Cloudscape

Suffering is the only thing that does not cause growth, yet that which causes the suffering often causes most growth. To grow, one must overcome suffering.

It is because of the irresponsibility of the illicit drug black market that drugs have been made illicit; but in doing so, the government has refused to take on responsibility for these drugs, and left it to the masses. In this, they only gave the illegal drug industry an advantage, whereas if they took drug industry in their own hands in a responsible way, illicit drug industry would cease to be attractive to users. Since users would therefore be better informed and guided about their drugs, this would probably result in an actual decrease in the abuse of illicit drugs, so that drug use would lead to less addictions, overdoses, and side-effects such as brain damage.

All use of drugs should therefore be monitored by a psychiatrist, unless or until the subject is deemed sufficiently responsible to use them independently; in this case, the subject could receive a license, the allocation of which would be based on the psychiatrist's assessment of the individual's prudence and knowledge. Without this license, the use of the drug should be prohibited. Police officers could take action if they see that someone uses a drug in an irresponsible way, as they can in the case of alcohol. Whenever they know that someone has used a drug they can ask their license, even if the drug is alcohol (in the case of alcohol, however, this would only be done in obviously high dosages, as alcohol is otherwise used far too frequently). In doing so, it is important that, should they have used hallucinogens, they do not do this in an aggressive way.

If someone is caught using a drug without license, the penalty depends on the nature of the drug. If, by taking the drug without license, they might cause harm to others, they are penalized for that risk. Such risk to others would usually be seen in the case of addiction, such as to cocaine or alcohol. If they cause no significant risk to others in taking the drug, for instance in the case of marijuana, they receive no penalty for this. However, they are encouraged, in either case, to see a psychiatrist to guide their use of the drug. In the case of drug addiction, they could even get reduction in costs as any other mental patient (that is, in countries where such reductions occur), since DSM-IV recognizes drug addiction as a mental illness.

However, they could receive a penalty for buying their drugs from the black market, as they thereby support their dealers and so indirectly harm others by encouraging them to further deal drugs; not only do they thereby encourage their dealers to continue dealing, but they might also encourage others to buy from them. The subject is promptly interrogated (as soon as the drug has worn off, of course) about where he got the drugs, and if he can remember his dealer's face, this may also prove useful in finding him.

The foremost role of the psychiatrist would be to educate the subject about the substance, not to decide whether or not they should use it; if they educate them correctly, the subject will be able to decide for themselves whether they should use it or not. The only exception is that in their use of the substance, they do not harm anyone else, as they cannot decide for the others they might pose a danger to. Disorders such as schizophrenia and psychopathy are therefore possible contraindications.

Legal conditions of use should be a responsible set and setting: if usage results in dangerous psychotic behavior which may be harmful to themselves or others, this is a sign that they have not made responsible use of it, either because they have used it without a license or because the psychiatrist has misjudged their responsibility. Dangerous behavior while under influence of a substance will result in a retraction of their permit for the particular class of that substance, just as dangerous driving may result in a retraction of one's driving license.

The police officers may, if qualified to do so, administer an antipsychotic to sedate someone under influence if they are using it in an irresponsible way (something which can also be useful in other cases of dangerously psychotic behavior). Usually, punishment will be unnecessary because the negative experience will be the most efficient way of discouraging anyone from using the drug in an unpremeditated way; rather, the abuser should be incited to see a psychiatrist; an exception is when the user is driving or handling a mechanical device. Since this need not be associated with a negative experience, it is best to impose a sanction on the user either how, upon which the user should be escorted back home.

In doing so, however, the police officer must be warned to be as respectful and careful as possible, lest the sanction itself will lead to a negative experience. In the case of psychedelic, this can be a traumatizing experience, so it is quite out of place to do cause a negative experience as a punishment; to do this, as well, should be punishable, whether the person who caused the negative experience is a police officer or anyone else. It can be very difficult to judge, however, if the negative experience was in effect caused by the person in question, as this can be very subtle. This can be a conundrum for trials, but the same is true for bullying, which in some countries is nonetheless punishable.

A permit for substances is especially important for hallucinogens. Because different classes of substances will have different levels of risks, such permits should, obviously, be subdivided into several classes. The endowment of such permits should not be taken lightly, as they enable a person to make use of a substance without any supervision by a psychiatrist at all. This requires the person to have a profound knowledge of the possible risks or side effects of the drugs and the dosages at which these may occur, as well as a proper judgment of these facts: for instance, people who are suffering from mania, dissociative identity disorder or orbitofrontal dementia, should not be given such a license. For some substances, such permits would be exceedingly rare, and might even require an extensive course on the substance in question. Importantly, such a license might be temporary, or otherwise provide further specifications about the place, time, or other circumstances in which the substance in question should be used.

Some licenses would be easier to obtain than others, based on the possible dangers associated with them. Some substances, like tobacco, would require no license at all, and the user would be trusted to be courteous in when to use it or not. If there would be one, a license to alcohol would require only limited assessment or more likely none at all, but it could be taken from them, for instance, in the case of binge drinking, alcoholism or drunk violence. In the case of drunk driving, it makes more sense not only to take the driver's driving license but also their drinking license. Since people will be forced to drive back home anyhow after they've drunk alcohol, it's better to just forbid them drinking alcohol.

If such law was indeed introduced for alcohol, it would be best to distribute the licenses for alcohol freely at first, lest no one would pay heed to it; later, they might be issued with one's passport. What is most important is that the license can be taken from people who engage in dangerous behavior whilst drunk, much like a driving license.

The problem with the use of drugs is not that the user might harm themselves, but that they might not be aware that they are doing this. As long as they are aware of the damage they might be causing themselves, they are free to do so if they deem the experience of the substance to be worth it. After all, if they will harm themselves, they will already be punished, and if the risk of harming themselves will not be enough to discourage them from irresponsible use, then neither will the risk of punishment.

As long as one does something only to oneself and one knows what one is doing and really wants it, one should be free to proceed. The greatest danger is that a user might underestimate the addictive nature of some substances. However, if all drugs would be legal, after all, drug addiction could be much easier to treat, since drugs such as ibogaine and other psychedelics have proven to be effective in the treatment of drug addiction. Moreover, people who are addicted to an illicit drug will be unlikely to seek help for their addiction, either because they would not trust their doctor to keep it secret, or because others might find out why they see their doctor. If the drug is licit, not only does treatment of addiction become far more evident, but so does social support.

If even the most dangerous and addictive drugs are made legal under psychiatric supervision, they automatically become less dangerous: they are less likely to be contaminated with other, sometimes toxic substances; they are less likely to be administered with unsterile needles, which may transmit disease; they are less likely to lead to addiction, and when addiction occurs, it will be less likely to remain untreated; most important of all, the user will be fully aware of the dangers.

If one can use a drug safely and legally by simply regularly consulting a psychiatrist, one will be very likely to do so rather than to resort to an unsafe and illegal black market. What the individual needs is guidance, not enforcement; as we know from experience, enforcement seldom works.

While the dangers of drugs must be dealt with, it is also important that the benefits of drugs are exploited. Doing so can save many lives from various conditions. It is known that many psychoactives could have invaluable applications in medicine, psychiatry, psychotherapy and even the self-development of the healthy individual. Some psychedelic drugs, in a

can offer a dramatically effective treatment for depression, anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, alcoholism, drug addiction, cluster headaches, and even schizophrenia, where any other kind of therapy has failed. It is therefore inhumane to forbid the medical use of these substances. Doing so condemns millions of innocent people to unnecessary suffering and even suicide, and it can therefore not be represented as anything less than murder.

It is, moreover, especially important for the use of psychedelics to be legitimized under psychiatric supervision so that they would not be used without. The greatest danger associated with psychedelics are caused by the irresponsible way they are used. If they were used only under the supervision of a psychiatrist, this danger would be dealt with decisively. Psychiatrists know the effects of the drugs, which dosage is best administered, and what mindset their subject has; most important of all, they are armed with anxiolytics and antipsychotics in case the subject would react adversely to the drug, such as by a panic attack.

This is especially important, of course, for people who would use psychedelics as a treatment for mental illness, as this is an extremely delicate matter best left to a psychiatrist. A psychiatric setting would offer complete safety for the subject, as the notorious "bad trips" would never have to occur. People have had severe psychological damage from bad trips which would otherwise not have occurred had they been supervised by a psychiatrist, similar to post-traumatic stress disorder. Users of some heavier psychedelics such as DMT have reported having had panic attacks for several years after a negative experience, and some were even hospitalized with psychosis (though this usually lasted only a few days). Moreover, some people have killed or injured themselves during a negative experience, both accidentally and intentionally; if nurses are nearby which can administer an injection of thorazine or benzodiazepine, or in the worst (highly unlikely) case, use a straitjacket, this cannot happen.

Another possible problem with some psychedelics, including THC found in cannabis, occurs when they are used in immoderate amounts or frequency. In this case, the effect of expansion of consciousness becomes excessive. The mind becomes so expanded that it becomes difficult to concentrate it, as these are two opposites. When the mind is expanded, it experiences; when it concentrates, it thinks. When consciousness becomes so expanded that it can no longer concentrate, it becomes harder to think.

The mind needs to have a flexibility between expansion and concentration, and psychedelics can help one achieve this flexibility; nonetheless, they will also generally incline the mind to expand itself more frequently than concentrating itself. Usually, this is not an issue, as in the intervening period between two uses of psychedelics, the user will maintain its powers of concentration by training them in day-to-day activities. However, if this intervening period becomes too short, the mind will have difficulty to catch up to improve its flexibility to switch back to concentration. The result, in this case, can be that the user develops cognitive problems.

This cognitive damage is, however, usually of psychological rather than neurological nature, and it is because of this that it has been found to be temporary, in contrast with the cognitive damage caused by alcohol. Two popular psychedelics which are likely to be abused, in contrast with others, are LSD and cannabis: LSD, because it can be used in extremely high dosages, and cannabis, because it causes far less tolerance. In both cases, abusers reported cognitive damage, and in both cases, recovered abusers reported recovering from this side-effect over time.

Some people have reported to have the opposite problem with nootropics, (legal) substances which increase cognition, stating that it was harder for them to experience as their increased insights crowded in on them. If so, then perhaps nootropics can be used to remedy this problem. However, it is better to avoid that these problems ever occur by not using the drugs without moderation.

In extreme cases, this effect may further escalate to cause such symptoms as "flashbacks" or HPPD, ego death or, in some cases, psychosis. Cannabis is even thought to be linked to schizophrenia, though it is uncertain if the cannabis caused the schizophrenia or schizophrenics are more likely to use cannabis. It is likely a bit of both. That this problem appears to occur mostly with cannabis is probably because unlike most other psychedelics, it can be used frequently and so has greater abuse potential.

Although the long-term side effects of abuse for psychedelics are temporary, it is unknown if this is also so for abuse of dissociatives, another class of hallucinogens which act mostly on the NDMA receptors. Dissociatives, such as ketamine, memantine, phencyclidine and dextromethorphan, are thought to cause Olney's lesions, although for most dissociatives, this effect has been established only in rats. Nitrous oxide is known to have this effect in humans, but, at least for nitrous oxide, this effect turned out to be temporary; being a common human anesthetic, nitrous oxide is the only dissociative which can be tested on humans. This may suggest that Olney's lesions from all dissociatives are temporary. However, some heavy users have reported their brain damage lasted for several years, though it is, of course, uncertain if this was because of the dissociatives or because of other drugs they might have used in the meantime. This damage can apparently be prevented by gaba-a receptor agonists or anticholinergics. Serotonergic psychedelics and MDMA can also prevent Olney's lesions, but because the combination of any of these drugs with dissociatives is unpredictable, caution is particularly important. To a random user, it would be pure guesswork in what dosages to combine these substances, although a psychiatrist could be able to prescribe the right specific dosages.

For several reasons, most psychedelics have very little abuse potential. One is that tolerance from psychedelics forms quickly, so that after a single usage, the drug has little effect for several days. Another is that it these psychedelics do not activate the reward centers through any direct physiological action. And most importantly, the use of psychedelics can be a quite challenging activity, much like climbing a mountain or running a marathon. Users report feeling no craving to use the hallucinogen again after the effects have worn off, although they often decide yet to do so in future.

There are few drugs which are known to be completely safe, but the possibility of side-effects must not be dramatized: many drugs have been used by millions of people, and any side effects associated with them, though not scientifically established, are therefore generally known to them. Usually, the knowledge among them of the possible side effects can be relied upon, as they are based on past experiences of people, although not everyone among them has that knowledge, and not everyone among them believes it to be true.

Long-term side-effects of drugs are generally caused by a buildup of short-term side-effects, so that one may notice them as they start to appear. There is no way that after causing no short-term damage, a drug would suddenly magically start causing damage after several years, long after it has left the body, at least, not damage of a physiological nature. Therefore, if the use is supervised by a psychiatrist, he or she may decrease, suspend or discontinue use when noticing that long-term side effects are starting to build up to form actual long-term side effects. Usually, like the short-term side effects, these long-term side-effects will usually wear off in time, though they will obviously take longer to do so than the short-term side effects — unless, that is, the side-effects are of a psychological nature, but as discussed before, these could already be prevented by psychiatric supervision.

It is usually hard to research the long-term side effects of illegal drugs, because of two reasons. The first is that most people who use one illegal drug will often use another, especially if the drug in question is a hard drug. The second is that many people who use illegal drugs are already mentally unstable before using the drugs. Especially, there is an obvious inclination among people with schizoid personality disorder, schizotypal personality disorder and schizophrenia to drugs. Moreover, some people with other mental illnesses will use drugs, especially psychedelics, as a self-medication.

However, there are some drugs which can be researched without these stumbling blocks, because in certain cultures, they are both seen as normal and used separate from other drugs. These are the alkaloids used in some ancient tribes, mostly in Africa and North- and South-America: three prominent examples are ayahuasca, san pedro and peyote. Peyote is likely one of the only so-called hard drugs of which there is conclusive and compelling evidence that it is safe: comparing a group of 79 Navajos who used no alcohol or other drugs with a group of 61 Navajo members of the Native American Church who regularly used peyote, Dr. John Halpern et al. found no short- or long-term cognitive, emotional or perceptual damage among the group who used peyote, and that in fact they emotionally scored better. That they scored better emotionally may be partly because they were religious, but it also seems likely to be partly because of their peyote experiences themselves.

San pedro is very similar to Peyote, and since the primary active substance in both cacti is mescaline, it is also highly probable that mescaline itself is physiologically harmless. It must be noted, however, that psychological damage might still likely follow from these substances. The reason why no psychological damage had been found among the members of the Native American Church is because this group had learned to make use of the Peyote in a responsible way. Notably, there is a convention among them never to use it alone. The experience is normally always shared by the entire group, and is preceded by extensive ritual preparations.

In theory, almost any psychoactive can have applications in psychiatry in subjects who miss just that which the psychoactive brings about. The problem with some of these psychoactives is, of course, that they can have side effects, most notably addiction. However, if those particular psychoactives are used only rarely, this need not be a problem. Heroin, for instance, is routinely used in hospitals, where it is known as diacetylmorphine or diamorphine, to alleviate pain — as is morphine itself.

Though most therapeutic value lies in psychedelics and empathogens, in rare cases other drugs might similarly be of value. Cocaine or other stimulants could perhaps be used in the case of chronic catatonia, though this is quite speculative. Some people remain in catatonia for weeks or even months (in some cases, as in encephalitis lethargica, even years or decades). This may lead to severe complications such as thrombosis, joint symptoms and bedsores, the latter being the primary iatrogenic cause of death. Obviously, in this state, these patients are unresponsive to any form of psychotherapy, but should they first be given cocaine or other stimulants to take them out of their catatonic state, they might temporarily be more responsive to reality; ensuing treatment can then lead to long-term recovery.

In these patients, the reward centers are usually hypoactive, so that addiction is hardly an issue. Nonetheless, tolerance could eventually cause a relapse into catatonia unless the patient has been successfully treated by then. One must be very careful with these cases, however, as in many of these patients, a too-high dosage might trigger psychosis or cause an aggravation of already extant psychotic symptoms. There are, on the other hand, many non-psychotic cases of catatonic schizophrenia in which cocaine might speculatively have some use. Extra caution should be paid if the catatonic patient has had made past attempts to kill or injure him- or herself or someone else, in which case the cocaine might elicit renewed attempts. However, as such cases of chronic catatonia are mostly found in mental hospitals, this would be relatively easy to control. Catatonia also occurs in some other mental illnesses, however, such as depression or autism, which is less severe and in which such treatment would not be necessary or advisory.

In the past, LSD has effectively been used by psychiatrists to treat various mental illnesses, as well as a means of self-development, until it was forbidden in 1968. Originally, it was limited to psychiatric settings; later, it was used by the general public with little responsibility. Perhaps what the government should have done then was to forbid people to use it irresponsibly, rather than to forbid its use entirely and thereby only increase its irresponsible use.

The same goes for MDMA, more commonly known as ecstasy, which was originally used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, and some countries are currently re-evaluating this application. MDMA has also been used, generally as a self-medication, for general anxieties, and it could likely likewise be used for more specific anxieties, such as phobia, in particular social anxieties. Many people have reported becoming more sociable after using MDMA. It is not unthinkable that it could even be used to treat autism, to those who would prefer to be treated for it.

It is known that MDMA causes damage to serotonergic axons, although the original US government-sponsored research which discovered this effect had dramatically exaggerated it, stating that a single recreational dosage could cause a decrease of up to 85% serotonin function — a decrease of which it is questionable if it could be survived at all. The same research also found a link between MDMA use and Parkinson's disease, which was later found to be because the researchers had administered methamphetamine instead of MDMA. This debacle has caused the government to lose a lot of its credibility in its attitude towards drugs and in particular MDMA.

Later researchers found a far slighter decrease of just 5%, which appeared to be temporary: the brain recovered its lost axons after a period of three months or less. However, more recent research suggests that this pattern of reinnervation is abnormal, with approximate brain areas becoming hyperinnervated and more distant brain areas remaining denervated. It is, after all, more difficult for the newly sprouted axons to reach the more distant brain areas. Because of this effect, MDMA may still, after all, cause cognitive and emotional damage over time, though it is uncertain to what extent. When used infrequently, it is doubtful that this effect is significant.

It must be noted, however, that everything, no matter what is is, has side-effects of some sort. Many prescription medications have caused thousands of deaths, including some which have not been retracted from the market. Some neuroleptics, for instance, can cause neuroleptic malignant syndrome, which can cause death in 10-20%. Others can cause tardive dysphrenia, which can trigger or worsen psychosis. If psychedelics and empathogens became the new medicines in psychiatry, then perhaps there would be far less side-effects.

Compared to long-term acting drugs such as antidepressants (which work only when used long-term), short-term acting drugs like psychedelics (which work immediately upon using once) have many advantages. The most important is probably that long-term acting drugs change the individual in a purely chemical way, short-acting drugs do so instead in a psychological way. The former force one's personality to change in a particular way that is outside one's control, while the latter encourage one to change one's personality in one's own way. People who use long-term acting drugs often complain that they do not feel themselves, as though they are becoming someone else, while people who use short-term acting drugs often claim that they have finally found themselves, as though they are, instead, becoming who they really are. Drugs such as psychedelics work by giving people insight into who they are and how they can become better people, much like psychotherapy; drugs such as antidepressants, on the other hand mask who they truly are.

While most long-term acting drugs remove some quality from the individual's personality in order to add another, short-term acting drugs usually only add qualities, rarely taking any away from the individual. Many people using medicines complain that they are becoming superficial, unfeeling uncaring or uninspired. Some lose their emotions, others their creativity, their dreams or their willpower.

Mental illness has been associated with artistic abilities. 70 percent of all artists have had some mood disorder at some point. Many great geniuses had mental illnesses of some sort of other: Einstein, Da Vinci, Edison and possibly Beethoven might have been dyslectic, Dali schizotypal, Beethoven, Lord Byron, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Schumann, Nietzsche and Newton bipolar, Oppenheimer, Kierkegard, Van Gogh, Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy and Bohm depressive; John Nash, Van Gogh, Enduard Einstein (Einstein's son) schizophrenic, Dostoevsky and Edgar Allan Poe might have had Geschwind syndrome, Leonardo Da Vinci ADHD, and the list goes on, as I omit all but the most well-known names, as well as the more speculative diagnoses. These people all had abilities which modern medications would take away from them, and there is no telling how many people today might have lost such abilities because of them. On the other hand, psychedelics would, rather than taking away these abilities to end their suffering, learn the people who have them to be able to deal with them in such way that they do not cause them as much suffering.

There is another advantage to psychedelic therapy above pharmaceutical therapy, and it is the decreased incidence of toxicity. Using a substance foreign to the body every day is likely to cause adverse reactions, but using such a substance once every few weeks, or every month or year, is highly unlikely to cause long-term adverse reactions. Most substances only damage the body after regular use. It is nonsensical to fear damage from substances which are would have to be used only rarely in therapy while many prescribed substances regularly cause damage the body, causing a wide range of symptoms both physical and, more importantly, mental.

By forbidding drugs, the government cannot shirk their responsibility over them; damage due to the drugs still occurs, and it is their duty to do something about it. Forbidding all use of these drugs is no help at all, as this only shoves the illegal drugs aside to the black market.

The reason why drug use is not licensed in psychiatric settings, though it could solve the greater part of the problems caused by drugs, is that the drug law isn't meant to protect the individual but to enforce norms. Drugs are forbidden because they are taboo, not because they can be dangerous. Society demonizes anything that does not conform to it, and it is therefore not surprising that they punish it.

Earth needs water, or it will crack; water needs earth, or it will stagnate. Either put alone will destroy itself.

Spiritual beliefs need not be true; whether they are or not, they work if you believe in them. In this they are true to the spirit — in a spiritual sense — which is all that matters.

Spiritual beliefs are akin to hypnosis: similarly, hypnosis makes use of suggestions which, while untrue, still work. Hypnosis might visualize images such as light filling the body, or pain assuming a physical form, or, as means of hypnotic induction, of magnets on each hand attracting each other or a balloon tied to the hand lifting it; none of these things are real in the physical world, but they are real in the mental world. They are constructs of the mind, and so to the mind they are true.

Within, they exist as thoughts, which are quite real. When one considers this, one realizes that there isn't really anything which is not "real," and that immaterial things matter as much as material things. Every day, we all create new ways of thinking which may change the influence of the outside world upon our minds to become altered, sometimes drastically.

Whether these hold any direct relation to the material world does not necessarily matter. We cannot neglect them just because of this, because they can be equally important.

We may, for instance, conceive of things as though they were alive; from what we know this may be true or it may not be, but that doesn't really matter. From a certain viewpoint, one could say this is true because the things we perceive around us are themselves but our own perceptions, and therefore, part of our own mind, very much alive. As they are part of our own persona, it can allow us to more fully respect our persona if we deem them as if they were persons themselves.

It is unscientific to simply take it for granted that it is so, but one can nonetheless imagine that it is so. Thereby one can allow oneself to feel more connected to the outside world, even when one is alone.

On the other hand, it can be misleading to mix scientific and spiritual beliefs, though the two may be connected. If one merely imagines something to be true without knowing whether it is so or not, one will never be deceived; if one actually assumes it, however, then one will be easily deceived.

Connect to each moment as it though it were to a person, and love it as a person. Otherwise it will not be rewarding to become aware of it. Everyone does this to some extent, but rarely consciously.

Whatever happens to you, it will have a positive as well as a negative influence. By being aware of its positive influence, one can make it stronger by thus opening oneself to it; by being aware of its negative influence, one may avoid it by closing oneself to it. It is important to be aware of both, but remain detached, remain objective.

Love for every moment — it is infinitely simple, yet it and it alone can solve all your problems. Not just a mere awareness of the present, but loving awareness of the present, for awareness is worth little otherwise. Imprint this as firmly as you can in your mind, and live for it in everything you do. Don't let it remain a mere concept at the back of your head, but let it absorb your entire being, for everything in life depends on it. Love can be seen as a positive or creative awareness; without it, no life — no consciousness — could exist or grow.
Know, however, that love must be powerful as well as gentle, lest you forget to fend for yourself. Even in seeking love for all things, do not neglect to rid yourself of harmful influences; but do even this with love.

When you seek to become more aware, do so with love for that of which you are to become aware, or your awareness will be of little worth. You can concentrate on your perceptions as a cashier would scan wares or an officer would inspect his soldiers, but it will not bring you happiness. Without love you cannot enjoy.

You can pay attention to something as an archer would pay attention to his targets, or as a lover to the eyes of their beloved.  One must be mindful both with gentleness and with alertness; without either of both there cannot be balance.

When feeling an emotion such as anger and despair, observe them as though it were a leak of energy and no more than this — a leak that needs to be sealed — thereby encouraging you to do so, as well as to take an objective distance from the emotion.

When you look at the list of countries by income per capita, it becomes apparent that nature is apparently an important factor — though the list varies from year to year, countries such as Norway, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Ireland, Iceland, Danmark and so on have often been among the list. Two other relationships appear to be a history of fossil fuel exploitation and a history of war, both of which indirectly stimulate productivity.
The causality of this relationship is probably dual. On the one hand, richer people may have been more inclined to seek out nature, and the children of wealthy people are generally relatively wealthy themselves. On the other hand, nature may make people happier and thereby more productive.
If the latter is more important than the former, then it is important to recognize this factor in economy; it must be known that nature is important in economy, and therefore there is all the more reason for the two to be in harmony. Environmentalism does not need to hamper economy, but may on the contrary promote it. Everything, including economy, is a question of balance, and so it must be approached in a holistic as well as a more analytic way. Economy that is out of balance will damage the environment, which will damage the well-being of the population, which will damage economy.

This remains, however, a hypothesis.

"Every 14 days a language dies. By 2100, more than half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth—many of them not yet recorded—may disappear, taking with them a wealth of knowledge about history, culture, the natural environment, and the human brain." (Source: National Geographic)

Perhaps languages that have been lost aren't irretrievably so. Even when the words in a text lose their meaning, they still retain their order, and based on this, there are only a limited possibilities for the meaning of every word, or, if the word occurs often enough in the text, only one, as it then becomes almost impossible to assign a different meaning to the word without causing inconsistencies.

In future, using advanced AI, it might be theoretically possible to relearn languages which have been forgotten. Suppose that, as a first step, a supercomputer would fill in the meanings of the words of every sentence in a text more or less at random; more or less, because it could have certain inclinations, such as the inclination of relating words of shorter length from both languages, since simpler words are usually shorter: in most languages, for instance, the equivalent of the word "the" is only one character long.

Suppose it would then after every sentence control whether or not the sentence makes sense: if it does make sense, it moves on to the next sentence and repeats the process. One way of doing this would be by using search engines: if a fragments of a sentence does not return any search results when stripped bare of adjectives and adverbs and having all words replaced by their most straightforward synonym, it probably does not make sense. If the adverbs and adjectives, placed before or after the words they are related to, do not return any results either, then they're probably incorrect too. (Note that to return results of an entire fragment on search engines today, quotes must be used.)

If it encounters a word similar, but not identical, to a word it already has, it can try all different forms of that word, and if that does not work, then words related to it or similar in meaning; if these possibilities are exhausted, the supercomputer goes back to random guesses.

So far, the supercomputer can still fill in the sentences with any meaning at all (that is, any that makes sense), as long as it has the same number of words. However, when it sees the same word twice, it will (usually) be forced to review its possible meanings; as it sees the same word more and more often, the possible meanings will be narrowed until only one or a few remain.

The more texts there are available of the language, the fewer words will be left out with an unknown meaning. Of course, if there is too little text material available, it will be almost impossible to translate it.

No material thing is inherently as it is perceived.

There are always two ways of dealing with a feeling, either by dealing with its material cause or dealing with its psychological cause. Choose whichever feels most efficient.

Madness is an abandon of reality to escape into fantasy; schizophrenia is also an abandon of the self in order to do so.

When you have the intention to become conscious, remember thereafter now and then to renew that intention, so that you do not become unconscious again. Do this as often as is needed to remain conscious continuously, at least every minute; to do this, you might use a mantra, such as "I am aware" or "I live" to remember your intention quickly. Repeat your mantra whenever you catch yourself becoming les conscious than you want to be, and resolve at that moment to remain conscious for as long as you are able.

Similarly, oneironauts have made use of the mantra "I am dreaming" to prolong lucidity when finding their dreams to become less vivid. Analogously, one can use the mantra "I am living" to prolong mindfulness when finding one's awareness to become less vivid.

When you focus on our experience, you may sometimes feel anxieties as soon as you do so. If so, note that they are there, accept them as part of your experience, and do not give up.

Everything has both a yin and yang aspect, and therefore in some aspects it wil be yang, in others yin; in particular, it may be yin in the more material world yet yin in the more spiritual world, or the other way around. It is clear, then, that even this is relative as are all things.

Anger, for instance, is an emotion and therefore yin when compared to material things, but for an emotion is a yang emotion. A dance is an example of the opposite.

Combine everything with its complement and you will grow yet remain balanced — something which is in itself a combination of complements.

At times our thoughts crowd in on our experience, the transition from one experience to the next becomes more difficult, and we must instead make use of the transition from thought to experience, meaning that we must seek out experience through thought, as a detour. Often when we want to become conscious of our experience, we try to do so; but experience itself cannot be a goal, and when we try to experience, we do so from our thought; when we are trying to become more conscious of our experience, we must therefore realize that we must be patient till the trying wears off, and we can truly experience, not departing from thought but from feeling.

Thought should start with questions, not with wanderings. Think only when the need is felt, and otherwise, feel.

Everything strives for its own survival, for it would otherwise not have come to exist.

Everything can be both positive or negative depending on the case. Therefore nothing in itself is positive or negative, thought to different persons or things it will have positive or negative effects; it is impossible to do anything that is positive or negative in itself, except relative to a specific person or thing. It is but the combination of two things that will make either of the two either creative or destructive to the other. We should try, then, to combine all things in harmony; though to do so fully to all things we would have to be divine.

We can try to let whatever happen to us be as positive to us as it can be, and no matter how negative it may seem, it can always also have a positive influence. In the long run, it may even be constructive even though seeming destructive on the short term.

Wonder and ask yourself with an open curiosity what will happen the next instant, both without you as within you in feelings, thoughts or actions, and experience the answer as it comes. Control it all the while, but only when you find yourself feeling or thinking that it is needed. In this way, observing yourself in every way as though you were someone else, you will become more aware.

We slip into unconsciousness not because we are forgetful, but because consciousness tends to hurt at times. If we wish to be conscious, then we must endure it. Discursive thought is a means of dissociation. We must face this shame to recognize that we are afraid of every single moment, lest we never conquer that fear — everything we feel would become overwhelming were it not that we seek to escape from it.

Meet whatever waves of emotion flow towards you; be not swept away in them, but resist them neither.

If you stay with your experience in word and thought, you will never tell a lie. For what one experiences, be it in sensations or feelings or thoughts, is the only truth one knows for sure. Say not how things are, but how you perceive them to be.

It turns out that in every single aspect of our lives, and not only as aspects of our lives, we need both yin and yang. For one thing, while yang is motivation, but yin is patience, and so, even though yang is more oriented on motivation, you cannot achieve something with only yang.

Everything has both a yin and yang aspects, and therefore be yin in one area yet yang in another; in particular, it may be yin in the material world yet yang in the emotional world, or the other way around. Anger, for instance, is an emotion and therefore yin when compared to material things, but for an emotion, it is a yang emotion. A dance is an example of the opposite.

On two levels on which people show most who they really are: that of the very small and the very great; the normal level is social and therefore self-consciously adapted according to the impressions it would make. Details, few ever worry about; and in case of dramatic events, few worry about what impression they will make, either.
If you want to understand people, study them on these nonsocial levels; since dramatic events rarely happen, if you want to understand people, study the subtleties in their behavior, for those come by themselves, without reflection.
Highly sensitive people do this spontaneously, and because of this may find themselves strangely affected by small details. They will often be thought of as overdramatic; but those small details can tell a keen intuition a great deal.

Many scientists attribute our every quality, be it directly or indirectly, to genetic evolution. Art becomes a means to show off to attract partners, love becomes a means to keep them and others with them.
However, this narrow view of evolution is incomplete; it has already been shown that evolution works through at least two mechanism of selection: natural selection and sexual selection. However, a third mechanism of selection is so absurdly obvious that it it easily overlooked; the third mechanism of selection is our own: choice. "Intelligent selection," as it might be called. The first is unconscious; the second is conscious; the third is self-conscious. The first created the second, the second the third, though the three transition into one another gradually.
Natural selection is the first and most basic mechanism, which depends on survival of the fittest; this mechanism is partly genetic in that it applies to genetics, but also of importance before and beside genetics, as it applies just as well on chemical, atomic and even lower levels, beginning from the very birth of the universe.
Sexual selection is the second mechanism, depending on sexual attraction; this is, arguably, the only of the three mechanisms which is purely genetic, depending on how one interprets "selection." A bacterium does not feel sexual attraction during conjugation, or a virus during insertion, or an oxygen atom during combustion, or a neutron when it collides with a fissile atom, yet these are all examples of reproduction. However, unless matter is conscious, this is not "selection."
Finally, neurological selection is the third and as yet the last we know. One might say that this mechanism is barely genetic at all, but it may be that it is partly epigenetic, though more research would be required. It is known that the activity of certain genes in our brain cells can change over time. It is also known that we may increase certain chemicals in our brain by desiring their effects; what, then, if the latter partly involves the former, and we may change the activity of our genes indirectly by desiring to do so? And what if these epigenetic changes affect the epigenetics of our gametes? This remains speculation.
Be it in part genetic or entirely memetic, neurological selection has dominated our evolution over the past thirty thousand years. For a large part, our sense of beauty is for a large part a mere side effect of our genetic evolution, but this side effect has started to lead a life of its own, and grew more and more sophisticated without any further genetic influence.
The collective unconscious was programmed, mostly genetically, to appreciate certain environments more than others by instinct because they were more favorable, and to appreciate all their aspects: birdsong for instance as a sign of life, flowing streams to lead to fruiting plants, distant views to detect approaching danger, physical appearance to find a successful partner or friend, aromas to find food that is healthy, taste to examine its contents. These are all things that increase likelihood of survival.
But flowing from these simpler perceptions grew something far more complex; the brain took over, and used these perceptions for itself. It improved its enjoyment of beauty not with the purpose to ensure chances of survival, but because it found it pleasurable, and to seek pleasure is simply how the brain is meant to work. The brain started to evolve by itself without much regard of evolution. It is because of this that among humans we see phenomena such as asceticism, celibacy, even masochism, phenomena which from an evolutionary viewpoint are contradictory. This is because the brain has acquired a will of its own, detached from genetic evolution; genetic evolution plays part in neurological evolution as neurological evolution stems from genetic evolution, but it no longer depends entirely on it, just as genetic evolution no longer depends entirely on chemical evolution. The brain has become so complex that it has become like an ecosystem of itself, with its own species.
Thus, aside from viability there came a second selector, and it was enjoyability; today, the latter has become far more prominent in our world than the former, and it no longer has very much to do with viability. Think of the things you do in your free time for enjoyment: how great will their effect be on your chances of survival or those of your offspring? The answer is, very little.
Of course, everything may indirectly alter our chances of survival, but relative to other things you might be doing instead, most leisurely activities will not do so to any significant extent. From a purely evolutionary standpoint, we are wasting the majority of our time, with a things ranging from smalltalk to art. All of these activities have an effect on our chances of survival, but it is so small that relative to those of other species, our activities are utterly irrelevant. If we were to survive rather than live, we would behave as animals. Our average pastimes score extremely low on the evolutionary ladder, though even in an environment as we have, we could do far better.
The memetics of neurological selection may be both collective (through the collective unconscious), but also individual, since the brain, especially in humans, is so complex that it may perhaps undergo such a rapid evolution throughout life that one's sense of beauty is developed through one's own life. How their sense of beauty would develop would depend on their genetics, environment, and a third factor of how the brain would interact with itself, since, as said, the brain has become as complex as an ecosystem.

Do not always look at the positive side, for you might then overlook facts that are in effect negative, that is to say, destructive. Instead, always look at the most positive state you may achieve, taking both positive and negative facts into account. Do not always be optimistic, but always be constructive. Do not see everything as positive, but seek whatever is most positive.

To achieve the balance of neither repressing negative emotions nor surrendering to them, acknowledge them first of all and afterwards do something about them if needed, be it either by changing one's way of thinking, or the situation that causes it; when it comes to this, do this both through thought and through action in balance. Remember how you feel, but also remember how you could feel instead of how you feel.

A war should be fought only if it would save more lives than it would kill; otherwise, other means should suffice. Such wars, however, are very rare, as most only cause even more suffering than they resolve; because of this, war should be avoided as much as possible.
However, we must nuance this attitude. In all things there are exceptions, and so too there are in war: if none had fought Nazi Germany but all had yielded to them, then there would have been far more deaths than there had fallen in the Second World War. Sixty million people fell in the Second World War: however, in about the same time, eleven million people fell in the holocaust.
Suppose that all had surrendered to Nazi Germany in the hope, likely correct, that its despotism would disintegrate before long, as despotisms tend to do, then it would still likely have lasted long enough to kill more than sixty million people, so that even to endure its oppression would not have been worthwhile at all.
Thus, in some cases aggression may be better than passivity; but it is very flawed, and people who rule over an entire country should at least have the competence to find other means. These are people who claim to be proficient to lead millions of people, and, should it come to war, possibly to bring them to an end: if they really are, then they should be able to avoid war and find other ways of dealing with despots. Sanctions, psychological warfare, conspiracies, assassinations if needed — these can all be ways to avoid war and yet deal with tyranny in a way that could save lives.
Unfortunately, many leaders yearn to play part in a war, as it thrills them. Churcill, for instance, cancelled an assassination plot on Hitler as he thought that war should be fought on the field.
This goes to show that in all things we need both yin and yang in balance, and in our own wars as well; but in politics, for most of history we have had too much yang and too little yin. In all likelihood, this was because territory was originally a means for the male to reproduce, and so involved mostly masculinity, but little femininity. It is mostly over the past century that this has started to change, although we still see leaders who see war as a game. But when dealing with other lives, one has to be careful. The least mistake can make the difference between a hero and a murderer.

Some people say technology takes away all challenges in life; yet we have never had more challenges than we have today. We have more to strive for simply because we have more possibilities. Many goals have been achieved, but for every goal we achieved many others became unlocked. So it will continue.
There is always something to fight for; even when he have achieved what we've fought for, there is something else, something beyond even that. In the end, there are no limits, thus we can push our own limits further and further forever. Even when we have achieved everything we could achieve today, with those things we will have achieved then, we will be able to achieve far greater things, and many of these will take far more effort than we are willing to sustain today.

If you seek beauty, deem only of worth that which is done with love, as love is the appreciation of beauty. However, though all things are created with love in some way or other, albeit the love of destruction, not all love is equal.
Love the whole, however, not its parts, as you will otherwise led astray from the greater beauty; for as far as you yourself are concerned, the whole means all that which you perceive, indeed you can be said to be the whole of your perceptions. If we see the self as such, to love the whole therefore means to love oneself. What this means, then, is to do whatever feels best for oneself, as only through feeling, not through thought, one can consider the whole rather than just the parts.
If what is best for you means to you what is most comfortable, then by all means, do whatever feels most comfortable when all is said and done. If you seek beauty, then do whatever feels most beautiful to you. Do not then be held back by either fear or craving to love whatever beauty you seek, but listen to your center, the heart.
For you can know what will bring you to beauty only through feeling it, as only you can feel what beauty means to you. For everything you do, listen to your feelings and examine whether or not you truly want to do it, accepting whatever it may bring along with it.
If you are urged to do something out of craving, no matter what it may be, even if it is something beautiful, then check yourself, until you feel you can do it out of love rather than out of craving; for nothing is beautiful with love, as love is what defines beauty, and craving can make even that which is beautiful worthless.
To achieve beauty, one must struggle against the forces of gravity, up towards the sky; craving and fear pull one down, but love tells one to fly on upward.

If you are unbalanced in some way, try not to decrease that of which there is too much, but to increase that opposed to it of which there is to little. In this way, rather than towards a lower level you will move to a higher level. Do not, for instance, decrease your determination if it becomes exhausting, but rather, increase your patience. Balance need not entail static stability.

In whatever we do, we should start from our feelings and end with it, using thought only when we need it as a tool.

Cherish positive emotions as love and hope, and they will grow. Pay no further attention to negative emotions as hate and despair, and they will dwindle. With positive emotions, I mean to refer to emotions that further growth, and with negative emotions, to emotions that destroy; in this sense, positive emotions need not always be pleasant, and negative emotions not always painful.
Remember to recognize negative emotions rather than repress them, but pay no further attention to them, for whatever thought one will pay attention to will grow.
Some negative emotions may sometimes partly feel positive. Despair often comes with a resignation which takes away our fears, while anger takes away our fears through defensiveness; despair, then, is an extreme of yin, while anger is an extreme of yang. While both these extremes should be avoided, the the yin and yang of these extremes can be used; thus, rather than decreasing the yin or yang of either extremes, perhaps we should complement them with their opposite.
We sometimes yield to them because, ironically, they give us a feeling of safety; if that happens to us, we should not repress the negative emotion but focus on its positive aspect of safety. Pain can bring us into a state of detachment; if we can preserve this state of detachment even when our pains have not been in vain.
Some people believe that only through suffering one can grow; I would say that suffering is, rather, a side effect of growth: suffering is resistance to growth. Hardship makes one stronger only if one learns to love what life brings you even in your hardship, even if that means to love your hardship in itself. One can grow only through love; but love can bring suffering along with it as it causes you to grow; remember therefore that love does not need to be pleasurable, and can just as well be painful. It is not an feeling in itself and can manifest in many kinds of feelings; but unless it is incomplete, love always brings us to greater beauty.

Indifference and craving are the two things we must avoid. They are two extremes, and balanced between the two is love, which neither craves nor is indifferent. It accepts and yet not resigns, cherishes and yet does not desire.
Craving can be in the form of desire, or in the form of anger; the craving to add something, or the craving to remove something. Yet both in the end are forms of destructivity.
Many people who seek enlightenment focus on reducing craving, but do not love, and in so doing become indifferent; enlightenment, however, is unconditional love. In its perfect sense, it is love for all things in the universe, which is a state of divinity. In apathy one will find enlightenment no more than in desire. We should not merely seek to avoid pain, but also seek love.
And yet, at the same time, we should not crave even for enlightenment. It is very difficult.

If for everything one paid, taxes were levied equivalent to the damage to ecology it entailed, and the money of those taxes were used to negate it, then no further damage would be done to ecology at all. This would be similar to VAT, yet serving to a far more important cause. It is ridiculous not to include one's ecological footprint to the price of products or services.
This could also apply to population growth, for instance in crowded countries such as China: rather than fining families which have more than one child, one could simply make life more expensive so as to discourage familial growth. Increasing the price of residential zones would also save space. If there are families who are willing to tighten their belt to have more than one child, they could do so without causing environmental destruction if they paid the price to undo it.
In this way, all weight imposed upon environment would be reduced to zero. Awareness of ecological footprint would no longer be necessary because it would no longer exist at all: for whatever damage one would cause nature, one would pay the same price needed to repair that damage.
Instead, people would come to prefer more ecological means simply because they are less expensive. Thus, taxing ecological footprint would not only reduce the damage of ecologically unfriendly means, but also reduce their use.
This is viable. There are plenty of ways to undo environmental damage, though they aren't always cheap. The only thing that keeps us from doing so, then, is greed. However, the more technologies to restore environment would be used, the more efficient and therefore less expensive they would become, as their increased use would encourage their further development.
It is an absurdly simple notion, but as it would check the mass consumption of our society, it is unlikely to be implemented with a mindset as we have today. We have acquired the attitude that economy is more important than ecology. We have become so estranged from nature that we have come to appreciate hedonism more than nature's sublimity.

There can be no ultimate limits in the universe, because those limits would themselves need to have a reason to be what they are. Everything has a cause, and therefore so do physical constants; if they had not, then why could they not just as well have another value? Why do physical constants have one value rather than another, if they are purely random? There is a reason, for instance, that the speed of light is 300.000 kilometers per second, rather than 400.000 or 200.000; the same counts for every other physical constant.
The fact that physical constants are fine-tuned to life means that they cannot have been predetermined before existence; they must have been determined by existing factors. If they do have a cause, however, then that cause must be changeable. We cannot assume constants to be fully constant without dispensing with causality.
Since it would be too coincidental that there would be only one universe which is fine-tuned to life, there must be many other universes, most of which are not fine-tuned; ours merely continued to evolve because of natural selection. Something must have fine-tuned its constants. If we can find out how this happened, we might change these constants within a closed system, and so even these may not pose ultimate limits.
If all things have causes, and those causes themselves have causes, then this must essentially go on in infinity; this means that causation occurs in an infinite series. Thus, throughout this series, as everything will have random causal connections with other things, it must follow that all things are causally connected in infinitely many ways, throughout the infinite series of causations.
This means that all causes can themselves be changed; this also means that with sufficient science, all things can be observed, and that with the right technology, all things can be influenced. There can simply be no one-way causation if all things are causally interconnected, and so all causes can themselves be changed.
If everything has a cause, including physical constants, this may also mean that the universe cannot be finite. If the universe would be finite, this would mean that it possesses a certain finite amount of energy.
As this amount of energy would be specific, however, it would again be the question why it would be the specific amount it is: why one amount rather than another? If there is any such finite amount, we can only suppose that this amount would be random. Even if there were a reason that it is this specific amount, that reason would itself have been determined by other specific parameters and so forth. However, if this amount is ultimately random, it follows that its determination is acausal.
All limits, like anything else, must have a cause. If a system is limited, there must be something that limits the system; but the Universe itself cannot be limited as there is nothing to limit it. There is nothing outside the Universe to limit it, neither was there anything before the Universe to limit it, as the Universe is all that exists.

The only thing one can do about negative emotions is to one way or another pay no more attention to them; that can only be done by turning one's attention to something else, as one's thoughts will otherwise always stray back to one's negative emotions. The attention one gives to an emotion is the only thing that keeps it alive.

Sensations are the foundation upon which all else is built; therefore, focus on your sensations unless you have found something more interesting to focus on, which may be an insight, an imagining, an impression or an emotion. But order not to get lost in discursive thought, return to your sensations by default, straying from it only when needed.

To become free of suffering one must become free of craving. But to become free of craving, it is not enough to detach from craving when suffering has already occurred, for it might by then already have brought one out of balance; instead, detach from craving when one has wishes for the future. Do not crave one outcome above another, even though one outcome may be better; in the end you will see what outcome fate has brought you. Realize then that all outcomes have their own value, and, if only one is aware of it, also their own beauty.

One should try not crave anything; yet at the same time, neither should one crave to be free of craving when craving occurs. On the other hand, though craving nothing one should seek to love all things all the same; yet at the same time, one must love even fear and hate when they occur.
This can be a very difficult exercise of balance. The more one loves, the more difficult this becomes.

Everything is perception, and so all perceptions about the present are equally true. Only perceptions of what may happen to one's perception in future can be false.
For instance, someone may believe they will not hurt when they sticks their hand in the fire, but when they do, they will usually find that their hand does hurt; the belief that they would not hurt themselves was therefore false. However, if someone believes they will hurt their hand when they stick their hand in a hallucinated fire, that may indeed very well hurt if they hallucinate the pain; the belief that they would hurt themselves was therefore true.
Whatever perception someone has is true to themselves, for as long as their perception lasts; the only reason that it may not be true to others is quite simply that they do not have the same perception.
As another example, the perception that the sun turns around the earth is true to anyone who holds it, as in their perception it is true. However, the belief that, when they observe the universe, their observations will conform to the predictions of their belief, is false.
Thus, the causality of our perceptions is the only truth that matters; whatever lies unchangeably beyond our perception is irrelevant since it might as well not exist at all. All our perceptions about the current are true; only our perceptions about the future may be false since our perceptions about the current might change in future.

Nothing is in itself superficial; only our own perception can be superficial.

Perhaps, for all its irony, it is by resigning ourselves to the mystery of the universe that we may better understand it. We may find safety in delusions of being all-knowing, but it will bring us no answers. Only by in all humility bowing down to the enigmas of existence can we fully see them, and see that they are far greater than ourselves, far greater than we could ever see, even for one moment, with our limited minds.
Thus the mind dissolves in the infinity of possibilities, and it comes to see that no matter what we will ever know, there are still infinitely many possibilities of how that which we know could be explained. That can be a frightening awareness, and so most people have fled from it into the safety of their certainty. But though it may cause many doubts, those doubts will in turn raise questions which will lead to insights; perhaps not always truthful insights, but insights nonetheless.
Still, when one has reached such state, one can be faced with doubts which at times can be tormenting; but through those torments, one becomes detached from opinions.
Still, uncertainty remains, as one then sees that one cannot know what will happen to oneself or the universe; one can deal with those doubts by not seeking truth in one's thoughts, but rather beauty; for the beauty of thought lies in its logic, and so the more logical it is, the more beautiful. For beauty lies in connections, and so does logic.
Thus, one can be at peace with thoughts which may not be correct, knowing that even if they are not true, they are beautiful; and cherishing the beauty in thoughts, it will grow, and so become more logical and thus closer to the truth. Hollow earth hypothesis, caloric theory or luminiferous ether: these are all thoughts which turned out to be wrong, yet they remain interesting, for they would otherwise have been forgotten altogether and not have been recorded in history. It is no loss, then, to have views that are not truthful, for thought they are not useful, they are still beautiful. If one seeks for beauty in thoughts rather than truth, then even if we will never know the truth, they will still have value to us. With this in mind, one can be open to all possibilities without being torn apart by doubt.
Since the beauty of thoughts is in their logic, the more beautiful thoughts will be, the closer they will be to the truth, even though they may never quite reach it.

A spherical vehicle using its exterior as a wheel while rotating its interior compartment as stabilization could be made invisible if its exterior would be made of a metamaterial, and yet be able to move.

Perhaps matter cannot go faster than light because matter is light.
E=mc^2, meaning that mass is in fact condensed energy; energy in its purest form is light. Perhaps, then, matter in fact consists of photons condensed into more complex structures.
Light moves at a constant speed in vacuum but can slow down in other media because it bounces back and forth from atom to atom. Scientists have even managed to freeze light altogether: firing it through hot rubidium atoms, they locked in place by trapping it in between two control beams, which interacted with the rubidium atoms to create layers which reflected the photons altogether. Clearly, it is possible for light to be still. Perhaps, matter is light that constantly rebounds in some kind of subatomic system — a kind of extremely dense photon gas.
In photons, all energy is kinetic, equal to mc^2, while they have no mass-energy. If matter is condensed light, then its mass is actually condensed kinetic energy. In the form of light, all mass-energy is converted into kinetic energy; it is obvious then, that no matter can go faster than light, as for that to happen, more than 100% of its energy would have to be kinetic, meaning that its every photon would have to move in a line. In fact, because of this, matter that would move at the speed of light would necessarily disintegrate.
Since photons have maximum speed, then if all matter consists of photons, one can't really increase its speed; rather, when increasing the net speed of a mass, one employs part of the intrinsic speed of its photons, which is normally almost fully neutralized.
If this is true, one could say the speed of light is absolute for similar reasons that the speed of sound is. Air atoms always move with about the same speed; but usually they move in a random way, so that they do not move on larger scale. When sound waves are produced, however, they collectively move at the speed of sound. This would be very similar to how photons would behave. According to the Bohm Interpretation, photons merely behave like a wave because they move collectively according in a wave function, much like air atoms; in fact, photon waves might be nothing more than an analogy to sound waves.
If air atoms were in a closed system, then over time all air atoms would have the same speed, since their kinetic energy would have distributed over the entire system. Without interaction with other systems to cause differences in energy levels, their energy would become evenly spread in accordance to the law of entropy. This is what would have happened for the photons the universe would comprise: they would have exchanged their energy just as air atoms would, but over a period of thirteen billion years, until their speed would become almost perfectly constant. Because everything in the universe is made of the same photons, there was no outward influence to cause gradients in their kinetic energy; or that is what this hypothesis would signify.

There should be only one law, and it is that of Wiccan lore: an it harm none, doth what thou wilt. All else is tyranny.
The only law should be not to impose one's will upon someone else; not the will to harm another, and neither to change them in any other way, should be allowed. Only those that seek to control others should be controlled in this urge. Whether that control is in the form of murder, rape, theft or law does not matter; it is a violation of free will, and this alone is what makes it immoral. The murdered do not choose to be murdered; the raped do not choose to be raped; the robbed do not choose to be robbed; the enslaved do not choose for their oppressed. If murder were chosen, it would be euthanasia; if rape were chosen it would be love-making; if theft were chosen it would be a gift; if law were chosen it would be convention; and if this were the case, then there would be nothing wrong at all with any of these things.
No-one has the right to control us in any way. Politicians may direct those that wish to be directed, those that would seek their guidance. They may use only those resources that we are willing to endow on them, if people feel that they knows better what to do with them; but they cannot take our resources to increase their control. Others may wish to use their money in their own way or define in which way their money is to be used by politicians, having it invested in the infrastructure in their own home city or district rather than in weapon industry or other idiocy. They may control only other people's control of other people in itself, which is the only real crime.
Furthermore, politicians may at most make us aware of risks; but they may not forbid us to take those risks, for our very lives are made through naught but risks. If we wish to do something that may or will harm ourselves, then we may do so. It is senseless to punish this; if harm is done to ourselves, then we are already punished in as far as we should be. If we have done no harm to ourselves, then only the punishment would have done harm to us, and so the punishment should be punished.
There is nothing more dangerous than to forbid to endanger ourselves; for we need danger to live, as any trial is dangerous; the newer what we try is, the more dangerous it is; but it is through trial that civilization was built. All experiments are dangerous, yet without experiments, neither would society exist, nor would we ourselves ever have taken our first steps as toddlers.
To forbid what is dangerous to ourselves is a slippery slope; two thousand years ago we started by forbidding suicide, though no-one knows what lies beyond death; today, we often forbid things such walking on ice. It won't end there; anything that has some danger involved could potentially become forbidden. And of course anything has some danger involved, no matter how small. Were does one place the line where something becomes dangerous enough to become forbidden?
Yet the most risky endeavors are often the most rewarding, on a political as well as individual level. On a national scale, examples are manned space flights or economical interventions; on an individual scale, there are things such as moving or marriage.
"Mountain climbing, glacier trevassing, skydiving, deep scuba diving, and high-speed motorcycle riding" are all highly dangerous activities, and according to Geo Stone's "Suicide and Attempted Suicide," the average climb of the Mount Everest is actually as dangerous as the average suicide attempt. Does this mean that such activities should be forbidden? People who face dangerous activities are almost always aware of the dangers; if they have to face the consequences, that is their concern.
In fact, there are many people who either do not care about the consequences (even death) or actually hope that they will follow. Some borderline people openly state that they would not have a problem with drug addiction or other possible consequences of their behavior; for some people, after all, drama remains of value in life. Who are we to deny it? For those that choose for it, any experience can be valuable. Whether what they do to themselves will be painful to them or no, if they seek pain then that is their choice, and it as well might be enriching. We may but warn others of dangers, but never forbid them. It is up to them if they think the advantages of a course of action are worth the disadvantages for themselves.
We may help someone find their own way, but we may not choose which way they are to take. We cannot know what is better for someone else without knowing them as they know themselves, because what it better for someone is subjective. Whatever someone feels is better for them, they're right. Everyone's experience of the world is different, and we cannot impose our own experience upon others.
Perhaps it is time that we dispense every law and leave only that of respect. A new time will come in which either authoritarianism becomes total, or else dissolves altogether; but it cannot remain in existence without . It cannot keep us caged forever, for over the years, more and more the younger generations are crying out for freedom.

Some interpretations in physics dispense with causality; in that these interpretations are no longer scientific, since science is nothing but the investigation of causality, of why things are as they are. Physics without causality is no longer science, but mysticism. Believing something to be as it is without needing any explanation in physics is as unscientific as believing this in religion. Scientists who say that the occurrence of a physical event needs no cause are no better than creationists who say that the existence of God needs no cause, and surely polytheists believed the same in the past about their gods; but we only give up finding the cause of something and say that it "just is" when we are confused about it. Some things about modern physics are very confusing, but that does not give us an excuse to descend into despair to explain them.

Beyond death there are but three possibilities: either there is nothingness, or there is infinity, or there is something between the two as there is now. The first would mean to become undone; the second would mean to become one with all of existence; the third would mean to be reborn.
In the latter case, whether we are reborn in heaven or in hell or in earth, we would remain much like we are now, that is, limited. Thus we would be reborn over and over again forever, since nothing that is finite can remain the same as it is. If this cycle of reincarnations would last for an infinitely long time, it would also randomly involve an infinite amount of situations and eventually repeat them infinitely many times; if not, then it must end either in nothingness or in infinity, as it could not remain stable otherwise.
This is actually quite a horrifying possibility, since it would mean that we would end up in every possible situation we could imagine, from the most blissful to the most painful, be it in reality or in imagination. Be it through our environment or hallucinations, either how, we would go through every possible experience that could be conceived of. More frightening still, because of this we would also end up being every possible person, from the most honorable to the most cruel. In some future life we might be a murderer, or a rapist or a tyrant. Worst of all, we could do nothing about the fact that everything that would ever happen would happen again, and we could never do anything to avoid it.
As to what came before birth, likewise, there are again the same three possibilities. But here the possibility of infinity and of nothingness become harder to defend; after all, both nothingness and infinity are stable. There is nothing that defines them, and therefore no state into which they could evolve; after all, why should it evolve into one state and not another, if the starting points are identical? If we came from nothing, or came from infinity, then we would have remained either nothing or infinite.
Nothing can simply pass from nonexistence into existence; for nonexistence has no configuration whatsoever, and so cannot change into another specific configuration such as that of a human body. This would be a complete paradox: if we came from nothing at all, then there would be nothing that would determine what we would become. There would be no reason why we should be ourselves rather than someone else, and therefore who we are would be acausal. There cannot have been a beginning, neither of the universe nor of our lives within them, because something would have caused that beginning, as well; otherwise, it would just be without any reason at all.
Seen purely from our own viewpoints, how could our own consciousness one moment have not existed and then suddenly have been bound to a specified body? Since my consciousness was bound to a particular body means that it must have been defined in a particular way, but how is this possible if it had not existed before?
If we suppose that everything has a cause, then this is completely impossible; thus, our own consciousness must always have existed. This may or may not mean that if this is so, it will also always exist; after all, if our consciousness had existed for an infinitely long time, then from a purely statistical viewpoint it would appear impossible to stop existing. This is not something I say because I want to believe this, for I believe the possibility of eternal repetition is far more terrifying than that of eternal nothingness. The possibility of infinity is the only that offers some comfort, as infinity could only remain stable through infinite love.
That our consciousness never had a sudden beginning is not as far-fetched as it seems: after all, how can we place a line between consciousness and unconsciousness? Are not some of our own perceptions even now only partly conscious, that is, subconscious, and some to so little extent that we never realize they are there at all?
At what point does a fetus become conscious in the womb? Or did we already have some more fundamental consciousness still before that? Can we pinpoint an exact moment at which it becomes conscious, before which there was no consciousness at all and after which all of a sudden there was consciousness? And if so, where did the consciousness suddenly come from? Out of the blue, from nowhere at all? Or does consciousness arise gradually?
Perhaps the only solution to this question is that our consciousness has always existed; in that case, there are but two possibilities: the first is that what we are now is just another of an infinite series of reincarnations, which over time will go through every possible situation and eventually repeat themselves.
The second possibility is that our consciousness has grown for an infinitely long time. Before we were born, before our consciousness was bound to the complex system of our brain, perhaps our consciousness was bound to simpler systems. Perhaps if one would go back in time and if somehow one could observe what one's consciousness had once been, one would find that it would always halve, and halve again and over and over forever as one would go further in time; perhaps once, before we were conscious of our own bodies, we were conscious on lower levels. However, since every level of consciousness could be halved, our consciousness would have been lower and lower in the past but never have reached zero; however, it would have approached zero as a limit. That is, it would have been infinitesimal in the past; as every level of consciousness would further be halved without quite reaching zero, it could have existed for an infinitely long time. If this is true, we don't need to deal with the inexplicability of consciousness that arose from nothing to become something.
Perhaps consciousness is something that grows from an infinitesimal point to bit by bit spread over the entire infinity of the universe. Put another way, perhaps that of which we are conscious grows until it becomes the entire universe.
To live is a transitive. We are always aware of something. Right now, we are aware of our own bodies and their surroundings, perhaps, earlier, we were conscious of a single atom, and before that of a single particle and so on ad infinitum. Maybe we should not think of consciousness as something that arises from matter, but rather something that merely relies on it: we are aware of matter, and as such we could not be aware without matter as there would be nothing to be aware of; but that does not mean per se that matter causes consciousness.
If our consciousness has grown from a infinitely close to nothing over an infinitely long time, it is reasonable to assume that it will continue to grow towards infinity, though possibly never fully reaching it. In fact, relative to future, infinite levels of consciousness, our current level of consciousness would then still be infinitesimal. This is merely a question of frame of reference.
I would like to emphasize that this is merely a hypothesis, and not my personal belief. Consciousness is probably by far the most mysterious thing in the universe, and since it cannot be observed, we can only hope to understand it through pure logic. But logic, too, can be flawed. I still believe each of the three scenario's (infinity, finity, or nothing) to be possible and favor none of these; but my hopes are that we will, sooner or later, reach infinity. If we do, however, the question still remains if we will do so in a finite amount of time, or if we can only approach it over an infinitely long time.

We are what makes the difference between a cosmos that could just as well not have existed at all, and a universe that is full of wonders. It is we who bring the entire universe to life. In the blink of an eye we can create anything at all before our eyes. In the clear night, all the stars obey us, coming at our bidding into the sky when we look up, stars that without us would have no light. Without us flowers would have no color, the winds would have no sound, the rain would have no touch, the air would have no smell, and spices would have no taste. All the marvels in the world we have created ourselves, for otherwise no-one would otherwise experience them.
For no matter how vast, the greatest stars or galaxies do not know of their own vastness; in us alone are they vast. It is we, then, that are the crown of evolution. We that are alive are greater than anything in the universe. For without us there would be naught. We, living beings, are the creators; for beyond us there is naught but that which could become.

In an infinite universe there will always be infinite suffering, and nothing we ever do can ever change that. For an infinite universe as a whole can never be changed, for that would otherwise have been done by others before us. While its parts may be changed, on the whole it always remains as it has always been.
The only thing that matters to us, then, is the beauty of our own experiences.

In anger, more Yin;
In sadness, more Yang.

In excess, more Yin;
In emptiness, more Yang.

Beauty is no more and no less than the degree of complexity of patterns; any patterns, whatever they may be. In everything there are patterns; in fact, everything consists of patterns. "Patterns" does not have to mean symmetry, as patterns often occur in lack of symmetry, ie asymmetry. Whether or not those patterns appeal to us is merely a matter of perception.
However, complexity is not always obvious and may occur in subtle ways, as some things, such as a color, may appear simple and yet actually trigger complex impressions or emotions. Simplicity in itself may be complex.
There is beauty in all things; but some things are more beautiful than others because there are more things to be perceived within them. In other words, though all existence is beautiful, there is more existence in some things than in others. Things which can be divided into more parts are more complex, and so more beautiful.
There is beauty in all things; but some things are more beautiful than others because there are more things to be perceived within them. In other words, though all existence is beautiful, there is more existence in some things than in others. Things which can be divided into more parts are more complex, and so more beautiful.
For instance, from a purely graphical point of view, a detailed drawing is more beautiful than an rough sketch because more shades of grey are to be distinguished in it. On the other hand, from an expressive point of view a rough sketch may be just as beautiful or more so, depending rather on the shades of emotion that are to be distinguished in them.
If all existence is beautiful, and we life to exist, then we life for beauty. The more we find beauty in our lives, then, the more we will exist. Thus, choose whatever path that feels most beautiful.

It makes no sense to ask what meaning existence has; for whatever it would be for would itself be part of existence. The meaning of existence is to exist. What one sees as meaningful is but subjective; anything is meaningful if one sees it as such. Whatever beliefs one has about what is meaningful, then, are not philosophical but rather emotional. Love, beauty, happiness — all these things are meaningless if one sees it as such; but why should one, if by doing so one will never find meaning? Things have no value only if one does not recognize their value. It is irrelevant just what the meaning of life is as it may have infinitely many meanings; life itself, in every moment, is its own meaning.
If any, the question here is not what the meaning of life is, but rather what its destination is.

Since Special Relativity has become a paradigm of modern physics, any phenomenon of faster-than-light communication has either been ignored or dismissed by physicists. Over the years there have been many experiments in which true superluminal velocities have been observed. Unable to dispute their results, mainstream scientists often represented them in such way that their significance was masked, using cyclical arguments or irrelevant metaphors. Scientists seem to fear that if proven possible, FTL travel would mark the end of Special Relativity.
There is no reason, however, why we should give up Special Relativity if we find that superluminal velocities exist; but perhaps we should nuance it somewhat. Nothing in the universe may be absolute. Natural laws tend to have exceptions. Natural laws are causes of phenomena, but they themselves are phenomena, and so we might assume that they as well have causes. Those causes might be changeable, like anything else in nature appears to be.
We live in a universe that appears to be "fine-tuned" to the possibility of life. For example, should the fine-structure constant (a dimensionless constant equal to 7,29 · 10^-3) be just 4% different, then stellar fusion could not produce carbon, and so life would be impossible. (There is, of course, a possibility of life that need other or less atoms, but the question is what life could do with just two non-inert atoms, hydrogen and lithium!)
This suggests two things.
The first is that there are, or have been, many other universes with other parameters. After all, if there were only one universe (or one region in the universe with distinct physical constants), it would be too much of a coincidence that it is inhabitable. That we live in a universe which happens to be fine-tuned to life because there could be no other universe to live in in the first place.
The second is that physical laws, or at least physical constants (which include the speed of light) are changeable (at least in very extreme circumstances), since they must have formed at some point in time to become what they are now. For our universe, this supposedly happened in the early stages of its birth (although there may be other universes where the laws of nature are still changing constantly). Some of the circumstances of the primeval universe are actually being simulated in particle accelerators, albeit over extremely small spaces. Who knows? Perhaps, one day, we'll get so far as to bend the laws of nature in our own particle accelerators.
In fact, such phenomena have already been observed.
Natural nuclear fission reactors are subterranean deposits of uranium which may undergo spontaneous nuclear reactions; one of the oldest of these nuclear fission reactors lies in Gabon, which has been discontinuously active for about 2 billion years. By analyzing the nuclear decay in these deposits, researchers have discovered that the fine-structure constant, which determines nuclear reaction cycles, has slightly changed over that time.

Phenomena Superluminal Phenomena

1) Inflation Period:
Perhaps the most dramatic instance of superluminal velocity in the history of the universe was at its very beginning: in the "inflation period," a period which lasted for a tiny fraction of the first second after the Big Bang, all the matter in the entire universe exploded at a speed far higher than the speed of light. In 10–33 seconds, the universe increased 1026 times in size. The diameter it had achieved at the end of this period was no more than 10 centimeters, but all this had happened in such a short time that this was by far the most extreme explosion ever. The velocity it involved was 1032 meters per second, or 3 · 1023 times the speed of light.
Many physicists would, as usual, dismiss this phenomenon by pointing out that space and time at this point were distorted by gravity. However, this argument confuses two unrelated frames of reference; from our frame of reference, the speed was faster-than-light. If this would happen again before our eyes and we could somehow observe it, then, supposing that it wouldn't destroy the entire world, we would observe a speed that is undeniably superluminal.

2) Gain-assisted superluminality:
Researchers have achieved faster-than-light communication by sending light pulses through a supercooled gas of exotic cesium atoms. The light pulse travelled so fast that it had actually exited the gas chamber before it had finished entering.
They claim that this leaves Special Relativity intact; the light pulse did not actually travel faster than light, they state, because the light pulse on the other side of the gas chamber was actually a reconstruction of the entering pulse, so that is not actually the same pulse. This interpretation does a poor job hiding the fact that either how, information was nonetheless passed through to the other side of the gas chamber faster than light. This contradicts Special Relativity, which says that under no circumstances information could travel faster than light; it may be that Wang and his colleagues were afraid to openly contradict Special Relativity, for fear of criticism or disregard of their research.

3) EPR paradox:
Observing either of a pair of entangled particles will instantly affect the other particle, no matter how far it is — a fact which has been experimentally verified. No matter how one interprets this, the information that either particle has been observed travels to the other particle instantly, or at least (and perhaps more likely) at a speed faster than we have as yet been able to measure.
It is claimed that this does not allow faster-than-light communication, yet regardless it has been proposed to use this phenomenon in quantum cryptography: by using entangled particles to transmit information, eavesdropping would be instantly detected since it would affect the other particle of the pair. In other words, the information of an instance of eavesdropping would instantly travel to the other particle; this is certainly communication.
The event of the observation of either of the particles has an immediate effect on the other. Einstein mockingly called this "Spokhafte Fernwirkung," and in the formulation of the EPR paradox claimed that this meant that quantum mechanics is incomplete. However, since this "spooky action at a distance" has been confirmed as factual, it would appear that it is rather Special Relativity which is incomplete.

4) Speed of gravity:
Although Einstein dismissed "spooky action at a distance" as impossible, the mainstream interpretation of General Relativity today itself uses "spooky action at a distance" to avoid faster-than-light speed. Tom van Flandern has calculated, based on observation of planets and binary quasars, that the speed of gravity must propagate at no less than 20 billion times the speed of light to accord with their angular momentum.
To avoid this, mainstream physicists interpret gravity as the curvature of space-time rather than an actual force of nature, like electromagnetism. While representing gravity in this way may render the nature of gravity more obscure, however, it does nothing to change the fact that, be it through space-time curvature or through an actual force, gravity propagates at a certain speed. If gravity is represented as space-time curvature, the fact remains, obviously, that mass has an effect on space-time curvature; this effect cannot be random, and therefore requires a signal from the mass that causes it: this signal must be faster than light.
The effect of mass on gravity is such that it can affect the other side of the observable universe in just two seconds. In other words, information is passed at faster-than-light speed, the information of gravity; in the space-time curvature representation, this is the information space-time needs to know just in what way it should curve in accordance to the mass that causes it to do so.
The only way to deny that this is a faster-than-light effect is by detaching the effect from its cause, in which cause one has to give up the entire idea of gravity. In gravity, cause and effect are related at a speed that is faster-than-light, and only through sophistry can one deny this, unless observations are somehow wrong.

5) Virtual particles
Similarly to gravity, electromagnetism appears to propagate at faster-than-light speed through virtual photons. The nature of virtual particles is still unknown, but they are thought by mainstream physicists to be a manifestation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Again, most physicists dismiss the faster-than-light nature of virtual particles because they are virtual; that is, they exist only for a very short time. Outside of their interaction, they do not exist. However, this is irrelevant, as their interaction itself is superluminal; therefore, their interaction might also be used to allow superluminal communication.

6) Opposite or closing speeds:
Special Relativity states that regardless of the frame of reference, nothing can go faster than light. Actually, one doesn't need to think far at all to see that this is plainly impossible: when two photons move on a straight line towards or away from each other, than from our frame of reference they do so twice as fast as the "speed of light." When you tell this to a mainstream physicist, he will say that from the frame of reference of either of the photons themselves, the photons will not move faster than light, thereby changing your question so as to best suit an answer which accords to Special Relativity; the frame of reference of the photons is not very relevant, however. Since all motion is relative and all things in the universe are in motion, it is easy to travel towards something at faster-than-light speed from the frame of reference of the Earth. That is to say, when you have reached your destination which was 200 light years far, it might be that less than 200 light years have passed in the universe.
This is probably the least relevant of all faster-than-light phenomena, since it does little to bring us closer to faster-than-light travel or communication, but it is a faster-than-light phenomenon nonetheless. One can hardly move a star towards a spaceship: while it may be possible to move a star by means of a stellar engine (a type-2 Dyson sphere), it would not be very worthwhile to use this simply to accelerate space traffic.
The least that this means is that we should reformulate the Special Relativity: "Nothing can travel faster towards or away from an object than light would travel towards or away from it." At least, that is how it tends to be.

7) Current cosmic inflation:
The observable universe is 93 billion light years or 28 billion parsecs across in diameter. Every second, the universe expands by 2 trillion kilometers in diameter every second, or 20 million times the speed of light. The matter at one end of the universe moves away from the matter at the other end with the same speed.
Mainstream physicists argue to this that it is not the matter in the universe which is expanding, but rather its space. But be it through the three dimensions we know or through some esoteric "fourth dimension," this expansion of space is in itself a kind of movement, albeit the movement of space. This is, again, nothing but another interpretation of the same thing; but an interpretation which is so abstruse that is hard to find arguments against it. Again, however, matter is moved faster than the speed of light; that is to say, the distance between them grows at a speed faster than light could cover it.
Physicists keep finding new ways of formulating "movement" to mask faster-than-light phenomena. All right, so let's call "movement" "the expansion of space between two objects." In that case, in accordance with this new formulation let me likewise reformulate my question! Is it possible to expand or shrink the space between two objects so that the objects move towards or away from each other faster than light would?
That the observable universe is able to increase the space between its ends faster than light does seem to give us hope that we might ourselves find ways to expand the space between masses faster than light could pass the same space.
Actually, there are plenty of physicists, including Feynman, Dirac, and, earlier mentioned, Tom van Flandern, who did not give credence to the theory that gravity is caused by the curvature of space-time, believing it to be a force of nature just like any other. Either how, it is quite clear that, in whatever way, the space between two objects can expand faster than the speed of light, and it is happening every second. How one interprets this changes little about the fact.

7) Quantum tunneling:
Perhaps the most significant FTL experiment aside from Wang's gain-assisted superluminality was conducted in Köln. Unlike Wang, Mintz was less timid about the results of his experiments, but like Wang's, Mintz' research has not gotten as much credit as it deserved.
Critics found it more difficult to find arguments against Mintz' research, mostly because the experiment was so simple that it was hard to make it seem complicated: the setup of the experiment consisted of an amplifier, a 20 centimeter long tube, and Mozart's 40th symphony in the form of microwaves.
This experiment used quantum tunneling, which is manifested in the earlier mentioned virtual particles, in this case virtual photons. This proves that, despite claims of the opposite, virtual photons can effectively be used as a means of faster-than-light communication.
Quantum tunnelling is a phenomenon in which a particle can spontaneously pass a finite potential barrier in the form of a virtual photon, which is then reconverted into a standard particle. Mintz wave transducer made use of the Hartman effect, the effect that, if a barrier is thick enough, the tunneling time (the time it takes for a particle to get past the barrier through quantum tunneling) becomes independent of the thickness of the barrier and inclines towards a constant value.
The tube, which was called a wave transducer. The wave transducer, which was about 11 centimeters wide, was far too small for microwaves, which start at a wavelength of 30 centimeters, so that normally, they would net be able to get through. Virtual photons, however, could get past the wave transducer through quantum tunneling. On the other side, the tunneled photons went through an amplifier, which then played Mozart; not at very high quality, but enough to be recognizable as Mozart's 40th symphony. In this way, the symphony had been transmitted at 4,7 times the speed of light.

It is often argued that while the group velocity (the speed of the whole of the wave, which may change in dimensions) may exceed the speed of light, the front velocity (the speed of the front of the wave) always remains the same. There are, indeed, phenomena in which some kinds of wave velocities (be it phase velocity, group velocity, energy velocity or signal velocity) are superluminal yet the front velocity remains unchanged, such as negative refractions and atomic coherence effects, but when the wave is observed to have arrived at its destination before light in vacuum would normally have done so, surely this argument is no longer satisfactory. If the wave as a whole has reached at superluminal speed, then obviously so has its front, in violation with Special Relativity.

There have been so many observed FTL phenomena, and many more will follow in future, that we can no longer ignore them. Sooner or later, modern physics will be forced to review its principles, at least insofar as to nuance them. Again, natural laws tend to have exceptions.

Micro black holes, when no mass is added to them, usually evaporate instantly in the form of Hawking radiation. Since all their energy is converted into photons in this process, creating micro black holes might be a potential source of energy in future. Such energy source would be even more effective than antimatter, since half the converted energy in matter-antimatter reactions is lost in the form of neutrinos.

Quantum waves are perhaps much like macroscopic bundles of light. These bundles of particles can be at two places at the same time depending on how broad they are. A first pulse in the bundle of particles would leave a gap, which would then be filled in by a second pulse and so on, causing a wave function to arise.
After some research, it turned out I am not quite alone in this position, and a minority of physicists has espoused a similar or identical position known as the Bohm interpretation, rejecting the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Is is also known as the De Broglie-Bohm theory or, originally, as the pilot wave theory.
According to this theory, particles seem to behave like waves because they move together in a wave function, somewhat like air atoms in sound waves. To the critical mind, this theory divests one from a burden of confusion brought about by the Copenhagen interpretation, be it rightly or no. It appears to solve many of its paradoxes, such as indeterminism, acausality and unlocality, that to the intuition are simply unacceptable.

Everything is relative. Nothing by itself is good or bad, small or large. For example, the Earth is large compared to our body, but small compared to the sun. Many have heard such rhetoric before, but it goes much farther than that; as another example, a sociopath may be cruel compared to the average person, but kind compared to Hitler, and in a world where almost everyone would be a cruel as Hitler, sociopaths would be Saints.
When we judge something, it is not by itself true, and therefore meaningless; for this reason, judgment has no use. Judging something, be it as good or bad, is the cause of attachment, which in turn is the cause of all suffering.
There is nothing that does not depend on subjective experience; the only absolute truth, then, is subjective experience itself, although it only is for some people, and sometimes for only one. True is only that which is experienced, that which has been experienced and that which will be experienced.
What one will experience in future depends on the causality of that experience. For instance, if one will put one's hand in a fire, one will get burned. If one jumps up, one will come back down. We know things like these because we have experienced it before.
Furthermore, if other people say something, it is sometimes, but not always, true: for instance, your mother might have told you that you will get burned if you put your hand in the fire. In this case, you have not experienced it before, but you have experienced that when you are a child, it is often best to listen to your mother. As another example, scientists might have told you that certain medicines aid against certain diseases. You have not experienced this, but they have experienced it through experiments. In this way, much of human experience can be shared by all humanity.
Any thought that is not practical, however, is pointless. But thought may have another practical use except for predicting causations; thought may help us to imagine things. Through thought we can create an entirely different world within our minds, the world of concepts. Knowledge is not only something we memorize, and ideas aren't just things that we think; both are also things that we experience. If we could not experience these things, they would be quite uninteresting. But thoughts are more than just tools; they are patterns which have their own beauty. In a way, notions are experienced in a way similar to sensations, but less vividly.
We could classify thought in three categories:

1) Judgmental thoughts
2) Causal thoughts
3) Conceptual thoughts

Of these, the first is the most common, followed by the second and third in that order. Conceptual thought is beautiful in itself, in the same way that anything else we experience can be, such as a flower or a sunset; causal thought is not beautiful in itself but is useful, meaning that it may lead us to greater beauty (but also to lesser beauty, when it is used to destroy rather than create). Judgmental thought, however, mostly impairs the quality of our lives.
When you realize that everything is relative and so nothing by itself is good or bad, however, judgmental thought, which is in effect attachment, starts to disappear. Finding it to be unneeded, you slowly let it go over time. It is an immense liberation when you find that there is no need to see anything good or bad, and that you can therefore just experience it.
Try to pay attention when you have judgment. Also, try not to judge your judgment itself. Your judgment itself is, after all, part of the current moment, just as every other pattern that is part of it; instead, try to experience even your judgment, the emotions it brings about.
Whenever you find that you judge something, try to see the relativity of whatever it is that you judge, and your judgment will no longer distract you from your experience. Judgment in itself is beautiful if that's how we see it; judgment is merely not conducive to greater beauty.
For instance, suppose a driver comes at a zebra crossing where an old man is very slowly (of course, relatively) shuffling to the other side. The driver may feel impatient and hoot, judging the old man slow. The old man may then feel annoyed, judging the driver hasty. Neither point of view is absolute. Thirty seconds may be a lot of time to cross a zebra crossing, but nothing compared to an entire day, let alone an entire lifetime.
In this way, the meaning of every word is relative. This does not mean that we can never speak the truth, however, as much of what we mean in what we speak is not said. Every statement depends on context and otherwise makes no sense at all. (For instance, the old man is slow compared to the average human we know, but we do not mention this as we assume that the other knows what context.) This is, however, more an issue of linguistics than of ontology.
However, by realizing that everything is relative one may be more able to experience is as such. This will make it easier to detach from judgment and just experience everything in itself. In our thoughts we must make comparisons; but not in our feelings.
In one's experience, the best frame of reference is that of nothing. If one compares everything in one's life, anything at all, with nothing, one will always find it to be better than nothing. Ask yourself the question: would I rather have what I have now, or rather nothing at all, though everything has its beauty? In this way, one will be more able to appreciate the value of what you already have. By thus assuming a more neutral attitude, one will enjoy more and suffer less.

The butterfly effect says that very small changes can have very large results. It is famously quoted that the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brasil may cause a tornado in Texas — imagine! This is more than just a thought experiment; it actually happens.
This is so because of chaos. The Universe is so complex that extremely small changes may have extremely large consequences. For one thing, the world consists of atoms, and all of those atoms, in the whole world, are connected to one another at the speed at sound of their respective material; above all, those atoms in turn consist of quanta of energy, and all those quanta, in the whole universe, are connected to each other at the speed of light and perhaps beyond.
This is so because the universe is emergent. Every layer of existence arises from the layer below it; the human level arises from the cellular level, the cellular level from the atomic level. When the butterfly flaps its wings, the energy of its motion spreads across the atoms around it across the entire planet and even the entire universe.
At the atomic level, it takes at most 19 hours before its energy has spread across the planet in the form of sound waves; it gets no further than the earth for a very long time because there are few atoms in space. However, at the quantum level, it takes just one fiftieth of a second before it has spread across the planet, and a hundred thousand years before it has spread across the entire galaxy, in the form of light waves.
After all, the way the butterfly moves affects the way light shines on it, and so too the way it will shine onto other elementary particles, which will then in turn affect other elementary particles until every atom in the world is very, very slightly different. Very, very slightly, but that is enough given that this counts for every atom in the whole world to potentially have dramatic consequences.
Next time you see a butterfly, run for your lives.
It might go even further than that. The mass of the butterfly has a very tiny influence on the Earth's gravitational field, and the flap of its wings will change that influence. This effect is extremely small, of course, but quantum mechanics is so extremely chaotic that even so, it may still have enormous effects. The tiniest gravitational wave will affect the atoms it affects, and even if it is just by a femtometer, that's more than enough, as the atom affects all other atoms on the same planet. If gravity travels faster than light, then its gravitational influence will also have a faster effect on the universe than its electromagnetic influence, despite the fact that the latter is much stronger.
Tom van Flandern calculated that the speed of gravity is 20 billion times that of light, and if this is true, it would take two years and four months for the flap of a butterfly to affect the entire observable universe. Through an incredible snowball effect, the slightest movement of a single atom could, in this way, change the course of history throughout the entire observable universe.
If one thinks about this further, this becomes so frightening that it will profoundly change the way one looks at the world. For this is far, far more than a bit of scientific trivia; it casts a different light on the meaning of everything we do in our lives.
Over an infinite amount of time, every action, every event, will randomly cause infinite suffering as well as joy, and also prevent infinite suffering and joy. It will, in fact, have infinitely diverse consequences. That is to say, given that the universe is infinite; even if it is not infinite, then this effect will still be inestimably large. In a universe that is not only infinitely large but also infinitely complex, this infinite butterfly effect is not only infinite over time but also instantly (see entry "subcosmic and supercosmic levels").
Whatever we do, then, will cause cataclysms far greater than we could even begin to imagine, from human to astronomical extent. What, then, is the meaning of our actions here and now, if not for the enrichment of our own lives?
Nothing we do will make the slightest difference in the long run: for whatever we do, both the destruction as well as the creation we cause without even trying to do so is already infinite, and so neither will be greater, nor can either be made greater or smaller; the two will always be equal, since they are both infinite, and infinity divided by infinity is undefined.
In this aspect, all entities in the universe are equal in worth; all of us are Gods, and so is every tiniest bit of energy. Everything in the universe is so infinitely connected that it has no use to cling to such values as dignity except for ourselves and our own lives.
We should but love, then, for the beauty of love, not for what it does to others or to the world; this I say for all kinds of love, from the love of a friend to love of one's occupation. If one sees how people benefit from one's love, then that is a beautiful thing; but it is no more than that. It is not of any actual importance to the world; only to one's own world.
From the viewpoint of severe psychopaths, there is no reason at all to love someone, nor, aside from law, any reason not to kill someone if they wish to. After all, it does not make a difference to themselves, and neither does it make a difference to the universe. But they will never know the beauty of true love unless they somehow learn to see it.
Many people go so far as to state that everything we do is done out of selfishness. This is one perception, but it is no more than that, a mere way of looking at things: it is no more or less correct than any other. Though one could interpret this as selfishness, it is merely an interpretation. It is indeed true that, one way or another, we do whatever we do for our own feelings; even if we do something for others, we do so merely for our own feelings, be it our feelings for others or our feelings about ourselves. One could then say that we do everything for our "self."
The fact of the matter is, this merely depends on how one defines "self." If the self is our consciousness, and we are conscious of other people, then to the extent that we are conscious of them, they become part of ourselves. The only reason why we are ourselves more than we are others is because we are more conscious of ourselves, since, after all, we live in ourselves, and so are conscious of all our perceptions; whereas, if we have compassion for others, we share only part of their perceptions, so that we are them to a far lesser extent than we are ourselves.
Put in a more scientific way: from a neurological viewpoint, our selves are usually defined as our brain, or rather as the contents of our brain. It appears that we are not the matter our brain comprises but rather the information it stores; but this information concerns both ourselves and others. When we empathize with someone, we construct a "scale model" of his or her feelings within our own brain (at least, of what we think his or her feelings to be). In this way, our brain attempts to integrate part of someone else's feelings — a purely evolutionary mechanism, one could say, but also the most beautiful mechanism of our organism, for it gives us the ability to love. When one empathizes with someone, one could say that one thereby becomes partly unified with them, as one's emotions become partly synchronized with theirs. Love is a connection with other beings. When we love someone, whatever we do we still do for ourselves, but our selves have come to partially include another person or their feelings.
Should we still love, then, if love is useless but to ourselves? Of course. That love is useless on the whole does not make it meaningless. Love is the most beautiful thing in the universe, not only to the people we love but also to ourselves.

If the universe is infinitely complex, it must involve infinitely many levels both below the quantum level as above the astronomical level. All of these would have varying degrees of complexity, some of them as high as our own level. Some levels, like our own, would be able to support life. Such level could be called a "habitable level." In habitable levels below the quantum level, time would go much faster from our perspective, while in habitable levels above the cosmic level, time would go much slower from our perspective.
There is no reason why such levels would be impossible; however, if these levels exist at all, it may not be possible to connect with them. In fact, perhaps it is natural to assume that there are habitable levels beside our own just as it is natural to assume that there are habitable planets beside our own. Science has already shown us that we are far from unique; why should our level, then, be unique? Would it not be too much of a coincidence if there were only one level at which life is possible, that of chemistry? In no way we appear to live in the center of the universe; why should this aspect be an exception? Such chauvinism has betrayed us too often before to be closed to this possibility altogether.

Infinite levels of complexity below the quantum level ("subquantum levels") would mean that there are also infinitely diverse systems below it, some of which would be able to sustain higher degrees of complexity than others. Each level below the quantum level would affect the higher levels, but would do so in such chaotic ways that their effect would appear to be random.
We might never be able to observe those worlds, but although the Planck length may be the smallest size that we can observe, and therefore the smallest size that matters to us, that does not mean that there could not exist anything smaller; we simply can never connect to whatever exists at such level, at least so it seems for now.
Infinite levels of complexity above the cosmic level ("supercosmic levels") would mean the same thing. In an infinitely complex Universe (with capital U, referring to all of existence) there could be forces of infinite speed, although they might not occur except at an infinitesimal frequency; this could, for instance, bridge the distances between separate universes (which would in turn be but particles!) so that they could interact at faster-than-light speed. This would not have to be necessary for there to other levels above the cosmic level, however; suppose that nothing goes faster than light (which would, however, be very unlikely if the universe is indeed infinite in complexity), then this would merely make the interactions in supercosmic levels much slower; they could still, in effect, take place, even if there are no other forces than the ones we know already.
Since our universe expands so rapidly, it could not take part in any interactions because it would dissolve before it could do so. However, if again we assume that the Universe (with capital U) is infinite, there must be infinitely other universes (small u), and some would have density parameters which would make them stable for a long term. Most subatomic particles are very unstable, lasting only a fraction of a second; but the few that are stable are enough to form a viable level.
There are two ways in which stable universes might interact with one another: one is through forces which to us are still unknown. In that case, it is possible that our own universe has a charge we are not aware of; after all, since it does not manifest to ourselves, we cannot detect it. Indeed, if there are habitable subquantum levels, then the hypothetical inhabitants of an electron who have come to discover that they live on an electron might think it to be neutral, not seeing that there are particles beyond their own and calling their particle "the universe."
The other possibility is that stable universes interact with one another through the same forces present in our own universe. Some universes might be electromagnetically charged; even if none have a very great charge, then still, either how every universe is likely charged to some extent, even if that charge comprises only a few elementary charges. Though this is small on our level, this may have an entirely different meaning at supercosmic level. Given enough time, even the slightest force, no matter how small, will have an affect. The only thing that can prevent this is that it would be countered by another force, but those would not or barely occur in the space between universes.
Just how long this would take does not matter at all, as time is relative; on supercosmic levels, a billion years might be a very short time, just like a femtosecond is a very short time to us. In contrast, on quantum level a femtosecond is a very long time, and most subatomic particles do not survive that long.
The effects of a force depend on time as well as space. This is testified by the gravity that keeps superclusters together; certainly that force is not relevant to us, that is to say, not on our level. Time and space are relative, and what to us is a very long time may be but a very brief instant on supercosmic levels, while what to us are very vast distances may be but very short intervals on those levels.
Thus, regardless in what way or at what speed, if there are universes beyond our own then they will interact. Very slowly to us, they will move to form greater structures which in a higher level might be similar, for instance, to stars on the astronomical level — which will then again form greater levels and so on. If the speed of light is an absolute limit, the only difference this makes is that the greater levels will move slower, but even so, in that frame of reference it is not slow in itself. It must also be noted that, should there be an inhabitable supercosmic level, this slowness would also affect consciousness, so that it would not perceive its world as slow at all.

Light is love. In this it is merciful, even for the dark. Love spares what it loves, even if it hurts; only hate can destroy. While light may increase positive things, it may not decrease negative things; only darkness can decrease negative things, though it cannot increase positive things. Day casts light both on that which is beautiful and that which is ugly, or is seen as such; night hides both in darkness.
Of course, what is good or bad depends entirely on one's perception, but what perception is good or bad itself, as well, depends on one's perception of it in turn. Positive and negative are entirely subjective, as are all things.
If in the eternity of time, aught has achieved to become one with the Universe or even near, then its infinite light must love all people and all things in the Universe for it to exist at all, and so it does not seek to change them; not even oblivion, chaos, suffering, ignorance, or lack of free will. If there is a God, then God is infinite love, love for everything, even all the things that we hate, and even for our hate of those things, and for our hate of our hate and so on.
For love has not the strength to undo that upon which it shines its light; and hate has not the strength to become one with the universe, for if it would do so it would come to hate itself and destroy itself.
In an infinite universe all things already are. Changing such a universe would mean to remove something from it, for one cannot add anything to it. It therefore removes nothing from existence as that would make it less complete
In an infinite universe all things already are. Changing such a universe would mean to remove something from it, for one cannot add anything to it.
In this God loves hatred, suffering, darkness and emptiness as much as love, happiness, light and beauty. If one loves something, one will not change it; if one loves all the Universe, then so too one will not change it. In this there is nothing that separates God from the Devil; God is not just good or evil, but both, or else neither.
For us, even if there is a God, there might not be any God for ourselves. It makes no difference to us at all whether there is or not, unless we follow it to become one with the Universe ourselves.
Universal love means universal mercy. But what does mercy really mean? In the epics where Good battles against Evil, it has often been shown how, while the evil side spares no-one, when the good side prevails it has mercy for evil side. Whatever deeds have been committed by the evil side are often forgiven by the good side; the evildoers, even their leaders, are imprisoned, banished, or converted, but rarely killed. This is so not because the good side happens to have such inclination to forgiveness, but because that is what defines is as the good side.
If one had the perception that everything is beautiful, one would change nothing at all, not even things that hurt oneself or others. Only through love can one become infinite, for one would otherwise flee from that infinity. There is nothing that could become one with the Universe, and thereby become the Universe, without loving it altogether as it is.
Such is the bane of God's love.

Greater beauty should be loved the most, but even so, we should all love all beauty we have the strength to love. We cannot love all kinds of Beauty at the same time, for to do so we would have to be infinite; we can but cherish the Beauty that we already see. We should not repel forms of Beauty that are hurtful to us when they befall us, but neither should we embrace them. For we may never be able to learn to love all beauty there is, as our time might be limited.

Graphene oxide is a substance similar to graphene, able to form planar structures of a few molecules thick and tens of micrometers wide. In this it is rougher than graphene, but can become much wider. To give an idea of its size: a single sheet of graphene oxide can wrap several average human cells — this while it is a thousand times thinner than the average human cell (10 µm in diameter)!
Recently, scientists tried to stack sheets of graphene oxide, but found that the sheets repelled each other: when pushed against one another, their edges crumpled. The researchers found that the sheets connected like water lilies, so that they could form much larger sheets. These can be used as planar conductors.
Suppose that one would spread such large membrane of graphene oxide over a body of water, and that one could impart a strong current through it, this might be able to increase the surface tension of the water by attracting the positive poles of the water molecules. How significant this increase in surface tension would be is hard to tell, but it's possible that the water might be able to support greater weight. The uses of this effect depend on how strong it would be, but it is unlikely that it would allow it to support human weight as it supports the weight of some insects.
For a human to walk on water, the surface tension would have to be increased at least hundreds of thousands of times. Using several layers of graphene as conductor, or other, similar polymeric molecules which would be more conducting, might enable us to do this. To be worthwhile, such technology would have to be a great deal more viable than rapidly freezing water.
A way to further increase surface tension might be to use two layers of graphite oxide, heat the water between the layers and salinize it through reverse osmosis. Heating it would decrease its weight per volume; salinizing it would increase its surface tension.
Either how, if it will ever be viable at all, it will likely only be in far future, and for now remain only a subject for science-fiction or futurism.

As of January 2009, one could state that on a 2 mg iron pin, this number would have a theoretical limit of roughly 2 · 10^34: a billion yottabytes, or a sextillion terabytes. Though it will remain unanswered how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, Stanford researchers showed angelical skill in dancing on a similarly sized copper chip.
Storing 35 bits per electron, the researchers left the initials of the Stanford University in the interference patterns of electrons. This is analogous to classical holography, which uses the interference patterns of photons on a much larger scale. The technology has therefore been called quantum electronic holography.
Surpassing the past record of IBM, Stanford University wrote the letters on bits the size of 30 angstrom, which is slightly greater than the diameter of a hydrogen atom. It must be noted fairly, however, that while the holographic "projection" itself was just a few carbon atom diameters across, the "projector" was more than twice as large.
Those who still believe Moore's Law is about to become obsolete, raise your hand.

For more information about this amazing feat: http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/01/30/stanford.writes.worlds.smallest.letters

""Before' implies time""


No, no.
"Time" implies "before."
Time is basically movement. There's no way you can separate the two concepts whatsoever.
If you remove movement, there's no more time, et vice versa.
So if you'd say there was no time before the Big Bang, how did it come into being?
Obviously such line of reasoning as what there was "before there was time" is bound to lead into sophistication, and therefore I will continue to assume in the nature of an infinite and eternal universe.
I just don't believe in a beginning of existence because of Occam's razor; an existence which had no beginning is simple simper, requiring less tortuous logic.
The only reason why one would favor a universe with beginning is because it's intuitive: everything in our world, after all, has a beginning. But if beginning itself would have a beginning, then that as well would have to be part of the beginning. In other words, there is no reasonable way in which one can "exclude" something from existence and assign it the cause of existence. Anything that would have caused existence would already have been part of it.

In everything there is infinite beauty; in what things one sees beauty is but a matter of preference. To say that the beauty of something is greater than that of something else is prejudice, for if all beauty is infinite, there is none that is greater than any another. There is inexhaustible beauty in all things, and to be fully conscious of it would mean to be God.

Some people fear that if we would improve ourselves through genetic manipulation, we would all become equal. However, it must be observed that genetic similarity is not necessarily correlated with psychological similarity. Humans are more alike than any other mammalian species, and yet we are also the most psychologically diverse. Furthermore, people with higher IQs also have more varying personalities than people of average IQ. The complexity of a person's personality is proportional to his or her intelligence; it would therefore be simplistic to state that eugenics would necessarily reduce the diversity of our species; indeed, the more advanced a species is, the more diverse.

When in times of hardship you are numbed with pain and feel that you have lost all feelings, remember that they are still nonetheless still htere, even if they are hidden in your unconscious mind. All you need to do is to find them again. Acknowledge that they are still there, even if you cannot feel them, and they will bit by bit return. Just saying to yourself how you think you would feel in a moment as is present, and describing how the feeling would be like, can help a great deal to become aware of your emotions again. Just imagine how an emotion would feel like, imagine it as vividly as possible, and it will become real.

In schizophrenia, severe chronic stress resulted in the failure of the individual's coping mechanisms; she or he loses courage to face his difficulties and therefore to care for her- or himself. In other words, the ego dissolves. Practical thought becomes reduced because the individual has lost the will to concern her- or himself with it. Not finding safety in reality, the individual is then forced to flee into unreality, leading to psychosis.
What remains is simple experience, be it of a sensory nature (i.e. sensations) or abstract (i.e. imagination). No longer having the will to filter perceptions of practical value from those without, perceptions that are normally filtered at once become more prominent. This is referred to as decreased latent inhibition. Perceptions that are normally unconscious encroach upon the conscious, while normally conscious (practical) perceptions become unconscious.
Because the individual's awareness is partly transferred from the practical thought which usually accounts for a large part of our mental processes to experience, this may lead to a state of expanded consciousness. While this may be experienced as pleasant at times, as the illness progresses it becomes so inescapable that it becomes horrifying.

In a world of lies, honesty is the greatest sin. Being one’s true self is self-pity. And aside from the prescribed clichés, anything we might say is either selfish or meddlesome. When we’re sharing our daily mantras, we might as well bark as dogs do. The level of meaningfulness would be about the same, were it not that at least dogs still put some emotion in their barking. When we’re talking at all instead of chanting, all we are exchanging is but dead and deadening information. The only thing in which people are still somewhat together, then, is in the things they do — sadly, there is a very great deal we no longer dare to do. The few that still resist this compulsive inhibition are seen as irresponsible or even insane.
In our dishonesty, when someone else is honest and we cannot deal with their honesty, we are ourselves too dishonest to let them know this, but rather neglect them. Since it is seen as rude to be honest, we take it for granted that others should be just as dishonest as ourselves — those who are not dishonest are ignored.
Rather, should we not express ourselves just as much in our feelings of our own as in our feelings about others' feelings? Would it not make more sense to tell others just how close they can get to us rather than to never get closer to each other than two strangers?
Why do even friends remain at a distance that is dictated to them by society? How can people live in such detachment from one another? How could we let it come so far that we keep our hearts shut just because it is the only way we can still know that they will not get hurt or hurt others? If we would just tell others how much they can share their emotions with us, then there is no need for them to hide them altogether. If others' feelings hurt us when they share, we as well should share this. There is no way one can know in advance when one's feelings will hurt someone; some are used to others' feelings, others are not. But can we just shut up altogether because all things we say have a chance of making others feel uncomfortable?
We can but tell each other inhowfar we can deal with listening to their secrets, or else remain in our ice-cold panzers.

The possible psychological dangers of violent videogames is proportional to the realism of the simulated emotions of the opponents; and except in the most labile individuals, this will also be the only important factor causing desensitization.
Even though all but some psychotics will rationally know that the characters aren’t real, anyone will empathize with their emotions. This occurs in any form of fiction and even in daydreams: but there is a huge difference between imagining feelings from a neutral viewpoint and imagining causing them.
At first, causing simulated pain will automatically go along with feelings of guilt. To cope with these empathic feelings, it is possible that regular players become desensitized.
They overcome the empathic feelings because they know that their actions have no consequences; they still know that in real life their actions do have consequences, and only psychotics would be inclined to think otherwise. However, it has been proven through brain scans that human sense of ethics is not based on reason, but on emotion. In a moral decision, reason follows emotion rather than the other way around. Unfortunately, our emotions make not make much distinction between reality and virtuality: it makes such distinction only to the extent that the two differ in realism.
Many people will argue that, since it is only a game, only people who cannot tell the difference between a game and reality will undergo significant desensitization. Empathizing with characters from videogames would occur only in people to whom imagination has become almost as important than reality, if not more so, such as many schizophrenics or autistics. But consider that many videogames have become extremely realistic, and that it’s only a matter of time before they become indistinguishable from reality except through memory.
Suppose that you killed people in a game and it was so lifelike that the only reason you know it to be a game is that you remember you entered into it: you hear your opponents’ screams, their pleadings, their moans, you see their expression, their wounds, their blood, their internal organs — all this as realistic as reality itself. The potential dangers of immersive virtual reality in violent computer games are quite apparent — upheaval, traumas, desensitization, psychopathy, dissociation, even psychosis.
In conclusion, for the psychological health safety of the players, it would be safer if either simulated emotion from the opponents should be forbidden in first person shooters, or games that include them would by law require regular psychological screening.

Recently, methane has been observed in the atmosphere of Mars. This appears to indicate that Mars is either biologically or geologically active. Although it is possible that this methane is being emitted by microbes, there is no reason why this possibility should be greater than the possibility that it is caused by volcanic or plutonic (subterranean volcanic) activity, well on the contrary. Though it seems very attractive to see this as possible evidence of life on Mars, however, everything seems to point in the opposite direction. Looking at a map of the methane distribution in the atmosphere (an example of which can be found here), anyone with some knowledge of the Martian geology (or "areology" as it is called) will see that the vast majority of the methane is located above the Tharsis bulge. The Tharsis bulge is about the largest volcanic plateau in the solar system, also containing some of the largest volcanoes in the solar system.
One study stated that volcanic activity is unlikely to be a major source of methane based on studies of Mauna Loa, the largest active volcano on Earth; they found that Mauna Loa emitted 9 metric tons of methane per year, whereas on Mars, 300 metric tons of methane are emitted per year. Mars has no active plate tectonics, and no volcanoes on Mars are known to be active. Since Mauna Loa is the largest volcano on Earth, they therefore assumed that its volcanic emissions, if not surpassing those on Mars, would compare to a large percentage of its emissions. However, this argument is based on the supposition that there is no major volcanic activity on Mars, which obviously makes it cyclical: there are no major volcanic emissions on Mars because there are no major volcanic emissions. Furthermore, there is another flaw with the conclusions of this study: the final results were published in 2006 after thirteen years of research. However, Mauna Loa has been dormant since 1984, and no significant seismic activity was observed since then until 2002.
I believe that, despite the fact that no volcanic activity has been observed on Mars, we should do well not to underestimate it. For one thing, most, if not all, volcanoes on Mars are shield volcanoes, whose eruptions are far less dramatic than those of stratovolcanoes. Their lava has a high liquidity, so that it flows out easily and steadily, rather than being locked up in the magma chamber for a long time until it suddenly explodes. Because of this, eruptions are far more frequent but less prominent. Because of the low viscosity of the magma, it also flows out without bringing too much scoria with it. This, in combination with the low pressure with which the highly liquid lava flows out, causes the eruptions to produce very little smoke in comparison to their more aggressive brothers the stratovolcanoes, which often cause smoke trails which can be seen from space. The most dramatic eruptions of shield volcanoes are caused by water entering a vent, due to the pressure of the expanding vapor — since there is very little water on Mars, this never or almost never happens.
Furthermore, we can draw from the results of the Mauna Loa study that even when shield volcanoes are dormant, they still emit some methane. Considering we're talking about a planet covered for a large part with volcanoes, we might very well assume that ten times as much methane is produced on the entire planet than by a single dormant volcano on Earth.

There are no sane people. There are just insane people and people who are insane in an abnormal way. Almost everyone holds beliefs that they are certain to be true, but for some people these beliefs are shared with a large percentage of the population, and for some people these beliefs are shared with a smaller percentage. In other words, for some people the insanity is collective, for some people it is individual. We are almost all insane, but some are more original in their insanity than others. Some people think of their own delusions, others just copy them from others. The only difference is in the source of their inspiration. Most people's insanity is to adapt to others' insanity and blindly believe them to be right; other people's insanity is to blindly believe themselves to be right.
Almost everyone thinks they know the truth and that whoever thinks otherwise is wrong, with exceptions only in the very, very few open minds there are in the world. Generally, the more intellectual someone is, the more they are attached to their own opinions. If we attach any value to our beliefs, I believe it should be because of the beauty of the patterns of our thoughts, not because we think they are true. The truth can never fully be achieved but only approached. It is something which lies outside of ourselves, and in that we are perhaps too small too understand it. I believe that nothing is ever fully true or false, and that the truth is always somewhere in between. Thus, we can approach the truth as closely as possible, but never actually reach it. It is the asymptote of the function of knowledge. The truth is something infinitely subtle and nuanced, and while we may come closer and closer to it, we cannot fully reach it unless we could see its infinitely many nuances.
This is illustrated by the model of the atom: at first, it was thought the atom was a solid sphere (Dalton); then, it was thought that that there were negative electrons floating on the positive nucleus (Thomson); then, it was thought that there was actually a lot of space in between electrons and protons (Rutherford); yet later, there turned out to be neutrons in the nucleus as well; yet later, it turned out the electrons weren't orbiting the nucleus in a circle but rather in a wavelike motion; yet later, the protons and neutrons appeared not to be solid but be composed of quarks, elementary particles; and yet later, these elementary particles all appeared not to be solid either, because they were actually really localized by the interference of energy waves. Right now, many scientists still live in the delusion that yes, they know the truth and that this is the end of it.
Will it ever end? Will we ever see that we are not, as we have deluded ourselves since the beginnings of time, Omniscient?
Someone who is deluded is always convinced of the truth of their delusions, and this conviction is by far a more criterion in defining delusions than their falsehood. If I believe that I might be involved in a mind control conspiracy, this is perfectly reasonable, as history has shown that it is possible; however, if I am certain that I am involved in such conspiracy, then I am insane. The irony is that this would make most people insane, were it not for the fact that a third criterion of a delusion is that it is not held by a culture.
I do not think I am so different. Even I like to feel that I know something, even if whatever it is I think to know is at most an approximation of the truth -- still infinitely far from the complete truth, but so too infinitely far from complete falsehood. Everything has some kernel of truth, and yet is not perfectly true.

In an infinite, or even just a very large Universe, there must have been at least some race which had lived long enough to achieve a state of godlike power and enlightenment. It is very possible that most sentient species would not have come that far, but even so, part of them would have, and in an infinite and eternal Universe, it would not matter how few there would be. Even in a very large and very old universe, it would still not matter very much how few there would be. Considering that as many of sixty have been observed as of 20/12/2008 which appear to be in the habitable zone of their star, and considering that there must be many, many more which we have as yet failed to discover with our currently primitive means of observing exoplanets, it is nothing less than prejudice to claim that there is nothing "out there."
Given the pains we take to attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence, if there are indeed intelligences besides our own, at least some of them would have taken the initiative to send forth Von Neumann probes. These are hypothetical spacecraft which would travel from exoplanet to exoplanet to explore, sending back information about their explorations either waiting for instructions or, more likely, make decisions on their own accord which would, with sufficient AI, get most obstacles out of the way. Every time they would have reached another exoplanet, they would replicate, meaning that they would produce more of their own kind, much like robots in factories today are already produced by other robots. Upon their replication, their now greater numbers could explore yet other exoplanets. Supposing these probes were nanoscale or even microscale, their mass would be so low that near-light speed would not require much energy -- - this would merely require more advanced miniaturization than we have today.
This energy could be provided mostly from an external source when the probe is still on or near its last exoplanet, for instance by the other probes, which then renew their own energy before departing themselves. Once it would be in outer space, its speed would not be braked by an atmosphere and could theoretically go on for many light years if it survived - it could use smaller amounts of energy to slightly adjust its course, to avoid obstacles or to enter into orbit around its target exoplanet. Because of their low mass, they could also be much, much greater in number, so that the chance that some would survive would be greater. In addition, they would not require much matter to replicate, as a proper micrometeorite would be enough. The most important problem with smaller sizes would be that less information could be contained in it. If the probe contained enough computing power, it could learn to communicate with us; this AI could be contained within a single computer, but it could also be contained within countless nanorobots. In addition, if it contained enough information, the computer could improve our knowledge by itself, for instance, or even improve ourselves, our very DNA and our thoughts, so as to "uplift" us as it is called in transhumanist jargon. The question here, of course, is whether we would want this, but some people among us certainly would (transhumanists, extropianists, many Buddhists, many mystics).
We have ourselves nearly achieved such level of technological sophistication, being at least a few decades and at most a few centuries away from it, supposing that our further development is unhindered by extinction level events (the most likely of which would probably be world-threatening terrorism). Since there occurred no actual events whatsoever which threatened to wipe out the entire human race since it arose, we may assume that many sentient species would probably have achieved the technology needed to build nanoscale Von Neumann probes. These could have explored the Universe practically at near-light speed, with only relatively very slight delays to replicate every time they would have reached new exoplanets.
Assuming that there have been such civilizations in the galaxy (four hundred billion stars), then they would have found us by now if they had existed at least fifty thousand years ago, which is only about fifteen thousand years before the first traces of the Cro-Magnon man showed up. Sensing intelligent life, their probes could have given at the very least some information about their species and their position in the universe. Given another hundred thousand years, their species themselves could have interfered by controlling the probes directly, so that even if their AI was too limited to make them communicate with us, the species themselves would have done so - the question is then if by that time this species would still exist or have interest in communicating with us. This would perhaps not have been necessary, however, as it is likely that if such probes had been sent at all, their AI could perhaps have been strong enough to communicate with us by itself, albeit in some primitive way.
Even supposing that we have been alone in the galaxy, there must have been some civilization whose Von Neumann probes could have reached us from somewhere millions of light years away. There is no reason why the probes would ever stop in their mission to find life unless the species which had initiated it would also itself terminate it. Our local group contains 35 galaxies and is about 10 million light years across - it would therefore have taken at most five million years for any sufficiently advanced species in the local group to reach us, and there are many trillions of stars in the local group. On biological time scale, five million years is just a minute. Five million years ago, the first hominids started to arise, so it seems reasonable to assume that at this time there had been plenty of races elsewhere in the local group which had become more advanced than we are today; the same can still more or less be assumed for hundreds of millions of years ago - at this point whatever intelligence there was on earth was still unsophisticated, but there are plenty of planets, including, probably, habitable planets, which arose hundreds of millions or even billions of years earlier.
Thus again, the question arises: where is everyone?

Failure, while it may be frustrating, is actually a positive sign: it means you're trying. Only when you are pushing ourself to the limits of your abilities can you fail. Thus, one learns most when one is failing more, and so every failure is also a success.

The essence of humor is nothing more or less than the delight of absurdity, and in every possible case of humor, it is triggered by absurdity. Often this absurdity comes as a surprise in a sudden shift of perspective, but even this sudden shift is absurd. You will notice that in everything humorous there is some kind of absurdity, and that it is always this absurdity, be it sudden or not, which makes it humorous.
If the absurdity comes suddenly, however, the effect is more apparent as it comes as a sudden release rather than gradually. In addition, if the conclusion of a joke is predictable, this is because it makes sense that things should turn out as they do in the joke; absurdity cannot make sense.
Something absurd will not be humorous to a person, given that he or she has a sense of humor, if and only if it is linked to negative emotional stimuli to that person. This is often the case if the humor takes place in or is concerned with reality: a homosexual will be less likely to appreciate humor about homosexuality, for instance, or someone whose father was killed with a toothpick will not be less likely to appreciate the humor of his killer.
How humorous something is depends not on the amount of absurdity, but rather on the complexity of the absurdity. However, the perception and appreciation of that absurdity depends on a wide variety of other emotional factors.

Chaos creates order. It is the raw energy that precedes it before it becomes structured. Although chaos originally meant "void" in Greek, the current sense is almost antonymous to it: chaos is random existence, but existence nonetheless. Just like order, it is a form of complexity, and therefore a form of beauty.

Without input, there can be no output. If we receive no stimulation from the outside, we will grow dead inside. Respect your sensations, for they are what empower your mind, and without sensations, you cannot live, cannot work, cannot feel.

Some teachings urge us to live by the principle of concentrating upon the here and now, and for many years I myself have lived by this principle. But I have come to believe that this principle is incomplete. What does it really mean, to live in the here and now?
Many doctrines, notably Buddhism, seem to urge us not to think. But I believe this is, if not inaccurate, then at least misleading: thought can be a beautiful thing. Not merely useful, but actually immanently beautiful.
For although we should be aware of the beauty there is in the world, so too there is a world within each of us whose beauty we should be equally aware of, a world, that is made of thought; a vortex of thought that can brings us from one place to another every second. It is a place where everything can happen and nothing is bound to time and space. It is a beauty we can experience just like a landscape, a landscape within the noosphere, the sphere of notions. We should enjoy its wonders just like the wonders of nature, for thought is one of our greatest assets as humans.
For what are daydreams, what is our inner world but an emulation of the real world? And if we are to live in our senses, should we not just as well live in the senses in our dreams? The sensations of our imagination are just like any other, less felt, but with far more possibilities, and if we enjoy them, they as well will grow with time. Thus, our inner world is part of the here and now just like the real world, and must be experienced just the same.
We would miss much beauty in the world if all of us had overlooked the beauty of thought. There would be no technology or science or even philosophy if we used thought merely as a practical tool, for all these things approached thought as something that is beautiful.
Thus, thought should be appreciated for its beauty for it is part of our experience. Thought is more than a tool to create beauty, for it is in itself beauty. There is beauty in our daydreams, but so too there is beauty in biology, in physics, in chemistry, in mathematics, in geology, in psychology, in languages, in everything.
This is, quite simply, because even knowledge is part of our experience. Knowledge is a very abstract construct in our inner senses. Concepts are made of imaginary sensations, which are usually visual; it is no wonder that 20% of our brain is visual cortex, because we think in a visual way. For instance, numbers each have a place in a long row in our mind, like a ruler; it may be made of the inner sensation of a ruler. When we say six, in our subconscious we may see of six dots, or a figure with six angles, or just the number six with other numbers next to it. When we say square, deep inside we see a square before us. When we say "atom," deep inside we see a nucleus with orbital electrons. If we say plate tectonics, we see the plates of the crust before us. All these things have their place in another world, a world of ideas, which is called, as mentioned before, the noosphere. Thought is mechanical. It knows space and time just like the real world, even if it is a world which is bound to no physical laws - only to the laws we impose upon it ourselves.
All these thoughts can fit together into such constructions of perfect elegance that it would be folly to state that one can find no beauty in thought, only in real experience. We should enjoy that elegance, revel in its wonderful panoramas. The beauty of thought is the beauty of connections, connections which take place in the mechanics of our inner world; if we should enjoy the touch of the wind, the smell of rain or the beauty of a forest, then we should enjoy the brilliance of a novel's plot, the ingenuity of our own bodies, the awesomeness of the giant balls of fire that show in a clear night's sky. We should enjoy the beauty of all the connections there are between all things, connections that aren't there in our sensations but which we create in our intellect. And we should be grateful for the gift to see these connections in the world.
We should live in the here and now. But even things that existed in the past or things that may exist in the future, as well as things that could never exist in the real world, can be part of the here and now within our mind. For they exist as thoughts, and these thoughts can be just as beautiful as real sensations or even more so.
But if that is so, then everything is actually part of the here and now. Does it still make sense, then, to say that one should live in the here and now? Whatever one perceives is "here and now" in that person's experience; is it possible to be not here and now, but rather there and then, if in one's mind there and then is here and now?
What is really important, then, is not to live just in one's sensations. It is senseless to exclude part of reality to concentrate on the rest of it, because then one omits part of life and its beauty. All one achieves in this way is too narrow the scope of one's existence. There is no such principle by which one can live.
There is, then, only one attitude towards life which can always lead to greater beauty, without excluding part of it, and it is to love everything in life, to love the beauty in everything, and to enjoy it. The love of beauty is the most beautiful, most powerful and most creative principle by which one can live.
Whatever one loves will grow; thus, if one loves beauty and cherishes it, it as well will grow. This just goes to show, that the sole fundamental principle in the universe is that of love: love is an act of creation. For love is that which causes whatever it loves to increase. Love is therefore the driving force of existence. Love creates, love is creation, and it is in this way that everything came into existence.
For even if that love was only present in a fundamental way before there was life, even so it was there: then, it was the love of an electron for its proton, or the love for mass for yet more mass, or the love of energy for yet more energy, or the love of complexity for yet more complexity. The universe loved itself in whatever form it was until it became what it is today, and we, as part of a universe, should love it with all our hearts so that it keeps becoming more and more beautiful until we become one with all things.

See also:
The Innerverse
Love is Immortal
Love Life

Beauty is no more and no less than the degree of complexity of patterns; any patterns, whatever they may be. In everything there are patterns; in fact, everything consists of patterns. "Patterns" does not have to mean symmetry, as patterns often occur in lack of symmetry, ie asymmetry. Whether or not those patterns appeal to us is merely a matter of perception.

To this day, there is no therapy specific for psychosis except for antipsychotics. A therapist can talk to a psychotic in the hopes that they will gain more insight in their own situation just like any other patient, but they can't give them any treatment which focuses particularly on psychosis.
Perhaps to this purpose, psychologists could subject the patient to a kind of training, a reality training. In such training, questions could be asked about a purely hypothetical person in a specific circumstance which relate to the patient's psychosis, such as:

"Person A finds that someone is following him or her. Is it more likely that:
A) the follower is involved in a governmental conspiracy, or
B) the follower wants to ask person A directions.

It may be useful to sketch the characters in the hypotheses as specifically as possible, so that, although they may be similar to the patient, the patient can think of them as other people. They do not have to be of the same age, sex, race, or personality. Important is that it is asked not what IS true, but what is more likely to be true. Implying that their delusions are false may make them defensive about their truth; they have to decide for themselves if they are true or false, but we can make them have a clearer view of their own situation by projecting it onto other people, so that they learn how others deal with them.
If one tries to convince a patient that their delusions are false by arguing about it, it is very possible that they will see one as being part of the conspiracy in their delusions. This probability is increased by the fact that many schizophrenics are often highly sensitive and might see criticism about their beliefs as a personal attack.
Because psychotics have a lot of imagination, they think highly parallel. They think in multiple possibilities, but are unable to see which is most relevant. They see so many possibilities in their mind that they no longer see which are likely to happen in reality and which are not.
Most people will tell psychotics that their delusions are impossible. In fact, nothing is impossible: it is always possible that they are being followed by someone who is involved in some conspiracy, but it's just very unlikely. Because psychotics are so good in hypothesizing, when they are told that something is impossible, they will eventually realize that this isn't true. "What if my father had somehow gained access to top secret information without my knowing and is keeping it somewhere, what if the FBI is pursuing me for this?" What often happens then is that when the psychotic realizes that their delusions are, after all, a possibility, they will wonder why whoever is telling them that they are impossible is "deceiving" them, which might make them believe that they as well are involved in some conspiracy which is meant to keep them from knowing the truth. Instead, it is better to tell them that their delusions, while possible, are very unlikely.
To a schizophrenic, the relevant possibility is no longer the most probable one, but the most drastic one. Because of their high faculties of imagination, they will also be able to imagine all possibilities very vividly; what then matters to them most is those imagined possibilities which elicit most emotion when they imagine them, that is to say, those which they fear or hope for the most. It doesn't seem to matter how likely they are because in their minds, they are already real: they happen in their fantasy as vividly as a dream happens in our own.

Unknowingly, we repress a lot of things in our lives because we are unable to deal with them. In fact, we usually only let in a small part of our stimuli into our consciousness because we would otherwise be overwhelmed by them.
Upheaval is the bubbling up of stimuli we usually repress, which can be either of positive or negative stimuli specifically or both stimuli in general.
If such upheaval occurs, we have two options: either we re-repress the feelings that emerge to the surface, or we learn to deal with them. If one is open to it, upheaval can be very enriching to one's personal development.
We all experience some extent of upheaval every day as we are subject to stimuli we cannot accept, and most of the time these stimuli are promptly repressed. Upheaval can arise from thoughts and insights, life-changing events, meditation, and so forth. In general, any stimulus we aren't used to may cause some degree of upheaval; it is therefore part of what makes us alive.

Anything we do can be profound if only we are doing it profoundly. An entertainer which experiences humor as a form of art and his audience as friends with whom he wants to share this art is just as profound about this as a scientist who experiences the knowledge as a connection with the wonders of the universe. The depth of awareness of something one experiences comes with the depth with which one experiences it, and any experience is far deeper than can be seen at the surface. Nothing at all in the universe is superficial; people simply tend to remain at the surface of everything. Ordinary things aren't banal; we make them banal, or make them seem banal, by treating them banally and perceiving them banally. In truth, everything is wonderful if only we aren't afraid to explore it to its depths.

Doing is being. Being is doing.

One's personality is made of inclinations, things one tends to do or would do: thus whatever one does is part of who one is.

If one is hurt by something or someone, one is also hurting oneself. There are always two causes of a feeling: one is an external stimulus, the other is the internal reaction to that stimulus. One can be hurt by anything if one is sensitive to being hurt. One cannot always know when one could hurt someone else, and when one is hurt one must know that unless they are enemies, the other does not mean to hurt you; people who hurt others usually do so because they are hurt themselves, and to stop the hurting.
If you cannot accept a loved one, they will not accept this because they cannot accept not being accepted. All quarrels between loved ones springs from mutual lack of acceptance, which is in turn always caused by a lack of understanding. For if you would understand them and why they are doing what they are doing, you would forgive them.
Suppose that you do something a loved one can't accept; this means that whatever you are doing is hurting them. He tells you that he can't accept this in a way which makes you feel hurt, and you then tell them in turn that you can't accept being hurt yourself, in such a way that he as well gets hurt again. Before you even know, there is a breach in your relationships because you both want to stop being hurt by the other, although this was all you really wanted to do in the first place.

In all cases, when is hurt there are two things that are responsible: one is one's own inability to accept the other or what he is doing or saying, the other is the other's inability to accept one or what one is doing or saying. There is no need to blame one another because both are responsible.
Of course you want the hurting to stop, and to do this you will often try to change the other or what they are doing or saying. It is fine to make them understand that they are hurting you, but at the same time, do not forget that part of the problem is always in you as it is you who is hurt.
There is no reason why it would be more right or wrong to do one thing more than something else if it hurts the other person the same. And whether one is cheating one's lover or just smoking in their presence, if it hurts them the fault is always in both parties.
We base our morality on norms. We say it is more immoral to be unfaithful to one's lover than to smoke in their presence because most people will not object as much to someone smoking in their presence as they would to their lover being unfaithful to them. This is just, however, as most people's emotions are programmed.
There isn't anything inherently wrong with a lover being unfaithful, for example: we just perceive it this way. That is how our mind works. But if someone is just as upset about someone smoking in their presence as the average person would be about a lover being disloyal to them, no-one will take them very serious if they shout at them about this. Yet the emotion, the hurting is the same, even though in the second case the person who is hurt is neurotic. In both cases, there may be some damage done, be it to one's relationship or to one's health; how much damage one can bear before one is hurt depends merely on one's own threshold. Although one isn't necessarily partly responsible for the damage which is done, one is always partly responsible for the hurting as one is hurt oneself, and one can do something about this.
In fact, one can do more about how one perceives whatever it happening than about what is happening; both must be done. We should make both our perception of life and life itself more positive.

Almost every moment, we keep letting almost each moment and all its wonders slip away through our fingers, so stuck in our cyclical patterns that we have forgotten to live, or what it is even like to really be alive. If you want to awaken from this ignorance, then NOW is the time to do so - NOW, when you're with one leg in your trousers, yawning as you're looking at your watch; NOW, when you've got only three minutes left to catch your train; NOW, when you're fighting your way through rush hour traffic; NOW, when the the bell and the phone ring at the same time when you're trying to eat at a table with three noisy children; NOW, when you're confined to bed with 40 centigrade of fever.
Don't have mercy for your own ignorance of the marvels around you, lest the day comes that they will be gone forever. Hold the current tight and never let it go; and no matter what troubles may come, keep holding on. It doesn't matter what time will bring; accept it gratefully, and you will see that even its curses are gifts.

This entry in a few words: being love is often seen as merely hormonal because it lasts only for a few months once we are in a relationship. However, exactly the same is observed in friendship. This is merely because people seem more interesting when we first meet them, at least if we take to each other.

Many scientists see being love as something purely hormonal, arguing that it does not, after all, last for long. They often point at the chemicals released in our brain and compare it the effects to drugs. However, the chemicals involved in romantic love - dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin, phenylethylamine - are all some of the same chemicals involved in social interaction in general, as well as in other emotions. We should not forget, however, that neurotransmitters are not our emotions; they are the paint in which our experiences and emotions are made. Sometimes, the result is just a big splotch of paint, as in the use of narcotic drugs or physical sex; sometimes, the result is a child's drawing, as in the thousandth repetition of a superficial conversation; sometimes, the result is a beautiful canvas, as in the contemplation of nature's wonders or true love.

Usually, after a few months we are no longer in love even though the person and often our relationship with them has remained the same. However, in this they make the crucial error not to take into account psychological factors.
Falling in love is an emotional reponse which comes from a deep and often subconscious need for a soulmate. Someone with whom one can connect to the roots of the soul, with whom one can share all one's feelings that lie deep within our core, someone with whom you can together discover who you really are. It's the need no no longer to be, alone, but to be, together, to find someone with whom one can live as one, someone who forms the missing part of oneself.
Often, even when we aren't fully aware of what this inner longing really means, and yet sometimes we can no longer live with it and tell ourselves that we have already found whom we were looking for. We fall in love. But we idealize the person we think the other to be, thinking that we have found our soulmate -- until a few months later, our false hopes lead to a letdown.
This becomes quite evident when one realizes that the same is observed in friendship.
When we meet someone and we take a liking to them, we're a lot more interested in them, and our hopes of our friendship are higher. We are more hopeful about the congeniality of the other's personality because we have not yet explored it in detail. At first we may seem more similar than we turn out to be later on because we broadly seem to understand each other - but it's those details which tell most of all about oneself, and only by paying attention to those details can one find out who someone really is.
Basically, friendship is a scale model of love.

I am aware this entry is in contradiction with one I've written earlier, but that's just a view from another viewpoint, and that viewpoint can be just as interesting.

With enough energy, nanorobots connected to a nanoscale knife could cut through almost anything because in their small size they would meet little resistance. Of course, the effects of this would normally be unnoticeable macroscopically, but suppose that as the nanorobots would cut through the material they would secrete a kind of lubricant, this would allow the microscopic slit to become larger as the parts of the material could slide off one another. For some materials, another method could be to heat it, so that part of it melts or vaporizes so as to lubricate it itself. If the material would be a metal, the nanorobots could instead use magnetism instead of a lubricant to repel the metal.

Love does not always croon. Sometimes, it roars.

If we think that something is good, it is hard to avoid that we'll also think that the opposite is bad, which creates fear of losing whatever it is that we think good. Instead, let us then feel that the thing in question is not "good," but instead enjoyable.

We must realize that in the here and now we cannot have lost anything: we could as well have started to live our lives now, and picked up in this moment ashave lived our lives since our birth. It makes no difference to the here and now what our past once held. Even when the surface of the sea recedes in the ebb, there are still oceans below them.

There is a fallacy in this argument, however: it treats the past as if it still exists when one goes back to the past. In fact, this turns the past into the present. This means that the past would actually have followed the present; in this way, it is impossible to be in the past because one is always in the present, but one could assume that one could make the present turn into what it used to be. "The present" just means whatever we are experiencing right now.
Thus, if one would go back to the past, meaning that one would change whatever there is in the present into what it was in the past, and then change the past, then whatever one would do in the past would cause the future to be altogether different (due to chaos theory), so that there would be no future to return to - or it would be an altogether different one. However, since you yourself would be part of the future, then you as well would be altogether different, actually meaning that you wouldn't exist. If you would therefore return to the future, you would just pop into existence from nowhere, just as you had when you went back to the past, and the only history you'd have was that you'd have travelled through time.
In short, there is no other time than now, and only by changing now can one make it like the future or past, although that doesn't mean that it is the future or past. It is just the present being as the past or future would have been, had it been future or past.
If one would travel through time by travelling to a parallel universe which is how your own universe used to be in the past, however, nothing in your own universe would be changed by whatever you would do in this parallel universe.
I don't actually believe in time travel at all. But it is an interesting concept in fiction; but when it is used in fiction, it aught not to get tangled in false logic.

Imagine a diffuse jelly of very large macromolecules which, while large in surface area, take little volume; these could, for instance, be very large macrocycles (macrocycles being large molecular circles), made large enough to let plenty of oxygen and other small molecules through. Suppose that, like most macrocycles, these would contain a great deal of aromatic molecules, and that through pi-pi interaction ( which occurs in the "stacking" of aromatic molecules), so that these would be weakly bond. Just how solid the whole of macrocycles would depend on how many pi orbitals there would be in the aromatic molecules and how many of these molecules there would be.
Now suppose that these macrocycles would be bond strongly enough to temporarily sustain the weight of an object or even a person, upon which the macrocycles would slowly break their bonds with one another. This would be reversible because the bonds are intermolecular, and after the object or person has sunk deeper into the jelly of macrocycles, they would stack again. If whatever sunk into the jelly would be a person, he or she could still breathe because the macrocycles, having such a large cavity, would allow enough air to pass through. The aromatic molecules could be so arranged within the macrocycles that they would bind to one another in a regular pattern, and above the cavity in every macrocycle there would be another.
Such diffuse "jelly" of macrocycles could be used as a kind of chemical elevator, although it could only go down. The advantage of such an elevator would be that it could be created very quickly, and could even be transported. This could prove to be very useful during emergencies. For instance, a helicopter could bring a kind of tube-formed plastic "bag" to a high story of a burning skyscraper, upon which it could be pumped full of such macrocycles from the ground (which would be far too heavy to escape from the top). Given that the helicopter would then keep the bag from toppling, people who would be trapped in the skyscraper could safely, slowly "fall" to the ground.

This entry is highly speculative even by my standards, and might be more of an interesting idea for science-fiction fans than a futuristic view. However, seeing how it is impossible to foresee the future, it is possible after all that we would find a means to realize the following.

If the axis of electron orbitals in an object could somehow be decreased, and this process would happen at a sufficiently slow speed, the atoms inside the object would steadily rearrange themselves as its electron orbitals steadily shrink.
Causing an electronic orbital to shrink would require a sophisticated insight into quantum mechanics, which we're still far from having. We know, however, that the distance of an electron from its nucleus depends on two important factors, much like with planets around the sun: the outward centrifugal force keeps the electron from colliding with the nucleus, while the Coulomb force keeps it from escaping from it. These can be mathematically equated as:

kZe2/r2 = mv2/r

where the first member of the equation is the Coulomb force and the second is the centrifugal force, and

k is the Coulomb constant
Z is the atomic number
e is the elementary charge
r is the atomic radius
m is the mass of the electron
v is the speed of the electron

Thus, the radius of an atom equals:

r = kZe2/mv2

k and e are universal constants, so unless we can locally manipulate the laws of the universe, these are impossible to change. However, recent evidence suggests that physical constants are perhaps not as constant as we believed: for instance, in a natural nuclear reactor in Gabon, the Sommerfeld constant was shown to have changed. However, changing physical constants might prove to involve such advanced quantum physics that this would perhaps not be the easiest way.
By increasing the momentum of the electron, however, its orbital radius would have to decrease too. However, increasing its momentum could instead cause the electron to escape its atom. Both increasing the momentum of the electron and keeping it in its orbital could theoretically be done by radiating it with energy from the right angle. This is simply the opposite of bremstrahlung ("braking radiation"), in which a charged particle (eg an electron) emits energy as it is slowed down by another charged particle (th emitted energy being its lost kinetic energy).
Now the real challenge would be: how can we know when to radiate the electron?
We can't. We can't even know where the electron is in the first place, not without knowing every interaction it has with other particles in its environment. At most, we can conceive of how this could hypothetically be done with even more hypothetical technology. That, in this case, would be picorobots, a subatomic version of nanorobots, which could collectively calculate where the electron would manifest macroscopically and based on this radiate it from exactly the right angle so as to slowly bring it closer to its nucleus as they increase its momentum - it would require astronomical computation power and technology we are today unable to clearly envisage.
Suppose, anyhow, that with science yet unknown to us today, somehow we could find a way of compressing atoms, be it by somehow manipulating the laws of physics or some other esoteric method, there could still be other problems involved. For instance, manipulating atoms would also manipulate the way they would interact with one another, so that if the process went too fast, the molecules they comprise would disintegrate; in addition, if the atoms would collide with one another, they could disrupt the process.
Supercooling the object may prevent atomic collisions from damaging its structure, although if the object were more complex, such as a person or even a single tissue, supercooling it may not be an option except with advanced cryonic technology; the necessity of this would depend on the speed at which the atoms would shrink.
If this would happen instantaneously, then certainly the chemical composition of the object would be profoundly damaged, and possibly all that would be left would be an amorphous heap of matter - this as well might be useful if the matter to be atomically compressed is already amorphous, such as a resource, in which case this might have other, indirect applications. Atomically compressing matter would NOT make it easier for transport because the atoms kinetic energy is retained, however, and therefore so is the outward pressure, but it might make it possible for it to permeate other material easier, even material which is normally very impermeable such as concrete; if the atomic compression were somehow temporary, this could also destroy the material in question, as the atoms' decompression throughout it would cause tremendous internal pressure in it. It might also allow it to pass through a pipeline faster, for instance, as more atoms could fit in it, or it could be easier absorbed by the body, perhaps even through the pores of the skin. This could also be used to create ultrasmall versions of nanorobots.
If the atomic compression could happen gradually so that it could be applied to a complex object despite the entropic force this process would involve, the result would be that the object would become a perfectly identical smaller version of its original. The possibilities such technology might involve would be endless, such as espionage, nano/picotechnology, and simply entertainment. Ironically, a human or object could safely be small without having to fear of be killed: being walked upon, for instance, would have the same effect as it would have if someone walked on you if you were of normal size, because you still have the same number of atoms and therefore the same energy holding them together as they would have if you were of normal size: in fact, because whatever force you would experience would be more diffuse, it would be less dangerous. Of course, unpleasant accidents such as being kicked against might be more frequent, but not any dangerous than at normal size.

People, and perhaps even animals, will often seek out partners who are similar to themselves. This is, of course, quite understandable from a psychological viewpoint, but it also happens to have evolutionary implications: if our partners are similar to ourselves and therefore have similar genes or memes, this makes it more likely for them to be preserved in offspring, increasing the chance of these genes' or memes' survival. This is significant because it means that sexual selection does not necessarily favor the fittest specimen, but the fittest most similar specimen.

Since a specimen's genotype is basically a collection of genes, this means that if it is to keep its genotype alive as long as possible, it will also keep its genes alive as long as possible; this doesn't have to be solely in the specimen itself, but can also be in other specimens, especially in social species such as ourselves. This is partly why similar people tend to associate in groups, based on the genes and memes they appear to have in common.

Artificial bacteria have been engineered to change in color in response to light. Suppose that another species of artificial bacteria could be engineered to either harden or cause their matrix to harden in response to light in a photochemical reaction, this could be used as a form of solid freeform fabrication.