A Simple Faith

When I was a youth I had a plain simple faith in progress. It seemed to me impossible that once man had passed a milestone of progress in one way that he could ever pass the same milestone again the other way. Once the telephone was invented, it would stay invented. If past civilizations had faded away it was just because they had not learned the secret of progress. But Science meant permanent progress, with no going back. [...] It may be, as some indeed suspect, that the science we see as the dawn of recorded history was not science at its dawn, but represents the remnants of the science of some great and as yet untraced civilization.

As above, so below

The first law of the universe manifesting itself?

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Most of the stars that will ever exist have already been born, according to the most comprehensive survey of the age of the night sky.

Jigsaw Falling Into Place

This is only my 100th post since i started this weblog in 2007. That's an average of 20 posts a year, or less than two post a month. Either i don't have much to say or i am not very good at putting thoughts into words.

I had pondered long on what to write for this particular post. Finally, it hits me. Why not write about the situation that humanity is facing today. Yes, that will be a good topic to write about.

So, here goes:

(1) Intelligence: (a) the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations : reason; also : the skilled use of reason; (b) : the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (as tests)

(2) Conscience: the sense or consciousness of the moral goodness or blameworthiness of one's own conduct, intentions, or character together with a feeling of obligation to do right or be good

(3) Wisdom: (a) characterized by wisdom : marked by deep understanding, keen discernment, and a capacity for sound judgment; (b) exercising or showing sound judgment.

Wisdom is intelligence informed by conscience.

There are only two types of people in this world, namely:

(1) People with a conscience.

(2) People without a conscience.

Only the first type of people could gain wisdom, if they worked at it.

The second type of people do not and will not have any wisdom. Now, if only more people will see humanity in this way.

No, we can't choose which type we are while we are already born into this world. Either a person has it or they don't.

The first group- people with conscience- do not follow anyone. They follow only their conscience.

But there's another social phenomena that the second type of people, those with power, creates. Followers of their psychopathic traits and personality. Authoritarian Followers may have a conscience but they need to find it in themselves. And no other person can help them on this.

Albert Einstein once said, "a foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth." No where is this statement more true today when society has been enmeshed in a big matrix of lies that surrounds us everywhere..

We elect the worst among ourselves because we want to deny the painful truth, we like to not get involve or god forbids be accountable for our actions, we love the comfort that life seems to provide in our insulated existence.

And who is to blame for this? Yes, the person who stares at me every time i looked into the mirror.

In short, we don't much like responsibility and so in our collective irresponsibility the world has become as it is today.

Electing someone else to solve my problems is only an excuse to avoid solving them myself. It is just an excuse to avoid facing myself. If every one can acknowledge the truth of this, then perhaps the world will become a better place to lived in.

But there is a problem. The world has become as it is today because we do not understand this truth. The time is getting late to change this. Maybe it is even too late to change anything now.

Perhaps we are born into a certain age to learn certain lessons.

Perhaps we are born into this age to learn about baser pleasures, greed, and the accompanying pain that must come from them.

A buddhist teaching i used to follow mentioned this is the age of the "Latter Day of the Law". Reading Silber's account of man's inhumanity to another human is heart-rending, to say the least.

To know that these cruelties do happened and they happened in other parts of the world does not me feel better that it doesn't happen here. The totality of this human tragedy could never be grasped by you and me who are not suffering the pain of this existence.

It could have easily happen here but for some twist of fate. It is just that this country does not have the kind of resources that is coveted by the aggressors. Or it is easily a little luck that played a role in where i am born.

Yes, for those of us who are not part of the elite, just ordinary, decent people, we have to live our lives in an almost constant state of desperation.

What we called 'good times' is when we are not trampled underfoot by the boot of injustice, war and poverty in our little corner of the world. Other people's suffering are not a concern of you and me. They are just having a bad day perhaps.

We have lost our respect for the natural law of the universe and instead follow man-made laws that are not only unjust but barbaric.

Truth is going to catch up with us sooner than we think. But have we prepare ourselves for it? More importantly, have we prepare our next generation for it?

i am no wise man. But how could anyone be in a world that has gone mad and not question this madness?

The day will never come when we ask ourselves "why the fuck are we even here today?"

So be it.

With Me You Will Stay

You come from far away
With pictures in your eyes
Of coffeeshops and morning streets
In the blue and silent sunrise
But night is the cathedral
Where we recognized the sign
We strangers know each other now
As part of the whole design

A Revisionist View of History

There is no change for the better until people can see what is wrong with the world. Until people can see that this is not "normal". As long as they think this is how things should be, they will remain. Things are as it is now because we let them be for the longest time. And they will remain, and be repeated in cycles, as time washes away the fickle memories of the ignorant and apathetic.

The World As I See It

One of his most beloved essay. A simple, elegantly written piece on the value of being human.

"How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people - first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving..."

Ghosts, Hauntings, Water and a Possible Scientific Explanation

As we have already noted, if the infrastructure of our civilization were to be destroyed, then if a person a hundred years later tried to explain the theory of radio and television, people would find it impossible to comprehend. It would sound like magic.

Where does the power to work a pendulum come from? Lethbridge thought that it might be something invisible and intangible, a part of us, which knows far more than we do. Is it mind or soul? Some sort of electromagnetic or psyche field? Something linked to a higher dimension? He agonized over this and admitted he wasn’t wise enough to come to any definite conclusion, apart from the thought that ancient man knew far more about it than we do today. 

Although, Lethbridge did a huge amount of experimental work in the field of dowsing, and his results deserve  attention  from any serious student of the deeper realities of our world, what we are interested in here is his work in another, though related, direction. 

In 1957, Lethbridge left Cambridge in disgust at the narrow-minded attitudes of the scholars there. He moved into Hole House, an old Tudor mansion on the south coast of Devon. Next door to him lived a little old white-haired lady who assured Lethbridge that she could put spells on people who annoyed her and that she was able to travel out of her body at night and wander around the district. She explained that if she wanted to discourage unwanted visitors, she had only to visualize a five-pointed star in the path of the individual and they would stay away. Lethbridge, of course, was skeptical. 

But, being an experimenter, Lethbridge was trying the visualization one evening while lying in bed. That night, his wife awakened with the  feeling that somebody else was in the room. She could see a faint glow of light  at the foot of the bed, which slowly faded. The next day the old lady came to see them and told them that she had come to “visit” them the previous night and had found the bed surrounded by triangles of fire. 

Leaving aside whether or not we can prove this story to be anything more than a subjective experience,  there are two important points we would like to make. The first one is that somehow, this practice of “visualizing pentagrams” seems to have a causal relationship to the appearance of the old woman in Lethbridge’s bedroom. It was almost as though the practice “attracted” the visitor, possibly even inspiring the wish or  compulsion to visit. The second is that the visualized pentagrams appeared as triangles of fire. Theories of how hyperdimensional objects might appear in fourth dimensional space-time, or how four dimensional objects might appear in three dimensional space time, in mathematical terms, lends a modicum of credibility to this story. If the old woman had seen fiery pentagrams, we would not  take such notice of  the  event. That a pentagon in our world might appear as a triangle in another realm suggests something very mysterious here. I am also intrigued by the possible relationship to the differences of these hyper-dimensional solids and the difference between the perspectives of the “triangle people” and the “circle people”. This is also a very important point related to the dangers of visualizing geometric shapes when we  consider the susequent events that Lethbridge recounted.  

Several years later, the old lady told Lethbridge that she was going to put a spell on the cattle of a farmer with whom she was quarreling. At this point, Lethbridge took her seriously and warned  her about the dangers of practicing magic. She ignored him, and one day not long after declaring her intentions, she was found dead in her bed under mysterious circumstances. As it happened, the cattle of two other nearby  farmers did get hoof and mouth disease, but the cattle of the farmer with whom the old lady was quarreling were unaffected. Lethbridge was convinced that the “spell” had rebounded on the old lady in some way. But, it was this event that led to an important insight for us here, which is why we have recounted the story. 

Sometime after the old woman’s death, Lethbridge was passing her cottage and suddenly experienced a “nasty  feeling”, a “suffocating sense of depression”. His curiosity aroused, Lethbridge walked around the cottage and  discovered a most interesting  thing: he could step into and out of  the “depression” just as if it were some kind of invisibly defined “locus”. 

This reminded Lethbridge of a similar experience he had had when walking with his mother as a teenager. It was in the Great Wood near Wokingham, on a nice morning, when suddenly the two of them experienced a “horrible feeling of gloom and depression, which crept upon us like a blanket of fog over the surface of the sea”. They left in a hurry and only later discovered that the corpse of a suicide had been discovered lying just a few yards from where they had been standing. 

Some years later, Lethbridge and his wife went to the seashore to collect seaweed for their garden. As he walked on the beach, he again experienced the sense of depression, gloom and fear descending on him. Resisting this influence, Lethbridge and his wife began to fill their sacks with seaweed. After a very short period  of this activity, Lethbridge’s wife, Mina, came running up to him demanding that they leave saying, “I can’t stand  this place a minute longer. There’s something frightful here”. 

In a discussion about the phenomenon with Mina’s brother the following day, the brother mentioned that he had  experienced something very similar in a field near Avebury, in Wiltshire. When he said the word “field”, it clicked  in Lethbridge’s mind and he remembered that field telephones often short circuit in warm, muggy weather. “What was the weather like?”, he asked. 

“Warm and damp”, replied the brother. 

Right there, the idea began to shape itself in Lethbridge’s mind. Water. On the day he had been in the Great Wood, it had been warm and damp. When they had been at the beach gathering seaweed, it had likewise been  warm and damp. Experiment was obviously in order! 

The next weekend, Lethbridge and his wife again visited the bay. Again, as they stepped onto the beach, the same bank of depression and gloom enveloped them. Mina led him to the spot where she had experienced such  an overwhelming sensation that she had insisted on leaving the place. At that spot, the sensation was so powerful that they actually felt dizzy. Lethbridge described it as being similar to having a high fever and full of drugs. As it happened, on either side of this spot were two streams of water. 

Mina went off  to the cliff to look at the scenery and suddenly walked into the “depression” again. She actually had the sensation that something or someone was urging her to jump off the cliff! When she had brought it to the attention of Lethbridge, he agreed that this spot was as “sinister” as the spot on the beach between the streams. 

As it turned out, nine years later, a man did commit suicide from that exact spot. Lethbridge wondered if there was some sort of “timeless” sensation that had been “imprinted” on the area via some sort of “recording” principle. It seemed that, whether from the past or the future, feelings of despair were somehow recorded on the surroundings, in the very atmosphere, it seemed. The only question was, how? Lethbridge believed that the key was water. 

A hint of what may be happening here is provided by the work of Y. Rocard of the Sorbonne, who had discovered that underground water produces changes in the earth’s magnetic field, and this was proposed as the solution as to why dowsing works. The water does this because it has a field of its own which interacts with the earth’s  field. And most significantly to us here is that magnetic fields are the means by which sound is recorded on tape covered with iron oxide. This suggested to Lethbridge that the magnetic field produced by running water could  record strong emotions that, as Lethbridge also noted, produce electrical activity in the human physiology. Such fields could be “played back” continuously, and amplified in damp and muggy weather. 

This would explain why these “areas of depression” seem to form invisible walls. If you bring a magnet closer and closer to an iron object, you notice that at a certain point, the object is “seized” by the magnet as it enters the force field. 

Lethbridge’s experiments took a new turn at  this point, and led to evidence that many things that are perceived as “hauntings” or “ghosts” are really just “recordings”. At some point he thought about the fact that ghosts are often reported to reappear on certain “anniversaries” which suggests that there are other cyclical currents that turn such recordings on or off or simply amplify them. 

To answer the question that is growing in the reader’s mind, yes, it seems that some hauntings are the result of happy emotions, and strong happiness can also be recorded in the same way. It also seems that the type of material substance that the human “field” interacts with has an important role. For example, in the1840s, a certain Bishop Polk told a Joseph Rhodes Buchanan that he could detect brass in the dark. He said that when he touched it, a distinctly unpleasant taste was produced in his mouth. Buchanan tested him and discovered that it was true, even if  the metal was carefully and thickly wrapped in paper. Buchanan experimented with his students and found that some of them had a similar ability. In fact, it seemed that there were quite a number of substances that could be detected  this way, and the only explanation that seemed reasonable was that the nerves of the human being produce some sort of  field - he called it the nerve aura - which interacts with a similar field” of the object. Buchanan and others called the ability to “read” these fields “psychometry”, and it is popularly practiced today. What many people do not realize is that the principle of psychometry, that many take for granted - they can “feel the  vibrations” - led Tom Lethbridge to some startling revelations. 

As noted, Tom Lethbridge had concluded after a lot of experiments that a dowsing pendulum could somehow respond to different substances, and that lengthening or shortening the string was like tuning the pendulum to a particular wavelength. Lethbridge spent days testing all kinds of different substances. He discovered that the wavelength for silver is the same as lead: 22 inches. Truffles and beech wood both respond at 17 inches. This meant that there must be something further about such “paired” items to distinguish them. After some testing, Lethbridge discovered that it was not just the length of the string, but the number and direction of revolutions. For lead, the pendulum would gyrate 16 times and for silver it would gyrate 22 times. It was beginning to look like nature had a truly marvelous and foolproof code for identifying anything. It is also beginning to appear to us that the ancients knew this and that they may have attempted to transmit this knowledge to us via myth and legend and the “Green Language”. (That magical mumbo jumbo might not be the solution to the mysteries is also becoming more and more apparent, but, let us continue into even more remarkable speculations of Tom Lethbridge.) 

Through a variety of experiments, Lethbridge established the “frequency” for both death and violent anger: 40 inches. This also proved to be the frequency for cold and black. Indeed, colors have frequency. Grey is 22 inches— - not a surprise since it is the color of both lead and silver. Yellow is 29 and green is 30. 

After months of experiments, Lethbridge had constructed his table of frequencies, and he had discovered that 40 inches was some kind of limit. Every single substance that he tested fell between zero and 40 inches. It was at this point that he discovered something curious: Sulphur reacts to a 7 inch pendulum; if he extended the pendulum to 47 inches, it would still react to sulphur, but not directly over it. It would only react a little to one side. He then discovered that this was true of everything else he tried beyond the number 40 —  it would react, but only to one side. He noticed another odd thing: beyond 40 inches, there was no rate for the concept of time. The pendulum simply would not respond. Lethbridge realized that he was measuring a different dimension. However, when he lengthened the pendulum to 80 inches, there was a response to the idea of  time. Lethbridge pondered this and finally theorized that in the realm beyond 40, the pendulum is in time itself, and that is why there is no reaction to the idea. But, beyond that, there are other “realms” where the idea of time exists in another world “beyond death”. 

Lethbridge discovered that if he lengthened the string again beyond 80  inches, he got the same result, as if there were still another dimension. Lethbridge realized that he had discovered worlds in other dimensions, outside the limits of space and time, and theorized that we cannot see it because our physical bodies are limited detectors. 

Tom Lethbridge continued with his experiments and determined that the world of the “next” level beyond our own is one in which the energy vibrations are four times as fast as those of our world. The effect of encountering this reality is like a fast train passing a slow one. Even though they are both moving forward, the slow train seems to be moving backward. This hyperdimensional world is all around us, yet we are unable to see it because it is beyond the range of our senses. All the objects of our world are very likely just our limited perceptions of what is happening in this total reality.  

His experiments with megaliths indicated that they were placed to mark places where the earth forces were most powerful, and to harness energy in some way now forgotten.

Unfortunately, Lethbridge died of a heart attack before he could complete his researches. 

At this point we would like to note that Tom Lethbridge was not a spiritualist. He believed that magic, spiritualism, occultism and other forms of mumbo jumbo are merely crude attempts to understand the vast realm of hidden energies in which we live. We would like to add that expositions along the lines of most esoterica generally serve only to obscure, not to reveal; to disinform, rather than to produce real knowledge. Tom Lethbridge used logic and experiment and observation to come to the conclusion that there are other realms of reality beyond our world and that there are forms of energy that we do not even begin to understand.

Excerpt from 'Stone Technology And T.C.Lethbridge' chapter of 'The Secret History of the World'.

Making Numbers Sound Important and Grand

"We also have a way to vastly increase US household income - the feds have only to spend more money! Just add zeros. How about that? The poor family has not a dime more in real, spendable income…but we’ve managed - by clever use of mathematics and economics - to double its income. But that illustrates the nature of modern economics. It is all numbers…and none of them mean anything. And none means less than the zero.

A Journey of Discovery

Ah, the end of the year 2012 is fast coming upon us.

What will happen to all of us? Is the world coming to an end? 

Read the full article for some answers to what is really happening. It may not be what you would like to happen or what you would think will happen. But we are not here to engage in wishful thinking, are we? Truth is what we are really after. 

The Pied Piper

If various circumstances combine, including a given society's deficient psychological worldview, individuals are forced to exercise functions which do not make full use of his or her talents. When this happens, said person's productivity is no better, and often even worse, than that of a worker with satisfactory talents. Such an individual then feels cheated and innundated by duties which prevent him from achieving self-realization. His thoughts wander from his duties into a world of fantasy, or into matters which are of greater interest to him; in his daydream world, he is what he should and deserves to be. Such a person always knows if his social and professional adjustment has taken a downward direction; at the same time, however, if he fails to develop a healthy critical faculty concerning the upper limits of his own talents, his daydreams may "fix on" an unfair world where "all you need is power". Revolutionary and radical ideas find fertile soil among such people in downward social adaptations. It is in society's best interests to correct such conditions not only for better productivity, but to avoid tragedies. [...]

Finding One's True Family

Not an original work. Taken from a blog i'd been following. Mired in a mental block due to being a slave for too long.

But this was too beautiful to not share...
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Your Allies on Life’s Journey - Finding Your Tribe

"We all desire to find our tribe, a community of those that feel comfortable to us and nurture our journey.

The Emperor's New Clothes Explained

Image from here

There is a certain type of argument which, in fact, is not an argument, but a means of forestalling debate and extorting an opponent's agreement with one's undiscussed notions. It is a method of bypassing logic by means of psychological pressure. Since it is particularly prevalent in today's culture and is going to grow more so in the next few months, one would do well to learn to identify it and be on guard against it.

The Search For Truth Is Like Putting Together One Big Jigsaw Puzzle

"It was rather like the preparations made to put a large, complicated jigsaw puzzle together. One begins by sorting the pieces by color into piles. At the same time, if one comes across those which are clearly the “border” pieces, one then puts them in an altogether different pile. Once in awhile, while sorting, serendipity brings two pieces together, and those are put in little “sub-piles.

After this process is completed, it is done again in a more refined and exact way.

Blind Obedience

But the more significant factor is that one can easily remain free of even the most intense political oppression simply by placing one's faith and trust in institutions of authority. People who get themselves to be satisfied with the behavior of their institutions of power, or who at least largely acquiesce to the legitimacy of prevailing authority, are almost never subjected to any oppression, even in the worst of tyrannies.

Why would they be? Oppression is designed to compel obedience and submission to authority. Those who voluntarily put themselves in that state - by believing that their institutions of authority are just and good and should be followed rather than subverted - render oppression redundant, unnecessary.

The Mystery of Life

These words makes me realized again that more knowledge does not equate with becoming a better person.

- Greater access to knowledge is not the same as greater knowledge.
- An ever-increasing plethora of facts & data is not the same as wisdom.
- Breadth of knowledge is not the same as depth of knowledge.

~ taken from this blog post.

A Companion Star To Our Sun?

"Heavy snows are driven and fall from the world's four corners; the murder frost prevails. The Sun is darkened at noon; it sheds no gladness; devouring tempests bellow and never end. In vain do men await the coming of summer. Thrice winter follows winter over a world which is snow-smitten, frost-fettered, and chained in ice." 

"Fimbul Winter" from Norse saga, Twilight of the Gods

"Why We Don’t Remember: The Gift of This Journey"

There is a gift in not remember who we are when we are born into this lifetime; the gift is the journey. Many of us wonder why we do not remember who we were before we were born. We wonder what it was like to be a soul without a body and what it will be like to be one again. Many of us have a strange sense that we do remember, as if we did experience a bodiless existence, but we can’t quite recall the details. We may remember feeling as if we were flying, or as if we were just incredibly light and unrestricted in our movements. Still, most of us do not recall anything in detail about the time before we incarnated into a human body.

'Hume's Paradox' by Noam Chomsky

The final of four articles by Noam Chomsky that i am putting up for readers to consider.

Taken from "The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (Interviews with Noam Chomsky)".
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You've said the real drama since 1776 has been the "relentless attack of the prosperous few upon the rights of the restless many." I want to ask you about the "restless many." Do they hold any cards?

'Human nature and self-image' by Noam Chomsky

The third of four articles by Noam Chomsky that i am putting up for readers to consider.

Taken from "The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (Interviews with Noam Chomsky)".
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Is racism something that's learned, or is it innately endowed?

I don't think either of those is the right answer. There's no doubt that there's a rich, complex human nature. We're not rocks. Anybody sane knows that an awful lot about us is genetically determined, including aspects of our behavior, our attitudes. That's not even a question among sane people.

Life and Liberty

"Nature frequently does not announce in advance her intentions to fundamentally alter the world. Men often do -- and usually such warnings are ignored."
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The above quote is taken from a blog i had been following. i would like to add another sentence towards the end of that one: "The ignorance of such warnings is probably why Nature does not announce in advance her intentions to restore the world to a healthy state, as it was in the beginning."

As someone who believes is faintly aware that life goes around in cycles, the natural karmic law, the statement does make sense in a sort of round-about way.

There is no natural evil. Nature is the constant, the balancing 'force' in the equation of life between good and evil, between our choice either of life or the state of entropy. In its most fundamental, human beings are divided only between those who choose life and those who oppose life. The duality of life. It is manifest in everything in life, if one care to notice.

Superficial traits like 'race', skin colour, eye colour, hair colour, body shape or size, intelligence doesn't matter to them. The intrinsic nature of what is inside a person differentiate humans. And this intrinsic nature can be broken down to its most fundamental of whether a person chooses life or if a person does not choose life. That is all there is. Just like a binary system, on or off, yes or no. Everyone needs to understand and recognize that there exist these group of people who are against life. To them all living things are expendable. That could only mean you, me and all of us.

The universal law that humans are allowed a certain degree of free will in this world, i have come to see that evil exist only in the hearts of men. Two opposing forces of life- one for life, the other against life. And free will is the power (though restricted) which a person has to call upon to choose whether to serve life or otherwise. But, this choice may not be available for the latter group, those who oppose life, for it (the choice) may have already been decided at birth. It is not that they do not have the free will to choose again later in life, but the choice had already been made by them and if they do not want to change then no one else could change them. It is in their genes. This knowledge is known to ancient civilization but it is lost in the transition of time.

Liberty plays an important part in those who chose life. Let me rephrase that. Liberty is the only important concept to understand for those who choose life.

"[T]here are certain things which are common to them all ... What they had in common was the belief that men were by nature, if not good, at any rate not bad, potentially benevolent, and that each man was the best expert on his own interests and his own values, when he was not being bamboozled by knaves or fools; that on the whole men were prone to follow the rules of conduct which their own understanding provided. Most thinkers of the eighteenth century believed that progress was desirable -- that is to say, for example, that freedom was better than slavery; that legislation founded on what was called 'the precepts of nature' could right almost every wrong; that nature was only reason in action, and its workings, therefore, could in principle be deduced from a set of axioms like those of a theory in geometry, or like those of physics and chemistry, if only you knew them. ... The more empirically-minded among them were sure that the science of human nature could be developed no less than that of inanimate things, that ethical and political questions, provided they were genuine -- and how could they not be so? -- could be answered no less certainly than those of mathematics and astronomy, and that a life founded upon these answers would be free, secure, happy and wise." ~ Isaiah Berlin.

The other group of people "when given a choice between liberty and death, would reject liberty". These are the people who are now taking the world to the edge of the precipice.

"In the vast domain of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom. As soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom, you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. You feel it already in the vegetable kingdom: from the vast catalpa to the humblest herb, how many plants die, and how many are killed? But from the moment you enter the animal kingdom, this law is suddenly in the most dreadful evidence. A violent power, at once hidden and palpable ... has in each major subdivision of the animals appointed a certain number of species to devour the others. Thus there are insects of prey, reptiles of prey, birds of prey, fishes of prey, quadrupeds of prey. There is no instant of time when one creature is not being devoured by another. Over all these numerous races of animals man is placed, and his destructive hand spares nothing that lives.

Man kills to obtain food and kills to clothe himself. He kills to adorn himself and he kills in order to attack. He kills in order to defend himself and he kills in order to kill. Proud and terrible king, he wants everything and nothing can resist him ... But who [in the general carnage] will exterminate the one who exterminates all the others? He will kill himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of men ... Thus is accomplished ... the great law of the violent destruction of living creatures. The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar, upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death." ~ Joseph de Maistre.

The world has move a step closer to a very dangerous position once again, as could be seen here, here, there, everywhere. The thing is, when we look at it simply, is that this world, the place we called 'home', is being run by people of the latter type.

The people who are 'pro-life', so to speak, are absorbing the values of the other group of forces. And the imbalance in the world could be causing all the terrible things that is happening around us- the looming financial and economic collapse, the (very) real possibility of war and strife. All man-made catastrophe that could only cause one thing- the destruction of lives.

If the good people of this world do not take action to "fix" this impending crisis, then it is inevitable that things will continue on its current course. How do we fix it is another question. Maybe, we could start by recognizing and acknowledging that there are human beings who does not have the qualities and traits of what could be called 'human'. And if we believe that the universe and life is eternal, and we don't do anything to fix this life-threatening situation, then something will intervene to preserve life in this world. That "something" could well turn out to be mother nature herself. It would be ruthless if nature were to do it.

The earth changes happening around us. This may as well be the "balance" to "fix" the "imbalanced" equation we are experiencing now. Life is a struggle. It may as well be for our children to live a better life. It may as well be that life is also a cycle.

"Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal." ~ Eckhart Tolle

"Change won't come from governments or the halls of power." ~ Cecile Pineda

"The influences of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to the degree that the walls of space and time have come to look solid, real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits in the world is the sign of insanity."~ Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

'The unmentionable five-letter word' by Noam Chomsky

The second of four articles by Noam Chomsky that i am putting up for readers to consider.

Taken from "The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (Interviews with Noam Chomsky)".

Something i'd known for so long and yet it is only recently that i read something that articulated this so well. Yes, i am a modern slave in the full sense of the word. Somehow, strangely, knowing this and acknowledging it makes me feel freer than the others. Though an enlightened slave is not much better than an ignorant one. On his own, he is still a slave.

'The Roots of Racism' by Noam Chomsky

The first of four articles by Noam Chomsky that i am putting up for readers to consider.

Taken from "The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (Interviews with Noam Chomsky)".
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All over the world-from LA to the Balkans to the Caucasus to India-there's a surge of tribalism, nationalism, religious fanaticism, racism. Why now?

How the media works

Whether they're called "liberal" or "conservative", the major media are large corporations, owned by and interlinked with even larger conglomerates. Like other corporations, they sell a product to a market. The market is advertisers- that is, other businesses. The product is audiences. For the elite media that set the basic agenda to which others adapt, the product is, furthermore, relatively privileged audiences.

So we have major corporations selling fairly wealthy and privileged audiences to other businesses. Not surprisingly, the picture of the world presented reflects the narrow and biased interests and values of the sellers, the buyers and the product.

The Myth of War

We condition the poor and the working class to go to war. We promise them honor, status, glory, and adventure. We promise boys they will become men. We hold these promises up against the dead-end jobs of small-town life, the financial dislocations, credit card debt, bad marriages, lack of health insurance, and dread of unemployment. The military is the call of the Sirens, the enticement that has for generations seduced young Americans working in fast food restaurants or behind the counters of Walmarts to fight and die for war profiteers and elites.

Density

An explanation of Density.

The idea of all being illusion should not be interpreted New Age style as stating that all is simply an artifact of one's subjectivity. One cannot learn to fly by saying that gravity is illusion. All may in the end be consciousness but one needs to distinguish between levels and degrees of consciousness. 

We could say that the scale of densities correspond to a matrioshka of illusions nested inside each other. This is so because perceptions proper to the next higher density would be somewhat speculative or exceptional in the lower one. Still, within each level exist rules and laws of nature which are objective and real within this level. We should not confuse limits of perception with misperception of the perceptible due to wishfulness, laziness or naivete.

Philosophy of Liberty

"You exist in Time. This is manifest in Future='Life', Present='Liberty', Past='The Product of your Life and Liberty'. To lose your Life is to lose your Future. To lose your Liberty is to lose your Present. And to lose the 'Product of your Life and Liberty' is to lose that portion of your Past that produced it..."

This explanation makes it so clear why liberty is the most important element in the 'present'. And also why oppressive governments are causing the natural progress of life and even time to come to a standstill or worse, revert back to an earlier cycle.

Nik Kershaw 'Human Racing' ~ A Review

An album 28 years in wait to fully realized its sound in all its digital glory after its first release in 1984. The album is all but forgotten except for its most ardent fans and admirers.



Ah, nineteen-eight-four. The year of Big Brother, newspeak, doublethink, the Thought Police and a world divided into three parts. Also, an unknown singer-songwriter would enter into the music scene which was then dominated by a genre known as new romantics or new wave. The so-called second british invasion- pop music driven by keyboards. Nicholas David Kershaw or better known as Nik Kershaw released his debut album, 'Human Racing' in that same year.

I was in secondary school at the time. A good friend said to me one morning before school starts that he had just listened to a new single. Ah the so-called cliched 'good old days' talk again. A time where all the care of the world rest on music, football and where to find good-looking girls. And so here he was, arguing with another friend about this song, saying how good it was while this other boy were dismissing his comments. Later, i got the chance to listen to that song. That song was of course his first single 'I Won't Let The Sun Go Down On Me'. It was good. But another song from the album would be my favourite. I would even say it was the quintessential pop anthem of the 80's, 'Wouldn't It Be Good'.

The remastering had given the whole album a more pronounced low-end. Nik has seen to it that the songs are not only brighter but the lower register is given due consideration. Of all the remastered albums i had, from the excellent Beatles remastered to early U2 albums, audio reproduction of this one ranks among the best. It managed to bring out the bass notes which were really flimsy on the original. Highs were crisp without sounding dull or too bright. No noticeable saturation in the sound is observed so i assumed audio compression is kept at appropriate level. There is an equal level of bass and treble without one being more prominent than the other as is usual in many remastered discs of past works. Extended listening even at high volume doesn't cause ear fatigue.

'Dancing Girls' starts the album off. Creative use of synthesizer, interesting drum pattern and the subject matter of a man tired of the ways of the world imagining better days 'inside his head' makes this a nostalgic piece.

The now unforgettable guitar strain of 'Wouldn't It Be Good' opens the next song. The melody makes this the strongest piece. The bassline anchors the song well making it more urgent and adding to the sense of pathos in the lyrics. The song works because of and also in spite of, its emotional appeal. Listening to it in a down mood almost always make a person project the same emotion on himself of which the song tries to evoke. When one is feeling optimistic it had the same effect of lifting the mood.

Then came a sequence of songs which seem light on the surface and does not take themselves seriously. 'Drum Talk' has interesting drums and funny percussion effects. Then came 'Bogart'. Inspired by Humphrey Bogart no less with inferences to Bogart's famous film noir 'The Big Sleep'. It could be about a man who is insecure when it comes to keeping a relationship with a woman. The opening synth sets the hook but it was the guitar riffs at the end which sets the tone of this song.

The whistled end of 'Bogart' segues into 'Gone To Pieces'. Another seemingly silly piece with some distorted 'hot-air balloon' vocals which never fails to put a smile on the face.

The second half of the album opens with 'Shame On You'. Much better than 'Gone' again because of the very interesting percussion and vocal effects. And equally a fun listen as pop music should be.

Up to this point, with the possible exception of 'Wouldn't It Be Good', one may think the songs and the album is just lightweight pop fluff. Only close and repeated listening reveals its maturity beyond just pop music.

'Cloak And Dagger' follows. The song is about the true state of the world we lived in. Things remains the same. Consisting of two parts- the half-spoken part representing the powers that be and the sung part which is the ordinary people. Intelligent lyrics frames its chorus. And the spoken part always builds up to the catchy chorus like a mass awakening of sort for the people. A masterpiece this.

'Faces' is a slow burn and is the weakest track of the whole. 'I Won't Let The Sun Go Down On Me' is the song which brings back memories of those school days. It was different from the rest of the synth-pop tunes when it was first heard. Still a fine song now though it had lost its 'novelty' due to the somewhat dated synth sound. "Human Racing', a commentary on the human condition closes the album with a down note. Hope is saved for a future record perhaps.

It is only in retrospect that I see this album for what it is. A social commentary on human nature in modern times interspersed with a great sense of humour. A gentle reminder not to take ourselves so seriously and at the same time taking a serious look at issues that surrounds us.

Nik has made a serious album while not taking himself seriously. The production and sound of the album has become a little dated today, yet it gives an old-school charm reminiscent of music from a bygone era where brass instruments figure prominently besides new technology like the synthesizer. But still more important is the songs doesn't take itself seriously.

Nik's debut is not a classic but it is still a very good record. His best work would come much later. Meanwhile, this debut has something to say and it said it well enough to warrant a listen another 28 years into the future.

A short summary of the accompanying second disc of remixes and B-sides. There are a lot of 12" remix of almost all the song from the album proper. While that will surely satisfy fans like me, only a handful of those remixes are worth repeated listening. The special brass mix of 'Shame On You' is so much better than the original. The brass section (trumpets) give the song an added exuberance making a good song so much better. 'Drum Talk' also benefits from additional percussion effects and a more tribal, raw drumming. And 'Cloak And Dagger' is excellent performed live. The second disc is not a necessity but it does enhance the listening experience. Did I mentioned the sound quality of both discs are top notch too? Nik has done a good job overseeing the remastering of the original 1/2" tapes.

'The Riddle' remastered next?

Rating: 8.5/10

The interview by SDE with Nik Kershaw on the release of the re-mastered album HERE.

Aung San Suu Kyi Nobel Peace Prize Speech

On the radio this morning, I had the chance to listen to her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, 20 years after receiving it. Her voice is steady, yet firm intonation and had a sort of peaceful feeling to it.

Her reference to buddhist philosophy specifically the Four Noble Truths, the six great dukkha, and especially the passage about 'perfect' peace is an eye-opener.

The Struggle

“The battles that must be fought may never be won in our lifetime. And there will always be new battles to define our struggle. Resistance to tyranny and evil is never ending. It is a way, rather, of defining our brief sojourn on the planet. Revolt, is the only acceptable definition of the moral life. Revolt, is “a constant confrontation between man and his obscurity. …It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.” A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object, But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.” ~ Albert Camus.

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i had an appointment yesterday afternoon. i drove there using an old familiar road. During the trip however i saw something not quite familiar. In the middle of the road there is a row of purple flowers with long, thin stalks stretching for quite a distance. It must have been planted there by the local authorities.

It must have been so ordinary that no one would have noticed them. i was thnking of something when they caught my sight. The rows of flowers were being blown by the wind. They were swaying back and forth at the same time and in the same pattern like so many delicate hands waving at all the passersby. It was such a mesmerizing sight to behold that should i be walking by i would have stopped everything and watch them. A child would have surely sees this, i thought.

In this ordinariness is the struggle of a plant against nature. If they were to struggle the wind would have break their bodies easily. Their struggle consists therefore to not struggle. Of course they don't have the consciousness to know this. For them, it is a mechanical, in-built mechanism of survival.

i'd read the above passage by Camus many times over and finally there is a glimmer of understanding. Therein lies the essence of his philosophical idea of 'Absurdism'.

On the surface of it, this short passage give the idea it is about a call to arms, to take action against tyranny and evil.

Only in reflection and a little thought does one sees the truth behind it. No, this is not a call for action, at least not action in the physical sense. It is a call to understand the human condition. To take a look around and try to understand the world as it is, objectively. To look into the self with no delusion and belief of any kind. Only then will one see the world today for what it is - a cruel place to lived for so many people. But it is only what it is today because we make it what it is.

The world has exists this way for as long as humans has been on this planet. A study of history will easily validates this. Part of the meaning of life, or more precisely according to Camus, the only 'constant' of life is the struggle against tyranny for it can be observed almost everywhere if one cares to look.

What is sad in this, is that good, "moral" people have no certainty of winning this struggle. The old adage "good always triumphs over evil" is just a saying to make us not give up hope. Hope is the only thing makes us keep up the fight.

But when we understand the struggle against tyranny is part of what it means to live, a different kind of hope is to be found. Perhaps then we will realize that even though we may not win in the end we will find that only by living in this way will we really have lived this life. We may not like to hear this but to live in any other way would be to live as a slave, in the full sense of the word.

Being free is the condition we are in before we chose to come here. A person who realized this will always struggle against tyranny. And some say with the coming age of enlightenment, more people will come to this realization. Still, everyone is subject to certain laws which we will have to learn before we can progress. So it must remain that humanity will not progress without learning its lessons. And it is not technological progress that is meant.

~ This post is dedicated to Paula, an admirer of Camus' work, mentor-friend, and who has more wisdom than this writer.

Money for knowledge

""Besides the absence of "love" many people were very indignant at the demand for payment, for money. In this connection it was very characteristic that those who were indignant were not those who could pay only with difficulty, but people of means for whom the sum demanded was a mere trifle.

Those who could not pay or who could pay very little always understood that they could not count upon getting something for nothing... Only those who had money did not understand and did not want to understand this.

Afterwards...

A curious person asked,

"I felt something beautiful which seems to me to be profound and life-changing. I experienced something which seems to me to be important, big.

Then, I tell myself I will never, ever forget it. I even remind myself of it.

Time passes by. It has been so many years after that beautiful and profound feeling. Many years after that important and big experience. Nothing remains of it now. So many things had disappeared.

Why experience so much so that I will forget it afterwards? Why feel so much so that I will not remember it afterwards?"

After what seemed like a long time, Memory replied, "you can remember the feelings and experiences only "when" you have them. One day, all of a sudden, when those feelings and experiences find you again, you will see that they have been absent a long, long time. You will then realized something."

"What is it that i will realized?"

"You can know that you have not remembered those feelings and experiences not at that very moment, but afterwards. These moments of remembrances are very short. And time will make sure you forget about them long before you remember them again."

Right Or Wrong...Err Left?

Had a short quip with a lawyer during a work-related lunch the other day, and suddenly remembered this comment posted long ago in a post on a favourite blog. The blogger, who incidentally is also a lawyer (talk about coincidence), offered some very interesting views.
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Elementary My Dear Watson

A perfect example of one song- Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner", that explains music's basic elements of melody, rhythm and texture. There's a kind of existential feel to the song too the more i listened to it.


Her original, a capella album-version of the song, although a little "breathy" (due to close-miking technique probably), has quite an unforgettable melody and monophonic texture (one voice singing a melody). One single 'melody' and therefore it has "one layer of sound" ie. monophonic.

A Walk in the City

“When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.” ~ Wendell Berry.

Her hand is warm against his. Cars passing by on both sides of the divide. She is careful with him lest one of them decides to care less. He could not tell exactly where they are going although she had told him before they leave home. "To work" is all he could recall. Unable to comprehend further he could only think of work as something fun. For him that is. How could it not be? The cars seems to say so too as they zoomed pass without a care.

What new vista will open up when they reach there? Will the people he meet be friends or foe? All these playing in his mind.

Now quietly they both walk to her workplace. The walk is long but his legs does not feel the weight in the warm air. The trees provide some shades from the scorching sun. Treading on soft dirt beside the road, shadows cast upon the ground where the sun smiles through the leaves. The sun and shadows seems to join in the fun now.

"How much longer before we reach there?"

"Not long. We'll be there soon after we cross the bridge"

The moment did not last for long. But realization only hits long after that. Too long. How could it be otherwise when the sun, the trees, those fast cars, and the shadows all come out to play on that warm sunny day.

Those moments are long gone now.

~ Dedicated to my mom ~

A Rendezvous

"Before my Soul taught me, I thought that when I was in any place on the earth I was remote from every other spot. But now I have learned that the place where I subsist is all places, and the space I occupy is all intervals." ~ Khalil Gibran

Looking out the window. Places passing by. The train moved ever so quickly. It has a date with lady-time.  Not realizing that she is always there waiting. Stopping in places to let weary souls get off. Some new souls will join the journey. While others will continue with theirs.

Music's Version of a Salvador Dali Painting

Coffee in a Cup (A Journalist's Song)

What is life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
—Last words of Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior and orator

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
—T.S. Eliot, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Nik Kershaw 'Human Racing' Remastered ~ An Interview

"The thing that I’m concerned about is the death of the album, especially in the digital domain – people just cherry picking stuff from what’s available. I’ll go on iTunes and I’ll download an album because that’s what I do, I like to listen to a body of work, but people listen to music differently nowadays, they consume it in a completely different way... there might not be CDs available in the high street in the next few years." ~ Nik Kershaw

In Search of the Miraculous

An excerpt of P.D. Ouspensky's book, 'In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching':

You do not realize your own situation. You are in prison. All you can wish for, if you are a sensible man, is to escape. But how to escape? It is necessary to tunnel under a wall. One man can do nothing. But let us suppose there are ten or twenty men — if they work in turn and if one covers another they can complete the tunnel and escape.

Minimum Wage, Inflation and Unemployment

A few economic literature on the subject of of minimum wage and unemployment:

From Freaknomics - minimum wage decrease unemployment: Link Here

The Austrian school view: Mythology of the Minimum Wage

Graham White 2001. "The Poverty of Conventional Economic Wisdom and the Search for Alternative Economic and Social Policies". The Drawing Board: An Australian Review of Public Affairs, V. 2, N. 2 (Nov.): 67-87.

Perception of 2nd Density Beings

Any relevance of this post to life is that all living beings share the same world, but each one of us has vastly different perceptions of this world.

The question is: if animals could not perceive the world as humans do, could it be possible that human beings also could not perceive the world as some higher beings living among us could? Put in another word- is it possible that we live and move among beings that we cannot perceive? Just as the 2nd dimensional beings could not perceive third dimensional beings (humans) in the first video you posted.

Listening, Or Not

On the way to work this morning, i turned off the radio just for a moment. Normally i always tuned in to BFM 89.90 each morning. Today, i passed the toll booth and with the radio off, thought "what a noisy city i lived in". The noise of the cars on the road, jam-packed after the toll as usual. Such a stressful condition i have gotten myself into just to make a living.



And then all of a sudden, of all things, i heard a bird singing. It sounded so near yet i could not see where the bird was. Could it be standing on some nearby lamp post in the middle of the road? Or could it be flying through the top of my car and sing for me? i had no idea.

It sounded so out of place in that busy highway that i wondered if anyone else hear what i had just heard. If i had consciously try to listen to a bird sing, i doubt i could ever hear it. It just happened without me knowing. For a moment when i turned my mind off the surrounding noise did i heard a bird telling its truth to the world. To any living things that care to listen.

And so as it is with real life. How many times have i actually listen to someone when they express their thoughts or feelings. Instead i project my own thoughts and feelings to the other person. How many times have i failed to understand what they're really saying to me. Sometimes i know that even they have difficulty coming up with the words to explain things to me. And yet i would not try to understand them.

There is much subtleties to be found in the music i listened to which i took time to find. Why should i not apply it to human conversation too. Maybe then the truth of what the other person is trying to say will reveal itself to me, like what the singing bird did this morning.

An Ancient Saying - reprise and expanded

"If the wrong person uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way".

This is in sharp contrast to our belief in the 'right' method irrespective of the person who applies it. In reality, everything depends on the person and little or nothing on the method.

From here: http://modernlife-maya.blogspot.com/2011/10/ancient-saying.html

"Obviously the present crisis throughout the world is exceptional, without precedent. There have been crises of varying types at different periods throughout history - social, national, political. Crises come and go; economic recessions, depressions, come, get modified, and continue in a different form. We know that; we are familiar with that process. Surely the present crisis is different, is it not? It is different first because we are dealing not with money nor with tangible things but with ideas. The crisis is exceptional because it is in the field of ideation. We are quarreling with ideas, we are justifying murder; everywhere in the world we are justifying murder as a means to a righteous end, which in itself is unprecedented. Before, evil was recognized to be evil, murder was recognized to be murder, but now murder is a means to achieve a noble result. Murder, whether of one person or of a group of people, is justified, because the murderer, or the group that the murderer represent, justifies it as a means of achieving a result that will be beneficial to man. That is, we sacrifice the present for the future, and it does not matter what means we employ as long as our declared purpose is to produce a result that we say will be beneficial to man. Therefore, the implication is that a wrong means will produce a right end and you justify the wrong means through ideation. We have a magnificent structure of ideas to justify evil and surely that is unprecedented. Evil is evil; it cannot bring about good. War is not a means, to peace."

~ J. Krishnamurti, excerpt from "The Book of Life". (Hat tip to blogger 'coyoteprime' for this excerpt).

Read the article, Protection Fraud, to better understand the above quote.

Being angry at the current situation and keeping the anger inside, or worse still, expressing those anger towards another person are not going to make the situation go away or gets better. The best way to make it (the situation) a little bearable, if not "better", is to share it with as many people as possible. It is the only act of freedom any person could do in this situation.

An Existential Thought

The most "real" world we live in is that of our fellow human beings. Without them, we should experience a sense of enormous emptiness; we could hardly be human ourselves, for we are made or marred by our relations with other people. The company of animals could console us only because, and to the extent to which, they are reminders, even caricatures, of human beings. A world without fellow human beings would be an eerie and unreal place of banishment; with neither fellow humans nor animals the world would be a dreadful wasteland, no matter how luscious its vegetation. To call it one-dimensional would not seem to be an exaggeration.

Man's Search for Meaning 'excerpt' by Victor Frankl

Posting this as a record to remind myself that life is worth living...

"If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering."

Experiences in a Concentration Camp

The Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle for 6-Year-Old

"The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa." ~ The definition for 'The Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle'

Three Reasons Why

There is a song by my favourite singer, Nik Kershaw called "One World". It is about humanity sharing a common aspirations, living in the same place we called Earth. That we are actually not much different from each other.

These three comments convey so succinctly why we need to reject the present government. They were taken from the post "What Sayest Thou?" written by a very good writer. The article ask readers questions on another excellent post written earlier "Smack in the Eye of the Storm".

Ten Life's Philosophy for a Six-Year-Old Living in a Modern World

The start of a new year already. And i still have nothing much to say.

So, inspired by a post from a good blogger friend (where she nentioned Albert Camus' philosophy of absurdism again), and in the spirit of Einstein's "if you can't explain something to a six-year-old, you really don't understand it yourself", here goes:

You see a box of delicious chocolate and a bowl of yummy ice-cream on the table. And let's say there is a little boy named Johnny and a little girl called Mary. Different people see life differently.