Once reality shows it’s true self to you, you can’t help but to seek reality, reality.  Is it possible we live in a world where are fare to other human beings?  Is it possible that we can actually help each other thrive, much like ants do?

Our species continues to ravage the Earth living here as if it was all created for us.  All of it.  The stars, the massive suns that create stellar systems of their own, with planets that can possibly dwarf the primitive version of life we have here on Earth.  All of this, was made for tiny little homo sapien.  A species that hasn’t even learned how to cohabitate with itself in peace yet.  This primitive hairless ape had the honor of having the entire Universe created for IT.

That is why we live the way we do.  The fundamental perception of our role and our place here on Planet Earth is flawed.  It is time to open our eyes and realize what makes this all work.  Once you look past the curtain that is being pulled over your eyes every day, then you will understand the beauty of what you really are, and why you are really here?

I wish we could sit together and talk about this for hours… it would be nice to know, that there are more of us who love to think about these important thoughts out there.

s3

Click HERE for Episode 3

Click HERE for Episode 2

Click HERE for Episode 1

Click HERE for Episode 2

Click HERE for Episode 1

You’re so unique.  Your style is all your own.  You make your own decisions.  That’s because you live in the world that you get to create.  The ultimate placation of a human being is the eternal ego massage of the all consuming self.  Welcome to your own self made prison Joe Public.

As promised the 2nd in a series of episodes that will shed light on the emergence of the ego based marketing strategies that Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud’s nephew) brought to the United States for companies to sell you things and ultimately control the masses.

Click HERE for Episode 1

It’s not surprising that your first instinct is to dismiss this seemingly harsh and abrasively preachy paragraph.  But until you have taken the time to understand the forces that are at play inside of your own head, and the basic construct of the the human condition; you are ill prepared to make judgement.

So as a disciple of the quest for the truth, I am going to provide you with access to some incredible knowledge.  And also a special thank you to s5.

Starting tonight, I will post a new episode of a documentary that dissects why who you think you are; why you buy the things you buy; and why you act the way you do, are all created by something and someone other than yourself.

Psychiatry has paved the way to for the use of subconscious driving forces in your brain and turn you into a mindless consuming machine.  The scary part is that there is an underlying political agenda to this.  Whether it is good or bad is up to you to decide… you can determine that after watching all the episodes.

The film is called “The Century of the Self”.  The complete run time is 8 hours long.  I will be airing a 10 minute episode every other night (of course you can click through and watch all the episodes on YouTube).  Otherwise you can tune in on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays to catch the next episode.

The reason for the 10 minute episode is because I know you all have very busy lives, and carving time out of your regular television watching time is difficult, so I figure you can take 10 minutes out of your work and let your boss pay for your daily 10 minute dose of awakening.

If you care about controlling your own brain, you need to watch all 8 hours.  I urge you all to do this.  Please.

As with everything in life.. The choice is yours.

Remember that we are the generation who is living on the cusp of a new era.  Soon you will all witness the emergence of a new world order.  A world where people live in public and binary controls their world.  Data flowing through cables connecting our thoughts and letting us listen to the silent digital ideas of others about our life.  MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter and every other social network is paving the way for the Brave New World that Alfred Huxley predicted in his book.

Last years election was the first in history that was heavily internet driven.  Politics has been introduced to this powerful data collective and thus begins the unfolding of one of the greatest chapters of humanity.  The world where our governments use our egos to sell us the illusion of freedom.

Welcome my friends to new world of virtual insanity.

s3

Episode Links

Episode 2

Episode 3

We live in a crazy society.  We are the most bizarre aberration of nature that walks the planet.

I’ve mentioned before that I like to go into the public and observe society during the holidays.  Holidays are special because for a sociologist or people watcher, it’s not unlike a feeding frenzy.  The human condition is so pervasive and readily available to observe that you don’t have to go far to get a lot of data.

Valentine’s day is now one of those.  I found myself at the Grove Shopping center in the middle of the day.  The parking structure can hold 4500 cars.  At the entrance there is a digital readout of how open spots there are on each floor.  Going into the garage the sign read FULL on every level.  Despite this, cars were pulling in by the dozens.  Once inside the labyrinth of the lot, there you have to circle at least one level before you can get out.

Swept into this, I found that every floor of the lot had at least 50 cars competing for spots.  Let’s look deeper though… what were these people doing?  They were spending their beautiful Sunday afternoon competing for spots so they could go shopping.  Shopping for Valentines day or night.  Pink everything was being moved around the mall.  People in festive valentines PJs walking around in public, but that’s okay since it’s all in the spirit of the day of love right?

Guys with Victoria’s Secret bags in hand because to be considered a “good guy” or a “good boyfriend” you have to participate and make Valentines day special.  So you buy flowers, chocolate, lingerie, so make reservations for dinner somewhere.  The point is you have to participate, and consume.  The average person thinks you are strange if you don’t celebrate or at least buy a card… or even SAY “Happy Valentines Day” to your loved one.  All this in the middle of a major economic recession. (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/02/13/BUUV1BUI19.DTL)

Let’s retrace our steps:  Holidays… Crazy Parking Lots… Mass Shopping… Participating to be “Normal.”

How does this axis form?

TV.

Nobody wonders about our bizarre behavior because the images reinforcing that this is normal are flashed in front of your eyes at 30 frame per second.  But to make it entertaining, TV does something reality doesn’t do… it uses different cameras to place you inside the story from different viewpoints.  You never get to experience reality in this mode.  In reality, you are fixed in the position of one camera.  But during an average TV show you are flashed 350 different cuts (camera perspectives).

This number is not fiction.  I watched a sitcom and counted the number of edits, and cuts.  So in 22 minutes, you are shown 350 edits and different camera perspectives.

I propose that for an organic being, born and designed to have only one viewpoint, this is going to have negative neurologic effects.

The problem with my last statement is that it is subjective.  The word negative is the issue.  You see, if you remove the word negative from the sentence, it describes the mission statement of every good filmmaker or TV show producer.  They are trying to create a neurologic effect that keeps your interest.  So to do that they create imagery, camera angles and viewpoints that lure you in and keep your interest.

At first glance this seems benign enough.  But on further analysis, you see the side-effect of this process reveal it’s ugly head.  If your interest is peaked during a process, e.g. rapid camera cuts, you’re subconsciously allowing for the feeling of interest to be experienced while your eyes are watching a certain image.

The effect of this method of imagery is more deleterious than the kind that Plato warned his people of.

TV creates subconscious ideas about what is normal.  The more you see rapid imagery, the more you passively feel pleasure from what’s being shown to you.  And what feels good, is what we all desire.  So we begin to emulate that imagery.  We begin to dress like it, talk like it, and live like it.

While we live in those characters, the same feelings of pleasure are reinforced because the drug that feeds this desire in now around us.  “Reality” is created in TV, and TV then is manifested by reality…  A true Ouroboros.

The irony of the story.  All the people in the malls today, were only soothing the pains of their addiction to this artificial reality by buying things to become the characters they watch on TV Shows, which keeps them working (so they can make money to buy these things), which in turn can be translated as them being slaves to the illusions they choose to believe.

Self inflicted slavery.

A tough verdict to swallow, but look around.

The reason I started this essay with the request that you accept the fact that we live in a crazy society was this very point, that we choose to live in a world of self inflicted slavery.

In this new era, there is no need for whips to make people work.  As long as you constantly want, you will constantly work.  The system we set up was rigged this way.  In our world we have we work to make money, so we can live a life that stands up to the status definitions we are feeding ourselves through our televisions.

One can argue that this is been the process since beginning?  Everyone wanted to live like the wealthy or successful, or “beautiful” people of the society in question.  But there are key differences.

In the older version of this process, your the access to this kind of visual information was not as prevalent and it didn’t change as often.  Think of how fast you can change styles or trends by just creating a new look for a character on a show or commercial.  Where as in cultural groups there have always been the “trend-setters” of the herd, access to these people and their message was not as readily available and rapidly changing as it is in the world of television.

So now fashion changes every couple of months. What’s cool is a fleeting idea that can never be captured for any worthwhile amount of time.  To get proof of this point requires something as simple of monitoring the inventory changes at your local Banana Republic.  Every 3 weeks merchandise is pushed back ⅓ of the store until it hits the sale section in the back.  That is because every 3 weeks, something new is introduced.  I often wondered how many variations of a basic poplin shirt a company can make.

During the entire time I have been awake, and watching, I have counted 14.

TV keeps your brain in a constant cluster fuck.  Not knowing which way is coming, and which way is going you succumb and find yourself spending an hour of your life waiting in a parking lot so you can spend your money on another unnecessary item for an already comfortable American (I am referring to the fact that every American lives many levels above their counterparts in the rest of the world ).

TV teaches you about society.  What to wear.  How to be.  What to drive. What to eat.

TV teaches you who to be.

Now there’s a channel for every “person”, so that they don’t send conflicting messages on one channel.  Every viewer can find their comfort spot or characters and only watch shows like in that zone.  Now advertisers can market to a specific audience, making an already powerful weapon even more powerful.

Before I close this essay, I’d like to put a challenge in front of you.

Unplug your TV for 1 year.

You really don’t have a valid argument against me if you haven’t done this yet.  I haven’t had a TV for many years now… and what I mean by that is that there is no TV in my house at all.

Think about this statistic:  According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day.  That adds up to 28 hours a week.  That means that you spend 1 entire day of your week behind a television set.  That adds up to over 2 MONTHS out of 1 year behind a TV (4 hours x 365 days = 1460 hours/year; 1460 hours/year divided by 24 hours = 60.83 days per year!)

If you assume the average person lives 80 years, that comes out to 11.6 years behind a TV if they started watching TV at the age of 10.  That’s 15% of your life.  And now that screens are every where (literally in the palm of your hands) that number will increase.

Unless you can literally not turn it on, you won’t see the changes.

If there are those of you out there that are really, and I mean really interested in and bothered by what is happening with our world and our society, all you have to do is unplug your TV.

You will notice changes in your life after a short time.  The world will seem different to you, and

People will seem different to you, and you will see reality reality, not the one that has been implanted into our subconscious minds.

Every year the reality show we call reality gets more and more bizarre.  These changes are happening exponentially in this era.  Indeed we live in the era of the exponent.  Every is faster, and our technology progresses, we will be able to make things even faster, in essence accelerating the rate of the bizarre-volution.

Having read this, you are now faced with a choice:

Are you going to be a character or an observer?

Enter the rabbit hole and you will never be able to go back.  Reality is something other than what your conditioning tells you.

Song: Silent Spring, Massive Attack

Have you wondered why we haven’t given any thought to what happens to us if our planet get’s damaged?

Doesn’t it strike you as odd that we don’t push for a society that creates swarms of scientists dedicated to one job… monitoring and understanding our planet to make sure our species can continue living on it.

Considering that we are pumping chemicals, waste materials, and by-products of human life into our world that would never have been here naturally, I ask for a new urgency to make this change.  The entire purpose of human life needs to change.

It starts with your decisions.  Whether you choose education over entertainment. Whether you choose consideration over consumerism.  It all starts with our individual actions.

The video you just watched was taken by NASA’s GEOS-5 atmospheric analysis satellite at a 7-kilometer resolution with the general circulation model.  This is ACTUAL footage of the Earth from space.  Real pictures… put together to make a video.

The GEOS-5 atmospheric model was developed by NASA Goddard’s scientists. It’s based on the Earth System Modeling Framework, an open source project “for building climate, numerical weather prediction, data assimilation, and other Earth science software applications.”

When you loop together the raw data and make a video, and speed it up a little you realize something magnificient is going on.  The planet is breathing.

What I mean by that is if you look over all the forests on the globe, there is a creation of weather.  Water vapor from the expiration and inspiration of the trees.  We all know this, and learned this as children.  But our technology has given us the chance to do something very rare in nature.

The life span of an ant is about 90 days.  But ants don’t perceive these ninety days as how we perceive ninety days.  Indeed the perception of time is a discussion that still baffles quantum physicists.  Rather, appreciating the relativity in all of this harmony called nature is all you need.  If you understand that an ant perceives 90 days as an entire lifetime, then all you have to do is scale yourself as the ant like existence you really are in relation to this planet and you realize that the Earth is also a living being.  Living… on a different scale.

The discussion is not about whether CO2 is the culprit of climate change, or even if climate change even exists.  The discussion is about you looking around and seeing how we have become a society that worships monetary satisfaction over science.  We value entertainment and idolize celebrities.  Once again I am left thinking is this all that humanity is good for?

I think we owe our home a lot more than outlet stores in the deserts, massive air conditioned structures to store excess stuff, and an unrelenting appetite for greed, destruction, mass consumption and lambastic entertainment.

Just think about it… she’s breathing.

The question now looms… who will be chosen for the next stage of human evolution?  In the past you didn’t have a choice.  To pass on your genes you had to be fit for your environment.  The selecting factors were impressed on the organism by nature.  In the modern world however we control these factors (most of them at least).

So will you be able to afford the next evolutionary leap to Homo Technologicus?  Are you going to be able to pay the price to evolve into Homo Sapien 2.0?

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.