how good many of

them are at the craft of acting.

" You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel

of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds

and a producer's heart." ~ Fred Allen

In actors, the worst of them are completely inauthentic. The best of

them, completely believable. So, put another way, good acting is

authenticity.

The Many Faces of Harrison Ford

Actors are people we often see all the time, but take for granted.

To me, the good actor becomes the character they portray. Think

about Harrison Ford as Han Solo in Star Wars. If I see Harrison

dressed conventionally, I’m probably going to identify him as

Harrison, but if I see him dressed in full Corellian costume (what

you usually see him in the film) – I immediate identify him as Han.

It’s kind of strange, but it’s almost like he’s two people to me. And

not to labour a point too much, but when I see him dressed in his

archeological digs, then I identify him as Indiana Jones.

You see where I’m going with this? Harrison Ford is an identity,

Indiana Jones is an identity. Who I identify the person that looks



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like Harrison Ford/Indiana Jones as, is completely contextual. That

person, who we normally refer to as Harrison Ford, has multiple

personae.

Good Actors, Bad Actors and False People…

Some people are almost born onto the stage or screen. Some

actors, like Al Pacino, Leonardo di Caprio, etc, are so fantastically

believable that to me, they seem to be completely assimilated into

the persona they’re playing.

Others, such as Sylvester Stallone, do not always seem to

disappear into their character, despite Sly being an example of

someone who has wonderful passion and intensity in his acting. It

seems that more often than not that he gets typecast in roles that

seem to suit his action man persona. I suppose this is fine, since

he’s very good at that sort of thing. It’s like the

character becomes him.

But I still think he’s a hell of an actor. I’d use the film Cop

Land as my example. I admire Stallone very much indeed.

Bad acting is so blatantly bad, that you usually can’t miss it. Yet

good acting is almost undetectably subtle. Like the best scores and

sound design are weaved into the background of a track, almost as

to be unnoticeable, good acting feels like a part of the reality of the

film or the theatre that you observe. Bad acting often breaks your

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cop_Land

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cop_Land



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suspension of reality, and it becomes very clear that what you are

watching has been staged.

Persona: Italian word derived from the Latin for a type of mask

made to resonate with the voice of the actor (per sonare: literally;

“to sound through”)

Thinking outside of acting, false people are often too obvious,

right? Depending on how good a judge of character you are, your

gut often senses these ‘political’ types. Those who act friendly but

are trying to use this relationship with you for a reason. And for

them, it doesn’t usually work. You can’t really like anyone that

gives that untrustworthy vibe off. The persona fails, and the true,

nasty face beneath the mask is revealed. Or the persona holds but

you steer clear anyway – knowing what awaits you.

Everybody in some way or another is an actor.

It’s true. Mum bakes a horrible pie? You get an Oscar nomination

for Best Prolonged Food Related Lie. Want to get that promotion

at work? – then play the role of proactive and interested employee

– not ‘I’m Just Here For The Paycheck’.

And there are many other examples…

Authenticity And Empathy

Good acting is not inauthentic, it is completely authentic.



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What is authenticity anyway? In acting, authenticity is reacting to

what happens, as it happens. The script works as a guideline to

direct the emotional performances of the actors. Words are simply

a vehicle for emotion and intangible atmosphere of the production.

It’s like music, where instead of words, the organisation of

harmonic and rhythmic textures are the vehicle by which emotions

are manipulated.

Acting requires a well developed imagination and the ability to

intuitively interpret things as they happen. From what I understand,

‘wooden’ acting comes from the situation where the responses

have not been authentic. A good actor is one who responds

completely to the environment and what happens, as it happens.

Or as you may have heard it said, ‘acting is reacting’.

Like any other act of expression, too much thinking seems to

hinder good acting. Overanalysing. And this is the same with many

other things. Want to talk to a guy/girl? Go talk to him/her – don’t

spend too much time deliberating about what you’ll say. Just say

hello. Then have a conversation. The same is true with acting. In

many schools of acting, actors are told to just do it.

And I think many of us, especially those more afraid to express

ourselves, could learn from this.



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The Persona – Responsibilities and Social Masks

Beyond the name you call yourself and who you think or know you

are, you have many identities and play many roles in your day to

day world…

Ever met someone famous and found that they weren’t who you’d

expected them to be? You may have witnessed the unmasking of a

social persona. There are countless examples of people’s ‘private

face’ being much different to whom they are outside of the public

eye. Read a gossipy magazine and you’ll likely find plenty of

accounts.

Similarly, ever thought about how you have a different role to play

when at a drinking establishment with a bunch of old friends, than

when looking after your kids? Your identity, though fixed to some

extent is very much contextual. I’d argue that what professional

actors do is to change the context of their identities further than

most of us do…

Our identities shift in line with our environment. The media

influences them. Suppose I find a new genre of music (lets say

Country) and a particular artist in it admire. Perhaps I choose to

adapt elements of their dress style as homage, and because I think

it looks good on me. That’s my persona shifting in response to

external events. I may now also identify myself as a ‘country and

western fan’, changing my behaviour, adopting certain mannerisms



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and so on. In this instance the genre of music has personal

relevance to me. You can actually see how it affects me.

Or another more obvious example of ‘musical personae’. Think

about the mild mannered, ‘accountant by day’ type guy who

dresses up in leather, studs and spikes and plays satanic black

metal gigs every other weekend. Or the loving father who makes a

good living touring as a member of a gangster rap group (and there

are many examples of this too).

And then of course there’s the other mild mannered guy who lives

out a second life roleplaying as a dungeon master on the internet in

a MMORPG. Not strictly musical, but a similar idea.

Role Playing Games – Vampires, Elves and Romans

In fact there are numerous subcultures where people practice

roleplay as another means to be themselves. The vampire

subculture is very active online and offline. Many of these

‘vampires’ incorporate an element of vampirism into their day to

day lifestyle, and they will often meet, specifically to role play.

The most popular game I could find being Vampire: The

Masquerade

Another group of roleplayers, usually with more of an interest in

traditional fantasy, are called LARP (Live Action Role Plays).

There are many different LARPS, ranging from fantasy oriented

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_multiplayer_online_role-playing_game

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_lifestyle#Members_of_vampire_subculture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_lifestyle#Members_of_vampire_subculture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire:_The_Masquerade

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire:_The_Masquerade

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_action_role-playing_game



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scenarios to historical reconstructions of the American Civil War

and Ancient Greek phalanx warfare.

Here the level of player dedication varies from people just out to

have some fun and hit people with large foam swords, all the ways

to groups of people who have created their own unique fantasy

cultures and hierarchies. There’s actually a pretty reasonable (if a

bit exaggerated) introduction to LARP culture in the 2008 comedy,

Role Models.

These are people who willing embrace a completely contrary

aspect of themselves. Often taking new names and behavioural

characteristics they’ve been unable to express as their ‘normal’

selves. Another persona.

And speaking of people getting in touch with other aspects of

themselves…

Animal Personae – Furries, Lycanthropes and Shamans…

If you have been on the internet for longer than 5 minutes you have

probably heard reference to the furry fandom.

Hohoho…

They’ve attracted controversy for all sorts of reasons, much of the

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role_Models

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_fandom



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bad press being unfair in my opinion. But I’m going to skip over

all that, as it takes us away from our subject…

‘Furries’ are an interesting study in persona. Instead of a mask,

many of them wear full body ‘fursuits’ and have another, animal

alias that they escape into in their free time. The community

thrives on the internet, often in places, such as Second Life, where

one can live out an idealised identity, unconstrained by physical

limitations (such as the fact that you were born human, though you

may really feel yourself to be a wolf).

Some of the more serious amongst them legitimately believe that

they have animal souls. Or can shapeshift. In that instance perhaps

they see their day-to-day identities as human beings as an

unwanted persona to live through. It’s food for thought.

‘Furry’ has been around for a long, long time, in some form.

People have physically identified themselves with animals for as

long as there have been people. Many shamanic traditions,

crossing multiple cultural groups, have an element of animism,

belief in shapeshifting, experiences in the body of an animal, and

so on. Lycanthropy & Therianthropy have been documented by

the medical profession for centuries.

It is an almost universal attribute of the various human cultures to

use animals as characters in the stories we tell our children.

http://secondlife.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycanthropy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therianthropy



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But who told you that you had to be just one person (or animal) at

a time?…

Group Personae – Riots, Sermons and Oratory

Personae also emerge on a larger, collective scale. I’ve already

spoken quite a lot about emergent phenomena, so I’ll make my

examples here brief. But take for example any ‘crowd situation‘,

such as a sports game. To some extent, especially during moments

of great passion and energy (like a scoring event), individual

personalities seem to merge into a larger mass. Sometimes people

‘lose themselves’ in the seething social energy of a football riot, or

a powerful religious sermon.

The individual persona merges with the group, if only for the

briefest time…

Conclusion: Who Are ‘You’ Anyway?

Whoever you want to be…

What I’m trying to get at with all this is that we can all be so many

different people over the course of our lives and in the day to day.

We have digital identities, aliases of our construction, the people

we think we are, the people we try not to be, the people we like to

be sometimes, the people we have to be in certain situations. We

change our manner of speaking to suit our environment, we change

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence



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our dress depending on where we go.

Because personae are just like the clothes that we wear, we have

some that we are fond of, and wear more frequently than the rest.

And some that we just take out for special occasions.

Human beings are like a more complicated version of the

chameleon. Changing our appearances just as quickly as we

change a multitude of other aspects of ourselves. Including the

very way we think and look at the world.

This is free will and you have the right to exercise it.

And it leads to the dangerous idea that if you don’t like what

you are right now, you can choose to be someone else.

Freedom means you are unobstructed in living your life as you

choose. Anything less is a form of slavery ~ Wayne Dyer

Whether we are conscious of it or not, we act every day. We act

upon things to get things done, and we also act in the metaphorical

sense…

We fulfill the social roles and functions that fit us into the societies

that we comprise. It’s obvious in how we choose our careers; the



Page | 34


person appointed as a policeman has to act as ‘guardian of the

peace’. The woman who becomes the midwife has to be that

supremely attentive, nurturing person. But when either of them

finish their shift they can go home and be almost anyone they

want. Maybe the policeman has his own desires for chaos and

destruction. Maybe the midwife does as well. And once the work

persona is done with, the devilish sides can come out to play…

And this can be very healthy. Perhaps the word is therapeutic. Both

individually and for society. It’s probably not a good idea to take a

position of power without an outlet for one’s baser instincts which

are completely at ends with the job description. We are all human

after all.

And there’s another way to allow the ‘other’ aspects of ourselves

to thrive.

The actual, theatrical craft of acting. Which may have more

benefits than you think…

It can be a way to get in touch with our intuitive, feeling, side, or

try out new personae, like you’d put on clothes in a department

store changing room.

For example; never been that much of an outgoing person, but

really want to be? Fake it ’til you make it. Act. If you need to, start



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in a dramatic environment where it doesn’t feel so weird, and get

some practice in. Allow the aspects of the character that you want

to be to integrate into who you are.

It’s been done before, over and over again. General George S.

Patton was obsessed with military history. He modeled himself

after everything he knew of Alexander The Great. What part did

this have in his success as a military commander? Or perhaps

Arnold Schwarzenegger, who at a young age idolised

bodybuilders like Reg Park, and decided that was who he would

become. And he did. In fact he even described the process that

took him to the top…

“What you do is create a vision of who you want to be, and then

live into that picture as if it were already true.” ~ Arnold

Schwarzenegger

And whoever you are, there’s usually someone or something happy

to tell you who or what to be. Think of the modern media

landscape and ‘lifestyle’ brands with their ‘consumer

demographics’. You are not a demographic…

But whatever the world tries to make of you, true self resides there

always. We are most happy when we are being the person we want

to be at the time. Though who we want to be can change. After 12

hours working in a stock exchange, we may no longer want to be



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the full stress, hard charging commodities trader. We may want to

be the caring father. Or watercolour painter. Both are perfect for

the time they are chosen.

So embrace every aspect of yourself. Embrace all the personae.

Because at the end of the day, they’re all you really.

"You have to have a certain persona to be a star, you know, and I

don't have that. I'm a banana." ~ Harvey Korman



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Pain Is Humanity’s Common Ground

Pain… A unifying, universal element of the human experience.

A place where we can build empathy and truly connect with others.

Because, despite our multitudinous differences and completely

unique lives, everybody has experienced pain. We don’t want it but

we must all endure it. Sometimes collectively, and sometimes

personally.

But we’re not in it alone.

“I feel your pain” is one of the most understated yet significant

things one human can say to another, if sincerely meant.

It’s an admission of connectedness and unity. A reminder that we

don’t and shouldn’t suffer the human condition in isolation.

We are there for others, others are there for us. It makes it easier to

bear.

A Buddhist exercise in compassion teaches us that, as we regard



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people, to remember and repeat the following silent mantra; “This

person wants love, doesn’t want pain”.

A simple reminder.

If we’re finding it hard to show compassion, maybe we can

remember that this person, on a foundational level, wants to love

and not to suffer.

Yet we are so quick to forget this, as we struggle and fight to carve

out small places in some of us see as a ‘dog eat dog world.’



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On Normality:

I’m going to talk a little about the social construction of

‘normality‘ and why changing how we define it can help the

collective shaping of a better world. It all comes down to standards,

though you may end up fighting ‘the herd’…

Bathing and killing people – what is normal anyway?

One way to define normality is as ‘what we are accustomed to and

come to expect’.

Normality is an attribute, not a constant or a ‘truth’, and is relative

to the person and situation.

For example, nine out of ten people may think daily bathing is

normal. One other may have a different idea. To him, bathing less

could be perceived as normal.

Is he a ‘dirty’ person? Or are the others just obsessive in their

bathing? Who’s right? It’s irrelevant. It is a point that can be

argued either way.

Some of us become accustomed to doing ‘extraordinary’ things…

For example;



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A hardbitten soldier: taking human life is normal.

A butcher: splitting the ribs of animals with a knife is normal.

An architect: seeing buildings that originally existed only in

his/her head is normal.

A concert pianist: practicing 8+ hours at the piano a day is

normal.

What we become accustomed to comes from the activities we

choose and the environment that envelops us. These things form a

cocoon of expected and predictable events and things that make up

an ordered life. A comfort zone.

We get used to them. On some level we associate them with our

safety. We begin to entrench, and keep doing them to stay in the

place we know. This is great if these things are what we really

want and make us happy, and maybe not so great if they are simply

a superficial means for you to feel safe.

Some people seem accustomed to challenging normality and this

zone of familiarity as time goes on, but this seems to be ‘less

normal’. From what I’ve seen, many are happy to just set in their

ways



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So, consider what ‘normal’ things you are participating in with those around you.

As I said, normality is often socially constructed. Do the norms of

your various social groups help or hinder you?

Is it ‘normal’ for you and your friends to be broke? Perhaps by the

standards of your friendship group this is ‘normal’ – but is it what

you really want? If you should be the one to start saving or

investing your income a little more wisely, how would that affect

your standing in the group?

Wealthy people seem to associate with other wealthy people. Is it

‘normal’ for them to be wealthy?

What about in other areas? Does normal mean a mediocre standard

of performance to you? The Japanese have an oft-quoted saying

that roughly translates to ‘the nail that stands tall will be

hammered down’. Another word used to describe it is ‘tall poppy

syndrome‘ – the idea that people of unusual merit or achievement

are ‘cut down to size’ by their peers.

It’s origins appear to go all the way back to the ancient world, in

which one or various kings had his most eminent citizens put to

death in an attempt to retaining power. I’m not sure if it worked.

It used to promote a culture of superior teamwork that stifled

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome



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individual achievement to some extent. Individuals who chased

their own dreams or grew ‘too big for their boots’ faced ostracism.

Or as some like to repeat these days, ‘there’s no I in team’.

But we clearly aren’t in feudal Japan anymore, and though

teamwork gets many things done, a culture of conformity is often

not the environment in which it feels safe to innovate or push

boundaries. To stretch an already tenuous metaphor, why not have

every nail or sunflower standing taller? – moving the standard

ever upward…

Introducing… The Idea Of Calibration

If you calibrate a device, you find something that is objectively

accurate, and set your measurements to it. For example, you can

calibrate the brightness on your monitor by using a diagram. Your

eye (subjective) becomes calibrated to a colour value (objective).

Calibration has also been applied to your personal standards,

whether you are aware of it or not. What you now define as ‘right’

is a personal calibration. What you define as ‘normal’ is also a

calibration. And the nature of calibration is that you can change

what your standards have been metered too.

I.e at some point, taking a lead from the environment that

surrounded you and the stimulus you were exposed to, you decided

that some level of a personal attribute was ‘normal’ or the status



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quo.

So, what are you calibrated to? The lessons of your parents? Holy

books? Social norms? Your personal code of ethics?

Calibrate your kiddies…

If you have children, why not encourage them to associate higher

standards and pushing boundaries with ‘being normal?’

Is it normal for your child to be told no, over and over? To be told

off. Does your child’s environment suggest that normality is not

doing anything new and remaining completely safe – so safe that

there is little chance for new experiences, perspectives and people?

For many families this is done with the best intentions but stifles

young questing minds all the same.

And it’s understandable, we want the best for our children, even if

that entails being a little …over cautious in how we care for them.

Perhaps we care too much?

But experience is the surest teacher, and if ever there’s an age

we’re learning, childhood is it. It seems like a shame to withhold

that opportunity for our children. It could save them years of

learning these lessons, in a far more expensive environment, and at

a much later date…



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Because, some lessons you have to learn eventually.

Outro: Is Simple

Much of personal motivation and the way that society plays out

collectively is just a striving towards perceived normality (via

groupthink) and a stable world.

‘Normal’ is not what people tell you it is. It’s whatever you want it

to be.

So make your normal better.

TLDR

We could all have better standards, even if it seems the

majority wants us to settle for mediocrity.



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“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.” ~ Pema Chödrön



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The Importance And Art of Listening

“Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep

going back and beginning all over again.” ~ Andre Gide

I bet you reckon listening to people is pretty important.

But have you really thought about how important?

We all need to vent every now and then, be listened to, and feel

validated by the act of others considering what we have to say.

Sometimes we just need space to talk and express ourselves in

words. And some of us, even more than others…

Why else would people write so much poetry that they’re so very

reluctant to share with others?

And feeling like nobody’s listening to you can really, really drive

people mad.

For an example, ever see the film Falling Down?

There’s more to listening than a lot of people think. Broadly

speaking, you can divide it into two varieties.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Down



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There’s what I’d call ‘conventional listening’ – this you do to

obtain information; discuss things in the normal sense, make small

talk in uncomfortable social situations and hold ‘less intense’

conversations with people you know.

Then there’s active listening – which is done by the listener to

specifically help the speaker. In active listening, the listener

actively makes an effort to listen and clarifies that he/she’s

understood the speaker. This hopefully leads to a dialogue with

greater understanding, and leaves the speaker with a feeling that

they’ve been really listened to.

The different effects these two kinds of listening can

be profound.

You can do listening wrong

Often we do the wrong kind of listening at the wrong time, which

is no good for anyone

The reason why I love some of my closest friends so much is

because we all give each other space to speak. It’s actually rare

and refreshing…

Because I feel the quality of listening where I am is usually

substandard. In conversation it very often feels that people are

just racing to fill spaces in dialogue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_listening



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In fact, it’s not even dialogue at all – it’s often like a series of

vaguely connected monologues.

Nobody really gains anything from it, and I don’t like these kind of

conversations at all.

Ever experienced what I mean?

Ever done it?

I think we all have… at least a few times

But we can learn our lessons and be forgiven.

Everybody’s talking but I can’t hear a word…

You probably notice that in the western world, many people are unhappy…

Or think they’re unhappy. Some think they need psychotherapy,

when all they really need is a listener. Or a counselor. Just a little

space to talk about their problems in a nonjudgemental

environment.

Why do they need this? Because they don’t get this kind of

listening from the people in their normal day to day life.



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“Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person

they are almost indistinguishable.” ~ David Augsburger

Perhaps they don’t have a friend that they can count as a

‘confidant’.

However, this can go both ways. Sometimes people try to turn their

friends into their counselors (without consent and often without

realising it). This is actually a very bad thing for both parties.

Because if this kind of ‘helping relationship‘ isn’t done right,

there’s a transfer of something I can only describe as ‘negative

energy’ from speaker to listener.

And it can destroy relationships.

Example;

Consider the scenario when someone calls a friend purely to

‘vent’. Often the listener feels ‘put upon’ to provide a solution, but

all the talker wants to do is vent.

This is often the problem in male/female relationships. ‘Solutions

oriented’ men want to offer practical remedies to their woman,

whereas she just wants to explore her feelings. At the end of the

miscommunication masquerading as dialogue, the speaker feels

just as bad and the listener feels like shit too.

Because it’s all been done wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therapeutic_relationship



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Other times the negativity of the speaker’s situation weighs down

on the listener, who just isn’t ready to ‘take on’ that burden.

Especially when the listener feels unable to help (which is often

the case). This can lead to a feeling of powerlessness in the

listener.

At times like this, the listener finishes the dialogue like they’ve just

taken an emotional beating from a friend. They often feel guilty

that they can’t help. And sometimes the listener even feel resentful.

And still, the speaker’s problem hasn’t been solved.

So don’t be that person dumping your problems on other

people.

Because we’ve all known that negative, toxic person, right? The

one who brings everybody down.

With these people, the process of listening can be much harder

work than we’d expect.

And speaking of listening as hard work…

Introducing… The Samaritans

Ever heard of The Samaritans?

http://www.samaritans.org/



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They’re a UK charity and one of the best examples of the

incredible good that can be done just by actively listening.

The Samaritans is comprised of people who volunteer to listen.

They man phone lines, counsel in person and respond to letters,

emails and text messages from suicidal or desperately unhappy

speakers. Often, The Samaritans are the only people that a suicidal

or near suicidal person feels they have left to speak to.

And it works! The stated aim of the organisation is to reduce the

number of deaths via suicide, and as far as I know, they’re seeing

results. For decades The Samaritans have been the ‘last line of

defence’ for the suicidal person in the UK, their phone-lines open

even when more ‘official’, governmental organisations such as the

NHS’ mental health helplines are inaccessible.

I wonder how many lives they’ve saved, just by being there and

properly listening when nobody else would.

Samaritans listen with a compassionate, non-judgmental ear. They

don’t offer suggestions, and don’t criticise, no matter how dire

your actions or your situation. Each of them is trained in active

listening and many of them have years of experience hearing the

most heartbreaking scenarios. Very often they have to counsel each

other, as hours of this kind of listening takes it’s toll.

http://www.samaritans.org/media_centre/latest_press_releases/network_rail_update.aspx

http://www.samaritans.org/media_centre/latest_press_releases/network_rail_update.aspx



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Pretty tough.

Their example shows us how important a kind, listening ear is, and

what listeners themselves may have to go through.

Conclusion: How to ‘get’ wisdom…

And there’s an another obvious, but often overlooked thing about

listening properly. You might actually learn something useful.

Well, depending on what you are listening to of course…

“Listen or thy tongue will keep thee deaf”



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Ownership And Denial

"Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim

at, with originality, which they should never bother about." ~ W.

H. Auden

Those who own their choices live closer to authenticity and

reality.

Ownership is accepting what happens and the state of affairs as it

is now, and it is not as common as you may think.

Sometimes people in bad situations (jobs, marriages or anything

else) haven’t fully accepted that their choice has led them to where

they are. Or the extent of the situation they’re in.

This is denial. People deny ownership of their circumstances. But

their circumstances are the same, and not seeing the problem

doesn’t make it go away, as we all know.

Think about the mother who refuses to acknowledge that her

initially ‘spirited’, now very delinquent son is getting worse. Or the

artist who refuses to listen to the constructive criticism directed at

his work, and thus never makes improvements.

It's that old cliche of 'burying your head in the sand.'



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We all do it…

I think everybody has an element of denial in their life. How many

things we deny, and the extent of the denial is a matter of degree.

We’re all a bit deluded, but some of us develop full blown

‘Delusional Disorders’ (as classified in the DSM-IV) of a paranoid

or grandiose nature. Hopefully this doesn’t describe you, or me.

So, I’ll use me as an example – to some extent I am in denial that I

may not have a future as a music producer or composer. My odds

of success are probably quite small. Perhaps I’d do better if I spent

more time working in areas where I have already seen results, such

as writing.

But I have always wanted to make a living out of music and I will

never give up on it.

So perhaps I am not completely in denial, since I accept this fact,

even as I fight against it by continuing to do what doesn’t seem to

work! I think I am moderately deluded. I have unrealistic

expectations, and it’s just a facet of my stubbornness.

Dealing with the ‘blind spot’…

The first step to solving a problem is knowing that there is one in

the first place. But actually seeing that there is a problem is one of

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders

https://soundcloud.com/xij



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the biggest. We don’t want problems, or at least, we want to be

entertained by superficial problems. We create small dramas and

diligently keep the larger ones out of perception where they may

do us psychological harm.

And this is why there can be such a blind spot. Some problems just

seem too big to face, let alone solve.

So the problem can be described as this:

We deny some of our potentially biggest problems so strongly

that we’re often not consciously aware of them.

And at times like this need an objective third party, perceptive

enough to notice our floors, assertive enough to be unafraid of

hurting our feelings, and compassionate enough to tell us for the

right reasons.

This person can give us the brutal reality check we need.

So who’s watching out for you?



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Distraction Vs. Inspiration

Simply put, there are three ways to

experience the world…

You can try to focus on nothing at all (which is very hard, your

mind needs something to chew on)

You can focus on distractions – we need distractions to entertain

us, and sometimes dull the existential pain (which we perhaps feel

as Dysthymia or boredom?).

You can focus on inspiration – this is material which ‘nourishes

your soul’. That inspires you to do ‘important’ stuff. It gives you

ideas and/or the drive to implement them.

But whatever you choose to focus on will in some way affect the

way you spend your life.

And you can choose.

The Balance…

As with everything, there’s a balance between distraction and

inspiration. Perhaps for many of us, we have spent too much of life

focusing on distractions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysthymia



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Yet, this is understandable, if you take a look at our world today.

Especially our media landscape…

It all seems arranged against us. The media is far more full of

distractions than inspiration. Sometimes I wonder if it is not a

conspiracy of some kind to distract us away from thinking for

ourselves more and doing bigger things.

And then it occurs to me that it probably just comes down to

market forces.

Because distracting you is profitable…

The main distraction today is advertising. The consumer

economy wants you to spend your money. People with goods and

services to hawk go hungry unless they can convince you that you

want the latest ‘hot item’.

Cos it’s harder to make money out of people who are inherently

focused on their own ‘thing’ and who aren’t looking at the ads,

right?

Thus, one ad executive’s inspired copywriting or advertorial image

is a distraction for multitudes. Take the example of being on the

Internet… did you ever see a place so full of distraction?!

Wherever there is this much information available ‘on tap’ –



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distraction is inexorable.

Let’s start with Youtube as an example….

You can visit, seeking ‘useful’ information, such as the multitude

of tutorial videos available there. But, after a momentary lapse,

you find that you’ve instead spent 35 minutes watching videos of

cute baby animals. Or street fights.

Has this ever happened to you?

And outside of Youtube, the internet world is full of banner ads,

popups and popunders. Like the Youtube example, all of it can

conspire to create sudden changes in direction that take you far

away from where you wanted to go, before you’ve even realised

what’s happened to you.

Unmindful Internet use often sets you on autopilot, like a dog

chasing a stick. This is fine if you are browsing for entertainment.

And probably not fine if you are trying to be inspired or get

any work done.

Onto TV…

Another example is TV. Usually it’s pop culture programming,

frequently punctuated by advertising which ranges from blatant to

subtle. Or the news, which provides a whole lot of information

which, hopefully, leaves you ‘informed’.

http://www.xijindustries.com/Words/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/tv_television_and_remote_controller__stock_photo.jpg

http://www.xijindustries.com/Words/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/tv_television_and_remote_controller__stock_photo.jpg



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‘Informed’ about information that you can’t really use…

Because unless you trade commodities or genuinely enjoy hearing

about what’s going on (accepting that it’s filtered through an

editorial agenda and strongly tinged with a sensationalist slant) I

believe that the news is feeding you junk information most of the

time.

Will you do anything about the horrible images of that car crash?

Asides from feel distressed?

Probably not. How can you…?

And watch out for (my) generalisations…

Of course one man’s distraction is another man’s inspiration.

And some people do enjoy being informed. They often become

journalists.

And, inspiration can be found in the strangest places. Perhaps one

of these soap operas tells a tale that really moves you to do

something. Or there’s a fictional character that you use as an

inspiring, possibly heroic example. And it’s not uncommon for the

news tells to uplifting stories, should a producer deem it

‘newsworthy’.

It is important that I try not to generalise too much (if I haven’t



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already!)

Because one thing is not always the same thing to everybody.

My point here is that as you consume information, you can

consciously ask yourself “is this distracting me, or inspiring me?”

And then you can ask, “What does it inspire me to do” – “or what

is it distracting me from?”

If no answer comes, keep asking, until something of an answer

emerges.

When you get an answer, then you can decide if you want to do

anything about it.

You can either continue with what you are consuming it or stop

and do something else.

The choice of your focus is always yours.

And as I said before, inspiration comes from the most unexpected

places and often requires you look for it. But distraction is

everywhere.

Guard against distractions and seek inspiration.

http://www.xijindustries.com/Words/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/jesse_jackson.jpg

http://www.xijindustries.com/Words/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/jesse_jackson.jpg



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Because the process of seeking, finding and creating inspiration

makes for an inspired life.

“Always remember, your focus determines your reality.” ~ George

Lucas



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Chasing Greater Pleasures

Sometimes, the greater pleasures in life come only once you’ve let

go of the lesser ones…

But so many people will never realise these greater pleasures.

This is because they fear losing what they have far more than they

are inspired by mere promises of something better.

Because ofttimes, when it’s right in front of you, it’s ohhh so hard

to resist it.

Yet some of us do, anyway.

Some people call this ‘delayed gratification’…



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Embrace Destruction

Destruction is… …not a thing that should distress us.

It is the process of (re)creation.

Nature periodically destroys itself so that it may be renewed.

Forests burn down, and new growth springs from the ashes.

Stars build complex elements within their cores, and then blow

themselves apart in supernovae. This seeds the universe with new

materials. And then new stars reform from these seeded materials,

to build more elements and blow themselves apart, again and

again.

This is how the earth got here.

Your body sheds skin, and turns over the cells which comprise you

on the inside. In a number of years the stuff that you are made of

has completely changed. Your brain, which does your thinking, is

not the same brain, a decade later. Your body has destroyed and

recreated itself.

Yet you are still here, anchored by your consciousness.



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In the business world, ‘creative destruction’ is the process by

which outdated ideas are destroyed and replaced with ones that

better serve the marketplace (us).

All that dies and decays on the earth, nourishes other life.

Destruction is just the other side of the coin of existence.

Inevitable, integral, beautiful and as perfect as everything else.

Embrace it.

“The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.” ~ Pablo Picasso

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction



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Part II: The Thought Experiments

•§•II “It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.” ~ Richard P. Feynman The second part of this work deals with a category of articles I call ‘thought experiments’. These are non formal exercises in thinking that can help you test scenarios and concepts using nothing more than your mighty and creative brain. Thought experiments have overturned everything from quantum mechanics, to computer science, pop culture and science fiction. In fact, one of the ideas that helped Einstein formulate one his Theories Of Relativity came from a thought experiment imagining what the world would look like to a beam of light. So perhaps play along and see if they give you anything to think about…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_experiment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity



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Apophenia

If humans are ‘pattern recognition

machines…’

Then perhaps there are a number of latent patterns of perception

which make for happiness and a life well lived.

And all we need to do is interpret them…



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Godlike Understanding

Here I try to speculate at how omniscience and omnipotence might work or feel, logically. As far as I can see none of these ideas can prove or disprove the idea of a God…

As human knowledge has advanced, it appears that the causes of

more and more phenomena are becoming clear to us.

If human understanding can be placed on a continuum where the

value of 1 represents complete understanding of the cause of a

thing, and 0 represents no understanding at all, maybe

‘randomness’ represents a value below 1. Randomness: the

incomplete understanding of causal effects?

Let me elaborate…

In times past, humans used various ‘unscientific’ explanations to

natural phenomena. Crops failed? Angry god. Comet? Angry god.

Famine? Angry god. You get the picture..

God: Original cause and solution to all your problems.

Where there have been things unexplainable through empirical

observation or science, we have reverted to a supernatural

explanation. Humans gotta know, right? However, now that

science is advancing, the amount of supernatural explanations we



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use is decreasing. They are obsoleted by new discoveries. Some

say that ‘The God Of The Gaps’ is shrinking.

As I understand it, randomness suggests an element of uncertainty,

but can be accounted for and worked around. For example, we can

leave space in our calculations to account for randomness and fully

expect this will affect our final result. We can account for

randomness but it means that the outcome can never be known

with certainty.

Possibility of Random Outcome: Uncertainty.

Possibility of Random Outcome: Everpresent.

Therefore, Uncertainty: Everpresent due to randomness.

‘Practical’ Impossibility

So, using statistics we can plot the probable outcomes of a

situation. The more results we get from our uncertain situation, the

closer we get to certainty in our predictions of how this situation

may play out in future. But we don’t ever get to certainty. For

example with a coin toss, the odds of getting heads 186,000 in a

row are ridiculously small, and coin tosses tend to even out

towards a 50/50 distribution in the extreme long run.

Even so, we can’t be certain that it won’t happen to keep coming

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps



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up with heads, no matter how ridiculously improbable, and

therefore we do not have complete certainty. In the practical sense

we can say it is almost impossible. But is anything really

impossible?

Trying To Define And Comprehend ‘Godlike’

A godlike/limitless understanding would imply absolute certainty

in all outcomes. Godlike power would mean that all endeavors set

into motion would work out absolutely flawlessly. In prediction,

there would be no randomness, as all outcomes would be known or

controllable (there’s that godlike power again). In a real sense,

things would be predestined because you’d know what they where

before they happened.

Put another way, perhaps random things prevent destiny, unless

there is some way of understanding so much that we could know

the outcome of events that were previously deemed random. Thus;

no more randomness.

It’d be a bit crap though. Why would you play a game of chess if

you knew the outcome of the game in advance and any move you

made changed nothing?

I can imagine two Godlike perspectives…

1. Someone who knows the outcomes of everything yet is unable

to interact in any way to alter the fixed path of events. Some sort of



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cosmic observer. Omniscient but not omnipotent. Perhaps the

loving God who sees all of our suffering but can change nothing.

2. Someone who can change any single variable and know exactly

what sort of limitless causal consequences this would take. This is

closer to a Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Such a creature would exist within each universe within the

multiverse (and there would be an infinite number of them), and

would probably see how ‘tweaking’ the effects in one environment

caused cascade effects on all the others. Omnipotent and

omniscient, and unable to act on anything apart from everything.

Such a being couldn’t be ‘disentangled’ from the multiverse,

because as part of everything, it has to exist. Similarly, since every

effect is in some way linked to everything else, every action it took

would cause an infinite number of consequences.

I guess this is closer to the traditional monotheistic conception of

an all-powerful deity. To say that this God was everything would

be literally true, since this being would be tied into everything and

every effect, which would be linked to everything else.

I think I’ve said ‘everything’ so many times it is starting to lose

meaning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation



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Here’s my main point;

What if there is an ultimate destiny, and randomness is simply the

symptom of a deficit of understanding?

For example, we are uncertain of where a coin lands, as we haven’t

quite grasped some bigger explanation that allows us to predict

where coins land with complete certainty. Knowing every

infinitesimal variable (which is practically impossible) might

allow us complete certainty in our predictions.

Another way to consider would be to think of the paradox of

predicting the future, which is similar to the well-worn

grandfather paradox of time travel; which applies to the past. To

recap, you can’t go back in time to kill your granddad because if

you did, you would not have been born and therefore couldn’t go

back to kill your granddad. Capisce?

OK – now lets loosely apply this to predicting the future, thinking

of how causality may disrupted by something else, namely

observer affect. Or put another way;

Perhaps you can’t see the exact future, because by observing it,

you change it.

And if that where the case what would that do to our hypothetical

omniscient being?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_paradox



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Protip: Don't go back in time to kill your grandad

TLDR/Summary: ▪ Could randomness simply be a lack of understanding every

single variable within a situation?

▪ Therefore; would an all powerful being know so much that

randomness was no longer a consideration?

▪ But – is it possible to know every exact outcome, if your very

observations affect what you are observing?

▪ Could an omnipotent being take any single action without

creating an infinite set of repercussions (butterfly theory)?

▪ Would an all powerful being by it’s very nature be forced not to

intervene in the nature of the universe to maintain free will?



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Time's Arrow

“This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws

iron, bites steel, Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins

town, And beats high mountain down…” ~ J.R.R Tolkien – The

Hobbit

Where is the empirical proof of time?

It is true, that we feel something pass every day. Or at least we see

evidence something passing; stuff getting on, stuff falling apart.

Progress…

But is time change? (Put another way, is the motion of time’s

arrow evidence enough for time?)

Crux of the argument:

How can we empirically observe time if we are forever trapped

within it?

What can we measure time against? Entropy; is that the corollary

value?

Can we have entropy without time? It seems not…

When we ‘do science’ our method often is to look empirically at

something from a detached position, that we may learn about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy



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Except, you can’t look at time from a distance, because you are

always ‘inside’ it. Relativistically speaking you are trapped in the

reference frame.

Within time where are our reference points? We use times and

dates, right? But they are all relative to each other, not measured

against some universal standard.

There is not a detached position to calibrate all of time’s progress

to.

If someone moves one goalpost, you’ll notice. If someone moves

both goal posts, you’ll probably notice. If someone moves the

entire field and you with it, would you notice?

Relativity:

How would we know if time’s progress rate has changed, if all the

clocks had calibrated to keep to this new rate of passage?

It’d be like travelling in a car that accelerates, yet with the dial

remaining constant despite of speed changes. In this car you can’t

see properly out the windows because it is terribly dark. How

would you know that the car were speeding up, slowing down or

even moving at all, if your senses and your instruments were

deceiving you?

http://www.xijindustries.com/Words/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/jack-xij-oughton-vaught-hemingway-stadium-001.jpg

http://www.xijindustries.com/Words/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/jack-xij-oughton-vaught-hemingway-stadium-001.jpg



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You couldn’t get out and verify if the car was moving, relative to

the ground. You can’t get ‘out’ of time to see what it is moving

relative to. So, similarly, how would we know that time were

changing? How would we even know that it ‘was’?

Is there a spoon?

Consider the importance of relativity…what is relative to time?

Everything?

What would a being outside of time experience?

Perhaps considering what it would be like to exist without time

will help us better think about its ubiquitous nature.

If time where plotted as a fourth dimension, what would a being

that where outside of time perceive, if it could observe time

discretely?

The First idea is that it’d see everything will have happened all at

once, the Second idea is it will have seen that nothing will have

happened at all.

If the first case, how would it differentiate discrete events? It’d

just be like a long exposure photograph that’d merged into a mass

of undifferentiated information. If it were able to interact with the

universe, maybe it’d be stuck in the mass…

http://www.xijindustries.com/Words/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/jack-xij-oughton-article-car-black-tinted-windows-001.jpg

http://www.xijindustries.com/Words/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/jack-xij-oughton-article-car-black-tinted-windows-001.jpg

http://www.xijindustries.com/Words/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/jack-xij-oughton-article-long-exposure-makes-ghosts.jpg



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If the second case, surely the being couldn’t exist without time.

Because in this instance time is only present when things happen,

and therefore since nothing could have happened there could have

been no time and no being.

If you took time away as a value (as in you removed the fourth

dimension), what would happen? Would the nature of everything

fall apart? Can time stop?

Why does anyone care anyway?

Because every scientific measurement we take, or observation we

make happens within time. It constrains everything.

Everything we do in our lives happens within the boundaries of

time. We only exist within a certain set of temporal and spatial co

ordinates. Put another way, you cannot be located at any point

without a time and a place to find you.

We take time for granted as we have always experienced it, yet

what we really know (in the personal sense) of time is felt

subjectively.

We put faith in the existence of time. An eternity for the fruit fly is

a day in the human life. There’s the relativity again, except it is

more perceptive.



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I quote Alan Watts, fountain of wisdom and philosopher of no

philosophy – “I have realized that the past and future are real

illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and

all there is.”

So are the timepieces in a way, reinforcing an illusion? A clock just

measures time; it is not proof of time, just as a ruler does not

prove that an inch exists.

But… Space: Evidence for time?

Evidence for time seems to come from the idea that you and I can

occupy the same space because time exists. For example

(disregarding the motion of the earth through the solar system, the

solar system through the galaxy, and the galaxy through the

universe), if you have been to the foot of the Eiffel Tower, you

have occupied the same space I have at some point. It therefore

follows that, obviously, time can put a distance between things

happening at a single point in space. If it didn’t I might walk into a

dinosaur or a Cro-Magnon villager in Croydon, UK which is where

I live and where they will have once lived.

So, I suppose, it follows that for things to change, time must

pass.

But is this evidence enough for you? I’m not sure we’re seeing the

whole picture on time, or if we are using it as a conceptual

http://www.xijindustries.com/Words/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/jack-xij-oughton-article-foot-of-eiffel-tower-001.jpg

http://www.xijindustries.com/Words/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/jack-xij-oughton-article-foot-of-eiffel-tower-001.jpg



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placeholder for something much more complicated. Maybe time is

an illusion or a simplification.

I wish my brain had more computing power.



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“Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well

as the earth.” ~ Henry David Thoreau



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Ranges

Intellectual Abstraction Into What Data and the Physical World Represents

Disclaimer: Geology and the stock market are complicated. I don’t

offend your intelligence by presuming differently, but I make some

gross simplifications in the differences between them for the sake

of metaphor. Thanks…

When you look at a volatile stock chart, you may notice that in

some way it resembles a mountain range…

It has peaks and valleys, jagged edges and all the formations of a

sharp area of the earth’s geography.

What does it represent? By design, it represents a consensus in

value, as projected by humans and plotted over time.

You may see this same jagged formation on the surface of the

earth. Certain mountain ranges have harsh jagged edges that

resemble more volatile times in the history of the stock market.

Other, more hilly ranges resemble times of less volatile mood.

The stochastic formations of the earth’s surface are the natural

result of statistical probability. The values of the stock market



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are the same thing. The sum of sentiment makes the trendline of

the market. The collective agents (such as the rock and material)

which make up the structure of the earth’s surface, form the sum

which resembles a trendline. The surface is the trendline(?)

Here is the Question:

We plot a graph of the stock market to represent the action of this

market over time. In a way we know what it represents (well, we

designed it after all!).

Perhaps, the shapes of solid things around can be thought of as

graphs. Except instead of being plotted by man, they are plotted

from the physical data going on in the background in our real

world.

It is interesting to look at the shapes around us as plots of

information. And if they are graphs, what is the data they

represent?

Definitely they dictate geological data. We can analyse, and using

the mathematics that understands pressure formations, work

backwards and plot their formulation. We can use mathematical

models to plot geological changes and ‘growth’ of a mountain

range. So, in a way, by representing them as 3d objects these

mountains are ‘graphlike’ manifestations of the data used in our



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mathematical model.

3d > 2d

Of course there are a few differences. On earth, all natural solids

(graphs?) are plotted in 3D, which would lead us to think the graph

has more variables (to account for an extra dimension), though the

same jagged pattern is unmistakable. As far as data goes, plotting

in 3 dimensions gives us a larger range of possible variables to

work with, within the same space.

So what does nature plot?

Though consciously designed to plot stock market data, without

any labeling, or prior knowledge of subject matter, a graph of the

stock market may hold very little meaning for the reader. With no

labels on the side to indicate what the values are, it just looks like

a jagged line.

Nature’s Games

I think that the stock market is a ‘game’ environment. Here I define

a game as an environment in which different agents play out under

a certain set of environmental rules, and there of course is an

element of chance. If there wasn’t any chance involved it wouldn’t

be interesting, ‘cos we’d know the outcome and would lose all

novelty and sense of unpredictability. Just because it is a game,

doesn’t mean that it is trivial.



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Ask any football fan if his game is trivial and you’ll see what I

mean!

I look at life as a game, a very complicated game, with nearly

infinite variables. Maybe our mountain range is just part of the

game…

OK so where am I going with this?

Look at the (3D) world around you. If it is some sort of graph,

what data is it manifesting? If we work out what the data is that

makes up the graph, can we work out what this data means?

How to ‘do’ this thought experiment…

Think of the physical universe as a big, dynamic

graph, manifesting certain underlying physical data. If this is the

case, what controls the variables in this underlying data?

What put the data there? What happens if you change a

value? How many values and variables could there be? Could it be

derived from one equation?

TLDR:

Think of the world as a big graph that represents some sort of

underlying physical data.

What does the chart mean and what are the variables?



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God's Eye

Imagine that instead of perceiving the passage of time as you do

now, second by second, you could choose see the passage of time

in different orders of magnitude.

You could choose to watch centuries pass like seconds. Or observe

nanoseconds drag by like hours.

Now, imagine you could see every of these variable speed time

frames moving at the same time. Everything happening all at once.

Can you visualise that? Paradoxical perhaps, you ask; how can

causality (the idea that things must happen in a certain order) not

be violated by objects existing simultaneously, but out of phase

within time?

Maybe they can, but we need to rethink what time is. Let’s do

away with notions of right or wrong here and just totally lose

the plot (the basis of any good thought experiment…).

If causality is the arbiter of circumstance (as in, things have to

happen because they have to come after causes) then perhaps time

is a law that enforces causality? Sort of like the rails on a

rollercoaster that keep everything travelling along at the right

speed. Time ensures that causality doesn’t ever go ‘wrong’ and we

don’t suddenly get cakes un-baking themselves or your tea un-



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brewing. That wouldn’t do in an ‘ordered universe’, after all...

We refer to the tendency for things to fall apart over time as

entropy, and that the fact they do indicates that time has a

direction. This is referred to as time’s arrow, and time’s arrow is

always in the direction of your ice cream melting or surfaces in

your newly cleaned house getting dusty…

Therefore, for causality to exist, we must have time.

This examination of causality is here so that we have an idea of

what we are doing away with in the experiment. Examining

causality further is a threatening and fascinating detour in itself.

I’m just going to say this is a ‘quasi- quantum’ eye that perceives

the passage of time very differently. It is not restricted by trivial

stuff like causality.

(Hey, this is God’s eye after all!)

So, back to your view through the eye…

With God’s Eye, in whatever ‘playback speed’ you look at, you

would find that everything on the earth is vibrant and alive, having

it’s own unique movement and moving in it’s own time frame.

In the eye that drags out milliseconds for eons, you could go back

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time



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to what physicists call the Planck Time and watch the forces and

energies of the universe decoupling, changing phase and

establishing themselves. You could watch the transition of the

primordial fireball as it morphed from the infinitely small energetic

dot into the wondrous universal playground we live in today. You

could watch it as it expanded and you could see its eventual fate

(whatever that may be).

Interestingly, from our ‘current’ human perspective, the early

cosmic genesis would happen so fast as to be completely

imperceptible. Worse, to be present at the Planck time would

probably result in some serious bodily damage – imagine being

killed by a wall of infinitely bright energy.

Anyway…

You may have seen a timelapse video in which the tidal motions of

the ocean resemble the lapping of waves in the sea in ‘real time’

(God’s Eye sees beyond this ‘real time’ nonsense). Perhaps you

observed a flower that appeared to watch the sun rise and fall?

Similarly, to see an individual rock in a longer time frame is to

watch an object metamorphose, grow, collect new materials,

change size and shape, form and re-form.

In the right timescale this rock may resemble something very much

alive, travelling around the earth and shedding and gaining size

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_time



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and materials, such as other rocks, or lichen and moss. Perhaps like

a human who moves home, who gains and loses body weight over

time, or changes his or her clothing and hairstyle?

What we perceive as ‘still’ comes from our reference point. We

are (relatively) frantic, fast moving and (comparatively) newly

animated carbon structures, surrounded by a nursing home of very

old and very slow moving heavier metals.

Like hummingbirds whizzing around a tree, our perception of the

timeline is blisteringly fast relative to much of the our

surroundings, such as the geology all about us…

We see trees grow, but perhaps not at the speed trees ‘perceive’ this

growth. If a tree could ‘see’, it may very well recognise humans as

fast moving blurs that are quick to come and hack away with

sharp, serrated instruments. Small, demonically fast and

brandishing chainsaws!

If I were a tree I would be terrified…

I’m a little uncertain about photons, a lead into Part 2….

Next time you see something that appears slow or unmoving,

remember that slow is an attribute that is relative to your

perception of time.



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The photons that carry the imaging information which makes up

your body may ‘experience’ you as a totally static environment in

which they play out. You know better. To you, they travel so fast as

to be unperceivable. More paradoxically still, they are the means in

which you perceive. You cannot observe a photon without

interfering with it. You cannot know perception from a 3rd vantage

point.

Scientists say that the observer and the observed are a closed

system. Information transfers between the two parts – observer and

observed, regardless. It seems to imply that we are all connected

through information.

Let’s make a mess of this with words. To perceive perception you

must use perception to perceive, and thus a truly objective state is

impossible, right? I think this is the Uncertainty Principle that

Werner Heisenberg expressed so elegantly.

Within the message is the messenger…

TLDR/Conclusion:

Imagine you can see with God’s Eye. God’s Eye can operate

outside of causality and does not affect the system in which it

observes at all.

It is completely detached from the bindings of the uncertainty

principle and of time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle



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Godhead, Bored

Here’s an idea.

What if our experiences of individual consciousness are all pieces

of an eternal, unified mind, which has grown tired of its

omniscience. It has chosen to forget everything it knows and

experience again the joy of discovery.

And with every new day you are remembering new things…

Consider how life would be if you had the kind of amnesia which

destroyed your identity every time you slept and brought fresh

novelties to every experience.

Perhaps stranger things have happened.

I know many will agree with me when I say that some of our

memories are not worth the space they take up…

"In the Hindu view of nature, then, all forms are relative, fluid and

ever-changing maya, conjured up by the great magician of the

divine play" ~ Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics



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A sticker in Covent Garden

Sometimes you come up with the strangest realisations when you

aren’t looking for them…

Whilst Out Walking

I saw a sticker in Covent Garden with a two-letter acronym I

recognised.

I calculated the odds of my guessing what it stood for correctly as

26 (number of letters in alphabet) x 26 (number of letters) = 671 to

1.

Then after that I thought what other factors could affect the

probability I was right…?

I hadn’t considered the usage of other alphabets,

A bias on probability caused by more exposure to the service in

London,

Other strange things about people’s preferences for putting stickers

in certain places and so on…

Which brought me to the conclusion that it is extremely hard to

know all the variables to any given situation or question and

http://www.xijindustries.com/Words/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/jack-xij-oughton-article-thought-experiment-stickers-001.jpg

http://www.xijindustries.com/Words/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/jack-xij-oughton-article-thought-experiment-stickers-001.jpg



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speak with absolute certainty. You can never be completely

right…

Life is less certain than we’d like to think, and this was, relatively

speaking, a simple guess that I was trying to make. What about

predicting economic outcomes or conflict scenarios?

The Best Laid Plans

Think about it in your planning. You’ve probably had plans go

wrong at some time in your life right, why?

Because…

A. A variable you had calculated for went awry.

B. There was a variable you missed.

You calculate from a nigh on infinite range of variables, which

increases your odds of getting something right, but you won’t

catch them all. There are always variables you miss.

You just need for things to be just right enough. And you decide

when it is right enough. But they are never completely right; at

least, not in the sense of absolute, utter certainty. Like so many

things, we put our faith in statistics and probability.



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Certainty Is A Mental Crutch...kinda

The implications in risk management are obvious. I guess you

could say there’s always risk and there’s always unknowns. There

is no insurance against whatever happens to you, perhaps apart

from happiness. If you are supremely, intrinsically happy, you

won’t care what happens anyway. I guess this is a goal of

existential practice, and is a kind of ‘spiritual invincibility’.

Yes, certainty is an illusion that makes us feel comfortable.

But what is so uncomfortable about embracing the reality of an

unpredictable world?

I mean, apparently the universe exploded out of a tiny dot in an

endless void of nothing, and we went from total entropy to dogs

driving cars in just a few billion years.

Who could have predicted that?



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“You've got to get out and pray to the sky to appreciate the

sunshine; otherwise you're just a lizard standing there with the sun shining on you.” ~ Ken Kesey



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Information Unshackling

This article is aimed at people who sell bits and bytes and wonder

why people don’t always pay for them. Drawn from my experience

of time amongst the digital natives.

Later it speculates into what would happen if the same lossless

duplication and abundance that digital information offers us where

to be applied to physical goods, which could happen in the future…

The ’Digital Revolution’ – it’s still happening:

At risk of pointing out the obvious; digital information does

wonderful things for art and culture because it is both abundant

and egalitarian. Once something goes digital; it can be copied

indefinitely and shared with anybody who has access. It allows the

unlimited distribution of old songs, books, films and things

previously no longer available to the world.

It is also insurance for our older treasured cultural works

threatened by physical degeneration. Consider Google’s

‘liberation’ of books to the public domain through its meticulous

program of scanning and uploading lots of very old texts. It is nice

to think that they are now available to everybody without charge,

and easily accessible. As they should be. You could think of it

doing backups on historical data.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Revolution#The_2010s

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books



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An old hacker maxim says Information wants to be free. In the

physical, and on a large commercial scale (think Google’s servers),

the cost of information storage is now so low as to be worth (in

economic terms) almost zero. Its price continues falling, as

technology improves and hosting moves to the cloud. The buyer

has the choice to pay, so can we really expect everybody to

willingly give their hand earned money away for our bits and

bytes?

Point I am making: In this instance we must not mistake pay for

with value. If I love your music, adore you as an artist but don’t

pay for it, I maybe incongruent in how I value you (maybe I’m

ripping you off?). However, I clearly value your work in some

way. Just perhaps not monetarily.

Do you love your girlfriend less if you can’t afford to buy her a

meal? What if you are too cheap? What if you steal the meal for

her?

Speaking Of Piracy:

And just because I download your album, doesn’t mean I don’t

value your music. The loss of a physical sale is not so much a loss

as a lesser gain; as not everyone who downloads something

illegally would have purchased it with no other option. The free

download option has given rise to a semi (emphasis on semi)

honorary system dubbed ‘try before buy’. It has been around in one



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form or another for many years now with the idea of ‘shareware’.

It appears that information starts to centralise as the efficiency of

communication increases. A better network facilitates a faster

diffusion of information. Think of examples from film or fiction

where someone leaks a story to the press – information is very

adept at duplicating itself. It starts off leaked from one source, and

eventually winds it’s way back to the major (central) information

outlets, CNN, BBC, Google News, so on. And it rarely takes that

long.

Music is a good example…

We can extend this metaphor of ‘diffusion’ to the distribution of

music. New tracks, especially ones by artists who are well-known

and highly commercial will be let released quickly as the insatiable

demands for them can be fulfilled. This includes new channels

such as peer-to-peer file sharing and digital distribution.

Why wait for your CD to arrive if someone has already leaked the

album onto a torrent, which will take you a few minutes to

download for free? Yeah, it’s possibly unfair but humans often

value utility over the relatively small ethical snags or guilt. This is

especially when the implications of illegal downloading aren’t

clear.

What is the Internet, asides from a conduit? It is a repository and a



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medium in which the majority of human information is being

indexed. I think of it akin to a big hard drive with an ever-

expending storage size that we haven’t properly mapped yet. You

can find almost anything there, if you know what sectors to look

in.

And collectively, the internet doesn’t really follow an ethical code.

Just because sharing pre releases of albums for free is illegal,

doesn’t mean our giant hard drive (the net) won’t make that

available to you. If you know the right search terms or places to

go, it is all there waiting.

If I download Rihanna’s new album, to me, that doesn’t seem to

take anything away from her considerable wealth. But if I leak a

pre-release of her album, I don’t necessarily see the damage that

I’ve done to her sales. She looks rich and successful to me

regardless, even if I do take a cut out of her figures. And if I am

harming her business, can we quantify the damage I’ve done? It’s

all a bit thorny and therefore easy for me as ‘Mr. Digital Native

With BitTorrent’ to really not care that much.

Does she feel a financial hit to her bottom line if I download her

album for free? What about the mailroom guy at the record label

she records for, do you think he feels it?

What am I getting at in all this? It’s that people, in their practical



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way, don’t see the consequences of these abstract laws they break.

They don’t want shackles and limitations if they honestly believe

that they are committing little or no wrong. And if they believe

themselves to be anonymous (which is easier online), they are less

afraid of legal ramifications.

We have an environment where everyone has the ability to share

files at great speed, with negligible cost to both sender and receiver

AND both are completely unconstrained by geography. It’s easy to

see that your CD is going to get out there, whether you like it or

not. There are people who crack software that they don’t use and

share music that they don’t listen to. They do it just because they

can, and they enjoy the challenge.

Don’t Fight The System, Change The System

Impose artificial scarcity on an essentially unlimited environment

and the system will correct itself whether your ethical stance

likes it or not. Digital natives cannot be told how to value things.

Don’t stake your money on convincing them to. A couple of years

of torrenting and 4chan and people get a sort of blasé approach to

the whole thing.

As an artist you may do a limited press run of 100 CDs, but once

someone has encoded that to an MP3 all the scarcity is gone, at

least as far as the music is concerned. Perhaps the intrinsic scarcity

(and value?) now shifts to the physical product…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_cracking

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrent_file

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan



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You know as well as I do that people still like to appreciate and

feel beautiful, tangible things. Give them a CD or DVD product

with inherent physical value in related to your music and those

buggers who pirate your sounds will have a hard time cracking and

sharing that experience!

There are tangible and intangible things that are beyond piracy.

Your brand and beautifully designed physical goods are amongst

them.

Yet Another Thought Experiment – A World With No Scarcity

Here is a thought experiment for you to ponder (because

sometimes I spend too much time and energy in my own mind).

If physical resources become susceptible to the same kind of

abundance as digital information has, what happens to value?

What happens to scarcity?

Theoretically matter equals frozen energy and matter can be

described as resources. Maybe at some point in the future, if

humanity will acquire the ability to harness immense amounts of

energy (zero point, fusion? etc.) and the mechanism to ‘freeze’

this energy into things. Maybe we’ll be able to create abundant

matter of any variety we like, and therefore experience no physical

scarcity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power



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In Star Trek, the devices that do this are called ‘replicators’. People

seem to use them to usually to make coffee. (lol…)

At this point is what sort of economic system and would we be

operating under?

New Economies Of Lossless Replication:

So, perhaps these digital shenanigans are a preview of the coming

new economics (given a few hundred years of technological

advancement). Economics driven by a value system that does

not incorporate scarcity any more…

Maybe this marketplace’s values will be driven instead not by

financial gain but by something higher, such as the need for self-

actualisation, e.g. the need to express our creative selves and the

altruistic urge to see people around us happier.

I and many others believe that the need to acquire is a phantom

happiness that passes onto the next new, desirable thing that comes

along (see ‘hedonic treadmill’). But, perhaps when the need to

desire material things is removed, the pursuit of happiness will be

redirected toward immaterial things. Spiritual things?

Maybe it’d head towards a more authentic pursuit of happiness,

which comes from things we cannot sell each other, but give only

freely. I say this with the caveat that we often tend not to value the

things we didn’t work for.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-actualization

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-actualization

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill



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How does this relate to the new digital economy? Perhaps it is a

prototype of a system to come as our resources increase and

marketplaces start to see less and less scarcity. A testing ground

for us to see how we can make money out of things that are

essentially free. Maybe a little paradoxical; what do we do with all

the money then?

No Replicators Allowed

Think about it, if someone invented a replicator that was

commercially viable for the general public, the damage that it

would do to the marketplace would be almost unlimited. I

wouldn’t be surprised if there where lawsuits to try and limit the

distribution and usage of this hypothetical replicator.

But think, we already have replicators that work losslessly with

digital information. We call them computers! And they’re doing

plenty of damage. What happens when people in the developing

world get them? More replication…

It makes me think; money is an incentive and a way to systematise

and control the exchange of goods and services. But if these goods

and services arrive instantly and without effort, you don’t need to

'incentivise' anybody. Money becomes redundant. The

inequalities in power caused by an uneven distribution of resources

go away. What then? Green Utopia? I wonder.



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Pay What You Want – You Might Have To Eventually

Asking for people to ‘pay what they want’ for something could be

the preview to a new economy. If you think of it as a continuum

between price fixing and haggling, then this form of everyone

individually valuing things is the ultimate form of liquidity.

Such a society could be full of deeply spiritual and contented

people. Alternatively it may come to grow lazy now that the

impetus and motivation to ‘do’ anything was removed. If you had

every material thing you ever wanted, what would you do?

You’d probably be forced to chase the intangible.

And that can be the hardest thing to chase…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_liquidity



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Freefall

Unpleasant Scenario: You are skydiving, descending, in freefall

at 15,000 feet. Your chute fails to open. Your second chute refuses

to open. You have only two chutes, things look hopeless.

You are above what appears to be a pine forest. It is now 10,000

feet below and the ground is rushing up to meet you…

You recall a story of an airman in the Second World War who

survived a fall from a similar height, and who also landed in a pine

forest. The only advice you remember that he gave was to land on

your back, creating as much surface area as possible, thus

dispersing the blow. You also intuitively understand that falling

from 15,000 feet without an operating parachute is instant death.

You can now choose to believe either of these things and act

accordingly. Should you choose to believe the airman’s tale you

can guide your fall over the forest and brace yourself for landing.

Should you choose the alternative you can make your peace and

prepare yourself for the end…

Symbolically – the outcome of life is no different from this situation…

Inevitably, you are going to die. This is neither bad nor good, it’s

just the way things turn out. You can either go on through life and



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deny it, or accept that life is shorter than it should be and that you

have many things to do before you hit the deck. Are you doing

these things?

Are you preparing for (or denying) the end? Or

making the most of ‘the dive’ whilst you still have

the time?



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”There is the sky, which is all men's together.” ~

Euripides



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Stuff By Me Cover image and back image by me, book design by me, words by me, publishing by me, (ineffective) marketing by me...

Stuff Not By Me The following beautiful creative commons licensed images… With thanks to their creators! 001 "Planet Earth" credit to: Jrwooley6 002 "Krak Sunset" credit to: Ed Brambley 003 "Meditation" credit to: Francesco Procacci 004 “black-and-white winter” credit to: Mervi Eskelinen

About The Author

Serious face is serious

Jack Oughton is a freelance writer/copywriter , composer/sound designer and digital artist/photographer from South London who has serious problems writing biographical information about himself in the third person. He has written for the likes of The Guardian, The Independent and FHM, and currently spends all day sculpting alien sounds using wavetable synthesis. Some people know him as Koukouvaya.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jordan_wooley/3230743889/

http://www.flickr.com/people/26474941@N00

https://plus.google.com/110172637974572601802/posts

http://www.flickr.com/people/tasselflower/



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Twitter(s): @xij @koukouvaya Personal Site: http://www.koukouvaya.co.uk

UFAQ Answering in advance the questions you probably aren’t going to ask…

Why do you write this stuff? To try and make people reexamine their assumptions and think more. What else do you write then? Well, I’m a freelance writer. So I write lots of stuff for lots of different people. Why pictures of clouds? Clouds are associated with the sky, the sky is associated with soaring, soaring is associated with freedom. I dunno. They look nice, don't they? Why ‘incessant typing’? It's a common complaint. Do you have any more of this sort of writing? Yeah, it’s all available on http://www.demysticism.co.uk

https://twitter.com/xij

https://twitter.com/koukouvaya

http://www.koukouvaya.co.uk/

http://www.demysticism.co.uk/



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What are ‘Analytical Adventures’ and ‘Icarian Philosophies?’ Analytical adventures: because exploration & love of knowledge can be fun or adventurous (I sound like a complete tool…). Icarian: The tale of Icarus is about a man who flew too close to the sun. In this I use it as a metaphor for an explorative and ambitious spirit, with the sun maybe representing ‘too much information’. I think the original tale was a metaphor as well… Or maybe I just wanted to try and come up with a snappy title to make it appear more appealing. You get to decide… Thanks for reading me -J

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus



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jack oughton - incessant typing

Education