Archive for May, 2002

Rant

Wednesday, May 15th, 2002

[warning – do not read the below if you do not enjoy seeing ranting]

Memo to the investing public: Investing for the maximum return on investment is not actaully the best way to get a good return on investment, short term.

Hello, people. INVEST IN THE KIND OF WORLD YOU WANT TO SEE!

This is NOT that difficult. when you put money into a company, you are giving a stamp of aproval to, if not neccesarily every little thing that company does, at least their general outlook on life. Hence, with your dollars, you vote for what kind of world we have. Yes, you, the high rollers, too! You’re just as responsable.

If you own a mutual fund, how difficult is that? I think I should sell out of my mutual funds.. that’s like appointing someone else your concience. Do you know what’s in your mutual fund? I don’t know what’s in mine.. I try to find ‘green’ funds, but what can you do in a world where enron would be considered ‘green’?

No, seriously, you are responsable for any company’s actions that you hold stock in. I realize there isn’t actually any law to allow you to suffer for your actions – except in the pocketbook when lawsuits occur, and even then it will only dip into your profits and possibly your stock price – but if you own stock in a corperation, you are saying that it is _right_ to take money for loaning money to this organization.

Funny how no one wants to invest money in the internet any more. Could it be because the companies that were there tried to grow up too quickly?

Anyway, I am guilty for Intel, but I hold more AMD and even more TMTA. I put my support behind the future I want. I hold more EVRC than you’d want to think about, because I beleive in what Evercel is doing. [And because face it, I love having a 100 mile range car]

I won’t bore you all with stock prices and things like that, but I’ll point out that even if doing the right thing costs you in the short run, in the long run it pays off for the human race.

Creepy.

Wednesday, May 15th, 2002





Find your Role-Playing
Stereotype
at mutedfaith.com.
[Angel.]

Yah, I buy that.

Interesting essay on memes

Wednesday, May 15th, 2002

http://www.memecentral.com/level3.htm

Okay, I’m going one better

Wednesday, May 15th, 2002

Rather than simply a essay devoted to plur, I’m creating a whole web page – at plur.us. Expect it to grow very slowly.. I don’t have unlimited time – but it will contain my thoughts, as I build them. Kind of livejournal like, except in a more fluid medium, so I can easily go back and edit things that don’t fit what I was/am/will be thinking.

Anyway, I’d write more, but I have to go take a shower and hit up SEVA. Must keep my life more balanced.

What else is new. 😉

More links and thoughts and things

Wednesday, May 8th, 2002

http://www.monroeinstitute.org/research/

Must buy some of these people’s tapes. Truly intense experience.

I really hope that what’s happening to me will not reduce my intensity.

That is, just as soon as I really understand what’s happening to me.

What astonishes me is that everyone I’ve talked to about the experience has told me that I’m not going crazy, at all.

——————-

So everyone writes their own religion? Everyone? This seems like kind of a strange thing for no one to have mentioned to me – but on the other hand, maybe it’s the kind of thing that you have to find out about for yourself, or it doesn’t work.

Is the universe really self-organizing? That’s such a beautiful thought..

Randomness. You can’t ever get a random number out of a computer, but a human can hardly avoid generating random numbers, even when we don’t mean to. But yet, we’re just biological machines.. or are we?

Maybe bill hicks was right, and it is just a ride. If so, I should try to have more fun. I’d hate for me to not get my money’s worth..

I do think that PLUR is about the best framework for a religion you could ask for. The ultimate in small source code – ten commandments? They’ve gotten it down to four _concepts_ – and not a single one of them negative (thou shalt not) – we truly owe a debt to whatever series of events made PLUR become a meme.

But as a framework, think about the peices. Note that what follows are just my own thoughts – I firmly beleive that everyone has to author their moral code themselves.

Peace. This is really quite simple. As Gil Scott-Heron says, peace is not the absence of war – it is the absence of the rumors of war, and the preperation for war. When we can all finally get to the point that we can trust each other enough to throw down our guns, we will have removed one of the biggest stumbling blocks to happiness for the human race.

Love. This one is so big and complex and overloaded that I don’t know that I’ll ever understand it. I don’t know that a human can understand it. But I do know this – once you truly lock on, once you truly love – you love forever, and without reservation or qualification. And the hardest thing you’ll ever learn is simply to love and be loved in return, to borrow a bit from Moulin Rougue.

Unity. This is a big complex one. Ask me later. I don’t know. I think I need to get another good look at it.

Respect. Huge one. In order for me to be able to look at myself in the mirror and not hate myself, I must respect other people. In order to not hate other people, I must respect myself. And, in general, the world would seem to be a better place when we all respect each other, since no one has any more or less of the total pie.

These things don’t just apply in raves, or when I’m with other people that beleive in PLUR. They apply all the time, and the cost of forgetting them is unhappiness – sometimes intense unhappiness.

The problem I see with organized religion is that it always seems to result in a large beurocracy, and bloated source code.

The problem I see with organized government is very much the same.

And then there’s the classic question – if we make everything that is not moral illegal, how will you ever discover what is moral and immoral behavior?

I wonder how many others are having this experience. I guess no one has exactly the same one – but many, many have some kind.

I don’t mean to disrespect christianity.. after all, if Jesus was a real person, he certainly had the best in mind for the world. But I really need to figure out how to remove christianity _completely_ from my mind. My parents raised me as a christian.. I got confirmed to make them happy, something that still makes me sad. I guess I’m a sheep too. I did chrystalis, cracked what was expected, and then faked the experience.

Memo to the chrystilis people: Apparently the right way to log Sheer in is to tell him that there is no hell, that everyone and everything has a place in this world and everything can – and ultimately will – be saved, if ‘saved’ is even the right concept any more..

.. but what you really have to have is really, really loud techno.

I’ve been told that what I experienced was a hemi-sync trance. Perhaps so. If so, my brain is a much more interesting place than I thought, and it has a lot of good advice for me.

Personally, while I beleive I _was_ in a hemi-sync trance, I also beleive that something much bigger than that also happened.

I can’t shake the feeling that there’s still something big coming. Maybe it’s living the rest of my life that’s the big thing.

Don’t know.

At least I can cry again. People, don’t ever tell yourself you can’t cry. You’ll beleive it and then where will you be?

——————————-

I’m sure that I’ll write more. I’ve been hesitent to pen down the experience of sunday night, for fear that people would conclude that I’d lost my mind.. but I’m thinking brenda’s right. You can’t ever talk, or read, or communicate in general, for the people out there. You always have to do it for yourself.

So one of my next projects will be to try and write a blow by blow – to whatever extent I can remember it – of the experience.

S.

Tuesday, May 7th, 2002

Just to make it clear – the point of the last message is that I’ve made enough people’s lives hell for the time being..

S.

And what is the next page?

Tuesday, May 7th, 2002

This mobius loop has got to end.

Hence, I therefore call a halt. I will be with no one until I can honestly say that I am at peace with myself.

And I will dance.

I went looking for change, and boy did I find it.

Tuesday, May 7th, 2002

When I finish figuring out exactly what I think of the experience that I had last night, I will then write a complete explanation – if, indeed, there is a complete explanation to be written.

In the meantime, let me just say that when I said that my life was flipped inside out last week, I was incorrect.

Now I know what it feels like to have your life flipped inside out.

It’s kind of a exhillerating experience, really.

Not at all scary.

Well, the implications are really scary. I haven’t yet truly figured out what I think of them. I’m having to re-evaluate a lot of what I thought I knew. It’s kind of scary to discover that you don’t really understand the world, I’ll admit. But, you know, I think I like this world better than the one I thought I lived in.

With that said, allow me to post my apologies to any of my friends who might be reading this who I might have a very good reason to apologize to. I recognize that my actions of the last few weeks have been.. well, not always well-considered. I hope that in the future I’ll be less difficult to have as a friend, and I would like to think that I won’t lose any of your friendship over this.

As for the other parts, well, maybe they’re already lost. In perspective, that’s all right. If they’re supposed to be there, they’ll come back. If they’re not, then it’s really better that I found out now.

What’s that saying about if you love something, set it free?

Watch this space for future updates including a short and abridged explanation of the past week’s events, a essay on PLUR and what it means to me [now], and updates on my current plans to relocate myself to SoCal and obtain employment there-here.

Had my first job interview to that end today. And consulting work appears to be lining itself up at my door, which is good.

S.

a few links from a recent experience

Tuesday, May 7th, 2002

http://www.deep-la.com
http://hulagroove.com/marques_wyatt.html

Monday, May 6th, 2002

Must read: Siddhartha by Herman Hesse