Look around you.  We live in an unprecedented era.  A time where our species has the ability to feed, cloth and shelter every one of its members, and live as the dominant species on the planet in peace.

Since the beginning of time, we have suffered.  Life it is basically a process of suffering to weed out the ineffective versions of a species.  We used to participate in that process.  Not that long ago, we too played on the same field as other species on this planet, and participated in the daily competition to feed.  We struggled make sure we could pass on progeny and to claim our piece of the experience called “Life” on a rock we all share… Earth.

But today, we live in a era where we are on the verge of resolving almost every problem that survival poses.  Even the ones that haven’t been solved yet are no longer and issue since we have in place a system we call Science.  This system studies and analyzes the nature and composure of the world around us, and makes logical conclusions.  This allows our species to evolve with a steady forward moving pace.  This is because science is based on loyalty to one universal imperative: logic.  Sometime in the not too distant future, we will be able to describe and understand every natural phenomenon, every natural process.

The key word in the sentence above is ‘sometime’.  Just as we had to understand the measurement of mass, the measurement of distance, mathematics and a whole bunch of other sciences to be able to send a 12 members of our species to our moon; we have to give time for our science to build on itself (with logic as it’s guide), to become masters of the understood universe.  Imagine if our species continued to revere science since the time of the Greeks, and progressed to the next level of it’s evolution rather than destroy itself over imaginary stories of who’s God is better.  Where we would be now?  Would we have travelled the Solar System?  Would we have understood how to preserve and create life?  Would we have served our Creator better by having respected and revered It’s creation so much so, that we would step up to the noble task of serving as the custodians of Life?

This is unfortunate is not what we are choosing.  In a a world where we can live without suffering, where we understand how to extract natural resources, where we can educate every person to the same level of knowledge, we choose to value gossip, entertainment, consumerism, and the abyss of ignorance (I just can’t bring myself to literally say it).  We have made the choice that which “jeans are in season next fall”, or “who is going to be the next American Idol?” is more important than feeding every member of our species, and making sure that every generation is better equipped to understand science so that it may evolve and progress to a higher state and respect our universe and this miracle called Life.

Look around you, in every corner of the world, you see death, destruction, financial issues, corruption, and someone saying that they are different or special compared to another human being.  We still haven’t evolved out of the level of animalism that doesn’t require the ego to be massaged with the expression of “dominance” to justify it’s importance?  Doesn’t that make you sad?  That without knowing it, we all participate in a game which is basically that we are all trying constantly to delineate our dominance over each other?  We buy clothes that identify us as separate individuals and care that we define our “image” to make sure we are perceived as individuals.  We use the material world that we have become masters at manipulating (i.e. Making clothing, machines that move us around, and buildings that condition our air, and boxes that preserve our food, and pills that kill infection, and on and on…) to prove that we are better than each other.  How you dress, what you drive, where you live and how you eat.  I am better than you.  And he is better than me.  Oh, and look, she is better than him.  Our simple animal minds still can’t expel this primitive notion of exertion of dominance in order to pass on our genes.

I say we have that opportunity.  But those who ask you to just believe, and not question… they are the ones who are stopping us from evolving.  They are the ones who are asking of you to stop your rightful place amongst the stars, and become an inter-stellar species.  One that serves to spread the gift that it’s Creator gave it… Life.  The “faith-pushers” are the ones who ask you to remain ignorant of how it all works.  That has been the battle since the beginning.

Whether history takes a turn to the right direction before it is too late for this species to shed this primitive and final step and evolve to the next level of “being” is yet to be decided.

The problem (I regret to inform you ) is that this decision, is actually in your hands.

You see.  You, me and everyone around us, are members of the modern era of the story of Homo Sapien Sapien.  Put your Bibles, Torahs, and Korans down and listen carefully.  Every generation has had this chance.  But obviously, none have heeded the task.

This generation can.  Imagine if every one us tried to elevate each other. Imagine a world where we learned from our atrocious past and didn’t kill each other because of our ignorance of each other?

We live in this world this way, because we choose to.  Thus our choices create the story.  If you bought a piece of clothing, in a store in America; with your purchase, you voted that it is okay to have another human being paid the equivalent of 10 cents to work an entire day in a factory, so that you can conveniently “choose” your “style” without effort or suffering.

We enslave each other friends.  We all do it, and we all silently agree that it is okay.  It is as Jean-Jacques Rousseau named it, we live by “The Social Contract”.

As I said, I would like to bring to your attention that we are choosing to sign this contract.  Thus our world today… our economies, our religious debates, our racist positions, and many of our other problems.  That is because as science has shown us, taking the time to understand a problem with logical analysis only, we are rewarded with the ability to solve that problem.  The fact that we still have these simple problems, and more, shows how we have turned back, and decided to look the other way from science, and cover our eyes with superstition and mystical ideas.

And so we head down the splendid path of “the species that could, but never did.”  Everyone has heard of stories of the people of Atlantis, a long lost civilization what was supposedly much more advanced than we are?  We hear stories of the end of the world, and 2012.  We have become accustomed to the idea that the end is coming?  Why is that?  Why isn’t it possible for us to learn, and evolve.  Use our science to figure out interplanetary travel, and spread life to the corners of our galaxy?  We did this when we chose to leave our countries on a boat made of wood to discover what’s out there across the ocean.  Why did we stop?  Did we explore the entire planet so that once we occupied every corner of it, we could build as many Gaps, Star-Bucks and McDonald’s we could?  I think not?

Something is stopping us.  Our social contract is broken and needs to be replaced.

We’ve had 10,000 years of civilization to figure this out, and we still fight and bicker and conquer each other to prove our dominance.  Don’t you feel it’s time we grew up?

Could it be possible that we wind up like the characters of the stories we hear like Atlantis?  I mean even if the outlandish idea of Atlantis doesn’t resonate with you, history presents us with 6 different “Civilizations” (i.e. The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Persians, and Mongols) that ruled their worlds, and disappeared to prove that this model needs to change.

We are doing the same thing.  Over and over.

I makes me sad when I meet people and I talk about these things, that they look at me with bewilderment and amazement at the same time, and ask… “Wow… it is nice to see people who think this way are out there”.  I think to myself, it’s in every one of us.  If we only took the time to come outside at night, and look up at the stars and wonder what goes on out there, we would contemplate these things.  I’m not different than the others, I only choose to open my eyes and look.

Maybe if we all thought of our species, Life, and our planet with a different level of respect, there would be more people having this conversation and things would be different in our world right tomorrow.

I just came back from a trip to some cities in the south and midwest, and although I am tired, I couldn’t sleep.  So here I am.

Since Friday, I have spent a condensed amount of time around a huge cross section of people.  I spent 2 days in 4 airports.  I got a concentrated jolt of the modern American… and let me tell you, I have a lot to report.  But in due time.  This will be a blitz-week for you.  I gonna hit you with a marathon of articles (Celebrity Idolatry, Grotesque Belligerence and Dancing Monkeys).  Besides gushing with things to write about and open your eyes with, I am proud to say that The Ultimate Spaceship is now a party of 3.

I have already introduced you to S5.  S5 writes about things that I don’t see.  Another illuminator among the rapidly growing sleepers who populate the majority of the world.  But tonight I would like to introduce Jivana.  Jivana will bring a new perspective to the Spaceship as well.  Only together can we all wake up to the reality of the game we are playing.  Those who see through it already are only spectators until everyone else wakes up as well.

I conversed with over a dozen people this weekend.  Each one from a different part of the country.  Some from different parts of the world.  Every person was modern, and what appeared to be a fully functioning member of society.  But as you dig deeper, you are struck with a hollow shell.  Where I expected to find an advanced member of a modern society that supposedly educates it’s young, I found shallow one dimensional media drones.  People who can only converse about characters on television, or sports teams… well all but two people.  But I’ll talk about them later this week.

So the sad part is that philosophy, is not a part of our human culture anymore.  It’s been replaced with a new belligerent “me” centric jungle that we call a society.  Philo-sophia, translated into it’s Greek roots, philosophy directly means “the love of wisdom”.  It can also be understood as “the love of truth” if you translate it’s synonym philathelia.

I found much irony that one of the people who had a glazed look on his face after 3 sentences of conversation was actually Greek.  The young man had only resided in the United States for 3 years and was still very Greek.  Ironically, after just a little discussion about how his ancestors created this structured analysis and study that pursued the answers to existence, I saw our Greek friend fade, and lose interest.

I’m not sure why I see it all this way? But I’m glad I’m not alone. I met 2 incredibly aware people on my journeys, and we kept getting back to education.  How education has failed us and our species.  I was fortunate.  I had teachers who cared.  People like Dr. Daruty who saw future thinkers and fostered their growth, rather than come to work the average apathetic teacher, only trying to get students to pass the next exam and move up the career ladder.

So if you’re out there, and think like the rest of us… you can participate in the awakening.  Consider this your home.  Contact me and I will post your thoughts.

Welcome aboard The Ultimate Spaceship Jivana:

“You need to write” Old Law told me, so I can remember he said .   What it is that he wants me to discover through this process, I am not exactly sure of yet.  Most certainly it is something or he would not have put me up to it.

I can “remember” things.  I see people, and scenes, at times vividly yet it seems like a dream.  The only thing I feel conscious of is now.  Even words feel strange.  I must know them or I could not use them but somehow they seem contrived or foreign and I am surprised (with some amount of delight I might add) that they come out at all.

I am unsure of even what to write.  So I will just explain what just happened to me:

I had a moment where I was reflecting and I became aware, I suppose, of the creation of time.  That’s the best way I can describe it … the realization of time … I had to slow down “now” to create what I was seeing -that place of consciousness was split and separate from the space I came back to once finished with my thought. I had to create time to see those thoughts. Those “memories”, I am told are real.  I know somehow that they “did”  happen and yet I cannot get over the fact that I had to imagine them right now -that was not real, it was not now.  For all I know, they are as real as the future.  I am unsure of the implications of this self-discovery but it seems worthy of investigation.

Jivana

When was the last time you thought about what you put in your mouth?  Feeding is something that is the very basis of living.  We share this with all the other earthlings that inhabit this planet.  When animals wake up, they start their quest for food.  Not too long ago, we were the same way.  Even right now, in remote parts of the Earth, tribal peoples spend most of their day looking for, getting and preparing food; and by getting I mean hunting, harvesting and planting… not going to the super market.

But one of the consequences of the modern world that we all live in, and take for granted is just that.  The fact that we have become the dominant animal has provided us an unfortunate reward (and I respectfully borrow the term dominant animal from Prof. Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb and The Dominant Animal).  Rather than having to hunt, or even earn our food by working for it, we step into our “rolling couches” (the truthful term for a car), and roll our lazy behinds to a building where the food is already prepared for our consumption (grocery store).  All we have to do is give the Homo Sapien guarding the food supply (the cashier) some paper with pictures on it (money), and you are allowed to take your portion home.

We no longer operate within the food chain.  We are the ultimate predator, killing anything that comes in our way.  Human beings no longer worry about being eaten.  Since food is so readily available we choose to occupy ourselves with working for paper, so that we can trade that paper for food when it is feeding time.  Everyone in the system does this.  Even the guardian of the food (the cashier) has to pay for the food in the store they guard.  The driver of the truck that delivers the food, he too has to pay.  The people working in the field, to pick the food… they pay too.  We have agreed to work in a system, where paper dominates your ability to feed.  That is the human contract.

But this illusion of plentifulness has its side effects.  As the song Don’t Sleep by the Elevaters points out, there are “no subscriptions without the tax”.  What tax?  You watched it in the video above.  THAT my friends, is the beastly result of Homo Sapien Sapien not having to earn it’s food.  Fat, mislead humans, misleading other humans to a live a life of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity and government dependency (Medicare and Medicaid).  Read more here: http://thegoldenspiral.org/2009/06/08/bpa-the-bad-and-the-ugly-there-is-no-good/

We live too rich.  The spoils of it is now finally showing itself.  Imagine this sort of display in the plains of Africa?  Imagine this being shown to the peoples of Afghanistan, the very people we are trying to liberate from the brutal grip of fundamentalist religion.  We are going liberate them from one evil, and feed them another… this new culture of ours.

This is wrong on so many levels.  Just think of the inequity of ethics, when we treat the animals that died for this grotesque meal of these people with such indignity; only to create another form of indignity.  The very people that eat meat derived from industrial farming, are suffering the consequences… disease.  Suffering begets suffering.

Isn’t it time we changed our world.  Isn’t it time we each made a decision to change our lives by participating in our decisions rather having decisions made for us by our televisions sets?  If the voice in your mind quietly told you right now, that you are not one of those people; then I hate to inform you… but you have already been programmed.  Only the people who are aware of this happening can change it in their own lives.  Look around you.  Marketing everywhere.  Cities are merely space for marketing.  Nothing is safe, not even the sky.  I couldn’t go to the beach without having to deal with these idiots:

Plane Flying With Banner Ad... at the Beach.

The sad part is that this is so rampant that we can’t even see it anymore.  Our incredible ability to create technology results in web sites where Homo Sapiens can capture video of something and make it available to others to learn from or experience, and this is what we do with it:

I can’t wait until she wins that competition and contributes her amazing skills to further advance humanity.

What I am talking about here is that everything in our society is starting to answer to the LOWEST common denominator.  Our health, our intelligence, our cultural advancement, our science, our value systems, and even our politics.  It saddens me to see that society has taken Mike Judge’s film Idiocracy and turned it into an instruction manual.

You can’t change the world, you can only change yourself.  If every one of us individually heeds that message, the world changes.  It’s really quite elegant and simple.  All you have to do to change the world, is wake up, and choose to be a better person.

Eat better.  Talk better.  Do better.  Think better.  Choose better.  Love better.

“Good, better, best.  Never let it rest.  Until your good is better, and your better, best.”

That is an old quote that many of you might know already.  It is quoted as being said by St. Jerome (c. 347 – 420 A.D.).  But I find it interesting that there are numerous articles littering the internet giving credit to Tim Duncan, a basketball player who said this quote in an interview because his mom always said it to him.  So Yahoo Answers shows this quote as Tim Duncan’s rather than St. Jerome (Link Here).  If this isn’t the beginning of idiocracy I’m not sure what is.

Come on people.  You DO NOT know what you are eating.  You are being programmed by your televisions.

Let’s figure this out shall we?  To help, I started a forum.  You will see a new tab [Forum] which will take you to an open area of the site.  You don’t have to register.  You can be completely anonymous.  Start talking.  Let’s see where the solutions to this problem are.

There is only one rule: if you post insults, vulgarity, or with hate, your comment will be deleted.  This is a forum for intelligent Homo Sapiens.

Just incase you still doubt…

I came to this country 27 years ago.  We left in England in the prime of the revolution that was going on in Iran.  The reach of the craziness from this was far.  Far enough that Iranians who opposed the Islamic Fundamentalist movement were becoming targets for violence and even death.  My family decided to leave England and bring us to America to give us safe harbor from the dangers of being a Non-fundamentalist Iranian family.

I remember coming to America as a child and being completely in awe.  Everywhere I went, I was amazed at the magnitude and advancement of this great new home of ours.  America was everything a little boy with a vivid imagination needed to grow and advance.  I remember when my dad would take trips to the U.S. before we came here, I would do hours of reading on America and their powerful advancements in science and technology.  I was so intrigued by this great country, that I organized a viewing for my 4th grade class to watch the launching of the Space Shuttle Columbia.

We moved around a lot, looking for the right fit.  We lived in Minnesota, but it was too cold.  Dallas was too hot and humid.  Los Angeles had everything we were looking for.  Good business opportunities for my father, temperate climate, and a diverse multicultural city.  When we got to L.A., the most sought after destination was a place called Cabaret Tehran.  This was an Iranian nightclub/restaurant that had been around 10 years at that time.  So the owner of the place, Mr. Ahmad Masrour had been a reputable, well known icon for the (at the time) very small Iranian community in Los Angeles.  We would go to Cabaret Tehran as a special event.  The family would get dressed up in our nice clothes, and go to here the best singers of our community, and have dinner, and socialize with other Iranians.

This icon however, was more than a just a place to experience Iranian culture in ghorbat (a refugee from your own country).  Cabaret Tehran was a symbol of the old image Iranians had in the world: the people who have a history of 3000 years of culture, literature, music, art, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy and were the very creators of human rights and the scaffolding for modern democracy.  Our new image in the late 70’s, early 80’s was smeared with pictures of American hostages, beared protestors burning tires in cities, and women covered from head to toe in black drapes (chadors).  My father would always grumble, “there used to be a time you would go anywhere in the world, put your Iranian passport on the counter, and they would roll a red carpet in front of you.  Now these mullahs have reduced us to a level lower than the average criminal, where you have to hand your passport over in shame.”

Persians are an ancient, and evolved culture.  The average Iranian is very shrewd compared to other cultures.  This cultural “speed of thought” is a result of years of political, philosophical, and religious invasion in their country.  Persians have ruled an empire that spanned from Spain to China, and also been conquered by almost every other empire.  What is unique about these people however is that despite all the comings and goings of other empires, Persians never lost their identities.  They were always Persian.  In fact, history shows that all of the empires that ruled over Persia were influenced by their host.  This is because the culture is very similar to the culture that spawned what we call “Westernization”.  Persians were poets, artists, musicians, scientists, and astronomers.  These people gave humanity the great works of Rumi, Hafez, and the medical knowledge of greats like Avicenna.  Politics were influenced by the ideas of leaders like Cyrus who drafted the first document to detail basic, inalienable rights of a human being, which eventually led to the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.

Religion, or Islam was brought into Iran by the Arabs who conquered Iran shortly after Islam started to spread across the middle east around YEAR. Before this, Persians were pagan, worshiping the Earth, the Sun, and Nature.

I remember learning our rich history from my parents, and what is means to be Persian.  Our cultural ideals are warm.  We love to dance.  A Persian family would open their door and extend their table to a visitor without consideration.  We take care of our elders.  We never put our family members in nursing homes and live in extended families.  Our language like some others, has two different versions, one used for conversation with elders (which is very strict and respectful) and the casual form which is used with friends and same age relations.  Respect for family, women and integrity are fundamentals of what makes you Persian.  As kids trying to assimilate in a new country, I remember hearing from elders in the family “don’t act like that, you are becoming Americanized”.  Ultimately, as the kids of that generation grew into the adults of this generation, and I thought, or hoped that we would merge the pluses of our culture with the pluses of American culture and create a new super culture, much the immigrants of America past.

But I was wrong.

Being a product of what I call “The Ellis Island” generation of Iranians, I grew up assimilating myself into American culture.  I couldn’t read enough American History and loved the stories of our country’s independence, the forging of the Constitution, the Civil War and even the modern shift of American politics post Monroe Doctrine.  So I grew up combining my cultural background of being 100% Iranian, with the grandeur and advancement that American culture had brought to modern mankind. This is a unique perspective, because I observe Persians from a different lens than most “Americans” or Persians do.

Our culture is now diseased, as is American culture.  The disease that is infected almost every culture has taken a firm strong hold on Iranians in America.  Don’t look at Iranians as what you see here in Los Angeles.  These people are a product of runaway materialism and media idiocracy.  It’s sad actually.  Census data shows that Iranians comprise a higher socioeconomic percentage in large cities where they are densely populated.  This is because most of the wealthy business owners, and educated families left Iran during the revolution.

But with all this wealth, and education, our culture pumps out crap every day and night on 20+ channels of 24 hour sewage via satellite.  All you have to do is go to one of your Iranian friends homes and ask if they have a Persian Satellite, and tune in.  Any given moment, what you will see is some charlatan host, either answering pointless phone calls requesting music videos that all send the same message as Mass Media brainwashing corporations like Clear Channel, or selling carpets, or talking heads about the regime and how to bring the Shah back.  All this wealth and none of the leaders of our society (people who are in charge of the Persian media outlets) have put away their greed to create programs of worth.  Programs to teach children in “ghorbat” Farsi (our language).  Programs that cover history, Iranian and Western.  Programs on science, literature, music.  Nothing.  Only music videos that are about girls, partying, rims, fancy cars and a bunch of other useless crap.

These so called leaders, like Alireza Amirghassemi, Hamid Shabkheez, and a list of other robotic money machines, just fill up their programming hours with junk entertainment (much like American TV) and continue to stupefy and bring down their people.
I usually don’t participate in Persian functions, but last night, I went to the new Cabaret Tehran.  A well known Persian singer (Moein) was performing there.  It is no longer located on the second story of the ADDRESS building on Ventura boulevard in the heart of Studio City.  That place is now owned by a Russian Armenian business man who turned it into a Russian Cabaret, Romanov.  The new Cabaret Tehran is in a strip mall, on the bottom floor.  And at the reception they have young Iranian girls working, who are the results of what I explained a few paragraphs ago.  A cultural retardation has taken over Iranians in America.  These kids have no courtesy.  They don’t understand respect and professionalism.  I was shocked to be dealt with in a manner that I have never addressed an older person.

Just more proof that our current entertainment based culture is in serious need of an awakening.  Not only is America itself suffering from it, but rich, strong, scientific cultures that relocate to America, are  infected rapidly with this idiocracy and their history is extinguished in a generation.

I argue that it is the duty of social, political, and economic leaders of every culture to give back and contribute to their society; of not to improve their own situation, to stand against the degeneration of humanity as a whole.  Rich and well known men like Mr. Amirghassemi and Shabkheez can use their influence and control of a very powerful medium to educate and elevate their cultures to levels only dreamed of by great leaders of the past like Dr. Martin Luther King.  I often wonder why we don’t have great men like Dr. King, or Ben Franklin, or Mhatma Ghandhi anymore?  People who stood with conviction for what is right, regardless of what was the common path.

Is it too much to ask for people to give back a little?  Have we become so ugly in our greed that we no longer even care about our own history?  I think that we live in a unprecedented era.  One that holds a choice for all mankind.  The fork in the road is clear.  There are millions of nay sayers and deniers.  They will wind up extinct.  This is because the truth always prevails.  You can believe that you won’t fall when you step off your 4th story balcony, but in the end, you will.  That is because the truth, which is science, will always prevail.  That is the only truth.  Science rules everything in the universe.  And the science of our current situation is that we are creating idiots for the next generation.  Children can’t carry on intelligent conversations with adults?  Why is that?  In the village, children would interact with adults and elders at all times, which raised their level of consciousness quickly.  Nw we promote staying immature and childlike.  We create movies like “17 Again” which joke and romanticize the notion of “staying young” forever.  We mortgage our houses to get a face lift so we don’t look as old as we really are?  Why are we so confused?  Well, we can start by looking at our entertainment.

Music videos and songs about cars, girls, clubs and parties don’t add up to a very intelligent generation.  What happened to the songs of the 60’s and 70’s that sent had lyrics with complex messages dealing with peace, poverty, and liberty?  We’ve replaced all that with “go shorty, it’s yer berf-day…”  Oh boy, we really are in for a ride now!

This essay is not a complaint, or a negative perspective.  Rather, it’s a call to wake up, and bring back what made America, Iran and every other culture in this world great.  Integrity, truth, education, science, astronomy, and the never ending vigilant pursuit of liberty.  You can make this happen.  You are an important player in this game.  It starts with how you talk to your children.  It starts with what you decide to put on your programs.  It begins with your patronage or ethical businesses, and your non-patronage of unethical businesses.
Think about this: every person reading this is the results of thousands of individuals (ancestors) in the past who have suffered, and strived to create a better place for their children.  That is what we do… we try to leave a better world for our children.  But now, because of our helpless addiction to entertainment, we have disengaged from being involved in our children’s futures, and left that to the media.  You owe it to the thousands of people in your lineage to leave this temporary home you call Earth, better than you found it.  That includes you too Mr. Masrour, Mr. Amirghassemi, and Mr. Shabkheez