Spirituality and Science OR Spirituality vs Science?

One of the most deeply rooted and age old debates in our society is the one between spirituality and science. For centuries, spiritual seekers have associated science with man trying to question the work of God and maybe play God himself, and the Scientific community has given very little credit to spirituality.

I choose to use the word spirituality and not religion because by talking about spirituality and science, I wish to focus on the subjects of faith and rationality, experience and exploration and try to find any connection that might exist between the two. And in this context, organised religion can be kept aside for a while.

Spirituality and science are often seen as opposing concepts and in general people who speak for science are against spirituality and vice-versa.
But when I try to examine the nature of spirituality and science, I do not see them as opposing concepts at all, rather to me they seem to be deeply inter-linked. Rather than being two completely detached and different ways of looking at the world, they seem to me to be two steps of the same process -- of understanding all that is life.

To me spirituality is synonymous with experience. Spirituality and spiritual conclusions/inclinations/faiths are usually a direct result of an individual's experiences and instinctive voices and science is exploration into the logical reasoning behind an experience. So to me it seems that spirituality is the first step of 'being' which is nothing but the act of experiencing life.

And once an individual has experienced, he/she wants to look into the rationality of that experience. To explore and find a logical reason for what the experience of the instinctive voice tells them.
So in this way of thinking, spirituality and science are two steps of the same process of being a human. First you experience and then you try to understand and find a reason for that experience.

In other words spirituality and science seem to be nothing but the two halves of our brains trying to understand and comprehend the unified reality in two different ways. The right side spiritually experiences the world and then the left rational half sets on the process understanding that experience.

And so conflict between spirituality and science in the world, to me, is representative of the conflict between the left and right side of our brains. The key to life in any context seems to be balance, but our world which is representative of our states of minds is clearly out of balance. We seem to be living in a world dominated by the Left side of our brains. And how are we to get a complete and unified view of the world when there is conflict between the two halves of our brains? Only when the left and the right side come together with their understandings and conclusions can we hope to achieve a complete picture of the world by the harmonious use of our brains entirely.

Logic, mathematics, and science gives us numbers, figures and infinite possibilities but one thing science can not do is reduce these infinite possibilities to one outcome. That is where you and I, the observer comes in. Every moment in our lives presents us with infinite choices but it is our choices that reduce all these infinite possibilities to once concrete tangible outcome in the real world.

I very strongly feel that human beings trying to explore life and universe through science without taking the observer/spirituality into consideration will never work. Here is the analogy that time and over again leads me to this conclusion -  Let us imagine the entire universe as one big jig-saw puzzle, and human species being a part of the universe is one of the jig-saw pieces. Now what is happening is that this one jig saw piece called human has pulled itself out of the overall picture and is trying to find the 100% in the 99% of the puzzle, which it will never find. Only when human scientific exploration puts the human piece of the puzzle back into the equation will the puzzle be complete, not otherwise.

Scientific development on a lot of fronts seems to be meaningless, and on a lot of other fronts it seems destructive because we are exploring possibilities of our universe without considering who is exploring?! And why did we begin the exploration in the first place?!
I strongly hold that human exploration on scientific and technological front will find the direction and reason that it clearly lacks currently only when spirituality is rightly recognised as the first step of human exploration and is deeply embedded into our scientific and technological endeavours.

Spirituality and science are not opposing in nature as it might seem at first, rather they are two steps of one unified movement of human existence and one can't be complete without the other; one is blind without the other.





















                                                          

Humanity as an extension of myself

Physics, philosophy, history, chemistry, biology, agriculture, geology,
archaeology, anthropology, art, education, psychology, sociology, and the list goes on and on. Humans have had to catalogue and categorise information about life under numerous names based on the nature of information to bring some sense of order to a seemingly random and chaotic universe.  

Life is so immense and complex that it is impossible for one individual to explore all the different facets of life and hence different people working in different fields, exploring many different facets of life works perfectly on an individual level and on a collective human level. 

Such diversity in interests among people helps build a more holistic view and understanding of life for the whole of humanity at large. At the same time it enables individuals who are caught up in their individual fields of work to understand life on its different fronts for which they don't have the time. 

Humanity could very well be visualised as a man with many faces and limbs, each one with its own special power and interest, and this is where I suddenly find myself thinking if this is precisely what Krishna was referring to when he showed his all superior self to Arjuna according to Indian mythology 'Mahabharata'. Forgive me for pulling you to mythological realm without any prior warning.  

It is self-empowering and comforting for me to see the whole of humanity as an extension of my own self rather than as a fragmented divided system. Also I wouldn't dare put one field over another as being more important, because it is only when knowledge from these different fields come together that we can begin to get a complete picture of life and its meaning. 

So here goes out a big heartfelt gratitude to all those scientists, anthropologists, historians and all other professionals whose curiosities and hard work have given me the understanding of the world I have today. 

Hate crime and not Criminals

To begin let us first consider a hypothetical situation where a society is in a state of total collapse, where there is a lack of food, water, and money. 

In this given situation I think most of us; in fact all of us would resort to stealing, looting, fighting, and killing for survival if we had to. 

But in a day to day normally functional society, most of us will not need to resort to such behaviour for most of our lives. Most people are found saying things like – “Stealing is wrong and I would never steal. And if someone does he/she should be punished for it”, without realising that they would never steal because they never find themselves in a position where it becomes a choice between stealing or dying and that may be some other people steal and kill because they find themselves in such situations. I think in such drastic scenarios most of us would steal and kill if we had to.

But in a normally functional society that we live in on a day to day basis most of us will not need to resort to such behaviour for most of our lives. And most of us judge other people’s actions as right or wrong from our individual level of comfort, without realising that we have created a society in which everybody is selfishly competing with one another for survival, and in such a paradigm everybody is constantly trying to secure more resources for themselves and lesser for everybody else. In such a selfish and competitive paradigm people who succeed get rich and continue to get richer, while people who didn’t have the situations working in their favour lose and stay poor. 

So poverty is part of our social structure, it is woven into the very fabric of human society. If there are rich people, there will be poor people. Unless of course we evolve to a point where we all freely share all our resources equally.  

And in this poverty stricken daily reality of the majority of the world’s population living under poverty line, struggle for survival is a day to day reality and just like any other human being would in such situations, these people resort to whatever means they have to, in order to feed and protect themselves and their loved ones. 

So looking at the broader picture we are all as individuals equally responsible for the crime in the world, because we let our selfishness blind us from seeing that in our individual pursuit for more, we let some of our brothers and sisters slip through the cracks and live in conditions that no human or animal should live in. 

And if pushing fellow humans to such situations of desperation wasn’t enough, we then punish them by the law for doing something that we all would have done in similar situations. 

And in doing so, we are doubly wronging our fellow human beings. First we push them to a point of desperation and then we punish them for doing something that we all would have done in such desperate situations.  

Of course I cannot deny that there are some sociopathic people out there who commit crimes because they love it. But I have to admit that most of the sociopathic tendencies are bred in the horrible conditions that the poor of our society live in. And so even in case of such sociopathic people, it is the environment or the condition that is to be blamed which is poverty. 

And poverty is the direct result of uneven distribution of wealth which arises out of each one of our individual attitude of trying to secure more for ourselves and less for everybody else. 

In conclusion, I think arresting and locking up individuals who have committed crimes might be necessary, at least till a situation has been understood and resolved. But it is nowhere close to ridding the society of crime. 
An unhealthy act is an outcome of an unhealthy mind, and an unhealthy mind is an outcome of an unhealthy environment. We need to examine the environment. 

Through this thought I wish to at least make people think twice about this issue, if not rid the society of crime completely.

Ron Paul Revolution

With 2012 American elections drawing closer, international and American media is buzzing with one name - Ron Paul.
A lot of independent media websites, activists and young individuals are supporting Ron Paul and the 3 big points on his election campaign agenda
1) End the wars,
2) End the Fed, and
3) End the war on drugs
and are upholding him as the only deserving candidate to be the next American President.
 Where as on the other hand, most of the main stream media outlets are trying to down play Ron Paul by either completely ignoring him, grossly under-representing him on television, and in some cases by constantly trying to focus only on his alleged past actions from over two decades ago rather than paying more attention to what the man has to say today, which clearly comes off as a desperate attempt to tarnish his image in public's minds.  
I guess even the corporate media understands that other candidates are so incompetent that they have to go out of their way to do everything they can to make sure that Ron Paul doesn't just sail through the election campaign to become the next president.

What ever it may be, one thing is for sure Ron Paul's increasing popularity is keeping the opposition leaders and the corporate controlled media houses on their toes.

But even though Ron Paul is the current favorite amongst a lot of young people, political analysts and independent activists because of the sincere points he is raising, let us not jump into conclusions about anything without putting it in context with what political history has to teach us.

Just like Ron Paul is being hailed as the face of change today, it was not long ago when Obama was being up held as the face of change and hope. The first elected black president, and beacon of hope, Obama revolution with slogans like "We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change we seek."

During the election campaign four years ago, most of the political pundits, commentators supported Obama's campaign but four years down the line and everybody including his most dedicated supporters want nothing to do with him.

Ron Paul is appealing to a lot of people today because of the promises he is making about the changes he plans to put in place once he becomes the president.
But making and breaking promises is one of the oldest games in politics.
Just making promises doesn't make Ron Paul any different from any of the presidential candidates from the past. What matters is whether he will live up to his word once elected or will he just turn on his words just like most presidents do.


 There are mainly two possibilities that could play out in the up coming elections as far as Ron Paul is concerned.
1) He is yet another puppet politician being put in place to appeal to the public's concerns but will not make any of the changes that he is talking about once elected. In this case he will most probably go on to win the elections through all the publicity he will get whether positive or negative and will not change anything. 


Some of you now might feel that it is impossible that Ron Paul is a corporate or political puppet because he is raising such genuine concerns and points that go against the very corporate and political structure.

But we have to understand that with help of social networking websites and other internet based activities today governments have a surveillance power like never before. Not only can they create and study trends of  the over all mood of the public, but they can drill down to individual level to understand what each citizen is thinking and doing. And with help of such elaborate surveillance system it has become very easy for political/corporate lobbyists to put forth a candidate who has been tailored to speak to the public's concerns at any given time.


I don't think that emergence of Barack Obama as a face of change four years back was an accident either. He was definitely a candidate who was tailored to address the public sentiments four years back.
But people are raising deeper questions now, and Ron Paul is out there addressing those concerns.
I am not saying that Ron Paul seems to be yet another puppet put out there to dupe the public. Most probably he is not a corporate puppet and has been firm on his point of view for a very long time, much before he started running for president. But I just had to point out that this possibility exists.

  2)The second and more likely possibility is that he is a genuine and unique individual who will fight for what he believes in till his own end. In which case two possibilities can play out
   a) He will be successfully ignored and down played by the media and the opposition and he will lose in the election race.
   b) He will go on to win the presidential race against all odds. To understand what might follow if this happens, we will have to briefly look back at the American and Global political history to put him and his political agenda in context.

Mahatma Gandhi, John F Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, John Lennon they all have two things in common, first that they all tried to point out the faults in the system at the most fundamental level, and tried to bring about a fundamental change in the system and the second that they were all assassinated.
Now with this said, let us try to put Ron Paul's political stand point in context.
He is talking about ending the wars at a time when there is a whole industry based upon military, wars and re construction. A powerful industry that loves to reap profits from human death and destruction. He is trying to end the war industry at a time in human society when the society is built on war and violence.
Secondly he wants to end the central bank or federal reserve bank system. The people behind the Federal Reserve are the real owners and rulers of our world. So it is like telling a king I am going to destroy your kingdom, what do you think the King is going to do to you?

And third End the war on drugs - The industry built around pedaling of illegal drugs is a transnational behemoth and reaps profits like no other industry on the planet and is run by ruthless mafia lords with help of politicians around the world. Do you think they will let anyone take away that kind of profit away from them by legalizing drugs? They will not. Besides the leaders don't want to educate people about drugs, they just want to keep them scared by calling them "Illegal drugs".
Besides legalization of drugs might be a blasphemy for religious people, they wouldn't want to see their kids having free access to drugs. 
At the end of it all one of these drug lords, politicians, bankers would have had enough of  Ron Paul's honest point of views and will get him assassinated and pin it on some frustrated father who was too scared that legalization of drugs will destroy his son's life who just got out of a rehab because he was too fucked up on drugs anyway.
Ron Paul is talking about shaking the very fundamental pillars of the corrupt society we have created. And while I would be truly delighted to see such positive changes take place in our world, it is precisely what the rich bankers, businessmen and politicians  do not want to see. They do not want people walking around talking about how our current social economical and political paradigm is flawed at the most fundamental levels. No they don't want that.
They just want temporary fixes and band aids so they can continue their system of control till the end of time.
And these ambitious rulers will do what ever they have to in order to hold on to their position of power and control, this is very evident from the history.

I do not know if Ron Paul is as genuine as he seems to be. But I truly love his political stand point and wish him all the very best.
He is a part of the system and he is trying to shake the system down from within, something I think can not be done because there are elements in the system who are too addicted to power and control. They are rich junkies, junkies who get orgasmic attaining more power and control and just like any other junkie they will do whatever it takes to get their next fix.

2012 | The Year Of Self-fulfilling Prophecies

Its December again and most people are as usual gearing up to welcome the new year in style, deciding about places to travel to and parties to attend and I have to admit that it is very hard to stay out of the festive spirit, but I decided to take some time out to see if we should be celebrating the arrival of the next year, or should we rather be busy preparing for some apocalyptic events that 2012 might hold for us?
2012 is supposed to be special isn't it? At least if we are to believe a lot of theories out there it is and now that we are almost ready to enter into the new year, i think it would be a good time to gauge what we can expect from the year ahead.
I personally think that 2012 will be nothing more than a year of self-fulfilling prophecies.We will come back to what a self-fulfilling prophecy is, in a while.

First let us look at why the year 2012, specifically the date 21st december 2012 is upheld as the doomsday, end of the world day by different groups of people and theories.
Listed below are different sources of information that people interpret as being the sign of the end of world arriving in 2012.

1) Mayan calendar:


The Long Count calendar identifies a day by counting the number of days passed since a mythical creation date that corresponds to August 11, 3114 BCE in the Gregorian calendar. According to the Popol Vuh, a book compiling details of creation accounts known to the K'iche' Maya of the Colonial-era highlands, we are living in the fourth world. The Popol Vuh describes the first three creations that the gods failed in making and the creation of the successful fourth world where men were placed.
In the Maya Long Count, the previous creation ended at the start of a 14th b'ak'tun ad will end on December 20, 2012.
Which can simply mean, that this calendar which was meant to depict a certain amount of time on a cyclic time frame ends on December 20, 2012. That is like saying that the last date on the 2011 calendar will be December 31st 2012. That doesn't mean that the world or time will end on that particular day. It just means we need to print fresh calendars for the next year. Long count calendars last for thousands of years and I am sure if Maya were still around they would have been busy working on the next long count calendar.


To me a calendar containing dates for a limited amount of cyclic period is no shocker. We get a calendar for a year which contains dates for that year, once the year passes we get the calendar for the next year. Similarly it comes as no surprise to me that Mayans made a long count calendar for a fixed amount of cyclic period that lasted 5000 odd years. I guess they would have planned to make the long count calendar for the next cycle as well when the time came. But they didn't even last through their first long count calendar and that ends on December 21 2012.

On a lighter note, this Mayan calendar theory seems to be nothing more than what the cartoon depicts below.


All said and done, that calendar is some marvelous piece of intricate stone work to say the least.


2) The I Ching:

The I Ching (Wade-Giles) or "Yì Jīng" (pinyin), also known as the Classic of Changes, Book of Changes and Zhouyi, is one of the oldest of the Chinese classic texts. It is an ancient Chinese system of fortune-telling. It does not predict anything by itself, but rather describes a system of making predictions by casting signs.
Although the I Ching makes no predictions itself, it was used by Terrence McKenna in his "Timewave Zero" theory. This is where the assertion that the I Ching predicts 2012 comes from, and not from anything in the I Ching itself.

3) Terrance Mckenna's Time wave Zero theory (Based on I ching):

Terence Kemp McKenna was an Irish-American philosopher, psychonaut, researcher, teacher, lecturer and writer on many subjects, such as human consciousness, language, psychedelic drugs, the evolution of civilizations, the origin and end of the universe, alchemy, and extraterrestrial beings. He used the I ching and plotted a graph of what he called 'Novelty' against time. Novelty at any given point in time is representative of the new change at that point in time.
This graph stops on December 21st 2012, which Terence Mckenna said means that "Linear time would cease to exist", and they called it the zero state.
"Achievement of the zero state can be imagined to arrive in one of two forms. One is the dissolution of the cosmos in an actual cessation and unravelling of the natural laws, a literal apocalypse. The other possibility the culmination of a human process, a process of toolmaking, which comes to completion in the perfect artefact: the monadic self, exteriorised, condensed, and visible in three dimensions; in alchemical terms, the dream of a union of spirit and matter".

In other words, with the speed of evolution accelerating, amount of change taking place in a given time is increasing drastically and maybe there will come a time when the rate of change will reach such a speed that change is all that will exist. Various fringe scientists have tried to calculate this point of infinity, giving us calculated dates ranging from 2010 to 2050. Dates that many of us will live to see. Perhaps the date is Dec 22, 2012. Ethnobotanists and fractal time experts Terrence and Dennis McKenna believe so, and they present their ideas in Invisible Landscape: Mind Hallucinogens and the I Ching (1993).
This when seen quite simply makes sense on the technological front. The evolution of technology is rapidly accelerating, today new technologies replace the old ones every month, so it is not so crazy to think that there would come a point where new technologies will replace old technologies everyday and a constant change is all that will exist.
In a nutshell their graph only suggests that 2012 will be a very eventful year with a lot of changes which looking at the current global scenario is not surprising at all.

The three Abrahamic religions Islam, Christianity, and Judaism seem to have very similar apocalyptic prophecies associated with the second coming of the Christ figure and the rise of the Anti-christ leading to invasion of the holy land of Jerusalem Israel. But none of these prophecies have any time line that says this would happen in 2012. They are the prophecies about the end times, and since the surfacing of the mayan calendar end of time in 2012 theories, people have been combining the two in their heads to mean the same thing.

Hindus don't seem to have any particular prophecies about the year 2012, even though some people claim that certain parts of the hindu literature point to the ending of 'Kalyuga' that we are in currently now and the beginning of a golden age called 'Satyuga' in or around 2012. But I will not be too surprised if all radical Hindutva groups go around torturing and killing minorities trying to “make a pure way for the golden age”.

I tried to look for a Buddhist point of view on 2012, but they don't seem to have any prophecies either. Except on someone's website I read that Buddhists see intervention by UFOs in 2012 but I couldn't help myself from not taking that too seriously.

4) Galactic alignment, Pole Reversal, Weakening Earth's magnetic field and Planet X/Nibiru:

Ancient civilizations seem to have referred to the cyclic motion of the heavenly bodies as a method of time keeping, and different positions, and orientations of planets and stars were used as reference points for this time keeping just like the numbers on the face of watch mark different points in a 24 hour day. Galactic alignment seems to have been referred to by the ancient civilizations for the very same reason. Occurring of this alignment would just mark a point on the cyclic long count time keeping and there is very little chance that anything cataclysmic would take place due to this alignment.

Pole reversal is a scientifically proven phenomenon, due to which earth's north pole and south pole switch their positions periodically. Even though a pole reversal might occur in the future, there is no hard evidence to suggest that it would occur any time soon, leave alone on a specific day in 2012.

A lot of scientists and theorists believe that  earth's magnetic field is weakening, which might be scientifically proven. But again, there is no evidence that it would reach a point that would lead to something cataclysmic in 2012.
As far as Planet X/Nibiru is concerned according to some it is supposed to be the 10th planet in our solar system that will return around this time. But scientists find no evidence of existence of any such planet in our solar system and as logical beings let us refrain from believing in something that has no proof of its existence.

5) Nostradmus's apocalyptic quatrains:

Nostradamus has attracted a following that, along with the popular press, credits him with predicting many major world events.
Most academic sources maintain that the associations made between world events and Nostradamus's quatrains are largely the result of misinterpretations or mistranslations (sometimes deliberate) or else are so tenuous as to render them useless as evidence of any genuine predictive power.Moreover, none of the sources listed offers any evidence that anyone has ever interpreted any of Nostradamus's quatrains specifically enough to allow a clear identification of any event in advance. It is only after a major event taking place that someone interprets one of Nostradamus's works to have predicted that event.

I am sure I have not covered all the possible 2012 theories that are out there, but the ones listed above are the main prophecies and theories that suggest that 2012 will be a year of dimensional change, apocalypse, end of time and the list goes on.

Anyway now let us get back to the question of what a self-fulfilling prophecy is.

According to wikipedia
"A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior.
The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behaviour which makes the original false conception come 'true'. This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning.
In other words, a prophecy declared as truth when it is actually false may sufficiently influence people, either through fear or logical confusion, so that their reactions ultimately fulfill the once-false prophecy."

In layman's terms a self fulfilling prophecy is one where an individual or a group of people uphold or propagate something someone said in the past and make sure that they do whatever it takes to make that prophecy come true.
There has been a lot of propaganda on the news, information channels and other media in general about 2012 and we have to understand that establishment, and most of the mass media network never air anything that they don't want the public to know about.But 2012 has not been ignored at all, if anything it has only been blown out of proportion to serve a hidden agenda.

The History Channel that is owned by Fox network has aired a handful of special series on doomsday that include analysis of 2012 theories, such as Decoding the Past (2005–2007), 2012, End of Days (2006), Last Days on Earth (2006), Seven Signs of the Apocalypse (2007), and Nostradamus 2012 (2008)

The Discovery Channel also aired 2012 Apocalypse in 2009, suggesting that massive solar storms, magnetic pole reversal, earthquakes, super volcanoes, and other drastic natural events may occur in 2012.

There was also a Hollywood blockbuster titled '2012', which showed how 2012 will be a year of utter destruction where mother nature will destroy the very life it sustained. 

And if you know your history, you will know that governments have used mass media, cinema industry to further their propaganda for a very long time. From trying to make marijuana illegal to driving away illegal immigrants was all done by persuading common public of their dangers through propaganda movies. 

One thing is for sure, even if the governments or establishment is not directly behind all the talk about 2012 in the media they at least have no problem with the hype that is being created about it or they would have kept this knowledge away from the common man and the only reason so as to why the governments promoted and allowed theories about 2012 on mass media seems to be- "because it helps their cause". 

With the help of the media there is already a lot of anticipation, doubt and fear that has been created in people's minds. 
While a small portion of people who do their own research might not give into these scare tactics, the common man has successfully been utterly confused.

I personally think that nothing extra terrestrial or unearthly will happen in 2012, rather everything that will go down in the coming year will be completely man made and it will be to serve a very selfish human purpose. 

People from different faiths and religions will make sure that their prophecies come true. Christians will uphold their leader as the Christ figure,and the opposing Islamic or Jewish leader as the Anti-christ and Muslims will hold the christian leader as the Anti christ and they will fight over their holy land and rights and make sure that things are played out exactly how their respective holy books prophesied.
And systematic collapse of world economies, combined with wars, climate control using Haarp and shortage of living resources will sufficiently convince the easily gullible public that it is the end of the world as their respective religions had predicted.

In fact most of the stage for events that will unfold  next year is already being set. Global economy it seems has once again been systematically and deliberately pushed to a point of no return just like it was during the great depression in 1930s which inevitabaly lead to WWII.

Some of the similarities between 1930s and now are uncanny. This is exactly how the economies were systematically collapsed during the great depression and countries were led to war and innocent young people were forcefully drafted into armies to fight and die.

Countries are collapsing one by one, tension between countries is rising, talks about the first great war of the 21st century have become a common place affair.
And as the next step in the fulfillment of these self-pushed prophecies- the war between the holy land of Israel and Iran seems to be drawing closer everyday, and once that happens it will become a religious affair and people will be convinced that it is end of the world indeed.

It will be the next step in what Hunter S. Thompson very aptly termed "A christian Jihad" when he saw the twin towers go down to the ground on September the 11th.
It will be nothing but furthering of a political and religious agenda that is very systematically being put in place and will most probably be executed without much hassle as most people won't be able to wrap their heads around all the chaos that will follow.
Population reduction and a paradigm shift from a world run by sovereign countries to a world run by a single one world government in order centralize the world power seem to be the primary reason for the stage that is being set as I type this out. 
2012 will be an year when the global bankers and leaders will set the stage where they can easily push forth the idea of a New World Order and a One world government and tattered and destroyed by the wars, diseases, killings and the social collapse people will settle for anything that promises peace and order.

If some of the independent researchers and journalists are to be believed the leaders plan to reduce the population of the world to a mere 500,000,000 from the current 7 billion.


By the time our leaders get done with their evil plans the human spirit would have been raped, tattered and destroyed and people who live through this hell will at the end of it beg for peace and mercy at any cost, and will settle for anything the establishment forces on them in exchange for a chance to live. All the human freedoms will be taken away by the establishment, allowing just enough to turn people into mechanical work machines.

The new leaders will be hailed as the Christ figures, and the ones that lose will be marked in history books as the evil and a new global empire will be installed and pushed forward as the beginning of a more peaceful time for humanity united under one government where divisions like country, religion will cease to exist.

They will sell war as peace, and slavery as freedom and people will buy it because they will be too weak to fight back.They will sell the one world government idea as a chance for humanity to grow beyond man made boundaries and unite and people will buy that.

But when the day comes, don't be fooled by their lies. The leaders only care about controlling every god damn thing in the world, and they will stop only when they do. They will make it look like they are doing all this for you the common man, but when they do remember that they will be the farthest from the truth.

2012 will not be the end of the world, it will be the continuation and furthering of an already ongoing systematic collapse of the society that will eventually lead to further centralization of the world power into the hands of fewer men, and these men will decide how we will live and die.

Anna Hazare | Face of Change Or NOT!!!!

Everybody is overjoyed to see that a lot of people are joining Anna Hazare to end corruption.
But where people see unity and hope for change, I see hopelessness like never before.

While for most people, the hope for a corruption free country might increase with every new person that joins this mindless revolution.
I see every new person who joins this fasting movement as just one more person who has no clue about the real problem behind corruption, and the hope for a truly corruption free society moving one step closer to going down the drain.

It makes me sad. Sad to see that 21st century Indian society still thinks that a deep rooted problem like corruption can be tackled by fasting.

Is this the best our leading social workers and thinkers can do?

Shouldn't we logical people try and see if there is a direct connection between the problem of corruption and fasting? Isn't that how we go about problem solving? To understand the problem thoroughly and then come up with a way to fix it?

And no matter how deep you go into the problem of corruption, you will not find a connection between fasting and corruption, trust me on that.

What is the difference between a child refusing to eat because his mother refuses to act according to his will, and Anna Hazare refusing to eat till people around him refuse to act according to him?

I don't know what the difference is, but I do know that both scenarios reflect on a lack of understanding of the problem, and hence a lack of understanding of how to go about tackling that problem.

And if our leading activist's understanding of the social problems is equivalent to that of a child's, then it is not fair to expect too much from the common man.

Also if a child, who doesn't understand much about how the society or people function, and a 74 year old man resort to the same way to get things done.
Then it makes me wonder, do people learn anything about life at all?

But looking at all the people and their hope of achieving change through the method that Anna Hazare is employing is not surprising at all. Since no one seems to be doing anything about solving the problem, people are just blindly following anyone who is trying to do at least something. Whether that something has anything to do with the actual problem seems to be of little importance to us.

They would have followed anyone else who would have decided to keep digging a hole in the ground till corruption ends.
Imagine over one billion people digging stupid holes to end corruption, and now think about those same people fasting to achieve the same thing and you will get what I mean.
People are just ready to follow anyone who is ready to lead, without any critical thought going into the fact if there is any connection between the actual problem, and the method being employed to solve it.

Some people at this point would like to lash out saying at least he is doing something, what are you doing?

To that all I have to say is that - while something might be better than doing nothing. Doing nothing is definitely better than wasting your time doing something nonsensical like fasting to end corruption.

Besides the truest revolution is the most silent one. There will be no one on the streets pointing fingers at other people or asking other people to change themselves and stop being corrupt. Because people will be too busy observing their own corruption in their daily lives and changing themselves.

And that's what I am doing to end corruption, recognizing the corruption in me and changing myself.

It might not seem as extravagant as Anna Hazare fasting on streets with thousands people behind him, but at least it's honest and true.

Fasting to end corruption, will only remove 10 corrupt politicians, and put different 10 corrupt ones in their place. And a few scandals down the line people will realize that these 10 are no better than the previous 10.

If history has taught us anything, it is that even Mahatma Gandhi couldn't end corruption by fasting. He just managed to replace the corrupt British faces with our own "desi" Indian versions of them.

According to the dictionary, Corruption is "Lack of integrity or honesty, or Moral perversion". Now look into your actions on a daily basis, and see how much of integrity, honesty, and morality exists in your own choices. Then we can talk about other people's choices, leave alone politicians.

Looking at the meaning of the word shows that corruption is something that exists at every level social existence. Friends are corrupt with one another, brothers are corrupt with one another, neighbours are corrupt with one another, lovers are corrupt with one another.

So how can the problem of corruption be ended by just putting 10 or 20 corrupt people in jail? When there are over billion other people still walking freely on the streets being corrupt their every waking moment?

If we are talking about bringing corrupt people to justice and to be put into prison, then don't just stop at bringing down a few politicians whose corruption has been caught on tape. 99% if not 100% of the population needs to be put in jail.

Corruption is so rampant in our society that with every corrupt person put in jail, I very much doubt that there would be anyone left out of the prison to lock us in.

We have to understand that politicians are just the leaders of our corrupt society, the rest of us make up that corrupt society.
Leaders are just leading by example. Blame yourself for the corruption, not some people sitting in the parliament.

If we agree that our society is corrupt, then the next step is to accept that we are all part of this society that is corrupt and hence are contributing to the problem.

The corrupt India is not just made up of 20-30 or 100 or even a 1000 corrupt politicians, it is made up of over one and half billion corrupt people.

Anna Hazare's Lok pal bill will definitely not free India from corruption. It will at best
1) give corrupt citizens more freedom to point fingers at equally corrupt politicians and in the process allow them to continue being in denial about their own corrupt selves, and,
2) Will train politicians to be more subtle and cunning about being corrupt, and hence in turn making them more efficient at being corrupt.
And honestly I fail to see the bright side of having politicians who are more skilled at fooling the public.
Look at USA, that's what has happened there.
I cite America as an example because I feel that it has already reached a point where every developing country including India is trying to get to. We are trying to imitate the American way so seriously that looking at America’s current state is like looking into India’s future.
The people of the United States have been fighting and hoping for a corruption free society for as long as we have and may be longer and look where trying to fight corruption by going on the streets got our American friends. The American government and world bankers are sucking the life out of their own citizens, and the people of the rest of the world and they still manage to convince a large portion of human population that they are the good guys.
Are the politicians of India any less corrupt than their American counterparts? I would say no they are not, they are as corrupt if not more. Indian politicians still lack the finesse that comes with the art of being thoroughly corrupt. But we are slowly getting there, because if we keep trying to fight corruption in such naive ways, we will just end up creating leaders and citizens who are more skilled at exploiting fellow humans.
The point being that even if the lok pal bill is passed, it will not make anyone any less corrupt than they were a day or a month ago. So the whole theme of the movement that everybody is so excited about - End Corruption and Corruption Free India will go for a toss.


Corruption rises out of people giving more importance to their own selfish interests over the common interest of everyone else involved, and if we honestly ask ourselves we will see that we all do it.
And the only way to end corruption would be to look at everyone as your own, and to give equal importance to overall welfare as we give to selfish needs, then we will achieve a balance in our actions which will eventually give rise to a corruption free society.

The only true everlasting change can come about through self change. When people stop feeling the need to point fingers at other people and start observing perversion and corruption of their own mind, we will see a corruption free society.

This whole Anna Hazare charade can best be described as- A blind man leading a whole country of blind citizens promising them a world that he himself has never seen and doesn't know how to find.

Prostitution | Poverty meets Sexual Suppression

"Prostitution is bad, and must be stopped at any cost", is the general response you get from most people.

And all the feminists and the women right activists, cops and all the rest of the social moral policing circus go barging straight into the brothels catching the helpless prostitutes and their desperate clients in the act, that can hardly be called love making even by the most twisted and sick minds and drag them out half naked in public straight to the prison. And in the process snatch away whatever little dignity they had left.

Even though everybody agrees that prostitution is bad, nobody seems to really know what it is exactly about prostitution that is bad. Because if people knew what was wrong with prostitution, then they would also know how to fix it.

You can usually tell how well an individual or a group of people understands a problem, by looking at the way they try to solve that problem.
And our way of dealing with such issues, reflects on a very poor understanding of the problems of the world to say the least. The way we handle social problems like prostitution cannot even be called finding a solution to the problem. At best it can be looked at as desperate attempt at trying to cover up our own mess.

Of course there is no denying that some people are into the profession because they make a lot of money, are happy being sex workers.
And if a person is happy prostituting herself/himself, I have nothing to say to them. It’s the rest of the helpless unhappy sex workers that I am concerned about.

Most individuals are too busy leading their own little selfish lives and have no time to ponder over these social issues, and since people have not had the time or concern to come to their own intelligent conclusions about such problems, they just mindlessly repeat what they have heard other people say over and over again without having any understanding of the actual problem.
Something on the lines of "Prostitution is an ugly scar on the face of humanity, and must be gotten rid of".

While I totally agree with the fact that prostitution is ugly, sad and degrading to women, I disagree with the method being employed to counter prostitution with the same intensity.

Prostitution, just like war is a product of our society.It has grown out of the very structure of our society ans is a result of the very way of life which we have all agreed to live by.

But while most people very willingly like to take a lot of personal pride in talking about the seemingly positive results or accomplishments of the way of life of our species, the most common and over rated one being technological advancement.
On the other hand we as individuals and hence as societies are equally reluctant to accept and embrace the adverse impacts of our social paradigm.
And since we refuse to accept that all social problems are consequences of all our choices and actions, to keep hoping for any real change to occur only seems more and more pointless.

Problems like prostitution are dealt with as if it is an ugly burden that was imposed on our society by some external force and needs to be gotten rid of.

The haste with which we want to turn a blind eye to, or cover up these ugly faces of human paradigm reflects on a nauseating sense of shame and embarrassment that we as individuals and societies are too fearful to face.

May be deep down inside we all know that each one of us is responsible for these problems, but we keep running away from facing ourselves.
Because if we accept that these social and individual problems are a result of our way of life, then we can no longer point fingers at other people for these problems and will inevitably have to change the way we live.

So in order to avoid having to give up our selfish lifestyles, we quickly try to detach ourselves and our actions from these problems and make believe that a problem like prostitution is something that is being forced on to us for no fault of ours and try to fight it as an external adversity that exists independently of our choices and actions.
Just like how a father wants to take all the credit for his son's achievements if the son is successful according to social norms, but wants nothing to do or claims to have nothing to do with his son's failure if he is not successful, all of us as individuals only want to associate with the positive aspect of the social paradigm and claim to have nothing to do with the negative.

Anyway let us try and see how our choices, decisions and actions as individuals lead to a problem like prostitution.

On taking a closer look it becomes clear that prostitution seems to be the love child of two more basic or fundamental problems with our society.

1) Poverty
2) Sexual suppression

Let us look into how each one of us is contributing to the problems of poverty and mass sexual suppression and in the process try and witness the birth of prostitution from our very actions.

Our social design is based on a very animalistic drive of selfish competition for survival. You look around and you see everyone competing for everything, for schools, for colleges, for jobs and for every other senseless thing.
Through all these competitions, everybody is trying to secure more resources and money for themselves, in order to improve their individual chances of survival. Now when everybody is trying to pull limited resources and money to their own houses and bank accounts, there is bound to be a struggle and fight for resources and power. And where there is a fight someone has to lose.
So some people manage to successfully compete and secure more money and resources for themselves, while the others lose and are forced to struggle for a basic survival. And people who managed to snatch away resources and money now find themselves in a stronger position to compete further and continue to hoard more and more for themselves. We see everybody increasing their bank accounts deposits, whether it be politicians or any common man.
And the people, who had failed to secure resources for themselves, now find it even harder to compete with people with more resources. And hence in our society we see that rich people keep getting richer, and the poor get poorer.
So while we see some people staying in mansions worth millions of dollars and driving super expensive cars, many others barely manage to find one meal a day.

We all see building our individual bank account deposits as a very natural thing to do but we make a lot of noise when politicians do it. Not because it's corrupt, but simply because they managed to hoard a lot more than most of the common public could.

The problem is that everybody creates an image for themselves, and calls it ‘me’ and builds their lives centered on it. To this image of ‘me’, people usually attach a few other people and call them my, this usually includes few family members and in some cases friends.
And the moment there is something that is ‘me’ and ‘my’, there automatically comes into existence something that is ‘not me’ and ‘not my’.
So people might postpone or give up the idea of buying the next big TV, car, or house if their own sisters and mothers were on the verge of being forced to prostitute themselves to make a living because they belong to the image of ‘me’ as my mother and sister.
But since people fail to connect to the whole of humanity as ‘my’, even though women have been forced by poverty to sell their soul and dignity for survival, all of us continue to build our individual bank accounts so we can take that next big holiday abroad, and buy the next cool gadget. Because we see these other women as 'not my' mother or sister.
Hence we see how all of us individually are responsible for the plight of women in this male dominated society.
But prostitution is not a supply driven market, but rather a demand driven one. Women with all other hopes lost, decide to make a living by selling themselves because a demand for such a service already exists in the society.

And this is where we come to the second problem of sexual suppression.

Even if someone, whether man or woman is prostituting themselves because there is a lot of money in the profession, the fact that a need for the existence of a profession like sex worker arises out of sexual suppression cannot be denied.

It seems that as part of the society, we all contribute to sexual suppression to some degree or the other for two reasons.

1)Even though different cultures and countries handle sex with varying degrees of sensitivity. One thing that is more or less common to all cultures and religions is that chastity, and abstinence are looked at as moral virtues and sex is either considered a taboo or less respectable to say the least.
Now As I said earlier, that everybody creates an image for themselves called ‘me’ or ‘I’.
And just like competing for resources is necessary for survival, competing for a positive social image is equally critical to social existence.
Social acceptance is very necessary for survival, because a negative social image leads to inevitable ostracisation of the individual.
Another important point that needs to be made at this point is the fact that sexual instinct is the second most dominating human instinct, after survival.
And caught up in a social paradigm where sexual instinct is suppressed rather than faced and understood for what it is, people being too fearful of being judged negatively for their sexual desires end up suppressing them. And as a result of suppression of such a basic instinct, doesn’t successfully put the sexual desire to rest, but forces it to come to surface in morally deprived ways like prostitution.

If psychology and study of the human mind has taught us anything, it’s that the only way to get over one’s fears, and anxieties is to face them, and not to suppress them. Suppression only leads to depression, and conflict.

2)The second reason for sexual suppression being the fact that just like we selfishly compete for resources, we also compete for sexual partners. And it usually helps to condemn or discourage other people from engaging in sexual act, so that with everyone else out of the way we can improve our own chances of sexual intercourse.
Our contempt for sexual act seems to arise more out of jealousy than out of concern for moral values.
I am sure everybody wants to be part of as many out of the box sexual experiences as possible, but since people find themselves deprived of fulfilling their desires. They discourage other people from achieving that too, by labeling the act as evil, or unhealthy. As a species and civilization we clearly love sex. Our increasing population is a testament to our sexual inclination. But while we like to go wild behind closed doors, once out we like to maintain a sombre image. And as this social charade of double standards continues, many people are completely deprived of sex and all the sexually frustrated people find themselves heading to the red light districts to get what the society deprived them of.
So we see here again, that for our selfish need to maintain a positive social image as individuals, and to compete for sexual partners we lead a two faced life and have created a social paradigm that when combined with poverty in a male dominated society inevitably leads to prostitution.

Continuing to live in a social paradigm
1)Where everybody is selfishly competing with one another for survival, and people are forced to do anything and everything to make a living and,
2) where the second most strongest instinct of sex is continuously suppressed and tabooed rather than explored and intelligently understood.

and then trying to stop something like prostitution, will directly result in even more stronger suppression of the sexual drive and will only end up bringing out the sexual needs in ways so sick and perverted that will make prostitution look like child's play.

The only way to free humanity from these miseries is to shift from a social paradigm where everybody leads a self-centered life to one where concept of 'me' and 'my' becomes obsolete.
Once people truly grow beyond their selfish needs, then possibly we can think about sharing our resources equally and handling and understanding life without perversion for selfish means.
Any other method to tackle social problems like prostitution short of the required self-change will only be a band aid, or temporary fix and not a solution.