I recently had a pretty shift in circumstances in my life, and everything is different from what it was two months ago. And now I really appreciate where I was back then, and how good things were. If I could, I’d wave a magic wand and I’d go back there. But of course, I can’t so I don’t bother thinking like this for more than a fleeting moment. What I do find though is that this allows me to reflect quite deeply on what I really want, and what’s important to me.

This process of self reflection is quite valuable in that it allows me to see what it is I really want out of life. And for that, I’m thankful, because then I can structure my life to follow this goal. So perhaps it’s not the worst thing in the world to have your circumstances change and you end up in a worse place than before. The worst thing about being in a worse place is that you don’t see a way out of it.

To some extent I think that we as people all have to experience good and bad, to understand the difference between the two. That’s the philosophy behind many eastern religions that talk about enlightenment. You live; you experience good stuff; you experience bad stuff; you learn; you grow. Without believing in any of this though, by the time most of us become adults we have experienced some form of emotional heartache and heartbreak to know that we only really grow as people during these periods. It’s the suffering that defines us because we’re forced to dig deep inside to evolve and change our circumstances for the better.

So tomorrow I’ll wake up and I’ll reluctantly go to the place I’m supposed to be, but at the same time I’ll remember that because of this circumstance, the next change will be going somewhere better because I know what it is I want.

Andy.

“Would that rate be suitable to you”? The nice man on the other end of the phone asked.

When he said the word, suitable, I had to stifle a laugh least he thought I was taking the piss or something. Compared to fuck-all, which was what I was getting as an unemployed foreigner, I thought that was pretty suitable, and so agreed to an interview.

A week later I was working for a European credit management company in their IT department doing software testing work. The job title though didn’t really reflect what I did. Almost immediately after starting with them, I went back to doing fuck-all, but this time getting paid for it. This was solely due to the company assembling the most incompetent senior managers in Europe into a single office space. Projects were never organised and nothing ever flowed through to my department in any way that could be called, regular. Hence I spent most of my day smoking cigarettes in the building common smoking area getting to know the regular smokers crowd. One day blended into the next, and before long I had myself a nice comfortable routine going, free from any financial concerns and work pressure.

Once the job was taken care of and I had some cash coming in my girlfriend M took me to her housing corporation and lied through her teeth for me so I could get my own rental apartment from some of the vacant ones waiting for renovations. The first one I looked at was a fabulous two room flat overlooking a canal only fifteen minutes bike ride from the Red Light District; somehow that was important to me even though I’d never had sex with a hooker in my life. Sure there wasn’t any central heating, and the shower was rigged up so the main electricity line and circuit breaker were just above the water pipes, in a spot where all the condensation gathered. (I was later told by a visiting electrician that I was lucky to be alive because I was washing myself in a stand up electric chair). But none of this mattered to me because the place was right in the centre of everything, and it would be mine. No more having to take abuse because I had dropped spliff ash on her floor, or failed to wash up the dishes to her satisfaction. It was a situation I was getting desperate to be rid of, so at the end of the tour – all 3 minutes of it – I said I’d take it and move in as soon as soon as possible.

And it’s all very VERY impressive. This new operating system is so slick it is the first one of its kind to equal what windows can do in terms of putting something in the hands of ordinary users that can be used, and in some respects do better than anything they have done. Ubuntu is really something my mother could use, and be happy with.

Why does this matter? Well there are lots of technical reasons why this is a milestone, but in my mind the biggest one is the fact that a lot of very vocal people over the last decade said, it couldn’t be done (this being a Linux desktop that anyone could use as easy as Windows). For me though, the even bigger reason is the cultural change this milestone is going to bring about to the worlds masses that use a computer for either work, or for personal use; which is to say, everyone.

To this day, the great technical unwashed masses use Microsoft for everything they do in their online lives, with the big exception of mobile stuff. Thanks to Apple, the iPhone has shown everyone there is another world out there that is exciting and fresh and hip. Apple’s marketing team has been hard at work though getting this message out for quite a number of years though through their series of television advertisements which have become culturally iconic. Justin Long, who plays Mac, and John Hodgman who plays PC, have become popular and parodied and sustaining in their comedic roles as the two friendly rivals on opposite sides of the computer technology fence. It was really a stroke of brilliance on Apple’s part to take the technology out of the tech, and put in it’s place personas that we identify with, and remember. This has been why the last 5 years have seen the rise of the Mac against the backdrop of the Windows behemoth.

So with Ubuntu now adding a new range of hammer and chisels to the mainstream with which to start chipping away at Microsoft’s monopoly, I see real change on the personal computer horizon. We’re still a long way from the days when there isn’t one all mighty powerful company running the global PC show, but a number companies that compete on the grounds of innovation and features for a user base that pays a very modest fee for their personal computing choices. However, like the Berlin Wall, it had to be chipped away one piece at a time over a long period of time before it wasn’t there any more. I liken the fall of Windows to the fall of the Berlin Wall because they both start with an ideology change in the minds of the masses, which takes root and grows, and eventually leads to action, which results in a downfall.

I’m not in any way saying that Microsoft is an evil regime, though many do and probably for good reason. My personal stance is, Microsoft just want to make a lot of money which they do through market dominance. I leave it to the courts to decide if what Microsoft does is done in a legal or good or bad way. However I do believe that we the masses are being screwed by Microsoft because they want to keep prices high for tech goods that are now so ubiquitous and necessary they should be cheaper than peanuts. The only way Microsoft really holds onto its dominance is by holding people to ransom to keep us locked into their business. Which is what they do with a lot of open standards that could free consumers choice; Microsoft buys off companies and governments to make them stay on their side of the fence. It’s legal, but really, it’s not right.

Today I see another avenger of justice on the desktops of ordinary people, and for the first time believe that one day I’ll live to wake up to a world where Microsoft isn’t on every computer everywhere I go.

Andy.

This was also a significant night in that it was the first time that I was meeting a lot of M’s friends. We had lived largely in isolation with each other the last couple of weeks, getting to know each others favourite positions, and telly shows. There wasn’t much to it as I had found out on the first night as she only had one of each, so getting out with other people was a welcome change from being in. One of her best friends D* was there and she had in tow a new boyfriend of her own, some guy from Venezuala I was told, who didn’t speak a lot of english or dutch, but his spanish pillow talk alone could give D orgasms. This made him an instant hit with the girls, and made me wonder whether Australian accents had the same kind of power; I hadn’t seen any evidence of it so far. I walked over to the guy, and introduced myself.

“Hey there buddy, my name’s Andy. You’re Balduino, right”?

There’s a lot the guide books don’t tell you about Amsterdam which they should if they’re really interested in helping you out. Like the fact that the first people you normally get approached by at Central Station with a backpack on are drug dealers looking for a sucker to buy from them. I didn’t know this at the time, so as I was coming out of the front entrance this wasted freak of a guy comes up to me with a big smile on his face, which made me think he was a hostel tout.

“Hey man”, I said all casual like, “know any places I can stay”?

“No man. You wanna buy some shit… coke, ecstasy, hash”?

Something about that didn’t sound right, but I couldn’t put my finger on it, maybe because I was expecting a different answer than that, consequently it threw me for a second. In the whole scheme of things, I wasn’t actually looking for drugs so much as a place to stay. Plenty of time to get into the local medicine once I had accommodation sorted out. I waved the guy off and kept walking up the street towards the center of town. Next thing I know this clown is hurling abuse at me at the top of his lungs.

“YOU MUDDAFUCKA… I KILL YOU MAN…”!

[[I'm going to assume at this point that you did watch the presentation, and have an understanding of what I'm talking about in the next paragraphs]]

What really struck a chord with me in Harris’s presentation was his statement that most people are willing to suspend the reason that they use in their every day life for purposes of believing in a religious framework. Let me give you an example if this isn’t clear. If I was to start a new website called ‘The Truth of the New Lord’, and in the first post explain that a voice from the ether called to me and bade me stand on top of some hilltop where upon a burning bush spoke to me and gave me instructions on how to live a moral life, how many people would believe it? Well I’d say none. There is a well known truism that states extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, yet this is just not the case when it comes to religion, particularly Christianity, which was the religion assigned to me by my parents at birth.

I feel a particular anger towards Christianity because I feel it is one of the faiths that lies almost completely to it’s followers, who in turn really must lower their mentality to that of a fucking moron to accept the doctrine that it lays down. It’s a vicious and dogmatic faith that rules by fear, and presents nothing in the way of universal truth that will make sense to a individual possessed of intelligence and critical thinking.

Yet Christianity is really just a derivative of Catholicism, both of whom believe literally what is written in The Bible. If these “stories” were in any other place besides The Bible we would simply discard them as rubbish if it wasn’t purported to be fictional literature. But because it is The Bible people forgo reason for madness; they accept the writings as gospel and use it as the foundation for a moral life!

Back to Sam Harris.

His paradigm faces a new direction, he is one of a handful of thought leaders that are using science in a new way, a way that provides answers to the questions of morality and human well being. He states clearly the reasons why science can answer these questions, and explains that in order for society to flourish organised religion must be put out of practice for society to move forward. In a conversation on this with my friend, I believe that there can’t be more than a small percentile of any societies population that could truly accept this paradigm and move forward with it.

It’s not an easy thing for an individual to radically change their viewpoint on something so core to our own psychology as religious or spiritual views. However this doesn’t mean that just because it’s a sensitive topic that we should shy away from heavy discussion on the basis of respect. If we fail to engage in debate with others simply because it’s considered polite to let them have their views, then we simply encourage ignorance. Reasoning individuals shouldn’t stand next to a person proclaiming the world is flat, and respectfully agree with them out of a sense of tolerance. Clearly there is right and wrong in moral standpoints, as measured by the well being of any and all citizens of a society. Which means we should not have to accept that all religions have something to offer a society just because they say so.

I face now towards a new direction, and no longer consider myself religious, but instead a reasonist. Atheist is a term that doesn’t fit with me in its current vernacular. I believe that there is still value in my beliefs as a Buddhist, but this is because Buddhism is in itself critical of its doctrine. The Dalai Lama has said that where the Buddhist Dharma is in conflict with science, the Dharma shall be resolved. This is a sweeping statement; the doctrine of faith that all Buddhists follow will be updated as science broadens our knowledge and disproves fundamental doctrine text. As far as I’m aware, no other religion has taken the equivalent position. Dare I be so bold as to state, only Buddhism stands as a truly enlightened religious framework, and perhaps the only one worth considering in the new frontier of the paradigm of scientific morality.

While it’s difficult to understand at first the far reaching consequences of accepting a new paradigm of belief and letting go of an old one, it creates its own sense of comfort knowing that the path ahead leads away from useless archaic traditions and in the direction of a truly utopian society.

The more people who make the same journey bring that dream ever closer to reality.

Andy.

Then I saw a young woman who wouldn’t have been much more than early 20’s. She was walking a bit funny as she approached a bench press machine and loaded it up with pretty respectable weights for someone her size. It took a moment to notice because of the very true-to-life manufacturing, that she was wearing a prosthetic leg. It was attached on her right side about mid thigh. This woman then got on the bench press machine and hammered out 4 sets with serious intensity. I watched her on and off for about three quarters of an hour as she went from machine to machine working out in a way that made everyone else look like lazy bastards.

You know, if anyone deserved to be making excuses about why life was shit, it was her. But then she wasn’t making excuses, she was in there giving it 100% and looking good doing it. The realisation hit me that we make excuses because we can. And we allow those excuses room to affect our resolve and motivation because we simply do.

That young girl taught me that you can make excuses if you want, but you can also get in there and make the best of it!

Life aint over until it’s over!

Andy.

The newspapers from my home are particularly skilled at weaving nasty sounding medical acronyms like H5N1 (avian flu) into doomsday scenario headlines containing words like pandemic. Now drop that on a mainstream population that doesn’t really know how to critically evaluate new sources and challenge the information for validity, and what you end up with is a slightly panicked and scared population. The point gets even more rammed home when I talked this morning to my mother on Skype and hear them talking about cow flu of all things, a purportedly more insidious strain of flu that *really* makes you sick.

Seriously I wonder where this crap will end? Worse for me, I really don’t know who to blame; is it the media journalists for writing all this biased sensationalist rubbish in the first place, or is it the irresponsible news consumers for not making even a modicum of effort to critically review what they are reading and taking at face value? All this wouldn’t be so bad except that where there is general population fear, there is somebody selling a cure and making a profit. Michael Moore in his documentary Fahrenheit 911 deftly illustrated the point when he showed how the sale of ridiculous personal safety equipment skyrocketed with each and every media campaign that declared the state of the nations terror level. In the case of Australia there of course is the marketing of flu vaccines to help save people from the evils of bird/swine/cow flu. Which if you look into with even a small amount of research will show a large body of evidence that suggests these vaccines simply don’t work because of the mutation that each flu virus undergoes when passed from host to host, until you get to a point where the virus is a different strain from what you have been inoculated against. However if you follow the trail of money eventually it will end up somewhere in a big pile, and someone or some corporation more than likely is sitting on top of it.

So at this point you could suggest a conspiracy of some sort that this is all manufactured at some top level, but I think that would be by and large, over the top. Human nature being what it is, there is simply no way to effectively organise even a moderately large group of people to serve one general purpose unless you are an outright communist country with a singular leader. No, I think it’s more likely that there are just clever individuals who know how to exploit a particular situation for their own personal or corporate gain by using (and manipulating) the social conditions that already exist.

For example, Australian journalists will always write sensationalist news because most news readers are so used to being shocked that if they aren’t they tend to lose interest quickly in such reportage. This particular style of reportage then creates a situation of fear in the readers, which creates a desire for protection from the scenario that is threatening them. Somebody identifies this desire for protection and translates it into a product that can be commercially produced and sold. This product is then made available and of course the masses follow suit and purchase the product, which in terms buys them peace of mind. There is a low level of social engineering involved, but in this example I would hardly call it organised. There are examples that can be made that show how organisations make very effective use of social marketing as one facet of social engineering to control a population, but that’s for another day. The point here is that the mainstream create this situation for themselves by simply going with the flow, rather than asking some questions that would prove all the fear wrong.

So after 5 days my man flu is tailing out, I’ve been nursing myself with Vick’s Vaporub, dis-solvable paracetamol and vitamin C, and old fashioned bed rest. I’ve complained and whinged, but I knew that I’d recover and that it wasn’t life threatening and didn’t require any cocktail of expensive vaccines to protect myself from. If I’d have listened to the Australian news I probably would have been in fear for my life, but fortunately I don’t do that. I really don’t know why anyone does? Mainstream news is swill and should be treated as such.

Perhaps all this anger is in part because I’ve sick for the last 5 days and I just want to be done with it; the recovery always taking longer than I want. But also because of the stupidity of a system that uses an ordinary sickness to create fear and profit in people that simply let it happen. Each of us can influence this directly by very simply not buying into the fear, and not supporting the fear mongers.

Now wouldn’t that be a world worth living in!

Andy.

I personally have a kinship with Daniel in this movie because when I was his age, I was going to full contact karate 3 days a week, and I was about his size as well. One grading I had to fight a bigger, tougher, more experienced fighter and, pumped up on the belief that anything was possible after seeing Daniel dispatch the bad guy, I  BELIEVED I could win. Well the referee said fight, and the next thing I was on the ground with my ears ringing and blurred vision. Some people rushed over and one guy said, “holy shit kid, I bet that hurt, you didn’t even see that kick comin, huh?!

Not really, no.

Modern storytelling mediums of film and TV have refined an art form as old humanity itself and created a powerful force of illusion that captivates the individual. In some sense I think this heightened sense of illusion has created an even greater sense of hope for those of us who watched a story and believed in it. The most blatant example of this that I’ve seen just recently was when I watched Avatar (IMAX 3D) and fell so hard for the Na’vi that I wanted them to win with a ferocity of heart that would have equaled any warrior on the back of an ikran. Of course it was really a foregone conclusion that the good blue guys were going to win, if they hadn’t I’m pretty sure people would have torn out their seats and threw them through the screen in defiant frustration. However even knowing that up front, when they did win everybody was filled with a profound sense of justice that they carried with them long after the end credits rolled up.

Within all of us we have instilled a strong sense of hope given to us from our birthright of storytelling heritage. Hope is as necessary to life as oxygen, without it a person will wither and die. But hope is something that we learn as much as a belief in our heart; the more powerful the illusion, the more powerful the hope it generates.

This is why movies like The Karate Kid (the 1984 original that is) have a magic about them that drives deep into our psyche; we wanted Daniel to win, even though we knew he absolutely shouldn’t. So when the dramatic music rose and he went into the crane stance our hearts rose in hope, and the final kick delivered us righteousness.

The illusion was complete, and we were better people for it.

Andy.