What good times we are living in!

We are really privileged, especially if we have access to the internet and the time to use it wisely. For that is the most important point. We can waste our times away very easily and swiftly, if we do not pay attention to our most precious resource, which is time. But on the other hand, we can train our mind, we can train our brain in a way completely unthinkable for former generations of human beings. If there is a problem in our times concerning that issue, it is not that access to almost any information your need in your life is denied, but how to find the right information in a big heap of what is often a kind of garbage. I think we do not live so much in an era of information but in an era of choice, of making the right selection of what is accessible to us. As much as there may be said about how the media influences the people, even they are blamed to stupidify a whole generation of younger people, and so on. The truth is, influence is what happens automatically, when people communicate with each other. There is nobody to blame for that fact. Every person has to pay attention on his or her own, it is not to the others to do that job for us. Face the fact, if you do not know what is important to you or what is not, you become like wax in the hands of others. And if so, you cannot accuse the world, other people, the media, or even the whole culture for your own lack of awareness.

Recently I was doing some research about different regions all around the globe. Including such remote places such as the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, the inner deserts of Asia, the islands of the South Pacific, southern Italy or the rain forest in Ecuador. Having not visited all this places on my own, I relied on reports of others who have seen them, books and guides and so on. But far apart from the technical data, I could use a lot of pictures of the landscape and especially what makes it more vivid, the use of hundreds of videos downloaded form Youtube.com. It gives you an inspiration and in some way it even touches your emotional system (of course only if you have made a similar experience throughout your life, so that your brain has a starting point to begin). For me, as a writer, this is even more valuable, because it supports me a lot in my daily work of writing. The combination of thinking and feeling with the help oft the world-wide-web is an enormous widening of my rage of action and imagination.

Not only the data material, in the shape of texts, pictures and movies, does a good job, but also the possibilities to connect with people throughout the planet. Sometimes you want to know something only people can know who live at a certain place, and/or at a certain time. And even this information you can get access to through the internet nowadays. Never before in my life, the net has ever been so precious to me. This is one reason, why I believe, we are living in absolutely great times. There are many more reasons of course and I will discuss them later in further posts. But for now, good night and have a nice time!

The need to face the game of power

At the age of 16, I had my first summer job in a major electronics company. It was my first true experience with “the real world”. At school you are in a kind of protected area, as long as you learn, are smart and know how to satisfy the teachers, you have a quite easy life (as long as you are no loner, or strange in some special way). Of course you don’t know that then!

My boss in that summer was a man of great integrity and virtues, he believed in values like honesty, hard work, rationality and common sense. His position in the company was stable and he was respected by most people, but his career had been manoeuvred into a corner. For ten years he was the chief of his department not advancing a single step since then. Other people, who were in the company for much less years, were promoted and found themselves in higher positions.

Under the surface there was the frustration you could feel and that influenced the whole department and the people of my boss. For me there was no reason why my boss was not advancing. Other people who where in higher positions like him where much less intelligent and their working moral was not very high. They cared more for themselves then for the company and many of them did not even try to hide their attitude that the company would exists for their own personal good and not for the owners, the people that financed the firm. I thought about the Peter-principle: Everybody gets promoted as long as he finds himself in a position where he fails.
I started thinking a lot about the situation, about power and the way you get it and what so many people seem to do to avoid being promoted. I was fascinated by the dynamics of power and in all the years since then my fascination grew even bigger.

Power is something that is present all around us but in our political correct times people try to avoid the word power. We do not tolerate obvious craving for power like with active aggressive acts. So even more people smile and pretend to be uninterested in power, use feelings of guilt, make others feel ashamed and make massive use of passive aggression. The situation is not so much different form the royal courts in Europe during past centuries. The more civilized human beings are, the more they are actors. In some way civilization is a fake and history has shown from time to time that even a very civilized nation, under a certain influence, can loose it’s thin layer of cultivation and show the substance that lies beneath.

Back to my job. One thing became very clear to me: I had a wrong idea about how human relationships work, what really counts in life and how the dynamics of movements can be controlled, even if you don`t control them. I came to the conclusion that moral is a human invention, it is nothing natural, nature would never have created such laws that very often irrationally limited the range of human behaviour. If I could look at things how they really are, and make a rational decision, independent of what people think and if they like me or not, I could get anything in life I wanted. In other words, if I could get independent of the crowd I could be in a position like a cowboy who controls the cows until they are brought to the slaughterhouse (as a specualtor in stock markets I know that it is not the crowd that makes the money – see my other blog http://samuraiofthemarket.blogspot.com). As a 16 year old I felt powerful and knew little about how much I still had to learn even if the basic principle was and is still right: “As a samurai (warrior) you have to have the ability to be cruel and unforgiving to do what is right and create the good in effect”. Or as Goethe wrote in his “Faust”: “I am the power that always wants the evil, but always creats what is good”.

After two months my work at the company was over. I made a few friends but no enemies. I learnt a lot (much more about human nature than about the technical abilities that were needed for my job). We have not created the world and its laws but every living being has to find his niche and go with the flow. You cannot resist the natural order – that is only human arrogance. If you want to make the ultimative victory in life, you defeat your enemies with intelligence and not with acts of violence or vengeance. It may sound very seductive to call the battle for power or war barbaric, but that is completely irrational – you are in danger to loose contact with reality. The truth is even more that war (in the widest sense of the word) is the father of all things – as Heracletus calls it – it cleans things and makes the necessary difference between people, companies and nations. It is neither good nor bad, it is just the human appearance of Darwin’s law.

Manifesto

I
In the beginning the true nature of all human beings is an image of the creator.

II
Human beings are created as characteristically good. Evil arises as the result of misuse of free will.

III
The source of evil is the misguided view that bad acting could lead to a harvest of sweet fruits. Evil has not its origin in human beings itself, but what touches humans from outside and gets accepted by humans by their free will.

IV
All men are equal in value. There is no higher and no lower

V
Every men has value and status out of his own existance. This value is inalienable by all circumstances and actions.

VI
No men shall rule any other men. Neither directly in person nor indirectly by
collectives or legal persons

VII
Every person has his own mission which has been given by the creator. The reign of the creator makes human being free and equals their self-actualization.

VIII
Individuality is the duty of every person. Self-actualization is the most noble pursuit of all men, as far as this pursuit is not guided by the selfish ego.

IX
Fear and pessimism are signs of immaturity, they enslave people. Fearlessness, not only courage, in every situation of life, is the rule

X
Thruth only lies in beauty and the good. What is not good or beautiful, is not ture.

XI
A man is male, a women is female. Whoevery acts against this commandment, acts against nature

XII
The sense of life is fulfilling one’s mission, given by creator and the personal relationship with the creator himself. The last meaning of life is being united with the creator and having eternal life. Therefore the creator has built a bridge over the ditch between creator and humans. Salvation comes by accepting this bridge.

XIII
Reality consists of more than what human senses and rational mind can perceive. Science and ratio have no access to crucial areas of reality. Humans cannot perceive such realities but they can make experiences through which they have certainty about these regions, if the grace of the creator is theirs.

XIV
All human needs are good. But the kind of fulfilment of these needs can be unfruitful and of bad nature.

XV
There is hope for the world, for nobody knows the complete plans of the creator and nobody knows who will be saved and who will be expelled. Only in relation to his own situation, men can achieve certainty about this question.

XVI
It is not rightful to search for the creator within creation. It is not rightful to pray or worship creation or parts of it or to search for salvation and healing within creation. Every searching for salvation outside of the creator is wrongful. Creation and Creator are not one and are not united but divided, but the bridge has been built to get salvation (XII).

Welcome

With one day’s delay I now start the English version of my German blog, which’s URL can be found at the sidebar. I want to use this opportunity to say hello to everybody who is interested in what I have to say and in this special case what I am writing. I am very grateful for every constructive feedback, idea and suggestion. So I always can reflex on my own thoughts an work on improving permanently.

The aim of this blog is of great variety. On the one side I want to inform people, share my thoughts with others and inspire them to think independently. On the other side, and that shall by far not be denied, I also wish to provide enjoyment and entertainment to you, my welcomed readers. Many ideas will not go according to what is “mainstream” or concidered ordinary in our society or in any society. I am not wishing to provide soft and charming concepts of what you get in the media, and what your hear on every street corner. The world is full of that, we really don’t run short of such, mostly irrelevant, news. My interest is to open up eyes and also to provoke controversy and even conflict if it is neccessairy. Harmony very often has a too hight price. The emotional and psychological tribute that is paid for cosiness and conformism can be much higher, than one can afford. That does not mean, that I am a nonconformist, not at all. For a noncornformist is as little free as a conformist is. It is no freedom, if you always have to do what is different to the others and the leading opinion. The really free man is independent of both conformism and nonconformism.

That leads me to the central value of this site, wich is freedom. I am everything else than a pessimist and I want to contribute to a more independant thinking and acting of people, as well as to serve the values of self-actualization and self-fulfilment. Individualism and self-actualization are duties of every human being alive, for when we do not find out who we are and what actions give a the biggest sense of being at the right place and that we feel that we are doing exactely what we were born for, we cannot fulfil our ultimate potential and stay far behind of what we could be. There is nothing sader than when a person dies and you have to say: “He could have been a great man, but...”. And by the way we do not contribute to our community in the way it could profit of us also.

The consciousness of the masses nowadays is irritated and misguided by thousands of different things of influence. Particular interests are demanding our whole attention. Every little social group wants its own place in the centre and everybody believes his or her affair is the most relevant one. The media and the politicans want to make us think like them, for it is important for them, not for us, but we are decieved not to see it. But what is most fatal, is that the majority of the news are bad news. The gravitation of negativity wants to pull down everything that is beautiful, true, noble and supreme. Zynism barely hides the truth, wich lies behind it: Fear!

We are all on earth to make it a more constructive and positive place and that can only be done by the individual and its freedom. In the end the individual is everything that counts. Only a person can make experiences of some kind.
What does freedom really mean, concidering all this thoughts? On the one side it is freedom of your gens, of everything that is inhereted within yourself. On the other side it is freedom of the control and influence of society, the state, politicians, economy and any other individual and corporational body, that is not you. In short everything, that is not your true self, your real person. This real person is not your body, your perceptions, your feelings, your thoughts and the contents of your consciousness.

In the language of psychoanalysis one could say: Freedom means being independant of the IT (ES) as well as of the SUPER-EGO (Über-Ich). So that there is no influencing factor than the true self alone. It is what the old Chinese called the “Wu wei”, acting withoug acting, what happens when the Ego has been discovered as a creation of delusion and vanishes like fog on a sunny morning. A person is not living so much, much more he or she is lived, by what could be called the Tao. A human being forms a perfect union with the world, there is no me and no you, no subject and no object. That is one thing I want so show by this blog.

Joyful readings and good thinking.