Cloudscape

This article reviews the 911 conspiracy theories in as neutral a way as possible, and presents multiple possible explanations for the information that gave rise to these theories. It attempts to offer at least two explanation to every fact, one in favor and one against the conspiracy theories. I have no single opinion on this matter, as in exploring different possibilities I come to the finding that several possibilities are, indeed, possible, and that more research is needed for either to be excluded. In considering as many possibilities as possible, even when contradictory, I seek to encourage people to do the same.

Because bias is likely to distort information, only objective sources have here been used, which allow the reader to think for themselves and not depend on someone else to interpret information for them. Parties biassed toward the conspiracy theories will only use arguments in favor of them, while those biassed against conspiracy theories will only use arguments against them, and this one-sided view on either side has enabled each to convince people that the other side is too ridiculous to be worth considering. Because of this schism, people come to ignore one another's arguments and presume that they are fallacious.

As long as this gap is not bridged, it will prevent us from finding the truth, as we all need to work together to find the truth. Due to bias either side will be inclined to take arguments in favor of their view too granted too quickly, while rejecting arguments against their view too quickly. People see but what they want, and people do not want to see the truth. But whatever the truth may be, I do not want to think that I know the truth.

I will, however, relentlessly subject any indications for any possibility to my scrutiny without mercy, and in doing so I will stubbornly refuse to have any sense of loyalty to any line of thinking, as though constantly defecting from one side to the other. By doing so I hope both to keep an open mind as to open others' minds, and reconcile strongly opposed views in the thought that our views are no more than this, and the truth is as yet uncertain. Despite all this, I am determined to use any relevant information that I can get my hands on.

First of all, there has been circulating speculation that, due to the profile of the hole in the Pentagon, the Pentagon had actually been hit by a cruise missile rather than a Boeing 757. Aerospaceweb.org (a "non-profit site operated by engineers and scientists in the aerospace field"), however, confirms that the debris found in the pentagon matches that of a Boeing 757 (Pentagon & Boeing 757 Wheel Investigation), and shows photographs of the debris. A photograph of a larger piece of debris can be found here. Comparing this with a Boeing 757 leaves little doubt that this piece indeed belongs to a Boeing 757. As depositing the debris afterwards would have been needlessly risky, we can safely assume that it would have been simpler to use a real Boeing 757 either how. Moreover, using a cruise missile in open view would in itself likewise have been needlessly risky when one considers that a Boeing 757 could be used just as it had been used for the Twin Towers, which, conspiracy or no, would have been safer, all the more when one considers the thousands of employees working in the Pentagon, many of whom were potentially able to oversee everything that happened. At least one of those thousands of people would not have kept silent. And if a Boeing 757 wasn't used in order to spare the most important military building in the US, why not choose another target? Finally, if a Boeing 757 didn't hit the Pentagon, what happened to the Boeing 757 which was seen nearing it?

It has been objected that while the airplane vaporized, many of the bodies were still intact enough to be identified, but the bodies were likely flung from the aircraft before the fire reached its maximum temperature, whereas the metal of the airplane remained stuck in place upon impact.

Furthermore, it must be noted that the only part of the airplane that is both large and very solid is the base of the hull, and Wedge One, the side that had been struck, had recently undergone renovations which were nearing completion on eleven September 2001. The wings apparently broke off against the reinforced walls of the building, and the hull was compressed to its base.

What is suspicious, however, is not so much the small hole in the building as the fact that Wedge One had so recently been renovated. Because of the renovations of Wedge One, which comprises a fifth of the Pentagon, only 125 employees were killed, compared to 20.000 people at work in the Pentagon (of course, it was only part of Wedge One that was destroyed). Because of the stiffening, the wings broke off. According to Lee Evey, "Had we not undertaken this effort, this could have been much, much worse." (Architecture Week: Pentagon Battered but Firm - PDF)

There are five wedges of the building, so the chance that an unwitting terrorist would strike this wedge is 20%. This is suspicious, but no more than suspicious. The 20% chance is only 30% from not being entirely unsuspicious, as, if 50% of the wedges had been renovated, then the chance that a renovated wedge would be struck would be equal to the chance that an unrenovated wedge was struck. What is more suspicious is that the renovation of Wedge One, which was the first to be renovated, had at that time been just "recently renovated" (Architecture Week: Pentagon Battered but Firm).

Including its preparations, however, the project had been underway since the early eighties (DTIC: The Pentagon Renovation Program - PDF), so that, if the restoration itself were part of a conspiracy, this conspiracy would have been going on for decades, and would not have been devised by the Bush Administration, which decreases the chance that no one would yet have confessed. If it was a conspiracy of the Bush Administration, then it would be more likely that Bush would have waited until renovations were finished. In that case, it can also be said to have been quite coincidental that Wedge One was finished relatively shortly after the beginning of his first term, although it had been discussed since the eighties.

That either possibility would be coincidental just goes to show how little evidence coincidences are, unless, that is, they are very great. Unfortunately, it is impossible to estimate the probability of a coincidence. Nonetheless, it is no small coincidence that Wedge One was struck so shortly after its renovation, and a coincidence far greater than the coincidence that Wedge One was renovated just eight months after Bush began his first term (even though the project had begun in 1993 (PENREN)). Also, the renovation would be no necessity for a conspiracy: it would merely have limited the damage, which is convenient but not necessary.

Another coincidence are the exercises that were made in the nearby Fort Belvoir (18 miles from the Pentagon on road [Google Maps]), the very morning of the attacks. According to the Fort Belvoir Site, Fort Belvoir conducted security exercises the very morning of the attack (Belvoir Remembers 9/11/01 - PDF), but it would appear that this is coincidental, as, even in the context of a conspiracy, there would be no apparent use for these exercises.

Also, just three months before 911, another training exercise, Mall Strike was conducted in Westmoreland County (Westmoreland County: Comprehensive Annual Financial Report - PDF), which neighbors the Somerset County where Flight 83 crashed. However, the location was not the same, and the Mal Strike exercise did not involve airplane crashes, and, considering how many exercises were conducted in those years, this is one coincidence that is not very surprising, at least not in itself.

Similarly, however, a year earlier a massive casualty (MASCAL) exercise was conducted in which a hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon (Dennis Ryan: Pentagram: Contingency planning Pentagon MASCAL exercise — PDF).

Another anecdotal mention of the MASCAL is found in an article in the Washington Post:

"Matt Rosenberg was down on Corridor 8, a medic at the health clinic in the massive military headquarters, grateful for an uninterrupted hour in which he could study a new medical emergency disaster plan based on the unlikely scenario of an airplane crashing into the place." (Washington Post — David Maraniss: September 11, 2001)

Strangely, in searching for sources confirming the occurrence of this exercise, I find that most links were broken (the same counts for many other links). Unless the sources were invented, it is therefore possible that, because of the controversy raised by the MASCAL exercise, most official mentions have been removed. DCMilitary.com was the only source that could still be found. The page has therefore been attached as PDF to avoid further censorship. I therefore decided to attach PDFs for all of the more important information. I do not share the opinion that it is safer to withhold information that might give people ideas. Rather, in innocence it is better to be fully transparent so as to gain people's trust; in innocence, that is. It is also that the government censors this information because it is not innocent at all.

This censorship, however, is not necessarily proof of a conspiracy. Information that supports conspiracy theories against the government is dangerous either how, whether it is true or not. The government might have feared that if too many people would think the government had been involved in a conspiracy, the chance of future terrorism, even from Americans themselves, would only become higher. Unfortunately, this is apparently a counterproductive approach: thus far, this secrecy has only increased suspicion on the side of the population. But perhaps the thing is that the government no longer even trusts its own population. After all, the Oklahoma City Bombings, which had been the worst act of terrorism until 911.

These are, in effect, dangerous times — not as dangerous as they appear to believe, perhaps, but dangerous enough. In such times it is a heavy responsibility to govern a country, and it is possible that the government panicked.

It is understandable that the government became secretive, as a means of becoming more defensive. Either how, the government has not done a good job at  suppressing conspiracy theories. Once the information leaked out, the government might have decided that it was a better course of action to attempt to keep on suppressing the information than to tell the truth, because they feared the truth would increase suspicion. This means either that the truth is that it was a conspiracy, or that the truth simply makes it seems as though it is a conspiracy. Both are possible, as, in either case, it was perceived as important to suppress conspiracy theories. The terrorist attacks may have made the government exceedingly paranoid, and therefore they might have seen conspiracy theories as a subversion of authority.

Either how, it is clear that, as the government became more tense, it also became more secretive (DEPUTY SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: Operations Security Throughout the Department of Defense - PDF):

"Defense Department employees, as well as persons in other organizations that support DoD, exercise great caution in discussing information related to DoD work, regardless of their duties. Do not conduct any work-related conversations in common areas, public places, while commuting, or over unsecured electronic circuits. Classified information may be discussed only in authorized spaces and with persons having a specific need to know and the proper security clearance. Unclassified information may likewise require protection because it can often be compiled to reveal sensitive conclusions. Much of the information we use to conduct DoD’s operations must be withheld from public release because of its sensitivity. If in doubt, do not release or discuss official information except with other DoD personnel."

Security had become increasingly tight over the months, which was "precipitated by the terrorist attack on the U.S.S. Cole in October of 2000 and the bombings of two American embassies in Africa" (1998) and "the Army’s stated intent in those early days of 2001 was that installations would likely go to full-up access control by the end of September 2001" (Belvoir Remembers 9/11/01).

This would also explain the security exercise at Fort Belvoir, and it fits far better in antiterrorism than in a conspiracy. We are thus faced with a coincidence that appears to be irrelevant, and again: this shows that coincidences aren't always enough evidence.

According to USA Today, over two years before 911, NORAD conducted exercises using scenarios in which hijacked jets were used as weapons, and one imagined target was the World Trade Center (USAToday, Steven Komarow: NORAD had drills of jets as weapons - PDF; The Free Library: NORAD drills foreshadowed 9-11 attacks - PDF). However, there had been many counterterrorist exercises in those times. Apparently, the number of exercises from June 1997 to June 1998 was 116, compared to 32 from 1995 to 1996 (General Accounting Office), and considering the 1998 United States embassy bombings and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, this is understandable. The number of exercises increased until 911, and in the year 2000 more than 200 exercises were conducted. (GAO: COMBATING TERRORISM, figure 3).

The scenarios involving these exercises were often "far-fetched" and sometimes even involved chemical and biological terrorism, including the spread of bubonic plague in New York (NATIONAL COMMISSION ON TERRORIST ATTACKS UPON THE UNITED STATES, NEW YORK CITY HOSTS "OPERATION RED Ex") and the spread of smallpox in several states (Center for Biosecurity, Michael D. Lemonick: Bioterrorism: The Next Threat?). With such great number of exercises of such great variety, it is no wonder that some exercises resembled the attacks that later happened on 911. Moreover, the choice of the World Trade Center was not coincidental, neither in the scenario nor in the actual attack. According to Washington Post, "Targets such as the World Trade Center not only provide the requisite casualties but, because of their symbolic nature, provide more bang for the buck." Moreover, the WTC had been bombed before in 1993, which is significant.

Also, twelve days before the attacks, the Department of Transportation had an exercise on which Ellen Engleman notes:

"During that exercise, part of the scenario, interestingly enough, involved a potentially highjacked plane and someone calling on a cell phone, among other aspects of the scenario that were very strange when twelve days later, as you know, we had the actual event." (Mineta Transportation Institute: National Transportation Security Summit - PDF [Page may not load; see PDF])

It has been claimed that the NORAD exercises on 911 slowed the response to the attacks. However, according to the 911 Commission Report, "On 9/11, NORAD was scheduled to conduct a military exercise, Vigilant Guardian, which postulated a bomber attack from the former Soviet Union. We investigated whether military preparations for the large-scale exercise compromised the military’s response to the real-world terrorist attack on 9/11. According to General Eberhart,“it took about 30 seconds to make the adjustment to the real-world situation. Ralph Eberhart testimony,June 17, 2004. We found that the response was, if anything, expedited by the increased number of staff at the sectors and at NORAD because of the scheduled exercise."

Another source confirms this: "In retrospect, the exercise would prove to be a serendipitous enabler of a rapid military response to terrorist attacks on Sept. 11" (William Scott: Exercise Jump-Starts — Response to Attacks).

However, it might be said that, while the exercise did not actually succeed in delaying defense, it might have been intended to do so nonetheless. The Vigilant Guardian exercise had the scenario of an attack from Russia, and so sent the aircrafts to the north, to Canada and Alaska, away from the rest of the US. (NORAD - PDF: "The North American Aerospace Defense Command shall deploy fighter aircraft as necessary to Forward Operating Locations (FOLS) in Alaska and Northern Canada to monitor a Russian air force exercise in the Russian arctic and North Pacific ocean.") If they had left earlier, this would have left the US Defense weakened. Due to bad timing, however, the fighters might not have departed in time, so that they could still be deployed in an attempt to intercept the hijacked airplanes. It might still fit. Or it might still be coincidence.

In the meantime,

"Incredibly, Marr has only four armed fighters at his disposal to defend about a quarter of the continental United States. Massive cutbacks at the close of the Cold War reduced norad's arsenal of fighters from some 60 battle-ready jets to just 14 across the entire country. (Under different commands, the military generally maintains several hundred unarmed fighter jets for training in the continental U.S.) Only four of norad's planes belong to neads and are thus anywhere close to Manhattan—the two from Otis, now circling above the ocean off Long Island, and the two in Virginia at Langley." (Vanity Fair, Michael Bronner: 9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes - PDF)

However, the author notes:

"The fact that there was an exercise planned for the same day as the attack factors into several conspiracy theories, though the 9/11 commission dismisses this as coincidence. After plodding through dozens of hours of recordings, so do I.)"

I agree that it could be a coincidence, but I do not wish to dismiss any possibilities.

As for the speculation that United 93 was shot down, however, I'd say that the conspiracy theorists are clutching at straws.

""When I asked Nasypany about the conspiracy theories—the people who believe that he, or someone like him, secretly ordered the shootdown of United 93 and covered it up—the corners of his mouth began to quiver. Then, I think to the surprise of both of us, he suddenly put his head in his hands and cried. "Flight 93 was not shot down," he said when he finally looked up. "The individuals on that aircraft, the passengers, they actually took the aircraft down. Because of what those people did, I didn't have to do anything.""

Supposing that all these coincidences had not been coincidences, what could this mean? Unfortunately, it could still be anything, which again puts us before the frustration of facing an unsatisfactory series of maybes. Maybe the government had suspicions. Maybe the government had received threats. Maybe the government had foreknowledge. Maybe the government had responsibility. Or maybe it was coincidence.

It might seem that the US government likely had, if not foreknowledge or responsibility, then at least suspicions of the attack. In that case, the least the government could be criticized of is incompetence. Incompetence, of course, is still more forgivable than actual involvement, but perhaps the incompetence was still considered too shameful to be disclosed to the general public, even to avoid worse suspicions.

Some people are under the impression the towers fell in 10 seconds, which would mean that the tower would have fallen almost as fast as in free fall, as could only be possible in case of controlled demolition, but it was, in fact, 10 seconds before the first debris hit the ground, which did indeed fall without much resistance. The last of the debris, however, had fallen only fifteen seconds later (National Institute of Standards and Technology: Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster).

"The seismic spikes for the collapse of the WTC Towers are the result of debris from the collapsing towers impacting the ground. The spikes began approximately 10 seconds after the times for the start of each building’s collapse and continued for approximately 15 seconds. There were no seismic signals that occurred prior to the initiation of the collapse of either tower. The seismic record contains no evidence that would indicate explosions occurring prior to the collapse of the towers."

Most of the so-called eyewitness accounts of explosive detonations were actually accounts of the explosions caused by the impacting airplanes or debris which were taken out of context. There was no mention of an explosion at ground level in professional sources. The remaining accounts could not be found in any objective sources, and were found only in amateur conspiracy theorist sites. I cannot cite sources for all this as there were simply no sources to be found at all. If you want verification for this, you'll have to verify it yourself. Googling quotes from the so-called witnesses, you'll find nothing but pages upon pages of amateur sites. One would certainly expect the media would have mentioned something so significant, and even if those reports would later have been censored, there would still be broken links to those reports. This time, however, there weren't even broken links to be found anywhere. Nothing at all. Some people did say they heard rapidly succeeding blasts, but this was likely the sound of the pancake collapse. The rumor of explosives stems from a hypothesis from some scientists, notably Steven E. Jones, that thermite was used to explode the buildings (Deseret News archives: Physicist says heat substance felled WTC), but this has never been proven.

According to NIST, "the WTC towers collapsed because:

(1) the impact of the planes severed and damaged support columns, dislodged fireproofing insulation coating the steel floor trusses and steel columns, and widely dispersed jet fuel over multiple floors; and

(2) the subsequent unusually large jet-fuel ignited multi-floor fires (which reached temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius) significantly weakened the floors and columns with dislodged fireproofing to the point where floors sagged and pulled inward on the perimeter columns. This led to the inward bowing of the perimeter columns and failure of the south face of WTC 1 and the east face of WTC 2, initiating the collapse of each of the towers. Both photographic and video evidence—as well as accounts from the New York Police Department aviation unit during a half-hour period prior to collapse—support this sequence for each tower." (NIST)

As for the airplane that crashed in Shanksville, it has been objected that the debris is so fine that it cannot even be identified as the debris of an airplane, but it must be noted that the reason the airplane crashed was that the passengers revolted against the hijackers. When an airplane crashes, the pilot is usually still capable of making an attempt to crash-land. During a crash landing, the pilot still tries to keep the airplane as parallel to the ground as possible, but when the passengers struggled with the hijackers, the plane may have hit the ground in any angle at all, which explains why the airplane was so utterly devastated. Supposing that the US Army had shot the airplane down, however, how did the pit come there in the first place? Supposing it had been dug earlier, would no one have noticed this? Would the conspirators even have dared to take that risk? For that matter, would it have dared to take the risk that someone saw the plane being shot down?

The FBI stated that there is "No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11" (Project Censored - PDF, Fars News Agency - PDF, but the CIA claimed it did find such evidence (CNN: 9/11 panel: Al Qaeda planned to hijack 10 planes). Either how, the FBI cannot be commended for its thoroughness in these matters, as the FBI had already earlier "ignored compelling evidence" of Bin Laden's role in the Khobar case (Inter Press Service; Gareth Porter: "Ignored Compelling Evidence of bin Laden Role" - PDF). On the other hand, after earlier conspiracies such as MK-ULTRA, conducted by the CIA, I would not trust the CIA, either. Without any organization that we can fully trust, we're left with the only option to assess the evidence and think for ourselves.

According to the CNN Osama bin Laden initially denied responsibility for the attacks (CNN: Bin laden says he wasn't behind attacks - PDF) but by October 29 2004, "Just days before the US presidential election," he admitted full responsibility (Guardian: Timeline: the al-Qaida tapes) (Reuters: Bin Laden urges Europe to quit Afghanistan). Unfortunately, it is impossible to know just when he lied, as at any of these times he might have had a certain goal in saying what he said, and, therefore, a potential reason to lie if it was not true. By denying responsibility, he might have tried to avoid conflict with Afghanistan, and by taking responsibility upon himself when Afghanistan was already invaded yet Bin Laden was nowhere to be found, he might have tried to make the United States withdraw from Afghanistan. The video from 2004 unmistakably shows Osama bin Laden, and can be found online. The September 17 2001 video could not be found online.

It can be trusted, though, that al-Jazeera is objective on whether or not Osama bin Laden was planned the attacks, as it later also published an interview with two of Osama bin Laden's aides discussing how they had originally planned to strike nuclear plants (BBC: Al-Qaeda 'plotted nuclear attacks'). Again, I must stress that, as any of the other statements made by members of al Qaeda, it may be a lie. In this case, speaking of plans to strike a power plant could have been meant as a threat — or, of course, it could be true. Either how, it is clear that at some point al Qaeda did lie, be it when Osama bin Laden denied responsibility or when he later claimed responsibility, and considering that he could have gained from either, it does not really matter.

Al Qaedas claims are poor evidence of their actual intentions. People who are not above murder are not above falsehood. Why should we trust al Qaeda's claims any more than we should trust the layman conspiracy theorists? Al Qaeda is not a professional, let alone objective, source, and so whatever they say, be it in favor of conspiracy theories or against it, is no evidence whatsoever. Considering that we have al Qaeda must at least at some point have lied (as will be explained below), we certainly cannot trust that they did not lie at any other time.

If the September 17 video is authentic, then it might very well be that the December 13 video was fake, though not necessarily so. The bad quality of the video, the strange appearance of bin Laden and the wearing of a golden ring, which is forbidden in Islam law, have been used by conspiracy theorists as arguments that the video is fake. Ed Haas attributes Bin Laden's altered appearance to a tape transfer artifact (Muckraker: Taking the fat out of the fat bin Laden confession video) (at the time I found this source the server did not be found, but the article has been copied here by an amateur). However, while the tape transfer may explain the altered appearance, it cannot explain the ring. However, considering that Muslims have the same commandments as Christians, and he already broke at least two of them, despite his extremism it is clear that he did not always live by Muslim laws.

Conspiracy theorists have also argued that bin Laden used his his right hand in the video although he was left-handed, but even left-handed people will, of course, sometimes use their right hand, and the other way around. In a famous picture Osama bin Laden can be seen raising his right hand with upheld index finger (The Washington Note).

According to CNN, "Videotapes showing the left-handed Osama bin Laden gesturing with his right hand led some viewers to believe that his left arm was injured" (CNN: Hunt for bin Laden goes online).

It must be noted that the December 13 video was published after the US Army had already invaded Afghanistan, so that Osama Bin Laden now had nothing more to gain from denying responsibility, and that beyond this point he did claim to be responsible. Thus, there is no reason to assume the video was fake, except for the ring and right-handedness. Poor lighting, poor quality and poor tape transfer and poor ambidexterity could account for the rest — except for one thing that few people have brought up.

In the video, Osama bin Laden is seem laughing. Would he still laugh at his triumph of 911 after Afghanistan had been invaded? It must be noted that he was of Saudi nativity, but Osama bin Laden likely identified more with the "Muslim state" than with his home country. Unless the video dated from before the invasion, it is strange. Osama bin Laden does not seem, to say the least, the kind of person that is quick to laugh, or even as much as smile or feel any emotion at all. Why then would he laugh in the face of his enemies at a time when everything he stood for was more than ever before endangered by them?

Even if the video is fake, it might be anyone who had made the video. It might really have been bin Laden, or it might be that bin Laden ordered someone else to speak in his name, or it might be that terrorists not associated with bin Laden but sympathizing with him choose to speak in his name… Or it might be that the video was indeed part of a conspiracy — but even so, who exactly would be behind it is hard to tell: perhaps the government, perhaps rogue officers, or perhaps even citizens. In either of these cases the intent would most likely have been to justify the war on terror. However, it might also have been meant as a taunt from about anyone who agreed with the terrorists, even when they were not associated with them.

"The NRO designs, builds and operates the nation's reconnaissance satellites. NRO products, provided to an expanding list of customers like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Department of Defense (DoD), can warn of potential trouble spots around the world, help plan military operations, and monitor the environment."

As it happened, on September 11 2001, the NRO was conducting an exercise in which a plane accidentally crashed into one of its buildings (John J. Lumpkin, Associated Press: Agency planned exercise on Sept. 11 built around a plane crashing into a building - PDF; United Press International: U.S. agency's strange 9/ll coincidence - PDF; The hidden history of 9-11-2001: real-time war game Paul Zarembka 132 - JPG) This gave the hijackers the opportunity of entering into US territory without being monitored by the NRO. This may be yet another coincidence, but if it is not, we may suppose that whoever organized the attacks knew of this. The attackers might have known of this either if they had collaborators in the US Army, or if the US Army collaborated with them. Conspiracy theorists will be inclined to presume the latter, while loyalists will be inclined to presume the former. I think we should not presume either without further information.

Moreover, either of these possibilities may further be subdivided into several others. The former of the aforementioned possibilities includes the possibility of infiltrators, defectors, or renegades. The latter includes the possibility of high-rank treason and governmental conspiracies. Governmental conspiracies are only one of

What is suspicious, however, is that, according to the aforementioned article, the government described this as "a bizarre coincidence." Considering how much the government spent on counterterrorism, shouldn't the government have investigated even the merest possibility of a traitor or spy in their most important source? Perhaps the government really was careless. Or perhaps it investigated this possibility in secret, fearing perhaps to spread panic, or suspicion, or motivation amongst other terrorists to espionage. Or perhaps, the government was indeed involved in a conspiracy.

Considering the incompetence of the Bush Administration, it might very well be that it had been careless. Considering the recent secrecy of the army, it very well might have conducted a secret investigation. And, considering the other coincidences around 911, it very well might have been a conspiracy.

Many of the superior members of the FAA were away on 911: Bill Peacock, FAA Director, "the ultimate manager of all air-traffic controllers in the country's system," was in New Orleans (Pamela Freni: Ground Stop, page 12), Tactical Operations manager Jack Kies "had been caught away from his duty post, conducting business in another part of the country" (Pamela Freni: Ground Stop, page 65) (FAA Employee Site) and Linda Schuessler takes his place (FAA Employee Site). FAA's investigation manager Tony Ferrante had just landed in Chicago when he was told of the first attack (Pamela Freni: Ground Stop, page 19). Rick Hostetler, a member of the FAA's Planning and Procedures organization, was at a dentist, and later stuck in traffic (Pamela Freni: Ground Stop, page 27). Mike Canavan, the director of the FAA’s Office of Civil Aviation Security, was "visiting the airport in San Juan" (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States). FAA Administrator Jane Garvey had been in Secretary of Transportation Mineta's conference room for a breakfast meeting (Pamela Freni: Ground Stop, page 62). It must be noted that we cannot know if this would have weakened defense, but either how, if there was some sort of treason or espionage involved, this might have been the intention.

Meanwhile, however, Bush was on a visit in an elementary school in Sarasota, where he stayed after he was told of the attacks (Sint Petersburg Times, Susan Taylor Martin: Of fact, fiction: Bush on 9/11 - PDF).

Earlier, the Bush Administration had in effect received warnings about a possible imminent attack (Andrew Gumbel and Jason Bennetto: Bush was given hijack warning by British intelligence - PDF; LATimes: Italy Tells of Threat at Genoa Summit - PDF; Village Voice - James Ridgeway: U.S. Ignored Warnings From French - PDF; Jane's Intelligence Digest: Why was Russia's intelligence on Al-Qaeda ignored? - PDF; Telegraph — David Wastell: Israeli security issued urgent warning to CIA of large-scale terror attacks - PDF).

The United States had also received warnings from Egypt about the earlier 1993 bombing, which has sometimes been taken out of context by conspiracy theorists (NYTimes, Douglas Jehl: U.S. Confirms F.B.I. Alerted By Egyptians - PDF), but the other warnings were factual.

However, again, this is no compelling evidence of foreknowledge, as it may indicate both this as simple irresponsibility. Bush had been on vacation for an entire month, and this may well be how the warnings went unheard (Fred Kaplan: While Bush vacationed, 9/11 warnings went unheard - PDF).

If so, however, it is still quite possible that at least someone in the government had foreknowledge. This need not necessarily involve a conspiracy per se, however. Someone in the government might simply have chosen not to act, foreseeing the end results of this inaction — and this could be anywhere, at many levels in the government. Perhaps someone in the Bush Administration, perhaps someone in the US Defense, perhaps someone in the CIA. If we are to find out who remained inactive, it is possible we might need to scour the entire government to find the traitor or traitors. But it might not have been treason that made the government remain inactive.

If it had been negligence, however, this does not make it excusable, and it does not make it any less a crime — a crime that should be brought to justice. Status should not render anyone immune from justice — but, unfortunately, it does.

If not of treason, then the government is guilty of neglect, and therefore of mass murder. Had these people not had their position, then other people would have been in their position who would have better handled the situation, and would likely have avoided the disaster. This means that by having assumed their position without having the capabilities to have such right, they effectively became accomplices in mass murder.

The question is, how could so many other nations have become aware of the terrorist attacks while the US Defense was only aware of it when it had begun? Again, if this cannot be ascribed to complete irresponsibility, then it cannot but be high-rank treason. In either case we do not want to leave society in such hands, and we must find out just who the incompetents or traitors were. At least some of them, and perhaps the most important ones, might be outside of the Bush Administration.

According to the George Washington University - PDF,

"In a series of recent public statements, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has again denied that the Clinton administration presented the incoming administration of President George W. Bush with a "comprehensive strategy" against al-Qaeda. Rice's denials were prompted by a September 22 Fox News interview with Bill Clinton in which the former president asserted that he had "left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy" with the incoming Bush administration in January 2001. In a September 25 interview, Rice told the New York Post, "We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida," adding that, "Nobody organized this country or the international community to fight the terrorist threat that was upon us until 9/11.""

"The crux of the issue is a January 25, 2001, memo on al-Qaeda (PDF) from counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, the first terrorism strategy paper of the Bush administration. The document was central to the debate over pre-9/11 Bush administration policy on terrorism and figured prominently in the 9/11 hearings held in 2004. A declassified copy of the Clarke memo was first posted on the Web by the National Security Archive in February 2005.

Clarke's memo, described below, "urgently" requested a high-level National Security Council review on al-Qaeda and included two attachments: a declassified December 2000 "Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of al-Qida: Status and Prospects" (PDF) and the September 1998 "Pol-Mil Plan for al-Qida," the so-called Delenda Plan, which remains classified."

It has been claimed by conspiracy theorists that Pakistan General Mahmud Ahmed had sent Mohammed Atta, the main hijacker, 100,000 US dollars. The only professional source I found confirming this is RINF (Jeremy R. Hammond: 911 and the Pakistan Connection), but it is not a mainstream journal.

Washington Post reports:

"On the morning of Sept. 11, Goss and Graham were having breakfast with a Pakistani general named Mahmud Ahmed -- the soon-to-be-sacked head of Pakistan's intelligence service. Ahmed ran a spy agency notoriously close to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban" (Washington Post, May 18, 2002; Richard Leiby: A Cloak But No Dagger - PDF).

Again, it could be coincidence. Or it could be that Mahmud Ahmed was in secret actually discussing the terms of to call of the mission. In that case, he might not have foreseen that the government would interpret this as an incrimination of Pakistan. However, this is speculation for speculation's sake, meant purely to open our minds to possibilities.

According to the 911 Commission Report:

"Four of the hijackers passports have survived in whole or in part. Two were recovered from the crash site of United Airlines flight 93 in Pennsylvania. These are the passports of Ziad Jarrah and Saeed al Ghamdi. One belonged to a hijacker on American Airlines flight 11. This is the passport of Satam al Suqami."

This has caused a lot of controversy, as it seems hard to believe that an explosion that weakened steel would leave a passport unscathed, but it must be noted that a passport is very light. Upon impact, light objects would have been swung back rapidly by the force of the impact to the tail. Due to the stress upon the airplane, the windows shattered, and as the air was pressed out of the airplane these light objects may then have been sucked out of the airplane, upon which the shock wave of the impact may then have blown it away rapidly. Since the shock wave preceded the explosion, the passport managed to remain unscathed. Some people might be inclined to visualize the IDs as flying out through the hole that formed in the airplane upon impact, but this is, of course, ridiculous: the hole would form at the front, where the explosion would burn the ID instantly. Neither would there be enough time for the stress on the airplane to cause a hole in the stern, although perhaps this stress might have unhinged the door or opened it.

If that is so, however, why were no other passports found? It is possible that the other passengers kept their passports in their baggage. Because the hijackers knew they would not land, they might not have had baggage with them, and in that case, they were likely carrying their IDs with them, so that the IDs were more likely to fly away, whereas the IDs in the baggage remained trapped. It is believed the hijackers used plastic box-cutters as weapons (CNN: Box cutters found on other September 11 flights), which passed through the metal detectors, and which were small enough to carry in pockets. On the other hand, carrying them in pockets would increase the chance that they were impounded if they were frisked, so that using baggage would decrease the risk of failure. Considering how well prepared the hijackers had been, it therefore seems likely that they did have baggage after all, all the more because flying without baggage is likely to arouse suspicion. On the other hand, unlike the other passengers they didn't need to worry about losing their passports anyway, so that, even if they did have baggage, they were more likely to carelessly put their IDs in an open pocket or even left it on the seat, whereas the other passengers would have been more likely to put it in their baggage to avoid losing it… As there were only 37 passengers in Flight 93, the coincidence would not be very great if none of them was so careless to put their ID in an open pocket.

Some conspiracy theorists claim that several of the hijackers are alive and well, and that the government allows them to walk free, but these actually turned out to be innocent (BBC: Hijack 'suspects' alive and well - PDF). As mentioned earlier, the FBI has made plenty of mistakes before, and it is therefore no wonder it did so again after 911. You can't just point at anything that appears inconsistent and without research use it as an argument for the most radical theories. Even supposing that several of the hijackers were alive, how would you explain this? Assuming that they were hijackers and their planes never departed, would they draw attention by proclaiming their innocence? If they weren't innocent, doing this would only lead to their arrest, and subsequent investigation would prove that they were guilty. Moreover, would a government that had supposedly killed three thousand of its own citizens spare foreign agents that might confess their involvement in a conspiracy? It would be far too dangerous, even if the agents themselves had never known who they were working for.

It is true that the FBI had been prevented from "carrying out full investigations into members of the Bin Laden family," but you might at least read the entire sentence:

"FBI and military intelligence officials in Washington say they were prevented for political reasons from carrying out full investigations into members of the Bin Laden family in the US before the terrorist attacks of September 11." (Guardian: FBI claims Bin Laden inquiry was frustrated - PDF)

The same article also says:

"High-placed intelligence sources in Washington told the Guardian this week: "There were always constraints on investigating the Saudis"."

The aforementioned "political reasons" may include the fact that the bin Laden family has close ties to the Saudi royal family:

"the Saudi royal family gave the bin Laden family--and group--exclusive rights to all construction of a religious nature, whether in Mecca, Medina or--until 1967--the Holy Places in Jerusalem." (PBS: About the Bin Laden Family)

On the other hand, "restrictions became worse after the Bush administration took over this year" (Guardian: FBI claims Bin Laden inquiry was frustrated). Why did Bush initially restrict investigations, then to fight an entire war in order to find Osama bin Laden? Obviously, this cannot be ascribed to coincidence. However, it might be that the Bush Administration foresaw that interrogations of members of the bin Laden family, who were, significantly, already living in the US, would likely be fruitless. The Bush Administration might have feared that interrogations would have provoked Osama bin Laden. Given the increase of counterterrorist exercises at those times, the government was obviously becoming anxious.

Another suspicious fact, however:

"Two months before September 11 Osama bin Laden flew to Dubai for 10 days for treatment at the American hospital, where he was visited by the local CIA agent, according to the French newspaper Le Figaro." (Guardian, Anthony Sampson: CIA agent alleged to have met Bin Laden in July - PDF)

For this, I find it very hard to find an explanation other than a conspiracy, but that does not mean that there are none. Either how, we cannot ignore this piece of information. Perhaps the government saw al Qaeda as a decentralized group over which Osama bin Laden had only relative power. Al Qaeda cannot, after all, be compared to an army, as al Qaeda is in itself comprised of free thinkers. Perhaps they saw Osama bin Laden as little more than a figurehead, and thought that arresting Osama bin Laden would only provoke al Qaeda, and another leader would rise to lead it. Until 911, Osama bin Laden as a leader did not appear as dangerous. After the attacks, he appeared to be far more than an average terrorist leader. Of course, it might also be that no CIA agent ever met bin Laden, or it might also be that there was indeed a conspiracy.

Or, it might even have been a case of nepotism. George W. Bush allegedly had a business relation with Osama bin Laden since the 1970s (CBC: Conspiracy or Coincidence? - PDF [source professional but not objective]). Perhaps, at that time, he didn't yet have the heart to bring him to justice. Ironically, one can easily be both a mass murderer and sentimental if one is unintelligent, as one then lacks the imagination to sympathize with those people that make up those mere statistics.

According to the FBI, the airplane that struck the pentagon was piloted by Hani Hanjour. Considering how low the Pentagon is compared to the WTC towers, this requires considerable piloting skill. However,

"Ms. Ladner [the vice president at the Pan Am International Flight Academy] said the Phoenix staff […] feared that his skills were so weak that he could pose a safety hazard if he flew a commercial airliner."

A former employee said,

''He didn't care about the fact that he couldn't get through the course,'' the ex-employee said. […] ''I'm still to this day amazed that he could have flown into the Pentagon." […] "He could not fly at all.'' (New York Times, Jim Yardley: A Trainee Noted for Incompetence - PDF)

We've already seen, however, that the FBI has already accused innocents before. It is therefore not unthinkable that Hani Hanjour is another innocent incorrectly accused of being a hijacker. If so, it may be asked why Hani Hanjour did not react to this. However, considering that few people know the names of the hijackers, it is not impossible Hani Hanjour is even be aware that he was accused. If someone he knew did remember the name, they might have shrugged it off as coincidence and thought that he was a namesake, or they might have thought they remembered incorrectly. If they did mention it, then Hani Hanjour might have shrugged it of as a joke.

The question is why the FBI accused so many people who were evidently innocent, as we have seen. Even when considering the incompetence of the FBI, it is difficult to swallow that they were mistaken. What is already clear is that the FBI did not care to verify whether the suspects were alive. This shows that the FBI is not only incompetent but also indolent. Perhaps, then, they did not even have suspects at all. Perhaps their so-called suspects were merely substitutes for real suspects. Perhaps the FBI found no way of finding out who the hijackers were, except for the few whose passports were found, and so simply invented suspects, picking out random Arab pilots. This might have been meant either to gain the population's trust or to prevent anyone from trying to find out who the real hijackers were. The latter possibility points at a conspiracy. Of course, there are probably other possibilities that I did not think of, or perhaps it really was incompetence — but if it was incompetence, it is of a singular kind.

As on 911, on 7 July 2005, there were apparently real-time exercises:

"At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now" (Nicholas Glass: Coincidence of bomb exercises? - PDF; BoingBoing, Mark Frauenfelder: London bombings coincide with security exercise; Live ITV News; BBC Radio - Drills Ran on Day of London Bombings).

However, all sources mentioning this exercise are based on Peter Power's testimony, which may or may not be truthful. It is possible that, with the best intentions, Power lied about the exercise in order to support conspiracy theories, hoping to get people to think about what he perceived as the truth. He never mentions the firm for which the exercise was conducted, and is evasive about other details concerning the exercise as well, which raises questions about whether his claims could be a hoax. He claimed that the exercise was coincidence, but might not have meant this. If what he says would prove to be true, then it would give the coup the grace to any doubt that 7 July 2005 was a conspiracy. Unlike in the other exercises, the coincidence is far too great: the actual attack took place not only at the same time, but also at the same place.

Everything said, we must admit that we can as yet not know just what, if anything, has been going on. We must keep an open mind. Conspiracies have happened before, including in the US. If 911 was a conspiracy, then it would be very similar to the CIA's 1962 plans for Operation Northwood. MK-ULTRA was a conspiracy meant to research mind control, and effectively involved holding hostages and the nonconsensual administration of high dosages of LSD. Any LSD user who has gone through a "bad trip" will attest that it can be by far the most painful experience of one's entire life, yet when an LSD user undergoes a bad trip, they do so of their own will. When one undergoes a bad trip from a carelessly administered dosage when one is unaware of what is happening and one is being held hostage in an unknown environment by people who are effectively criminals, the experience can be said to be worse than any way humans have ever depicted or imagined hell. This is an extremely severe form of mental torture, and the victims were not only innocent, but also unsuspected. Considering that the government is capable of such unspeakably cruel deeds, is it really so hard to imagine that it is possible for it to have been responsible for 911?

Furthermore, when we consider the torture of innocents in Guantanamo and the genocides in the Middle-East, how can we think the Bush Administration would be above a 911 conspiracy? Whether the Bush Administration did conduct such conspiracy or not, they could have done it, and the reason we should doubt a conspiracy is not their humanity, but the lack of evidence. There are, however, enough indications for us to think seriously about seeking for evidence.

Everything considered, it seems that a lot of things points at a conspiracy, but this is not enough. Indications can be deceptive. No matter how many indications there are, there is no way this adds up to actual evidence. Schizophrenics are very good at finding indications confirming their delusions, but this does not make them any more true. If you'd seek long enough, you could find indications confirming anything one could come up with.

There's no way you can calculate the probability of several coincidences happening at once, because we can't calculate the probability of a single coincidence at all. There are literally an infinite number of factors we'd need to take into account to calculate the probability of a coincidence. Even in statistics, we have to start out with a known probability before we can use those probabilities in further calculations. We can know those probabilities, usually, through observation. The problem with history that there's no way to experiment with it, as one would with chemistry. There's no way to go back in time and repeat to see how often the coincidences would happen again. Without a way of observing the probabilities and without a way to calculate them, we're left with our guesses.

The only way we can estimate the probabilities is through intuition, and this is a very limited method. Worse, it is subject to emotion, meaning that our intuition will basically estimate probabilities however we want. The control of emotion over our thoughts is the origin of all bias, and to be able to objectively estimate a probability through intuition, we must detach our emotion from our intuition.

We need to separate what we want to see from what we really see. As one of the few who has managed to do this, I can say that my intuition does not tell me that the conspiracy theories are true or false, but that they could very well be either — but if you want an objective estimation you can trust, you'll have to separate your own emotion from your intuition. Even so, it's only an estimation.

We need more evidence. Not more indications, but actual evidence. Unfortunately, to find evidence we need investigation, and for investigation we need credibility. For credibility, it seems, we need evidence.

Unfortunately, people will either deny the possibility that there was something more behind these coincidences or deny the possibility that there isn't, and it is the former who are in control.

As long as people are so narrow-minded, we'll never get anywhere. So what can we do? The only thing that we can do to open others' minds is to open our own minds. The narrow-mindedness of others is partly the result of the narrow-mindedness of the people opposed to them. By opening our own minds, we serve as an intermediary between closed minds.

Whatever you may believe after reading this article, I want to stress that things are often not as they seem. Arguments may be very convincing until one knows counterarguments to them, and questions may seem all the more baffling until one has answers to them. We are predisposed to incline towards extremes, and assume an attitude that is either skeptic or fantastic. When we become even slightly charged we will gravitate towards either of two magnetic poles. Let us try and remain electrically neutral.

Precisely because of this electromagnetic attraction, the truth usually lies somewhere in between. We've already shown that at least some of the claims by conspiracy theorists are unsupportable, while it also seems clear that at least "something" was wrong. That something might just be that for all the hundreds of billions that are pumped into it, American defense is, or at least was, a thoroughly inadequate organization — or it might be something worse. Whatever it is, we should stay open to all possibilities, including conspiracy theories.

Consider that either how we are dealing with a conspiracy, and the question is but whether the conspiracy was one of al Qaeda or of the US Government. One might even go further and consider the possibility that some conspiracy theories are themselves meant as a conspiracy against the US Government. Many conspiracy theorists seem to put forward conspiracy theorists not because they think they are true, but rather because they want them to be true.

The conspiracy theories about 911 spread even faster than public knowledge about the strange coincidences, and the conspiracy theorists jumped on any slightest hint that they could get their hands on. Why? Have people just become too addicted to movies? Or is there more behind this, and have people lost all trust in the government?

There appears to be an urge in many, and in some almost a compulsion, to seek for something extremely dramatic, as if these people are waiting for something to change. Perhaps it is the boredom of many people's lives that drives them to such patterns of thoughts. Beside the dystopias and apocalypses and horror stories which are so popular in our culture, perhaps conspiracy theories are just another manifestation of that boredom. Underneath the routine, perhaps many people are secretly so tired of the system according to which they are forced to live their lives that they hope to see it collapse, and in hoping to see it collapse they might even try to contribute to that collapse — for instance, through conspiracy theories. This says nothing about the conspiracy theories themselves, it does explain why many people are so biassed towards conspiracy theories.

Do not do anything just for how it feels now and do not do anything just for how it will feel later, but try always to do something for both, for the two amplify one another. Your current feeling will help you to achieve something in future, and the future achievements that your current feeling will help you achieve will also help you to more deeply enjoy your current feeling.

Future and present must be connected into something that is both creative and enjoyable, for in the end, what is creative will be most enjoyable and what is enjoyable will be most creative. Seek not for something that creates only in the future and seek neither for anything that creates only in the present, but seek for something that creates in both, for only then can great creation truly be achieved.

We must feel our goals and let our goal be to feel. But if we only feel without regard for our goals, then we will end up feeling nothing; but likewise if we pursue our goals without feeling, we will not achieve our goals — for the two need one another. We need to know the goals of our feelings and the feeling that fuels our goals.

We must walk in balance between future and present, for if we live only for the present, the present will turn to nothing, and if we live only for the future, the future will never come, for the future is but what is to become the present, and the present is to make place for the future.

This balance is achieved through creativity, and this balance itself is creativity. For we cannot be express without feeling, and neither can we contain feeling without expressing it. Thus, throughout our lives we should seek to be truly creative, and we will automatically find balance.

Let our pleasures be purposeful and our purpose we our pleasure. The two will be joined through dreams. The pleasure of what we already have will make us dream of the pleasure of what more we could have, and in the dreams of our purpose we will feel that pleasure even here and now.

Thus can there be present and future, and future will flow from present and present from future. Thus can we evolve and yet live, and evolve not through extinction but evolve through life itself.

We must love each other and hate each other, we must love ourselves and hate ourselves, we must love life and hate life. Hate is just another form of love. Hate is the love of destruction. Destruction is the creation of emptiness, and emptiness offers the potential of creation. Thus hatred may in the end also create, as long as that hatred is not excessive. Thus, to create we need a balance of hate and love: hate, to create space, and love, to create something in that space.

Hate only becomes destructive when it is in excess, but so does love. Hate in excess turns to cruelty, love in excess turns to greed. These excesses come into being through ignorance. We should not avoid hate, then, but ignorance.

We must love our hate as well as our love. Every emotion has its function, because it would otherwise not exist. Our emotions should merely be in balance, and be there at the right time in the right proportions.

We need to hate the greed. We need to hate the cruelty. We need to hate the ignorance. We must hate out of love and love out of hate. Hate and love are but yin and yang. Hate is the love of creating emptiness, while love usually means the love of creating fullness. Neither is just yin or yang, however, as anything that is complex will be both yin and yang at the same time: hate may be yin in that it creates emptiness and love yang in that it creates fullness, but, on the other hand, hate is yang in that it is powerful while love is yin in that it is gentle.

Hate and love are not opposites; rather, they are antipodal. They do not exclude one another, but on the contrary, as yin and yang usually do, they amplify one another. If one loves, then one will hate whatever threatens that which one loves. If one hates, one will love whatever threatens what one hates.

If you have no hate, then you have no true love. If you have no love, you have no hate.

We condemn hate as the enemy of love, yet we also condemn love as the enemy of hate. This shows that we are out of balance, and that we have too little hate in order to truly love, and even too little love to truly hate, to truly love destruction or creation. If we had more hate, then there would come an end to the greed, and if we had more love, there would come an end to the cruelty. We must hate the oppressors and love those we would oppress.

We condemn the love of our enemies fearing that we would no longer hate them if we loved them, and we condemn the hate of our friends fearing that we would no longer love them; and I tell you that we must love and hate friends and enemies alike. We must hate them to cure them of their weaknesses, and we must love them to cherish their beauty.

We must hate that which destroys and love that which creates. But, as I have said, destruction creates space, and, on the other hand, creation destroys space, so that we must also love the space-creation of that which destroys, and we must hate the space-destruction of that which creates. We must seek to create while destroying as little as possible for that which we create, and we must seek to destroy without actually destroying.

There are two kinds of creation and two kinds of destruction, and sadly we make too little distinction between them and use the same word for them. There is the creation of poison and there is the creation of beauty. There is the destruction of poison and there is the destruction of beauty.

Yet we rarely see this distinction, and so see all destruction as the destruction of beauty, and all creation as the creation of beauty. We focus too much on the positive and to little on the negative, and this is why we have become so excessive in creating as much as possible no matter the cost.

We may destroy to cure or destroy to damage, and we may create to infect or we may create to grow.

In response to American health care reforms, some have called universal health care fascist. To this I would like to say that Nazi Germany gassed hundreds of thousands of its incurably sick as part of its eugenics program, and there is therefore a certain irony in the comparison. More so, if we leave incurably sick people to their fate, we're even worse in this regard than Nazis. It's even more merciful to gas the sick than to let part of them die a slow and painful death. The only thing that makes it seem less cruel to leave them to die than to kill them is that the effect is more subtle, but even though it's not as obvious it comes down to the same thing. The only difference with Nazi Germany, then, is that while Nazi Germany actively killed many of its sick to save state money, Americans passively kill many of their sick to save their own, individual money. Perhaps, then, even for all its evil, even Nazi Germany was in this effect still nobler than America, and wasn't at least so hypocrite as to hide its intents.

For Nazi Germany, it was wrong-headed idealism. For America, it is simply greed, and what is worse is that unlike the Nazis, they aren't even aware of the effects of that greed, because rather than bringing people to death, people are simply left to die — a very small percentage, perhaps, but in a country of 300 million that is something, and over the years this adds up.

Is it that much better to be ignorant than to be deluded? Is it so much better to be indifferent than to be cruel? At least Nazi Germany did not deny that it killed people to save money. But no matter how you represent it, America is in effect killing many of its citizens to save money, and as in Nazi Germany, thousands of people die because of it over the years. The only difference is that Nazi Germany had them killed to save money, while Americans kill them BY saving money.

Unfortunately, it is easy to look the other way and not even pretend that there is a problem, as charity care exists — but it is not always available (Goliath: Health and Social Work, Elisabeth Benjamin et al: THE CASE FOR REFORM, p 32), and, when it is not, medical care may not be found, or when it can be found, it may not be sought because it is too expensive. People rarely know how serious their illness is, and they are even less likely to know when they are about to die from it, all the more because people are often in denial when they are dying.

Consider, furthermore, that the leading cause of death in the US is heart disease, killing 630,000 annually. (Centers for Disease Control and prevention: Deaths and Mortality) Of these, 500,000 people die of a heart attack. Most people who have a heart attack are initially in denial that they may be dying, because they cannot process the shock of the possibility that they are dying. Because of this, the average person who gets a heart attack only gets at the hospital after five hours, so that 300,000 people die of a heart attack before they reach the hospital.(Robert D. Lee: Down but Not Out). Considering that they usually do not know they are dying, the destitute might hesitate even longer before seeing a doctor or not even a see a doctor at all, or they might not even be able to get immediate attention at all. It might be thought that poor people, having less fat, are unlikely to get heart attacks, but this is simplistic. Moreover, due to malnourishment and insufficient vitamin B intake, they might suffer from hyperhomocysteinemia, which is another risk factor.

There is an even more important reason, however, why universal health care can save lives. Usually, once someone knows their illness is deadly if untreated, they are likely to get treated eventually, no matter the price. Usually — but what if the illness is not physical, but mental, and if the illness is deadly because the person may die by their own hand?

33.000 people in the US die from suicide, 60% of which suffer from major clinical depression (American Foundation for Suicide Prevention). Thus, nearly 20.000 depressive people die every year because of suicide. 90% of depressions are said to be treatable (Citrome L: Management of depression), so why would these people be less likely to search help?

There are several reasons for this: they might not have the energy to get help, they might not have the hope they'll ever get better, they might not have the courage to face their problems, they might not have the trust to talk about their problems, they might be afraid they won't stay themselves, they might not want to feel better, or they might think the world isn't living in anyway.

Yet all these are but subsidiary reasons in the long run. Clinical depression has been described by many as the most painful experiences of their lives, and, eventually, no matter how hard it is, one will seek treatment if one can, as treatment will never be as hard as going through depression itself.

There are, however, three important financial reasons why people who are clinically depressed don't get help.

One is that people who are depressed are likely to become unemployed. Due to low energy levels, they are likely either to be dismissed or to be forced to resign. Once unemployed, they are unlikely to get far in a job application until cured, as it is very hard to hide depression.

Another reason is that the time it takes to recover from clinical depression or other mental illnesses is unforeseeable, and it usually takes far longer than the recovery from other diseases, sometimes up to several decades. Even with medication, it can take many years. Treatment for depression may cost thousands of dollars, and depression itself may cost more than $13,500 in America (National Alliance on Mental Illness). For other mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, this is even higher.

It must be noted that, due to the anxiety of depression, this financial pressure feels even greater to depressed people than it would be to other people, and they might feel so hopeless that they might not see a way out of their financial difficulties, but envision themselves in complete destitution. This financial pressure is certain to significantly aggravate depression.

As a side note, because of the high financial pressure, depressive people will often be forced to take medication to recover more quickly, whereas psychotherapy would have sufficed if given more time. Because medication does not resolve the underlying issues of depression, which are often psychological or environmental in nature, the patient will then often be forced to continue using this medication for the rest of their lives, or, at least, until retirement. Medication for psychological depression will also suppress the functions that this form of depression may have, which may be to inspire change in one's life, cause personal growth, gain philosophical, psychological or introspective insights, or generally cause expansion of consciousness.

The most important reason why depressive people are unlikely to seek help, however, is guilt. Depression often causes people to believe they are worthless, and in this belief they might think they do not deserve treatment. Depressive people often feel guilty for what they cost their family, and may even commit suicide partly to save their family money. Their belief in their own worthlessness may be so great that they come to think they are of absolutely no value to their family whatsoever, upon which they may come to view suicide as a means to rid their family of an unwanted burden. They would not have to feel such a burden to their family if there were universal health care, and so the motivation to suicide would not be as great.

The lifetime prevalence of depression in the United States is 17% (Maria A. Oquendo et al.: Ethnic and Sex Differences in Suicide Rates Relative to Major Depression in the United States) (2 to 9% of which people eventually commits suicide. (John Michael Bostwick: Suicide Rates Overstated in People with Depression)). Considering that mental illness decreases functionality and health care accelerates recovery, then health care would increase the population's total functionality, so that it would make sense even economically to introduce universal health care, at least for mental illness.

It makes no sense, moreover, to make those who cannot afford an insurance pay more for illness. It is another matter for possessions: when one possesses something it is natural that one has to pay either way to maintain it, and this is only necessary if one is to keep that possession; one can always forego it one's possessions if one does not wish to pay for its maintenance. But one can't forego one's body or mind. From illness, there is no choice but to recover, or it would be death. This forces one to pay for illness either how, but the poor, who can least afford it, will be the ones who most need it, while the wealthy, who can afford the highest insurances, will less need it. Yet, since everyone gets ill sooner or later, this means that the poor will be more financially drained by illness, even more so because poor people get ill more often. This means that health insurances increase the divide between rich and poor, which is not only immoral, but also uneconomical in the long run, since both the very rich and the very poor function less by average: the very poor are less likely to get accepted for employment, and the very rich are less likely to still need to work at all. Universal health care, by increasing equality, might therefore increase the nation's total productivity.

Of course, the most important reason remains that universal health care saves lives, by ensuring treatment both of mental illness and of physical illness. If affordable health care is not available, many people will either postpone searching treatment or hope that they will recover spontaneously, and, not being doctors, it is inevitable that, sooner or later, they will underestimate an illness, sometimes with fatal consequences.

I do not believe that it one is not to feel guilty for not helping others, as one were then to feel guilty every moment of one's life for all the people one could have helped, and such guilt does not achieve anything. It is, however, quite another thing if one tries to stop others from helping people. Then, I think, a little guilt would not be out of place. To keep others from saving lives is nothing short of murder.

Under Action T4, 275,000 were killed in a timespan of five and a half years, or 50,000 per year. 2,400,000 people die in the US every year. If 2% of those could have been saved by better health care, then the Americans' indifference is already doing just as good a job as T4 Action every year. This percentage may or may not be close to being as high, but even if it is a small fraction of this, it will cause more deaths than T4 Action over the long run. T4 Action lasted only for five years. But this indifference has always been there. Perhaps indifference is far, far more dangerous than cruelty.

But how insidious is this subtlety, for while it is not at all evident, the result remains the same, though no one might ever even realize as yet another destitute person dies of disease why it was that they had died. They had died of disease, of course. But if charity care had been more available, would they not have been treated and likely cured?

Socialism and fascism may have the common goal of serving the group, but fascism considers the group as an entity in itself whereas socialism considers it a group of individuals. Hitler believed the health of the nation is all that matters, and the sick, if incurable, are as germs of the nation itself. If the average American believes that their own wealth is all that matters, and the sick are but as germs of their own finance to them, than they are below even Hitler.

How low have we fallen? Are we becoming so ignorant that we no longer even know when we are murderers? The murder has never ceased since older times. It has simply become subtler, and all the worse because of it. Now, we try to kill by keeping others from saving lives. But what does it matters that health care could save lives, and that, by paying your taxes, you might be saving someone's life?

Go ahead, then, and march on. Be sure to write "REVISIT T4 ACTION" on your next sign. Perhaps Hitler is not the man you would compare with Obama. Perhaps Hitler is your hero. He would make short work of a good deal of the sick that steal your money. But don't worry, you can still use your pictures of Hitler to actually support him in your next protest.

Socialism remains a primitive system, but to some extent, it is necessary because we have nothing better, and as long as our species does not learn to become compassionate, this control will be necessary, and we will be its slaves through necessity. It would be better if all health care, and indeed all social care, was supported by the people out of free will, but until then, until our minds have undergone such change, this force is, alas, necessary. Either how, America may apparently still have an even longer way to go in this evolution than most countries.

"Like a boil is the evil deed: it itcheth and irritateth and breaketh forth — it speaketh honourably.

'Behold, I am disease,' saith the evil deed: that is its honourableness.

But like infection is the petty thought; it creepeth, and hideth, and wanteth to be nowhere — until the whole body is decayed and withered by the petty infection."

— Also Sprach Zarathustra

"60,000 Reichsmarks is what this hereditarily ill person costs the community during his lifetime. Compatriot, that is your money too."

Ethics is a matter entirely of psychology. There is no "right" and "wrong," only creative and destructive; and, if anything, this is the only thing that good and bad should be taken to mean. This does not mean that there is no sense to guilt or pride, as guilt may in itself be creative if the guilt is at a destructive action, while pride may in itself be creative if it is at a creative action.

There are, after all, reasons why we have these emotions, but that is all they is, emotions. Emotions are in themselves never true. Someone is never inherently good or bad, worth of praise or worth of blame blameworthy or praiseworthy. Emotions are relative, never absolute. The question is but if that emotion creates beauty.

Emotions have value not for their truth, for this truth is subjective, as opposed to the truth of thoughts which may also be objective. Emotions have value for two reasons: one is their experiential value, here and now. The other is their functional value.

Usually, though not always, guilt due to a destructive action will creative, as will pride of a creative action, unless the guilt or pride is too great too bear, and will lead into delusion or despair. However, guilt at the lack of a creative action is far less often creative, because it may turn creation into a craving, a craving that, if not satisfied, will in itself become destructive. As there are an infinite number of actions that we could do but will not do, being guilty too much of what we have not done or will not or cannot do may become unbearable. Pride at the lack of a destructive action is more often creative, for instance when one is trying to stop  an addiction.

In any case, pride and guilt must always be in balance, but note in this that either pride or guilt may be at either a real or imaginary action. One may feel anticipative pride at the thought of doing something positive or feel precautionary guilt at the thought of doing something negative. Both are often encountered in dreams or daydreams. Dreams of absent-minded transgression, in which one dreams of relapsing into addiction, have been shown to have a positive effect on the outcome of recovery. Of course, ambitious dreams likewise have a positive effect on the outcome of the pursuit of one's goals.

Because of their fantastic nature, folklores are often dismissed as purely fanciful inventions, but it is rare for these to be entirely invented; they are usually either intuitive interpretations or representations, often metaphorical, of real events or phenomena. It may be interesting to investigate the kernel of truth behind them, as this may give us insight both into the real events behind the myths and into the mindset of the times in which they were told. What folklores tell about ancient times more than anything is that people thought in a very intuitive way back then, which is so starkly opposed to the analytical mindset of our times that we rarely see the line of thinking behind folklore, so that we tend to assume that there is none. As with folklores, there was usually a line of thinking beyond protosciences, even though it was usually wrong. Unfortunately, while intuition may be helpful in its creative aspects, it is unlikely to be of any use in the actual validation of something as logical as science.

One of the cornerstones of medieval and ancient medicine is the four bodily fluids, which were propounded by Hippocrates. According to Hippocrates, black bile was associated with a melancholy temperament, yellow bile with a choleric temperament, mucus with a phlegmatic temperament, and blood with a sanguine temperament. The names of these temperaments derive from the bodily fluid themselves, and even the word "humor" means bodily fluid. Hippocrates believed that if the humors were out of balance, illness resulted. Because blood is the most abundant fluid in the body, it was assumed that it was the most likely to be in excess, and so many illnesses were for a long time treated by bloodletting.

This is, of course, nonsense, and to modern doctors, this theory might seem so asinine that they are likely to assume they were entirely without basis, but although scientific method did not exist in this time, this does not mean that there were no other methods by which the healers of that time came to their conclusions. Since Hippocrates did not believe his theory had been an epiphany from a god, there must have been some reason involved.

Let us suppose, then, that rather than that he made up his theory out of thin air, there was a logic, albeit false, why Hippocrates believed in his theory of the four bodily humors, and in attempting to understand Hippocrates' reasoning investigate each of the bodily humors. First of all, let us investigate the biles, melancholy and choler.

Due to its role in breathing, the diaphragm is a place were tensions are likely to build up in case of stress. The diaphragm may then cause pressure on the liver and stomach, causing psychosomatic pain. The stomach, which is a cavity, will not undergo much stress from this pressure, but the spleen and liver are more vulnerable — especially the liver, as the spleen may partly subside into the stomach. This may explain why folklore associates spleen with anger, and why Hippocrates associated the biles with stress, as in the form of of anger or sadness, as bile is produced in the liver.

Also, alcohol abuse may cause aggression, and of course, alcohol abuse may lead to liver failure or decreased liver function, which may in turn cause a yellow complexion of the skin. It is possible that Hippocrates saw this as a sign that the yellow bile was spreading through the body, causing aggression. Liver pain may have confirmed this assumption.

Pressure may or may not have an effect on bile production, but either how, this might be the reason why Hippocrates made this association: if a patient complained about pain in the liver, and found that people who had these pains were often melancholy or choleric, he may have associated this with an excess of bile production. Since bile is very acidic and tastes very bitter when vomited, he may have thought an excess of bile could be the cause of liver pain.

Also, yellow vomit suggests the presence of bile (perhaps hence the term "yellow bile"). Vomiting of bile occurs when the pyloric valve is opened, which is usually when the stomach is empty (Health24: Nausea and Vomiting). As the function of vomiting is usually to empty the stomach, the vomiting of bile may be more often psychosomatic than normal vomiting, and therefore, may be caused by stress, for instance, in the form of anger, which may be caused by agitation.

Anxiety may also increase the chance of developing peptic ulcers (MedIndia: Anxiety and Peptic Ulcers may be Linked; Springer Link: Personality traits and gastric acid secretion in ulcer disease) (PubMed: Psychologic predictors of duodenal ulcer healing.) When a peptic ulcer in the stomach bursts, the result may be dark-red vomit. If the blood has been present in the stomach long enough to be partly digested by the gastric acids, the vomit will be black. Hippocrates may have confused this with bile, and called it "black bile."

Asthmatic people, who build up a lot of phlegm, cannot engage in a lot of physical activity, so that, in ancient times, they were forced to live a calm, stolid life. Hippocrates may therefore have been perceived asthmatics as "phlegmatic." Moreover, physical inactivity, may cause a buildup of mucus: during physical activity, mucus is cleared from the nasal cavity through breathing, both because of its pressure and its humidity, and because of the humidity of breath, mucus remains more fluid in case of more rapid breathing, as in activity or, also, excitement.

Again, as with the other bodily humors, phlegm may be emitted through the mouth, this time through expectoration. This is apparently important, as Hippocrates seemed to consider only the fluids emitted through the mouth in his theory of bodily humors. He did not, for instance, take into account tears, urine, or sweat.

Finally, we have come to the last bodily humor, and here there might actually be a significant kernel of truth. For once, Hippocrates might have been right.

Blood was said to be related to cheerfulness. Of course, the logical explanation for this is that cheerfulness may cause a ruddy complexion, and considering that the Greeks had little shame compared to the neurotics of our own society, blushing in the Greek era was most likely associated primarily or entirely with romantic or erotic feelings. This appears to be at least partly because dopamine, a molecule which is primary in enjoyment, increases blood flow (Informa Healthcare: Subcutaneous and muscle blood flow during dopamine infusion in man).

Strangely, there are actually real and relevant correlations between cheerfulness and blood. The relation between dopamine and blood flow is, of course, obvious. But there is actually evidence that cheerfulness may increase the production of blood as well.

For one thing, dopamine increases human growth hormone, (NeuroScience: Neurotransmitters and Hormones) and human growth hormone in turn increases the production of red blood cells (Science Magazine: Human growth hormone increases the production of red blood cells).

Moreover, testosterone increases dopamine (Biopsychiatry: Hormone-neurotransmitter interactions in the control of sexual behavior) and reportedly the opposite is also true (though this could not be confirmed). Testosterone increases red blood cell production (Encyclopedia Britannica: Facts about testosterone: red cell production), so that dopamine and red blood cell production are further linked indirectly, and possibly indirectly.

Thus, it is clear that cheerfulness may indeed be associated with an increase of blood, though this increase is not, as thought by Hippocrates, excessive. Nonetheless, it remains remarkable, perhaps, that Hippocrates was able to fathom this association through pure intuition. This may be coincidence, but it may also be that holistic thinking may sometimes intuitively perceive patterns that are too subtle for logic to see. In any case, of course, it is important, as Hippocrates and many other protosciences show, that intuition must always be verified by analysis before they are accepted to be true.

I believe this is just one of a number of hypotheses in protoscience that may actually have been true. For instance, alchemists believed that they could transmute one substance in another, and for many years sought to turn lead into gold. Centuries after these hypotheses were made, Soddy discovered radium were there was supposed to be thorium, and shouted out at his colleague Rutherford, "Rutherford, this is transmutation!" Rutherford, understanding that science was no longer as imaginative as protoscience had once been, replied "For Christ's sake, Soddy, don't call it transmutation. They'll have our heads off as alchemists." At another time, he had said about nuclear fission, "The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine."

The story of transmutation hadn't ended yet. In 1972, Soviet scientists discovered a way of actually turning lead into gold in a nuclear reactor. (Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D: Turning Lead into Gold — Is Alchemy Real?) The process costed far more than it yielded, but what had once been considered a fantasy had been proven to be possible.

Such truths in protoscience remain, of course, at least relatively rare, but they tell us something. Protoscience does not necessarily show that intuition is a wrong method. It merely means that it is insufficient, and that we need both intuition and logic in order to find the truth. We need intuition in order to think of possibilities, and reason to confirm those theories. In the past, we too often took possibilities as certainties. Although we still make this mistake now, another mistake we now also make far  too often is to take certain hypotheses as impossible. The protoscientific hypotheses that have been made in the past and later to be rejected by science, then eventually to be found true, shows that, while our intuition is often wrong, it is also sometimes correct. Since we have no better means of thinking of possibilities before we confirm them, we have to be patient with our intuition despite the errors it makes. While we need reason to find the truth, we also need imagination.

In fact, it may well be that intuition lies at the basis of every hypothesis, and that a hypothesis turns into a theory when it is combined with logic. Logic may verify hypotheses, but, on the other hand, it cannot think them up. In the past, we have used too much intuition but too little logic, but perhaps today, it is the other way around, and in our fear to make mistakes as our ancestors have done, scientists are now afraid to make mistakes, and seek to separate themselves as much as possible from protoscientists by concentrating almost entirely on logic. This ensures that we make less mistakes, but also that we .

In order to make another quantum leap, we need to be courageous in the face of failure, even humiliation, and dare to fail, dare to make mistakes, as long as we also always take into account that we can always be mistaken. We must not make the mistake of our ancestors to take the truth of our ideas for granted and think we can never be mistaken, and must retain our scrupulousness in trying to confirm the accuracy of our ideas with as much certainty as possible, but that scrupulousness alone is not enough if we are to progress. Perhaps, whereas our mistake in the past was to get carried away by flights of fancy, our mistake now is that we longer dare to imagine.

We must have the courage to take the chance of erring, and the humility to recognize that the chance of erring is always there. By combining Socratic uncertainty with imagination, we can truly open our minds.

In politics, control is regarded a means to further welfare. Since politics is a system of control, politicians, who take part in this system, will do so to have control for themselves, often so that they can use that control to help people. But because they need that control to be able to people, politicians may often, with the best intentions, for some time put control before welfare, so that they, or others in their place, may later use that control to bring welfare to the people.

Because control enables them to help people, politicians will often equate control with welfare, and so the two, to them, seem interchangeable. Control is a currency for welfare to them, meaning that welfare may also be traded back for control. Control brings order. Welfare may be more than order, yet the primary concern of the government remains not the welfare of the population, but its control.

It is for no one in particular that they seek this control except for the people themselves. There are no emperors, no vassals, and, presumably, no conspirators. This morbid need to control appears simply to be a disease of our time, not only of politicians, but of all of us. We want full control over everything in our lives. We live in a system of control, a system that is literally made up entirely out of control, and those who get highest in this system of control are those that most crave for control, while the most moderate people likely end up, for the most part, in the margins of society.

Perhaps this need for control is also so much greater in politicians because they are afraid of their own responsibility, afraid that if they will fail to keep control, they will fail in their responsibility. Their responsibility, after all, comes down to controlling a nation. Losing control is therefore tantamount to defeat. The worst-case scenario of failure is anarchy, and unlikely as this scenario is, it can still seem daunting to those who stand before the task of ruling an entire nation, because, while it is not likely to happen, if it happens, it is not only disastrous for the nation, but also the worst kind of humiliation that they can imagine, and since they became politicians to make a difference to people, honor is important to them. Wanting to make a difference, they want to exert their power as much as they can to further control, and so help increase welfare.

It simply never occurs to them, even to many tyrants, that they might be trying too hard to help people, and that they cannot decide for millions of people at once what is best for them without even knowing them. Only the individual knows what is best for themselves, as only they can feel what they need. But that is why the individual should not feel. Should the individual feel, they might start having needs of their own, and those might not match with those society wants them to have. Feelings cannot be controlled. They cause people to think, and, if the feelings become strong enough, they cause them to rebel. Thus, it is important that people do not feel.

The most emotional period of the twentieth century might have except for the World Wars might have been the sixties. Unfortunately, people that have so long been stuck in an unfeeling society for so long will be unlikely to have any understanding emotion, so that the only way we can feel at all is, as we always have, through excess.

That part of society started to feel was a move back from the excess of light (yang, materialism) and closer towards darkness (yin, emotion), but those people were still afraid of darkness, and so, even their emotion was still, in a sense, materialistic, that is, hedonistic, and still excessively so. People were still, out of habit, afraid of introspection, and this fear only increased as they were confronted with increased emotionality, so that they sought comfort in an increase pleasure-seeking activities. In order not to need to turn inwards despite their increased emotionality, they compensated their sudden increase of emotion with an excessive increase of materialism. The balance between darkness and light was not yet restored: darkness had increased, but because of the fear of darkness, this was compensated with an excessive increase of light. Excessive drugs, sex, and so forth were the result. Society was having a manic episode.

In this way, those people that started to feel might have revived some of the emotion in our society, but it was not of a kind that was meant to last. The emotion that sparked in our world became an excess, and this may only have fueled further excesses of materialism later on. We have lived for so long in excesses that we have no inkling of balance.

Our world is still characterized by the luridness of that time, perhaps in part because of this. But at the same time, it is now also, because of this, characterized by an increase of emotion. Were it not for the upheaval of our time, we might now live in a world that is more grayscale, for better or for worse.

But at that time, the emotion was too strong. It could not be contained. The world was undergoing various revolutions — social revolutions, sexual revolutions, cultural revolutions, feminist revolutions, colonial revolutions. People were protesting by the thousands for various reasons, including the Vietnam War. Youth culture revolted dramatically and cried out for liberation from norms and materialism. In a system which strives on control and greed, this was not appreciated.

Politicians saw as well as the rest of society the danger the counterculture posed to their culture. This upheaval could no longer be dismissed as the regular childish rebellion of adolescents. This was a war, a revolution, and one all the more dangerous because it was peaceful. If they put attacked, the government could easily quell them. But this was a revolution of a movement that did not believe in violence. The rebels could keep on spreading its beliefs and growing as it did, and there was nothing they could do about it. The counterculture was starting to assimilate the youth, and because of the solidarity seen in this age group, the situation was spinning out of control. One day, this generation might in turn spread their beliefs onto the next, and the counterculture would sustain itself as younger children grew older and part of them joined in the prevailing attitude. Gradually, it would spread to older age groups, until the counterculture would comprise a major part of the population. Once that would happen, society would lose control over itself, and this revolution could not be contained any longer.

That this revolution was one without violence made it one of relative subtlety, which made it all the more sustainable because of this, but it was not enough. It remained a revolution rather than an evolution and thus an open challenge of the system. It was therefore inevitable that, as it would meet resistance from society, society would react. But society was still stronger.

In the absence of violence there was no way they could fight back, and even the education of that time failed to keep control of their minds. Something broke every restraint society was used to keeping on its population. But on this one thing the entire movement depended. It was this that was their weakness.

From its very inception, the counterculture had entirely depended on — and would not have taken place in the first place were it not for — psychedelics. At this time, these substances were the subject of extensive scientific research, and what the scientists discovered was that these substances had psychotherapeutic value. When this knowledge spread among the population, curiosity into these substances grew, and before long psychedelics became widespread in society.

It might seem strange that something so simple caused such global upheaval, but psychoactives can have a dramatic effect on personality, and therefore, if it is used by a large part of the population, on the collective consciousness of society. This is true more than for any other kind of psychoactive for psychedelics — and, at that time, due to recent research in favor of their benefits, psychedelics had for the first time in history become widely socially accepted, not only among civilians, but also in the scientific community.

Most psychedelics had existed for far longer than LSD and other psychedelics were first synthesized, present in plants and fungi, but as long as science was not involved, the church and folklore had been able to denounce them as Satanic, which likely became the main motivation for the burning of millions of witches, who ritualistically used psychedelics (The Long Trip: The Prehistory of Psychedelia (Penguin Arkana, 1997)) (The Long Trip: The Prehistory of Psychedelia (Penguin Arkana, 1997) — excerpt).

Once science became involved, however, and presented actual evidence of the benefits, nontoxicity, and, when used in a responsible set and setting, the safety of psychedelics, the government found at first no way of suppressing their use. It was due to the support of science that psychedelics became so popular. People might for thousands of years have decried it as sinful, but people had acquired much respect for science. The World War had been won through science, and with the awe unleashed upon the world by the atomic bomb, space flight and other inventions, science achieved much influence among the population. Science had earned even the common man's admiration. There was no way that the government could contradict the scientists' findings in such a state of affairs, and thus this situation was allowed to escalate.

Unfortunately, however, popular usage of psychedelics soon became detached from its science. Hippies generally disregarded scientists' care with these substances, which, when used in the wrong set and setting, can be potentially dangerous, and came to use them in such an irresponsible way that they became notorious in society. This was the worst thing the hippies could have done, and it would prove to be the downfall of their culture. The government used the hippies' misuse of these drugs to misrepresent their dangers, and used this as an excuse to ban psychedelics without arousing suspicion of  their political motives to do so.

The ban of psychedelic was a reaction to the rebellion of the hippies. Perhaps that rebellion was the worst thing they could have done, and the best course of action would have been to pass on their ideas silently, from person to person. If a group challenges the government in such an aggressive manner, it is inevitable that the government will seek to destroy them.

Psychedelics were forbidden by the government, not by medical experts, and up to that time scientists had been using psychedelics both for psychotherapy and research. Most medical experts might in fact have believed in their value and were opposed their prohibition. It was important that these substances were therefore also forbidden in the field of medicine itself, as in effect happened. The more evidence would be discovered in favor of psychedelics, the worse. People were not to suspect that the actual reason that psychedelics had become prohibited was not the sake of their health but the sake of their control.

Therapeutic use, which had proven to be highly efficient, had been forbidden because it would make the therapeutic value widely known, leading to protests against the ban of psychedelic drugs from people who needed their therapeutic value when nothing else helped in their treatment. In a time when medication was primitive, this happened often, and psychedelics had earlier proven to be superior to any medication yet available, as may still be the case. People would realize that this ban killed people. People would lose loved ones to depression and mental illness through suicide because their psychiatrist did not have the proper tools to do anything about their condition. Their story would be known.

Psychiatrists would know that they could have access to a cure to their illness, but that they could lose their license if they would use it. For some time psychedelic therapy was still often practiced illegally, but this custom trailed off as psychedelics became increasingly associated with the hippies' abuse of them, so that neither psychiatrist nor patient still believed in their benefits.

By banning psychedelics, the government constrained their use to illegal recreational use, which kept on marring the psychedelics reputation through misuse. The government was not worried about this, and used this misuse to exaggerate the dangers of psychedelics. Slowly but surely, the hippies ensured that psychedelics would fall out of favor.

Psychedelics became associated not with psychotherapy and self-improvement but with the decadence of the hippies. As they became known as party drugs, their value was rarely still taken seriously. It became associated, moreover, with the hippies' nonconformism that people, in their xenophobia, so feared. The result was that, like the hippies themselves, psychedelics became feared and avoided, and even if they were legal, this situation would not change very soon.

The government may or may not have realized that if it took away the medical context of psychedelics and left only the recreational context, psychedelics would soon become unpopular. It is also possible that it had realized that it was the therapeutic use of psychedelics that was most dangerous to society.

At some point in their lives, nearly half the American population suffers from mental illness (lifetime prevalence 46,4 percent) (Ronald C. et al. Donna R. Kemp: Mental health in America, page 40; Medical News Today). Now, consider that for most mental illnesses, excluding psychoses, psychedelics offer a treatment superior to any other yet available. Most people who are mentally ill never seek treatment, but if psychedelics were legal and their benefits was known, people's attitude towards psychotherapy would change.

Many people avoid therapy because of the wish to be self-reliant, but psychedelic therapy actually merely causes one to heal oneself, much like meditation. Many people avoid therapy because it is expensive, but psychedelic therapy has major long-term effects even after the usage of a single dose. They avoid therapy because they do not want to share their feelings, but this, neither, is necessary in psychedelic therapy. They avoid therapy because medication might change who they are, but unlike medication, psychedelics do not change the mind in any other way than psychologically. They avoid therapy because of side effects, but, when used responsibly, psychedelics do not have any side effects at all.

If all this were known and the therapeutic use of psychedelics were legal, this would change people's attitude towards psychotherapy. Suppose that everyone who was mentally ill would seek psychedelic treatment, then half the population would be affected by them. This would profoundly alter their personality, and therefore the collective consciousness of society. These changes might not fit into the workings of society's systems.

Because of the consciousness-expanding nature of these drugs, their widespread use would cause people to awaken, and in this awakening they would start asking themselves questions about the meaning of their existence. People would no longer act without thinking, and so they would no longer fit into the machine that has been built for them.

Currently, mental illness is seen as a disorder because it is an emotional state, and so hard to control. We treat mental illness by suppressing it, just as we try to suppress all emotion in our society. Yet mental illness is often — though by far not always — a process of awakening. If people actually went through this process, the world would be much wiser than it is today. Mental illness forces us to stand still and think, and so, if mental illness was truly treated rather than suppressed, our automatic way of living would become unsustainable, and our society as it is today would collapse.

Psychedelics seem to cause a similar growth process as that met in mental illnesses, because both cause people to engage in introspection and thereby brings them psychological insight. Like mental illness itself, psychedelics cause people to think, and that is the last thing the government wants them to do.  They want us to leave the thinking to them, and not think for ourselves.

The ban of psychedelics was a purely political move, not a medical one. This isn't a question of health concern: it's about control.

Because most feminists in the West are themselves women, feminism is usually dismissed as biassed, subconsciously motivated rather by vindictive indignation at past discrimination than because of any relevance in current problems. People are inclined to believe that sexual discrimination has been dealt with in Western society, and to some extent this is true, as women are rarely discriminated in our society: rather, the problem today is the discrimination not of females, but of femininity itself — both in males and in females. In a world of such materialism, all things female, all things yin, all things emotional, are secondary. This is no longer a question of classification: it has become part of our psychology.

It might seem that the sexes are most in balance in our society than in other societies, but the opposite is true: living in such excessive materialism, conformism, industrialism and superficiality as we do, we live in the most male society there has ever existed. We still haven't learned at all. The irony is that the equation of the sexes is just another manifestation of the excessive masculinity of our society: we see everyone as equal not out of equanimity, but out of an almost militaristic need for homogeneity.

We have become as troops, and in a world where our weapons are our minds, it does not matter whether we are women or men. We all wear the same uniform. This is the only reason why men and women seem equal in position in this time. We do not have equal musculature for hard labor, but what good is musculature if we have machines of up to five hundred horsepower to do our work? For this alone have the roles of men and women become the same. But this does not mean that they have become impartial of the sexes: women and men now for the most part do mostly men's work: organizational work, such as bureaucracy, helping to keep the machine under control so that its production rate might be at maximum.

Although we do not all have muscles for hard labor, we all have a mind, and any mind can be made to become more male. In fact, our education focuses almost entirely on thinking and not on feeling, and therefore, on masculinity rather than femininity; even when it focuses on feeling, such as in psychology courses, it does so in an entirely analytical manner. What is more, our education focuses entirely on control. By the time we are through with our education, we have all become soldiers of the machine, men and women alike, ready to do the machine's bidding.

Thus, women allow themselves to become as men. Women who are also women in their heart are a species threatened with extinction. For the most part, all that is left are men and half-men. Most of us have known few women. Women's acme is feeling, men's acme is action. How, then, can there still be any real women in a society that does not feel at all?

Of course, men can be feminine and women can be masculine, and this is a variation which is valuable. It would be monotonous if all men were masculine and all women feminine, and a mixture of characters is needed — for one thing, it brings the genders closer together. But too many people allow others to choose for them who they are, and too many women allow themselves to be turned into half-men. Unfortunately, it is mostly the average women who undergo this transformation, and for them these words will fall on deaf ears, and the more self-conscious women will not need them as much.

At this point, at a time when we so direly need femininity, women are worth more than men — but only if their womanhood is respected, both by themselves and by others. Yet, in a society were only most influence is in the hands of men, it is the responsibility of men as well as of women that womanhood may be restored.

It is great women, more than great men, that today could save this world. Too long have men been so weak as to see women, and womanhood as weak, and though women have recovered their position in society, womanhood has not. Through history we have venerated men and condemned women: men were the voters, the kings, the prophets, even our gods. Women were but the helpers, the subordinates, the seducers to sin, the very reason that we had fallen out of our God's favor. This has been going on for thousands of years, and throughout its time it has had its impact throughout the fabric of our world.

For thousands of years, we have done everything the male way. We kept on fighting, kept on working, kept on producing, kept on expanding, kept on building — higher and higher, faster, faster, always crying out for more, more, more! —  and see where it has brought us.

Do we really we can efface the effects thereof by turning the page and giving women their rights? It is not enough. The damage has been done. Our world has been changed. By setting all that is female aside, we have destroyed our world.

Never mind the end of the world — the world is strong enough to heal once we're gone — but for all intents and purposes, right now, our world is destroyed, and we are but ghosts in the ruins. We can either repair our world or go on the way we've gone as we have always have, running on blindly as though in a race, just to get that golden medal. By all means, go on. In the end, over time we will destroy ourselves entirely, and then, the world can finally heal from the destruction we have left behind in the wake of our mad stampede. But are we so quick to give up?

It is because of our lack of respect for the female that this world has become so excessively male, so excessively materialistic. If we are to find out balance again, it is through femininity, through yin, softness: through emotion, through dreams, through introversion and suchlike, that we can be saved.

Of course, these qualities characterize both men and women; women more so, but this does not matter. Most of us, men and women, need more femininity in some way or other. But it is women that might teach men of these assets, at least those that haven't lost them, and for this reason it is all the more important that women be more respected: for what they really are, and not for the machines we have turned them, as well as men, into.

We were born and bred in this machine and have therefore all been changed by its machinery, even if we resisted it for all our life — even I, at times, have often found myself morbidly focussed on work, without regard for the feelings that I both need for my work and to live. If we spend our entire life in an environment of straight lines, we every thought in our head will follow the same pattern, and we will look forward, never sideways, and keep on marching onward.

Our environment affects us every moment of every day, and this for our entire lives, sometimes in ways we cannot imagine, and almost everything, everything we have created in our environment embodies masculinity: the straight lines, the right angles, the square buildings, the racing cars, the fixed schedules, the effort and all the hurry towards nowhere at all. The organization, the homogeneity, the functionality and hierarchy turns our entire world into an army. Everything has become action without emotion, and even what we see as emotion has actually mostly become just another kind of action, a role play in which we pretend to be alive.

Our lives are mostly just bread and games. Through decadence, alcohol, sexual obsessions, lurid colors and thrills, we keep trying to divert our feelings, trying to convince ourselves that we're there — but most of all, of course, through money, as money can be traded, and we hope that we can yet trade it into something that might yet make us alive, but later on. Meanwhile, we just keep on working, to maintain a living, to maintain our social relationships, to maintain it so that it might someday mean something.

Then, at some point in ourselves, we realize that day will never come, because there is nothing to feel, no meaning, no love to give us meaning. That time usually comes around forty, as we then come to understand that delaying to feel for dozens of years will not bring us anywhere. Midlife crisis, we then call it, but it's actually a very belated puberal "identity crisis" — belated, because we've kept on delaying to feel for half our lives. Of course, it is but a temporary hiccup in the machine, a bug that could not be prevented in our programming. Nothing to worry about: you'll soon realize that it's too late, and you'll resort to keep on using your programmed talents of dissociation, so that you're safely away from the bogeyman of feeling, that terrible illness which the machine has so soothingly labelled clinical depression. Our feelings rarely shine long enough for us to realize that all we have is right here, right now, and so we keep on marching. Onward, soldier! Never look where you do not need to.

Thus they go on marching, like soldiers in an army — marching through the streets, marching towards the bus stop, marching to the train station, marching to our workplace, marching to people they do not know but call friends, marching through a conversation about nothing at all, marching towards the television at home to march through yet more diversion from our feelings — or what we might have felt, had our feelings not altogether atrophied.

Thus is the life of the average human. We are as Sisyphus, every day to roll our boulder up the mountain. We never see it roll back down. When we come back down, we are fully convinced that it is a new boulder we are pushing uphill, even though we never get anywhere. We never even think about why those boulders are to be pushed uphill.

All our lives we thirst for something to feel, for some water, for some femininity, but we dare not drink, for we have become so dried out that we are made of salt alone, and the least draft would kill us. We could not drink if we wanted to, no more than an android could. Are we not all pinocchios, trying all our life to become real? We live but a illusion, that passes us by in our sleep without our even knowing it is there, oblivious. Would we ever turn inside, we would see only vacuum there. Thus, we turn without, and ignore the vacuum, forgetting that we are put empty shells. Would even women still turn inside to dream, when all there is inside is emptiness?

The worst thing is that we think we like this life, simply because we keep on living. The truth is that we like our life no more than a wheel likes to roll when it is pushed onward, but we feel our momentum, and it makes us forget, so we let ourselves we swept away by it.

We simply know of no better. Now and then, a chink of light shines onto us, but we never let it in, for it would burn us if we opened the windows of our mind and allowed it to shed its light into us. But when we see the chink, that is enough for us. We acknowledge that it is there, acknowledge that it is positive, and tell ourselves that we are content, even though they haven't got an inkling of what happiness feels like. They'll just smile, and equate their smile with happiness.

We all have man and woman, inside us all. Anima and animus is but one manifestation of this. What we see as man and woman is far greater than we imagine. They are elements of all things there are, encompassing everything in existence. It is a pattern that can be found in all phenomena: full and empty, solid and fluid, hard and soft… The Chinese discovered this pattern thousands of years ago, and called it yin and yang. There is nothing mystical about this. They are not magical forces, as is often believed, but simply fundamental aspects of all things.

The myth that yin and yang represent good and evil, and that the black side of the icon represents evil, just goes to show how far we have strayed from our balance. The black side — darkness, cold, night, sadness, winter, rain, caves, depths valleys, poverty, wilderness — is yin, the side associated with femininity. And what a coincidence, that it is this side, as well as most of its aspects, which we see as symbolic of evil.

It was Eve that misled Adam to Original Sin. It were witches that were burnt by the millions. The bible unambiguously asserts women's inferiority (Corinthians 11:9, Genesis 2:18-22, Corinthians 11:3), and some Christian fundamentalists still believe that women don't have a soul (Landover Baptist Church). Throughout history, we have not only discriminated women but also condemned them. This has nothing to do with male dominance: it is a psychotic delusion. So now we think we are cured. We think that we are sane as madmen do! But the delusion was never gone. It only changed in form. We still condemn femininity as evil.

Emptiness is still seen as useless, slowness as sloth, darkness as evil, sadness as self-pity, introversion as selfish, poverty as misery, the wilderness as dangerous, and cold, night, winter, rain, valleys, depths, and caves as symbolical of suffering. All these are feminine properties, and characterize some of the most creative people. If we all had more femininity to combine with our masculinity, we would all be geniuses.

As it is, we are all but machines of our cravings, and there is no one who has any use of these machines that we have become. Our entire species has been left to work on automatically, not just in the modern era, but for thousands of years. Stop the machines. We need to stand still to feel what we are doing.

Forget what you've been told, and sin. By all means, be slothful, be desperate, be acediac. If three of the Seven Deadly Sins all come down to the same thing, it must be very important indeed that you do not do it. This one thing is to stand still and feel — if you still can, if you haven't yet been so trapped in the system that this is no longer an option. Once you will do this, depression is inevitable, and if you hold on, it may last for several years before you become capable of feeling without suffering. You may die.

You may die. You may keep on suffering for the rest of your life. Or you might learn to feel, and understand the meaning of life, and understand that it is to feel, right now. There is no meaning to duty if there is no love. There is no future if there is no now.

The Chinese observed a number of patterns associated with yin and yang, and one of these was that yin and yang create one another. Without either yin and yang, therefore, the other cannot exist and will disintegrate. That is what is happening to us now: we are disintegrating. We are disintegration. We are a fire that consumes all. Only water can temper us.

Women, do not fear to be woman. Do not betray your womanhood. Do not try to prove that you are as strong as men, but teach them your softness. Fight, but fight as a woman. You will need manhood if you are to stand against men, just we all need both manhood and womanhood inside us, but take care not to lose your womanhood.

Whether you who read this are man or woman, if, amid this mindless march, you still have any feeling within you, then do not listen to their talk of the weakness of feelings, but cherish your feelings and let them grow, so that one day, you may share feeling with others, and bring water to their parched lips. Amid all this greed, teach your gentleness to this world, for this wasteland of concrete and steel begs for it as a desert thirsts for water.

The only species on Earth known to be incapable of producing vitamin C are the guinea pig, the fruit bat, primates, and us. Each of these relies on food sources, mostly fruit, for vitamin C. It may therefore seem that these species started eating fruit to compensate for their inability to produce vitamin C, but this alteration of instinctive behavior would involve an extra mutation. Since not a single generation can survive without vitamin C, this would mean that the mutations would have occurred at the same time, which would be too great a coincidence. But what if it's the other way around?

Instead, it seems likely that we atrophied our ability to produce vitamin C because of our diet: a major part of primates' food is the fruit from the forest's trees, so that the ability to produce our own vitamin C was no longer necessary. In a way, as a species we have become addicted to fruit. The same is likely true for the fruit bat and guinea pig.

When the north of Africa started to undergo desertification and turned to savanna, so that our evolutionary ancestors could no longer depend on the fruits from the forest, the withdrawal from this addiction may have threatened them with extinction. This might have affected our evolution, for, as our hominid ancestors migrated into the then expanding savannas of North Africa, fruit became sparse, and we were forced to search harder for sources of vitamin C. It is possible that, aside from the increased scarcity of food in general (at least, compared to the African forests), this contributed to the introduction of hunting into our species, since liver contains as much vitamin C as some fruits. As the liver is only a small part of the animal, however, and as hunting does not appear to have constituted a major part of our diet (even today's hunter-gatherer tribes live mostly from gathering rather than hunting), this was likely not enough, so that it may have been necessary to further actively search for vitamin C, for instance in roots such as sweet cassava. In the scarcity of fruit, finding enough vitamin C required intelligence, and this may perhaps contributed to its evolution.

Everyone has a piece of the jigsaw puzzle. Let us put all our views together into one encompassing totality that takes every possibility into account. Let us stand upon a mountain where we may gaze upon all the land, and not just each grub just in our own patch of land like ignorant animals. As long as we remain confined to that patch of mud, we may think ourselves lord and master of truth, but once we behold this endless panorama of possibilities beyond those we have considered, we realize that whatever we are, there is far more out there than we have ever considered — skies and massifs and oceans of thought. How can we be so doggedly convinced, so absolutely sure, that we know the truth, when we have not even considered all of the infinitely many other possibilities that might also be true?
How can we possibly comprehend at this time what our mind does not yet contain? How can we, after all, comprehend anything but that which we are already aware of? How can we know everything we do not know? How can we be aware of what we are not aware, and therefore how much there is of which we are not aware? That we think there is no reason that we would be wrong simply means that we do not know any reason yet why we are wrong, not that there is no such reason.
Let us combine our views so that we may view all, like a mosaic picture. Even those views that are not true remain interesting, because they give us insight into how things might have been, as well as in the ways that other people think. To consider other possibilities stimulates our imagination, so that even should it not bring us closer to the truth than we already think ourselves to be, it will still be to our advantage.
Fiction as well as truth has its value. Even if the stories of others views are not true, well, then at least let us enjoy the originality of those stories, these strange lands of thought beyond our own, as we would enjoy a novel. They will inspire us to see things in a new light, so that, even if their light is but a will-of-the-wisp, it may also incite us to see other new lights. If we open our eyes to every view, even those that may be wrong, we will not only become more open to others views but also to views that no one has ever thought of, which will enable us to discover and create new things. Thus, let us respect every view, even the most perverted, and be thankful that they share them, and let us only, but only, not impose our views upon others, or allow others to do so, for this is the only way that they can cause harm. If everyone was open to and critical of all views, be they wrong or right, then it would never have to be harmful to be wrong.
Even if someone else's view is not true, are they not interesting? They are ways of thinking beyond our own, as those of a foreign land. Think of schizophrenics, for example, whose views may often be deluded, but are they not infinitely intriguing? Is it not fascinating how other people think, and even more so if they are deluded?
The only thing that holds back this interest is that we are afraid. We are afraid of the others views not so much because they are strange to us, I think, but, because we are afraid that if they do not agree with us, there will be conflict. It is quite ironic, but we hate others for their differences because we are afraid that they will hate us. Racism is one such mechanism, and to condemn another view is no better than to condemn another race. One might say that one may condemn a view if that view harms others, but the only way a view can harm others is if the holder of that view condemns other views. Thus, it is not that view in itself, but this condemnation, that should be dealt with.
Let us explore every possibility, so that we may be ready should either of these possibilities turn out to be true, for we cannot know, we could not know, if the entire world turned out to be entirely different from what we thought. Often, when doing so, we will find that there is some part of truth in every view, and that the whole truth can be found only when all views are put together. The truth so often lies not on one extreme but in the middle, for the universe tends to combine all things. The universe has no views of its own: it merely combines, indifferent of what we might think about it, so that we often find that both explanations are in some way or other true. Let us, then, like the universe, combine.
The universe is complex, infinitely complex, and what are we, mere animals, to think we know anything for sure how it works? The only way we can more or less know what is true and what is not is what we experience, directly or indirectly, but even so there can be many explanations that each fit with all our experiences, perhaps infinitely many. Let us, then, consider every explanation we can think of, and be thankful for the explanations another offers. Even if others explanations are wrong, they can be interesting.
Ultimately, the entire noosphere is as a giant brainstorm of billions of people, and all our beliefs, even those that we hold for thousands of years, are as the suggestions made in a brainstorm in minutes. But why does it have to take thousands of years before we are done discussing everything that is said, if not because we are so terrified of being wrong? A brainstorm is likely to yield a lot of nonsense, but even that nonsense may help us to come up with better ideas, if we only listen. There may be that parts of that nonsense is true, or that it is true in another way than we thought of.

We should, so to speak, never hold a single view but as it were hold all views at the same time, and people should not be criticized for holding a certain view but for holding just that single view while considering no other, as this will limit them, and for condemning other views, which may limit others.

If a view is true, it may be useful to do think about them, and if it is not true, then it will still be interesting to do. Why, after all, should a view be true in order to be interesting? Even when false, a view can still be interesting as a thought experiment, and these are in themselves useful. To hold every view is to hold every card.

Whatever it is you feel, it has its value, even if it is painful, and the painlessness of a feeling is no measure for its worth. Therefore, too, your feelings, even when painful, may have their value to other people as well. On the other hand, a feeling that is valuable to you may also be only harmful to other people, even if that feeling is pleasurable. To know what feelings other people need, one needs first to feel them. Compassion, then, is the only state of mind that one should share with people when one does not yet know which feeling they need. It may be, though, that they are likewise compassionate towards you, so that you may then share what you feel anyhow. Only then, however, share what you feel with them, for if they are not compassionate, it will have no use to try and connect with them.

Sometimes, you may find that the people around might rather need sadness than joy. Sadness purifies us of attachment and so of anxiety, while joy fills us with enjoyment and so energy. Too little sadness, and we become unable to let go, so that our enjoyment turns into greed. Too little joy, and our purity turns into apathy.

Many people might rather need more sadness rather than joy, because we have become fearful of sadness, and so avoid it even when we need it. You cannot always know what others might need the most, but they do, and so they are the ones that can best choose whether or not to connect to your feeling. Either how, the feeling you have at this moment is the one that is strongest, and this is therefore the one of which you can offer the most to others. Thus, offer them this feeling, but take care only to offer it to them, and never to foist it upon them.

Hold it out to them as the flower offers its nectar to the bee. The bee might choose that it is more attracted to the fragrance of another flower, and thus choose not to take your offer, but woe to them if you are a carnivorous plant, that will trap your victim as soon as it as much as touches you.

Ask, but do not demand that others connect with your feelings, for, if they do not want to do so, this means that they will have no love for your feelings, which means that they will not be able to connect with your feelings at all — for without love no connection can be made, as love is in itself connection. Without being able to connect with your feelings, they will have understanding of them, so that they will not be able to help you, and therefore neither of you will benefit if you try to impose your feelings upon them.

If you know that others cannot deal with how you feel, then close yourself to them until you feel otherwise, be that when your feelings have changed by themselves or when you have yourself changed them — whichever feels best to you.

And yet, it may be that they will need to feel your feelings even though they do not want to. They might be afraid of what you feel even though it would help them to feel the same way. In that case, rather than forcing your feelings upon them, try to persuade them to see the beauty of what you feel.

Do this by connecting to their feelings, and trying to see how there can be a connection between their feelings and your own. Your feelings may have a common purpose, even though they do not realize this. Try to make this clear to them. Make them see that the beauty of their feelings is, in the end, of the same kind as that of your own feelings: for all feelings always seek for something that we can in some way or other enjoy, that is, something that we can love. It may be that they seek to be free of suffering, but this, as well, means that they enjoy being free of suffering. Thus, all our feelings seek for some form of love, even if it is the love for the feeling of destruction, or even the torments of hell. Let them see that all feeling seeks for some sort of creation, even if it is the creation of the emptiness of something else. All this is, of course, a mere matter of perspective! — but that is just what feelings are. Let them see that your feelings are connected, or that they can be perceived as such; at any rate, let them perceive them as such. Then, your own feelings will no longer be as strange to them, and as it comes to feel less strange they will no longer fear it. Then, a connection can be made, and your feelings can combine peacefully, rather than with the brute force they would otherwise have collided, had you tried to impose your feelings upon theirs. But all this can be complicated, especially if it is tried with those that are particularly narrow-minded.

Either how, whatever feeling we share with others must come from within, and when we give others a false expression, we are as a false flower to the bee, and we have nothing of value to offer. Such lies may help us to stay comfortably in forgetfulness, but they will not bring us any beauty, and through such lies we will certainly not connect with one another.

Rather than just faking an emotion you do not have, summon up that emotion to share it genuinely, but only if that emotion is what you and the people around you need. Emotions are shared through intuition, and intuition can tell the difference between a false and genuine emotion, even if reason cannot. Thus, even when you can fool people that you are feeling that emotion, they will not feel that emotion because their intuition does not receive it. But what is an expression worth if it does not express? Even if you see it as something merely esthetic, it will still be more beautiful when it is expressive.

By pretending to feel what we do not for others, we will also end up pretending to do so for ourselves. It is not natural to suppress an expression, and the only way we can do so is by suppressing our emotion, as our emotion will otherwise automatically reset our expression as we stop paying notice. Instead, if it is really best for us to change how we feel, rather than suppressing our emotions we should deal with them, with all the love we can, and our expression of our emotions will automatically change as well, while still expressing real, true, pure emotion.

People who do not show whatever emotion people want will sometimes be accused to be self-absorbed, but in our world, where everyone acts without any feeling, we need to be more self-absorbed. We cannot love others if we do not love ourselves. Love is all that we can give that is of value, and so, we cannot offer anything to others if we do not have anything ourselves.

We need to deal with our emotions and what they tell us, and yes, this will be painful, and all the more painful because so few people have done so before us. But the road to happiness is often one of suffering. We can avoid that suffering, but often, it is only when we have suffered enough that we learn how to avoid suffering in another way than by escaping it. If we dare to feel, we are likely to suffer, and thus it takes great bravery, not self-pity, to feel. It is but those that pity themselves that will shy away from the sufferings of emotion. Yes, we walk a path of danger if we dare to feel, but if we do not do this, then not only will our life be worthless, but we will keep steering on blindly in the dark. Our emotions are the light by which our soul can see, and without emotion our soul is adrift, and we live without a soul.

When we are sad, this means we need time for our thoughts, and when we are joyful, it is the time for action. Sadness only feels painful when we are not left alone with our thoughts. Unfortunately, we hardly ever get the time we need to think, as almost all our life is now action, in some way or other. We never feel what we are doing, and yet we still keep on going because we are afraid to feel. It is because of this that, no matter how hard we work, we often never get anywhere in our lives except in forgetfulness. Either how, if we want to truly live this life, rather than just work our way through it, we need both sadness and joy, yin and yang. Both are needed if we are to feel, and neither can be without the other: there can be no energy without the purity needed to sustain it, and there can be no purity without the energy needed to cleanse itself.

Let us feel that we may feel what it means to be alive, that we may know the meaning of life, which is feeling itself. Only if we feel can we know what we want. We need to be more occupied with ourselves so that we can find out who we really are, and what it means to be ourselves, so that we can know how we can give the most both to ourselves and to others — and to others through ourselves, and to ourselves through others. Compassion, when truly felt inside, can make all of us one, but only when it is actually felt, only when our compassion is both for own feelings as well as for others' — otherwise there can be no compassion at all. How can we connect with others if none are to show their feelings? How can we then be compassionate for one another? How can we love one another if no one is even truly themself?

We are human beings. We are more than just machines. Be yourself, not a machine, but a human being! Shine as who you are, for others and for yourself. Shine for all the world to see with whatever light of whatever color there is within you. Flood all the world with it, even though they would be afraid of it. In time they will learn to see its beauty. It will blind their eyes at first as that light floods over the darkness they are used to, but in time their eyes will adjust, and they will see.

Give yourself and others more than just a mask. Give them your heart and soul.

If you share something with too many people, you will have very little to share with each person, and so your gift will become worthless. If you share nothing at all, however, you will be alone. Share in such way that you still make a difference to each person with whom you share.

Take care not to confuse light as the absence of darkness, or darkness as the absence of light, for on the contrary the two, paradoxically, complement one another. Thus, in seeking light seek also darkness, and in seeking darkness seek also light; otherwise, you will not grow, but merely change in form, and thus only convert rather than truly creating.

Anarcho-communism will be feasible only as and when people become more sympathetic. Till then, we will live enslaved, not by our leaders, but by our greed.

Pain may be enjoyed, but if we are in suffering, we undergo our pain. Suffering is pain that is not loved, and in the absence of love nothing can be learned from it. Rather, suffering is a mistake we make as we learn. We may learn from that mistake, but not from its consequences. Suffering is a weakness we should overcome, and when we overcome that suffering, what is left is pain we have learned to enjoy. We would then no longer call our pain thus, however. All our pains could be as enjoyable as other feelings, and any of our feelings could be painful had we not learned to appreciate them. Suffering is the failure to appreciate the beauty of an experience.
Suffering should not to be sought, as suffering is a form of ignorance, but neither should we be stopped by it. Even in trying to learn to deal with that ignorance, we should neither seek out suffering nor escape it, but let it come as it must if we are to live, and face it so that we may overcome it.
It has no use to suffer. Some say that suffering is the path to wisdom, but it is the other way around: when one treads the path to wisdom one is more likely to suffer. Suffering, however, is no necessity on this path, if one at least already has the wisdom to walk that path in the right way, that is, in balance. Failure of balance will lead either to suffering, which is one kind of ignorance, or to apathy, which is another. Pain is part of wisdom; suffering is not. In enlightenment, there would be no suffering at all, but infinite pain.
If we keep on seeking to be free of pain we will destroy everything there is — for nothing is free of pain. But the suffering of pain rather than its enjoyment is a disease that afflicts us all. If we do not face that fear and, if not enjoy our pain, then at least bear it, then we are part of the disease.

What is best for the individual is always best for the group. What is best for the group is always best for the individual. The group benefits if the individual is well because they will then have more energy and so have more to offer to the group, as well as the other way around.

Spirituality is like a dance: in spirituality as in a dance, truth is not relevant. If truth is relevant with regards to divinity, then we are not dealing with spirituality but philosophy. But unlike philosophy, spirituality is a matter of emotion, and no reason may be involved, whereas in philosophy it is the other way around.

All that counts is how the dance feels. The dancer's movements are never true or false: they are merely movements. Spirituality, then, is a dance of ideas. They may well be true — or they may be false. It does not matter. Do not think about whether or not they are true. Feel them. Whether they are true or not, they are fantasies — intuitions which may contain some truth or not, but fantasies nonetheless, as there is no way of finding them back in reality. If there was, then it would be protoscience, and not spirituality — but even protoscience begins with many errors.

As such, these intuitions are always disjunct from one's reality, and, as far as one's own reality concerns, exist only in one's own mind — but that they exist in one's mind is significant. These intuitions thereby create their own truth, through suggestion, and so increase mental and physical health.

Spirituality is made of dreams, but even though they are no reality, dreams are still important. They are as the patterns that we see in clouds, or the daydreams in which we might lose ourselves. Are these of no importance? It is those moments that guide us. Often, our dreams reflect truths. But we must not confuse metaphors for literal truths, like madmen.

The dancers do not try to achieve anything through their movement. It is merely a question of emotion. Should the dancers try to get anywhere through their dance, the dance will soon turn into a march.

But religion in our world has turned into such march, a march in regiments that would rather think of fighting one another to the death than than to dance as once they had. The march went faster and faster, became more aggressive. The dancers forgot the meaning of their dance, became so focussed that they forgot that they were dancing at all, and the dance turned into a fight. Wars became the new dance. Religion, once meant to bring peace, now brought only discord — because they failed to see the difference between reason and emotion.

One may reason about God, but this is philosophy, and philosophy is per definition uncertain, as this is what sets it apart from science; only in this is philosophy distinct from science. If, however, one takes an idea to be a certainty without proof, one is neither scientific nor philosophical, but delusional.

One does not have to be rationally convinced of the truth of something, however, in order to be emotionally involved in it. Whether something is true or not in reality, it may still be true to oneself. One may create a reality of one's own in one's mind and, in a way, that reality may be said to be true — but whether it is or not does not really matter, as truth is only a concept; except as a concept, truth has no meaning. What matters is that, either how, it has no practical significance, but that it does have a subtler, psychological significance.

See also:

Spirituality and Hypnosis

Space is the absence of matter. Therefore, space is determined by matter, and not the other way around: that is, matter is determined only by space in the sense that it is determined by its own absence in between its elements. In any other sense than as this absence, as a privative, space is nonexistent and the concept irrelevant.

If you are unbalanced, try not to decrease that of which there is too much, but to increase that which is opposed to it, and of which there is too little, so that the two opposites can complement one another and compensate one another's deficits.

For instance, try not to decrease your determination if it is too exhausting, but rather, try to increase your patience. If this is at all possible, we should always try to increase the antipode of what we that which is destructive, and thereby end its destructivity without destroying it.

In this way, rather than towards a lower level you will move to a higher level. If we decrease that which there is in excess rather than increasing that which there is in shortage, we will never grow, because no matter what we do, there will always be something that remains in excess.

We can never perfectly achieve our balance, only approximate it. Even if we decrease an excess, if we will decrease it at all enough to reach our point of balance, then we will only go past it, and the decrease will itself be excessive, so that the opposite of that which we decreased now becomes the new excess. If we increase what is in shortage, then we will likewise always increase either not enough or else in excess, but in this way there is an increase rather than decrease in total energy.

If we decrease excesses, we lose their energy, even though, if it were combined with its opposite, that energy could be positive. We can use that energy. As long as that energy is not combined in balance with its opposite, it will be destructive, but once complemented, it can always be creative.

We can only approximate our balance, but we can approximate our balance either through destruction or through creation. If we try to achieve our balance by destroying what there is in excess, we might end up feeling less pain, but we will never achieve anything. If, on the other hand, we try to achieve our balance by creating more of what there is too little, then we will always keep developing. The only difference is that the former goes downwards and the latter upwards.

Decreasing excesses, rather than increasing shortages, may sometimes be necessary because the former often happens quicker the latter. If the excess is too destructive, we may therefore temporarily need to give up its energy, though this does not mean that we cannot use it again later. If at all possible, however, we should always approach an excess creatively, not destructively, and try to use its destructive energy and turn it into creative energy.

Even if we decrease an excess, if we will decrease it at all enough to reach our point of balance, then we will only go past it, and the decrease will itself be excessive, so that the opposite of that which we decreased now becomes the new excess. If we increase what is in shortage, then we will likewise always increase either not enough or else in excess, but in this way there is an increase rather than decrease in total energy.

There is no distinction between what is best for oneself and what is best for others. Compassion for others is in itself best for oneself, and compassion for oneself is also best for others, as by being more compassionate for oneself, one can become more compassionate for others, and the other way around. What's more, if someone else compassionately loves us, we will give something to them by loving ourselves.

Empathy is in itself therefore not just giving or taking, but both. When empathizing with someone, one shares emotions with them, taking theirs while giving either one's own emotions or something else, material or cognitive, in return. In this way, to give in itself always also means to take. To give compassionately is always an exchange. Through empathy, giving and taking thereby forms an immediate circle. Even when the other gives nothing in return, compassion is therefore always mutualistic.

To give compassionately to another person automatically means to receive vicarious pleasure in the other person's place, so that both benefit from acts of compassion. For this reason, compassion requires no gratitude in return, and the level of compassion of someone's act can therefore be measured by how much they want in return, the two being inversely proportional. If one does not require the other to give anything return, one's actions are entirely driven by compassion.

This is why compassion is called unconditional love. Unconditional love does not necessarily mean that there are no conditions which determine what brings about this love, but that all one needs "in return" for one's love is in some way to feel the effects of one's own love in the other's place. Unconditional love does not mean that one's love does not depend on who the person in question is, naturally, as this would mean that if someone's love is unconditional, they would be able to love everyone and everything in the universe. Since such love is something purely hypothetical to us, the term would therefore be irrelevant.

Rather, when one loves unconditionally, this means that one can connect to the other person so deeply that it is as though one gives to oneself. Obviously, if one gives something to oneself, one will not ask anything in return from oneself, and neither will one require anything in return if one gives to someone to whom one can so closely connect.

As such, empathy is in itself a symbiosis. Emotions are transferred between people through empathy, and it is in this process of transfer that emotions grow. Therefore, empathy benefits both ourselves as others because it furthers our own growth as well as others'.

Compassion allows us to expand our consciousness into the consciousness of other individuals, so that in the process part of their consciousness becomes our own. To alter our own consciousness of their consciousness, we often alter theirs, rather than directly altering our consciousness of theirs.

Our identity is determined at least partly by our consciousness, and so, if we are conscious of another person's feelings as though they were our own, then to some extent we become that person, or become one with them. This is what empathy means: it means to "connect" with a person, or, said another way, to become one with them. Whether we "empathize" with someone or "become one" with them is, of course, a mere matter of perspective. But by sharing our feelings, we share ourselves, who we are, our very lives, with one another, and so connect with them. Others' lives can partly become our own. It can be said to be a kind of telepathy, and thus far the only kind of telepathy that we as yet know of.

There are few such riches in the world as that of the variety of people that we can connect to, for in connecting to them, we can share in a wealth of experiences, a lifetime of emotions and sensations and thoughts that manifest in a person. But to truly connect with others demands that we are compassionate towards them, as compassion and connection mean the same thing.

To be able to deeply share people's experiences calls for imagination, however, and what is stopping us from imagining others' feelings as though they were our own is the fear of losing control. By connecting to someone else, we leave them to control part of our own feelings, and so this takes a lot of trust. By connecting to someone, we expose ourselves to others' influence and thereby become vulnerable, so that it is inevitable that we will be hurt. For this reason, we often hold our relationships at a superficial level, even though we could, by truly connecting to one another, partly feel what it is like to be that other person — simply by imagining it. It is not simply because of our lack of imagination that we do not to deeply connect with other people, but also partly because we do not deeply connect to other people that we lack imagination.

Of course, we can never truly experience their lives as they do, but direct communication between people is far more powerful than their most obvious means would indicate. Intuition is an incredibly powerful medium of connecting to other people, and through it, it really is possible to feel another person's personality as though from a memory, as though one had at some point been that person. If we were more empathetic of one another, if, in other words, we felt one another more, we could know people in a few days as well as we now get to know them in a lifetime.

In this way, we no longer need to be confined to just one life, but can, in a way, live several lives at the same time. Through compassion we can as it were borrow another's life as though it were our own, and feel in their place as though we were them. We can temporarily become another person, as if switching in between different persons. In this way, empathy truly frees us from the confines of our selves, and we no longer need to be limited to ourselves, but can transcend our egos to become something greater.

By thus connecting, we benefit from each other's well-being, and other's well-being becomes our own, whereas others benefit from our own well-being through that same connection. Therefore, there is no distinction between our own well-being and theirs. To truly love each other we must therefore love ourselves, and to truly love ourselves we must therefore love others. We can only love others if we love ourselves, and we can also better love ourselves through the love of others.

We should be impartial in our compassion, and make no distinction between the benefit of others and those of ourselves, for they are one. We have a common purpose in that in some way or other, we all seek for greater love, and greater love for all is best achieved by a balance between love for ourselves and love for others (or for something).

In the end, it will benefit no one if we care only about others or only about ourselves, since we will then end up compromising either ourselves or others, upon which, by doing so, we will then end up compromising others or ourselves, respectively.

We need to give love both to ourselves as to others, as by loving both ourselves as others equally, we cherish our love, so that it can grow, and we thereby have more love to give both to ourselves and others, while others will have more love to give back to us.

Both egoism and altruism are therefore senseless. It makes no sense, be it to one's own benefit or others', to sacrifice oneself for others' welfare, and it makes no sense, either, to sacrifice others for one's own welfare, as the greatest welfare is to be found in compassion. What all of us are to seek, then, is compassion, both for ourselves and for others. The greatest thing that we can give one another is the ability for compassion, as through it we can all gain far more than we could otherwise give each other. The greatest love, then, is to wish to give others the ability to love; the most loving thing one can do for a person is to teach them to love, to love not just others or just themselves but to love the whole of what we may connect to.

This is the true nature of what Eastern philosophers called karma, and which had then later been reinterpreted into a religious concept. The reason why karma is of religious significance in Buddhism is because of the Buddhistic belief in nirvana, which is perceived as freedom from selfhood — and therefore, transcendence to consciousness of all beings, or, put another way, infinite empathy. According to Buddhistic beliefs, throughout the path to enlightenment beings may get closer and further away from nirvana; the closer they get to nirvana, the more their empathy will increase and so the more they will become one with other beings — including those that they might have harmed or benefited in the past. There is therefore nothing magical about the belief of karma in itself; it is merely a logical result of another belief. The belief in karma is not about punishment but rather simple cause and consequence.

Whether we will ever achieve enlightenment or not, if we strive towards the highest possible level of love we can achieve, then naturally, we will often be faced with karma, though one of a very mundane kind. We have all encountered this phenomenon. In its most common form it is simply shame, and fulfillment on the other hand.

Helping others is not about dignity. It's about helping oneself — one's true self, which is greater than just one's ego and extends across the whole of one's consciousness: not just the consciousness of one's ego but also that of others, about the world around oneself.

Some say that there is no difference between self-interest and empathy, and that whatever we do, we always do so for ourselves, and, in a way, this is true; more accurately, if we do something for someone else, we actually do it for the part of ourselves, the part of our consciousness, that integrates the feelings of others.

When we do something for others, we actually do it for our own feelings, but these are the feelings that we have replicated from others'. In a way, others' feelings have therefore become our own, and in a sense, others have therefore partly, though of course not always accurately, become part of ourselves. Thus, when someone says that we do "everything for ourself," this merely depends on what they see as their "selves," as in connecting to others, our selves may be said, in a way, to come to include other people.

When we are empathizing with someone, beside our own feelings we build models of others' feelings in our mind, and in trying to help the other person we try to make that model of others' feelings in our own mind feel better — or rather, the other way around. We built this model using cues about the other person, hints about what would make them feel better. This model is based on what would make ourselves feel better if we were in there place, but uses these cues, which may be obvious or very subtle, to modify it, as their needs will usually differ at least in some way from ours. As we are increasingly different from those others, this model will need to be increasingly modified, so that to deal with people who are different from us will demand far more empathy, and for this reason, people who are highly different from the rest of the group will either become withdrawn or learn to become highly empathic over time.

It may further be debated on whether we ever do something for someone else or always do what we do only for ourselves, but this is merely a matter of interpretation, and usually, this interpretation is more of an emotional than a rational nature, and has no practical or theoretical significance whatsoever. One thing that is clear is that whatever we do, we always do it for our "own" consciousness, be it present or future. However, because of empathy, what defines our consciousness is never constant: it may at some point change so as to partly include the consciousness of other people, through empathy, or it may, whereas including them at one time, exclude them in future when we withdraw from them. The central part of our consciousness that is concerned with our selves is the only part that is constant in our lives, and so we will generally be more likely to cling to that. We are, after all, generally more connected to our selves than to others.

Either how, we will never seek to affect the consciousness of beings that we will never at some point empathically connect with in some way, unless it is simply to know that we have done so — in which case it is done out of morals and not out of compassion. Compassion is the inclusion of others feelings in one's own, and therefore in oneself, and so, in a way, is still something we do "for ourselves." This does not mean, however, that we always do it for our ego, our sense of self, which is, as must be noted, quite a different thing! When we do something out of morals, we do so purely for our egos, our pride, for the knowledge that we — our egos — have meant something. When we do something out of compassion, we do so for another aspect of our consciousness, our empathic feelings, so that we can feel the other person's betterment as though it were our own.

By being deeply compassionate, we could, sometimes almost at once, connect to countless personalities and lives, thereby gaining the freedom to feel not just our own experiences but, to some extent, also feel what it is like to be someone else. We do not try to do this because we are afraid. We are afraid of losing our identity, and we are afraid of losing control over our emotions. A greater world beckons out there, outside of ourselves, but we abnegate it for safety. Through compassion we could as it were switch between different lives, and feel someone else's experience of the current moment as vividly as they do themselves. That is true wealth. But we cling to our egos instead, and to our own, material wealth. That wealth, too, is important, but there is no longer any balance between the two. If balance is to be restored, we are to let go of what our selves are at this moment, and be more open to change.

What is best for the individual is always best for the group. What is best for the group is always best for the individual. The group benefits if the individual is well because they will then have more to offer to the group, and the other way around.

The unconditional love of compassion may not be confused with morals, which, rather than being a kind of love, is rather a kind of commitment, a motivation more of pride than of actual compassion. Morals are therefore no substitute for true love. Morals are meant to confirm the dignity of the ego, not to help others. Thus, if the dignity of the ego fails, so do morals. If one loses one's dignity, for instance because one fails to forgive oneself for real or imagined wrong, then all morals disappear.

For this reason, people who were born into criminal families or otherwise forced into crimes are not necessarily worse of character than moralistic people, for if the latter were in the same position, they would be just as unlikely ever to escape from it. Compassion is as yet very weak in our society, and people's apparent acts of compassion are today mostly motivated out of principles.

Morals, moreover, since they seek to confirm the dignity of the ego, fail not only where dignity ceases, but also were confirmation ceases, or, otherwise, where the ego is in danger. For some people, morals are based on their own principles, but many more people's morals depend on others', and so, they will not act out of moralistic love if it is in contradiction to mainstream morals, even though these may be wrongheaded. Think, for example, of the parable of Jesus' healing on the Sabbath (whether or not it is true does not matter, as similar events will surely have happened at that time).

Morals dependent solely on thought whereas compassionate love may draw both from thought and from feeling, and therefore, if thought errs, feeling may yet correct its error. Consider, for instance, the Inquisitors, who thought that by torturing heretics, they were proving them a favor by purging them of sin. If they actually felt for the heretics, however, then they would have felt that what they were doing was wrong, and that, even if their God was the right one, this was merely a matter of the heretics' delusion, and could be set straight through edification rather than torture, so that instead they would have converted them to Christianity rather than punishing them for their purposed ignorance. It would still be wrongheaded, but compassion would have saved them from worse crimes.

This is the second of three cases in which moralistic love fails. The third case, after the lack of confirmation and the lack of dignity, is if the ego is endangered. Countless people in the World Wars had completely left behind all notions of compassion in order to save their own skin, because their apparent compassion had throughout their lives been based on morals, and had been no more than this.

Morals fall apart if the ego is threatened, however, as morals are no more than meant to benefit the ego, or our sense of self. It is obviously primitive, however, if our apparent love for others is motivated by our sense of self rather than our sense of others.

Nonetheless, morals — or rather, at any rate, thought, may itself be useful in this context if empathy fails, for instance when the effect of one's deeds is too vague or distant to be felt, or if one goes through a period of insensitivity or blunted affect. In this case, because of the absence of feeling love must be motivated, temporarily, entirely by thought, until, through that love, feeling can revive and from there take over. At all times, of course, thought may be useful to guide feelings, including feelings of empathy, so that one knows what to do to be truly compassionate. Usually, however, it is best if actions of compassion, and indeed all actions, start with feeling, as feeling is holistic, upon which it is best that the coordination of that action is finished through thought, which, being analytical, is more suited for details, and is therefore more practical. All things practical, however, must be motivated by ideas, and these always stem from feelings, even if the ideas are rationalistic, in which case the ideas stemmed from a feeling of sobriety.

Defining moralistic love as dependent on the confirmation of the dignity of the ego, it is soon made clear that these three elements that it is dependent on are its weakness: confirmation, dignity and the ego.

Empathy, on the other hand, is dependent on the consciousness of others' betterment, which therefore also has three elements it is dependent on, three weaknesses.

The first is that, out of empathy, one will not help another if one is not conscious of others' betterment, and therefore needs to be able to connect with them in order to empathize with them. In case one is not able to do so directly, this requires imagination, so that the unimaginative are indifferent of the suffering of people they are never in contact with.

The second is that empathy may be biassed towards certain individuals above others, and in this way fail to be impartial. We may be less empathetic of someone who has harmed us in the past, for instance, because we distanced ourselves from them, or we might be too easily influenced by a good friend, even to do wrong, for instance through nepotism or by becoming an accomplice in a crime they committed; or we might do too much effort trying to help a good friend whereas we might with the same effort have helped others far more.

The third weakness of empathy is that it may prevent one from harming someone even if it would eventually do more good than harm to do so. For instance, many people, given the chance, would simply have be unable to kill a mass murderer such as Hitler, even if they could do so safely and without effort, even though, by doing so, they could potentially have saved millions of lives. In this way, the result of empathy may become reverted and actually become destructive. Empathy might even drive us to save mass murderers. In this case, empathy can be just as bad as the morals that caused the Crusades, the Inquisitions or the Holocaust. It is therefore clear that we must at times be able to control our empathy as well as our moralism, and morals and empathy must be in balance.

Both the weaknesses of morals and of empathy can be corrected if each is refined, but this is best done by combining the two. We must seek a balance between thought and feeling and not just depend on either. We must not be biassed towards either of the two and see one as being superior to the other, for we need both.

What can we give to the world if not who we are? If we are not truly ourselves, we are close to worthless except as a tool. But we have more to offer the world than yet another dispensable tool. We are people, and not just replaceable parts of machinery. The work of machines should be done by machines, not by people. It is an abuse of people that they would be used as such, that they should be reduced to such low level. To be used as machines puts us beneath even animals, for even they, at least, are still themselves. They, at least, feel, and live to feel. Who are we to say that they have no soul, if we have no soul ourselves, if we sold our souls as parts of the system, in return for its safety?

It is no longer our bodies that are machines to us. We ourselves are now the machines. Not only our bodies, but also our minds and hearts. That machinery no longer even belongs to ourselves, nor to anyone; it is now simply this, machinery that works by itself, without knowing why. We do not know why, nor does anyone. The machine is automated.

If we would truly work for our quality of life, then we would work to find a way to let actual machines do that work for us, that we ourselves might serve our true purpose as human beings, as beings that can love or create. But we do not want to serve any such purpose, for to do so we would need to feel, rather than merely acting. Instead, we prefer to live as machines because it is so much safer than to be a human, so much safer than to feel.

As it is now, we work not out of love, or out of any feeling, but simply because we think we need to. We think that by working, we will achieve something. But we work merely to further our downfall, to help the machine to grow, and as it grows, it destroys everything that makes the world a place worth living on. We work to further feed our excesses while destroying our freedom, nature, equality, individuality, and diversity.

We are like a fleet of airplanes that has been left on automatic pilot, now strayed far of course without a heart as pilot. The pilots have all fallen asleep. If you can hear this at all, wake up, and wake others up. We need to wake up, all of us — including myself as well as you — and not think too quickly that we have truly awakened to our lives. Are you awake now? Do you feel this moment? Or have you merely lost yourself once more into thought alone, that excess of thoughts that turn this world into a machine? Are you aware of what you feel? I, for one, cannot say that I was aware as I was writing this.

I am not preaching that I am any better than you. We all need to wake up. We cannot awake in just moments. It takes time. But if you have at least awakened to your own unwakefulness, then wake yourself up. Wake each other up, even those as me who tell you to wake up.

Some historians have theorized that the apparent similarities between Horus and Jesus indicate that Jesus was actually derived from Horus. This article discusses which of these claimed similarities are true, which are false, and which are ambiguous. The article avoids taking sides as to whether or not Jesus was derived from Horus or not, with the view that evidence is inconclusive, though it is explores both the possibility that this is the case and the possibility that it is not.

Through this neutrality, this article tries to set itself apart from biassed sources. Some authors have sought to interpret information in whatever way suited them best in their personal beliefs, and therefore, sources which are not themselves objective are avoided. I hold no personal beliefs about whether Christ was a myth or a historical person, and merely seeks to explore all possibilities to exclude those that appear inconsistent. Furthermore, it presents the readers with all objective information needed to allow them to draw their own conclusions. This objective information is from professional sources, mostly books, and can be immediately accessed online through links.

First of all, it is true that Horus was originally born on the 25th of December, at that time 6 Mechir in the Egyptian calendar. (Normandi Ellis: "Feasts of Light: Celebrations For Seasons Of Life Based On The Egyptian Goddess Mysteries; page 16, below: "The Birth of Horus, Child of Isis") Many people, however, will say that he was actually born in Koiak, and currently, this is indeed the case. However, this is only so because the current Koiak has shifted roughly to where the ancient Mechir used to be. It is easy to confuse the months of the ancient Egyptian calendar with those of the modern one.

This misunderstanding is because the Coptic Calendar shifts over time. A full solar year is actually 365,25 days long, not 365. In the Gregorian calendar this is solved using leap years or intercalary years. The ancient Egyptian calendar, however, disregards this, so that every year the Coptic calendar shifts one year. Because of this it has been called the Annus Vagus or "Wandering Year". (Bishoy K. R. Dawood, The Coptic Calendar; page 2: "the Egyptian calendar had no leap years, and as such the civil year moved one day every four years behind a solar calendar".) It must be noted that 25 December is not actually believed to be Jesus' birthdate; more on that later.

Some sources claim that Isis was a virgin and Horus was born through immaculate conception (Rosemary Ellen Guiley: The Encyclopedia of Witches, Witchcraft and Wicca, Third Edition, page 181: "A son, Horus, was born posthumously and in a virgin birth." However, pyramid texts appear to leave no doubt at all that she was in fact not a virgin:

"Isis comes to you [Osiris] rejoicing for love for you. You have placed her on your phallus and your seed issues into her, she being ready as Sothis, and Her Sopd has come forth from you as Horus who is in Sothis." This is quoted by M. Isisdora Forrest in Isis Magic, page 105, and from this it would seem that Isis was not a virgin. On the other hand, contradictorily, the same book cites numerous other ancient sources on page 140, including Ploutarchus, that are unambiguous evidence of the opposite. In one hymn to Osiris she was called "The Great Virgin." Yet there was no obscurity around Osiris' and Isis' intercourse in Egyptian culture: "Temple reliefs at Abydos, Dendera and on the island of Philae, show Osiris lying with erect penis and Isis as a bird above him" (Evžen Strouhal et al: Life of the ancient Egyptians, page 49).

However, unlike the Bible, mythology is not a single entity but a collection various of folklores, and often various versions of the same story, or mutually exclusive stories, exist within the same mythology. The reason that Isis' conception is particularly ambiguous even for mythology is because it can be interpreted in several ways.

According to the myth, Set killed Osiris and cut him into pieces, which he then spread across Egypt. Isis, with the help of other gods, set forth to retrieve the pieces. Earlier, Isis had forced Ra to convey his power onto her by poisoning him, and promising to cure him if he told her his secret name. (Myth Encyclopedia: "He told Isis [his] name, and she gained new powers"), and with this power now resurrected Osiris, at least, most of him.

One piece, however, was missing: the penis, which had fallen into the Nile, had been eaten by an oxyrhyncus fish. Isis therefore fashioned a penis out of wood, (or, according to some other myths, clay or gold), with which Osiris then impregnated Isis with Horus (Matheus Franciscus Maria Berk: The Magic Flute, page 287: "From this coition Horus is born"). However, another source states that Horus was already born when his father died (Donna Rosenberg: World mythology: an anthology of the great myths and epics, page 166). These are likely different versions of the story.

Since her conception happened through an artificial penis, however, this could be taken to be similar to artificial insemination, and so there are some that say that this is, in a sense, immaculate conception. Since the replacement for the penis was created from Ra's powers, it could be said that Isis was indirectly impregnated through the power of Ra. Osiris had earlier been embalmed, (Ross Shepard Kraemer: Her Share of the Blessings, page 71) which involves the removal of the organs. Without Ra's powers, he would therefore likely have been sterile.

Either how, it is evident that this can be interpreted in whatever way one wants, and if Jesus had been based on Horus, those that did so might likewise have interpreted it however they wanted.

There is, however, another story which leaves less ambiguity with regards to Isis' virginity: according to one text, Isis was impregnated with Osiris' seed by the flash of lightning:

"The lightning flash strikes, the gods are afraid, Isis waked pregnant with the seed of her brother Osiris." (Isidora Forrest, Isis Magic, page 22)

One author, however, J. Gwyn Griffiths, dissented with Faulkner's original translation ('The Pregnancy of Isis': A Comment, by J. Gwyn Griffiths), claiming that the original Egyptian text is ambiguous, and "the lightning flash strikes" may also mean "you shine as a star" or, "you are adorned with a unique star in the midst of Nut." Nut, the sky goddess, was represented as mating with Geb, the earth god. Moreover, the pot she was seen wearing on her head in hieroglyphics is symbolic of a uterus. (W. Hommel, Images of the Egyptian Goddess Nut). However, it is hard to fit this with the rest of the text, in which "the gods are afraid," and Isis "wakes pregnant." Moreover, the combination with the other Egyptian mentions of Isis' virginity does not seem to leave much room for doubt; their concurrence seems to settle this matter.

It is true that, like Jesus, Horus was an only son (Egyptian Myths: "Glory to Horus […] the only son of Osiris" (Song of Praise). There is, of course, little significance in this, and as there is no way to add up similarities of less significance, it might perhaps be better to seek for other similarities.

Both Jesus and Horus are said by some Christ myth theorists to have been of royal descent. Indeed, Horus was the son of Osiris, who was considered king of Egypt as well as of the Underworld (Geraldine Pinch: Egyptian Mythology), while Jesus is said to be descended from King David (Martin C. Albl: Reason, Faith, and Tradition: Explorations in Catholic Theology, page 293; also Joye Jeffries Pugh: Eden: The Knowledge of Good and Evil). It must be noted that there is evidence that, contrary to Osiris (probably), King David was real (Christopher Heard: Picking Abraham and Choosing David; also, Rachel Ginsberg: How Jewish is Jerusalem?), meaning that Christ would have been mythologically connected to a real royalty rather than to a mythological one, as Horus was.

Some have said that, like Jesus, Horus had twelve disciples. Though it is unsupportable to use the word "disciples", it is true that Horus had twelve followers, who followed him throughout his journey through the sky (E. A. Wallis Budge: Egyptian Heaven and Hell, page 176: "The Boat [of Afu-Ra] is now towed by twelve gods.")

Isis was associated with some other gods, including Hathor, the goddess of love and equivalent of Aphrodite, and Meri, the goddess of the sea. (Patricia Monghan: The New Book of Goddesses and Heroines). Meri is apparently pronounced like Mary. However, whether or not this is significant can be debated: Isis had so many names that a phonetic proximity with "Mary" might perhaps be coincidental. This is why one of her many names was Myrionymos, or "Isis of the Ten Thousand Names" (Isis Magic, Isidora Forrest, page 577.)

However, the coincidence becomes even greater when one considers that Mary is considered "the Star of the Sea," while Meri was a goddess of the sea. Moreover, Isis was called "Stella Maris" by sailors of the Mediterranean Sea, which literally means Star of the Sea. (James Stevens Curl: The Egyptian Revival, page 62; also Michael Streich: The Cult of Isis in Imperial Roman Times).

Some have erroneously stated that Seb was Horus' father, while in fact Seb was Horus' grandfather, the father of Osiris. (Deborah Howard: The Egyptian Culture Reflected in Worship: "Seb and Nat were the parents of Osiris, Isis") Any similarity of the name with Joseph's therefore appears to be entirely coincidental. Similarity of names does not seem to be enough to prove a connection. Note that the "Isis" is itself similar to "Jesus," while there is likewise no connection that makes sense. Also, IHS, a common christogram, is speculated by some to stand for "Isis Horus Seb." There are many christograms, however, so that this coincidence is not surprising, and, as said, Osiris, and not Seb, was the father of Horus. As a side note, there is even a myth amongst some laymen that "Horizon" derives from Horus and "Sunset" from Set. Set comes from the German zetten; Horizon comes from the Greek horizon kuklos, which means limiting circle. (Oxford Dictionaries.) It is dangerously seductive to confuse such coincidences for actual evidence.

There is some uncertainty whether Christ was born in a cave or in a stable (Joan E. Taylor, Christians and the Holy Places, page 100), and some Christ myth theorists claim that Horus was born in a cave as well. However, Isis actually gave birth to Horus in a papyrus swamp (Rosemary Radford Ruether, Goddesses and the Divine Feminine, page 66), and no reliable sources can be found which claims otherwise. There are also no reliable sources to be found claiming that Horus' birth was attended by angels or witnessed by shepherds. Since Isis hid Horus in the papyrus swamps because she was pursued by Set (Radford Ruether), it seems highly unlikely that this would be the case. For one thing, why would shepherds find her by accident while Set could not while searching for her? The visit of angels, moreover, would only make her more likely to be found. Moreover, because of the prior occurrence of coition, a message from an angel is less relevant anyway.

Also, no reference could be found about "three solar deities" popularly thought to have visited Horus at birth. A possible explanation for this popular belief may be that the sun was at one point represented by three Gods: Khepri wa the morning sun, Ra the midday sun, and Atum the evening sun (Geraldine Pinch: Handbook of Egyptian Mythology).

According to a text translated by Faulkner, Isis woke up knowing that she was pregnant when, as mentioned earlier, a flash of lightning impregnated her (Isis Magic, page 22). The text goes on as follows:

"The lightning flash strikes, the gods are afraid, Isis waked pregnant with the seed of her brother Osiris. She says, "O you gods, I am Isis, the sister of Osiris, who wept for the father of the gods (even) Osiris who judged the slaughterings of the Two Lands. His seed is within my womb, I have molded the shape of the god within the egg as my son is at the head of the Ennead." This text tells a lot, and one of the things it makes clear is that Isis clearly needed no angels to tell her that she was pregnant.

It is said by some that, comparable to Herod, who tried to kill Jesus after birth, Herut tried to kill Horus after his birth, but this is likely confused with Set. Herut is in fact another name for Heru-ur (Ancient Egypt Online). Heru is another name for Horus, and is usually used when in combination with another god, and Heru-ur means "Horus the Elder", which is the oldest version of Horus himself (Encyclopedia Mythica). No reference could be found that Heru-ur tried to kill the younger Horus. There are references that Typhon tried to kill Horus, but this is exactly the same story as that of Set (Isidora Forrest: Isis Magic, page 20). Typhon and Set are identical.

It is true, however, that when Herod threatened to kill Jesus, "an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. "Get up," he said, "take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him." (Bible: Matthew 2-13), whereas when Set tried to kill Horus, "Thoth, the great god, the Prince of Truth in heaven and on earth, said unto me : " Come, goddess Isis [hearken thou], it is a good thing to hearken, for he who is guided by another liveth. Hide thyself with thy child […]" (E. A. Wallis Budge: Literature of the Ancient Egyptians, page 88 (also on archive.org).

According to some Christ myth theorists, both Horus and Christ are said to have had some "ritual" when they came of age, and it is said that this was when they were twelve years old: Christ went through his Bar Mitzvah, while Horus had a ritual which restored his eye following a battle with Set. It is true that, when he came of age, Horus lost an eye in a battle against Seth, upon which Thoth restored his eye. (Albert M. Potts: The World's Eye, page 17) However, this restoration is not mentioned as a ritual, and I would assume it was more likely a kind of spell, like that which restored Osiris to life.

The most important error, however, is that the Bar Mitzvah does not appear to date as far back as to the time of Christ.

"The Bar Mitzvah dates to as far back as the fifteenth if not the eighth century." (Barbara H. Fiese: Family routines and rituals, page 69)

"One of the first scholars to use the term bar mitzvah in the sense it is used today was Mordecai ben Hillel, a thirteenth century German rabbi. Most of the references to the bar mitzvah appear after this date." (Ronald H. Isaacs: Reaching for Sinai: A Practical Handbook for Bar/ Bat Mitzvah and Family, page 8.)

"For most of Jewish history, there was no formal ceremony; reaching the age of Jewish maturity was synonymous with being a Bat or Bar Mitzvah." (Barbara Binder Kadden, Bruce Kadden: Teaching Jewish Life Cycle: Traditions and Activities)

While there is some uncertainty about when the practice of Bar Mitzvah began, one thing appears clear: "The Talmud, the major source for the rabbinic interpretation of Jewish law, is also silent with regard to a Bar Mitzavah at the age of thirteen, clearly indicating that the ceremony as we know it today was unknown in talmudic times. The Talmud does mention the term "Bar Mitzvah" twice, but both times in reference to any Jew who observes the religious commandments, not necessarily to a boy of thirteen." (Ronald H. Isaacs: Reaching for Sinai: A Practical Handbook for Bar/ Bat Mitzvah and Family, page 8)

Moreover, whereas the Bar Mitzvah is performed at the age of 13, males in Egypt were apparently considered to come of age at 14. (A. Scott Loveless, Thomas Holman: The Family in the New Millennium: The place of family in human society, page 116.)

However, another source indicated that this age has not always been the same through ancient Egyptian history: "In the biography of Bakenkhonsu, High Priest of Amen under Rameses II, we are told that he came of age at sixteen." (Arthur Weigall: The Life and Times of Akhnaton, Pharaoh of Egypt). Either how, there does not seem to be any indication of any sort that Horus was twelve when he lost his eye.

An argument that would make more sense, however, would be that both Horus and Jesus went through a sudden transformation when they came of age:

"Horus succeeded to the throne of his father" (Angela P. Thomas: Egyptian Gods and Myths, page 47)

As for Jesus:

"And the child grew and became strong; he was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him." (Luke 2:39-52)

It would seem that both suddenly ascended to something greater, from children to something greater.

Another argument that is used by some CMTs is that of either Horus or Jesus, there are no records of their life between the age 12 and 18. Indeed, "The Bible leaves us hanging for approximately 18 years after the 12 year-old Jesus visits the temple in Jerusalem (Luke 2:41-52)" (Nazareth Village).

However, for Horus no mention of any age could be found at all. Horus, unlike Jesus, was not seen as a historical but rather a mythological figure, and in the mythological realm, time may have a different meaning. The Egyptians likely did not ascribe any age to him, or any other of their gods, and likely saw time as passing differently for the gods than it did for humans. Although the Egyptians obviously saw their gods as being mortal, they did not seem to depend on time. This is, however, my own speculation, for which I cannot cite any sources.

No references could be found that Horus was "baptized" by Anubis. Anubis was an embalmer, and prior to Osiris was the god of the underworld. The most likely reason for this misconception was that Anubis helped to embalm Osiris, a process during which the body is washed upon removal of the viscera (Farid Atiya, Lamis Fayed: Egypt: page 14). At night, Horus and Osiris became one Farid Atiya: Valley of the Kings, page 9: "During the night journey Ra [later merged with Horus] and Osiris united and formed a single entity"), so that an overheated imagination might see a connection with baptism.

No source could be found confirming that Set tempted Horus in the Amenthes. It is, however, true that, like Christ travelled through the desert, Ra (or Horus) travelled through the Amenthes. However, Horus-Re travelled through the underworld every night (Jon Ewbank Manchip White: Ancient Egypt, page 37: [the sun's] "nightly journey beneath the earth"; also Evans Lansing Smith: The Hero Journey in Literature, page 386: "The Egyptians pictured the nightly journey of the Sun God Ra as a passage through a sequence of doorways connecting the twelve chambers of the underworld domain of Osiris").

Some claim that Horus walked on water, but again, no source can be found which confirming this. The most likely explanation for this theory is that Horus is theorized by some to be associated with Orion (Greg Taylor: The God with the Upraised Arm). This is because "The living Pharaoh was identified with Osiris' son Horus, as the 'living Horus,' and a dead Pharaoh was identified with Osiris himself" (Ninian Smart: The World's Religions, page 203), and the Pharaoh was often represented as a "God with the Upraised Arm" (as per Greg Taylor), which is reminiscent of Orion. Indeed, using Photoshop to superimpose the version of the God with the Upraised Arm on Orion, one finds that it fits exactly.

This image was taken from the walls of the Temple of Edfu (which is associated with Horus and his battle against Set) and was rescaled and rotated to best fit onto Orion. It must be noted that the lines on the image do not represent the modern representation of Orion, but rather emphasizes the connections that the Egyptians may have seen.

Also, like Horus, Orion was said to have been killed by a scorpion (Tamra Andrews: Dictionary of nature myths: legends of the earth, sea, and sky, page 171). Finally, in the northern hemisphere, the belt of Orion will point roughly at where the sun will rise at any point in the night, as can be observed using Stellarium.

Now, according to the Aeneid, Orion was perceived as walking, not on water, but through the waters of the ocean: "'As great Orion moves forward, cleaving his way, with his feet treading the floor of the deepest mid-ocean.'" (Virgil, Aeneid 10. 763 (trans. Day-Lewis) (Roman epic C1st B.C., via Theoi Greek Mythology)

In the evening, on the ocean Orion can be seen wading through the waters. Using the modern version of Orion makes him look quite awkward, but using the "God with upraised arm" version makes more sense. The former makes it look as though Orion is crawling rather than walking through the waters, whereas the older one makes it look as though he is making strenuous but coordinated strides.

If Horus was associated with Orion, it might be that he himself was believed to be able to walk on water. Anyhow, the association is easily laid, be it by the Egyptians themselves or by someone else.

It is argued by some that both Horus and Christ cast out demons. Though no references could be find confirming that Horus actually cast out demons, it is true that he fought against Set, which might easily be interpreted as a demon.

It is said that Horus healed the sick and restored sight to the blind. Again, no references. Rather, Horus had himself been healed by Isis, and later, his own sight had been restored by Thoth. However, since his right eye was the sun and his left eye was the moon (Geraldine Pinch: Egyptian mythology, 131), it can be said that by shedding light upon the world, he thereby lent others the sight of his own eyes. Possibly, the Egyptians might have believed that light and sight were the same thing, and that the light from the sun and moon was the sight from Horus own eyes.

Another statement is that Horus stilled the waves, as Jesus according to the Bible (Mark 4:35-40), but this is inaccurate. The true version is that it was so Ra who made the waves still for Horus (Michael Pollard: The Nile). Nonetheless, the similarity remains. This similarity is great enough that it can be exaggerated, but small enough that it can be ignored, whichever you prefer.

Asar was indeed another name for Osiris (David Frawley: Gods, sages and kings: Vedic secrets of ancient civilization, page 271). "El" is Hebrew for Lord, and "Some of the divine names compounded with El in the Hebrew Bible were probably originally used of non-Israelite deities" (Bruce M. Metzger, Michael D. Coogan: The Oxford guide to people & places of the Bible). It is therefore quite possible that Azar was combined with El to form El-Azar, and it is also quite possible that the Romans, who were not used to words without suffixes, added the suffix "us" to this.

But then, there are also some that say that Israel comes from "Azar-el," while it can just as well be said to come from "Isis-Ra-El." Since Israel is similar to two combinations of gods' names that make perfect sense, it is obvious that a high probability of coincidence may be involved here.

It could therefore be argued that the name Lazarus is also a coincidence, but consider that Horus also helped to raise Osiris from the dead. If this is also coincidental, then the probabilities of both these coincidences must be multiplied for the total probability to be calculated. The result is that the total probability decreases exponentially. It therefore seems likely that Lazarus, who was raised by Jesus from the dead, was indeed derived from Osiris (John 11:1-46). This remains unproven, but probable.

It is true that Horus played part in raising Osiris from the dead, though he was not alone. His part consisted of bringing Isis and her sister, Nephtys, into the underworld, where Isis and Nephtys brought Osiris back to life (Donna Rosenberg: World mythology: an anthology of the great myths and epics, page 167: "He led Isis and Nephthys to the world of the dead").

Though Horus did not actually resurrect his father, but he did reinvigor him once he was resurrected: "Horus then removed his eternal eye, placed it in his father's mouth and directed him to swallow it." (Donna Rosenberg)

Another claim that has been made is that, like Jesus (Matthew 12:40), Horus went to hell for three days before resurrecting, but as has been said before, he was resurrected the dawn after the night he died. He did go to hell to resurrect his father, but no source could be found stating how long Horus stayed there.

It is most likely that there has been confusion with one of Horus' battles with Set, which lasted for three days and three nights (Donna Rosenberg: World mythology: an anthology of the great myths and epics, page 167). Since Set is the god of the underworld it is easy to imagine this battle to have taken place in the underworld. However, no mention can be found that this is the case. Horus' other battles with Set and his followers apparently did not take place in the underworld, either, but in Egypt (Sacred Texts), as Set, at that time, reigned over Northern Egypt (Archibald Henry Sayce: The religion of ancient Egypt, page 162). Northern Egypt was the part closer to the sea and therefore also called "Lower Egypt," hence, the confusion with the "Underworld" is easy.

On the other hand, it might also be that, in ancient times, the two had likewise been confused. "The Lower Lands" might have been translated as "the Underworld." Consider, for example, that "inferno" means both hell and lower, as does "nether." Thus, some might say that if Horus had been syncretized with Jesus, the syncretists might have had the belief that Horus had been in hell for three days. This is, however, speculation, as must be duly noted.

The belief that Horus spent three days in hell is most likely due to Gerald Massey's claim that Jesus' resurrection after three days in hell are Egyptian in origin, though he mentions this only anecdotally, and does not appear to back this claim with arguments other than that "Three days was the length of time allowed for the burial in Amenta" (Gerald Massey: Ancient Egypt, the light of the world, page 814).

Actually, for pharaohs (and it is the pharaohs, who were at the same time Horus [Moustafa Gadalla: Historical deception: the untold story of ancient Egypt, page 55], that we are dealing with here), the process of embalming could take as long as 70 days. (Social Studies School Service: Ancient Egypt, page 55).

Many of the unsupportable claims made by some Christ myth theorists seem to originate from Gerald Massey's "Ancient Egypt - the Light of the World," but there do not appear to be any other sources that corroborate these.

Gerald Massey often cited his sources, but he also often did not, and, what is worse. In his writing he makes little distinction between what is established fact and what is his own speculation, and the two are so intermingled with one another that it can easily seem as if his speculations are likewise established fact. If I had likewise forgotten in this article to mention what parts are speculation, I might, likewise, have convinced a lot of people that they were true, since I cite references for everything else.

As a side note, another speculative explanation for Christ's death and resurrection that one might put forward could be apparent death, be it that of Christ or of a pharaoh. After all, Horus was believed to be incarnated as the pharaoh (Moustafa Gadalla: Historical deception: the untold story of ancient Egypt, page 55), and so anything that would happen to the pharaohs could have been translated into the mythology of that time. Since the pharaohs were identified with Horus, if Christ was inspired on Horus it is therefore well possible that the death and resurrection of Christ was inspired on true events. History is rife with instances of premature burial of people who were in a state of apparent death for several days, upon which they returned to life. William Tebb's "Premature Burial, and how it may be prevented" mentions a large number of incidences of apparent deaths, and for some reason, in the majority of the ones he mentioned, the person in question started giving signs of life again after three days, rather than two or four days. This may be because dehydration is usually fatal after two to three days (in the case of apparent death, it is more likely that this takes three days, because almost no fluid is lost due to sweating or breathing), so that, on the third day, the dormant central nervous system might spring back to life with the adrenaline of severe pain signals.

It is true that Bethany, the village where Lazarus lived, means "house of Anu" (or "house of the dead") (Timothy Hogan: The Alchemical Keys To Masonic Ritual By, page 46), whereas Osiris was, according to Egyptian texts, indeed born in "Anu," (Sir Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge: Osiris and the Egyptian resurrection, Volume 1, page 125: "[…] he himself is Anu, born in Anu"). Anu or Annu is another name for Heliopolis (literally "city of the sun") (Sir Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge: Osiris and the Egyptian resurrection, Volume 1, page 202).

Like Jesus, Horus is said by some to have been buried in a tomb, but again we are here faced with the typical problem of identity faced in Egyptian mythology: the pharaohs of Egypt were each associated with Horus, and all of these were, of course, buried in tombs. The first few pharaohs, however, including Hor-Aha and his first generations of successors, were apparently typically called Horus (Juan Ricardo Cole: Colonialism and revolution in the Middle East, page 15). This does not appear to me to be of any significance, as anyone of royal descent is likely to be buried in a tomb either how.

No objective sources could be found confirming popular claims that "Both gods delivered a Sermon on the Mount," that "Horus is known as KRST, the anointed one," that "Both Jesus and Horus have been called the good shepherd, the lamb of God, the bread of life, the son of man, the Word, the fisher, and the winnower," that "Both are associated with the zodiac sign of Pisces." Of course, this does not mean that there are no sources confirming this, merely that, until we do, we should not yet be too quick to accept them as true.

Although Horus himself was not associated with a shepherd's crook, his father, Osiris, was (Dr. Raymond Faulkner, Raymond O. Faulkner, Carol Andrews, James Wasserman: The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day, page 49.), and, as we have said before, Osiris and Horus merged (C. W. Leadbeater: Glimpses of Masonic History, page 29). This symbol is also associated with Jesus (David Fleer, Dave Bland: Preaching John's Gospel: The World It Imagines, page 157).

No references were found that Jesus was associated with a beetle, and, again, this belief seems to originate from speculations by Gerald Massey (Ancient Egypt - The Light of the World, page 623). It is true that Horus-Ra was associated with a beetle (Victor Harold Matthews, Don C. Benjamin: Old Testament parallels: laws and stories from the ancient Near East, page 6).

Some Christ myth theorists affirm that, as with Jesus, the birth of Horus was heralded by a star in the east, and that this star was Sirius. Indeed, when aligned with the stars of the belt of Orion, throughout the night Sirius points at the place where the sun will rise, and since Horus is the sun god, it might therefore be said that his rebirth every morning is heralded by Sirius. However, Sirius, or Sothis, was in fact identified with Isis herself.

This makes the association between Horus' birth and Sothis of a very different kind than the association between Christ's birth and the Star of Bethlehem. Whereas the Star of Bethlehem was seen as merely indicating where Christ was born, Horus was actually seen as having emerged from Sothis. Thus, if there is any connection to the Star of Bethlehem at all, it would be that, rather than being based upon the birth of Horus from Sothis, it would be more accurate to say that it has been inspired by it. There is, however, no proof of this.

Nonetheless, it is possible that there is a connection between Sothis and the Star of the East.

Ra was said to have burst from an egg (Encyclopedia Britannica: "an egg, which hatches as Re"). Since Ra was later merged with Horus, and Horus was born from Isis, it is therefore not unthinkable that a connection was laid between Isis and the egg from which Horus-Re burst forth, and, therefore, that the star Sothis became seen by some as an egg. There are many references to "the egg" with regards to Isis, including:

"I am Horus, born of Isis whose protection was made within the egg." (From coffin texts. Robert A. Armour: Gods and Myths of Ancient Egypt, page 72. Also Alan F. Alford: The Midnight Sun: The Death and Rebirth of God in Ancient Egypt.

"O you gods, I am Isis, the sister of Osiris, who wept for the father of the gods, (even) Osiris who judged the slaughterings of the two Lands. His seed is within my womb, I have moulded the shape of the god within the egg as my son who is at the head of the Ennead." (R. O. Faulkner: The Pregnancy of Isis, page 40.)

"You are pregnant and you are hidden, O girl! You will give birth, being pregnant for the gods, seeing that he is the seed of Osiris. May that villain who slew his father not come, lest he break the egg in its early stages, for the Great-of-Magic will guard against him." (R. O. Faulkner: The Pregnancy of Isis.)

"He is the god, Lord and Heir of the Ennead, who made you within the egg." (Isidora Forrest: Isis magic, page 22.)

It is true that, even in mammals, the fetus starts from an egg, or ovum, although very different from the one laid by birds; yet, it seems strange that references of "the egg" should be so abundant, especially since Horus was, after all, no longer an egg when these gods spoke those words.

There is a legend in Christianity that when Mary Magdalene discovered that Christ had resurrected, she went to emperor Tiberius with an egg. When she told him that Christ had arisen, Tiberius laughed and said that this was as impossible as that the egg in her hand would turn red. The egg promptly turned red. (Dr. Donald R. Houston: Hand-Painted and Decorative Easter Eggs; also, Diakonissa Pamela: Esoteric Christian Witch.)

Coincidence or not, in many ancient sources Sirius is described as red, whereas other sources describe it as blue, and yet other sources as white. (David Darling, "Sirius: Mystery of Red Color"; Holberg: Sirius: Brightest Diamond in the Night Sky, Chichester; Whittet: A Physical Interpretation of the ‘red Sirius’ Anomaly.) Today, it is not seen as changing in color.

While this cannot be seen by the naked eye, Sirius is in fact not a single star but a binary star system, consisting of a larger A1V star, which will eventually turn into a red giant, and a white dwarf, which has already passed through its red giant phase. Some astronomers have tried to explain this by stating that at that time Sirius B was a Red Giant. However, Sirius B turned into a White Dwarf 120 million years ago, and is only 8 light years away, so that this is obviously far too long ago for any human to have noticed this transition.

On the other hand, 120 million years is a short time on astronomical scale, and the Sirius system has been around for only 200 to 300 million years. It seems unlikely that an event of such scale that happened only such a short time ago would not still have some repercussions a hundred and twenty million years later.

During its collapse into a White Dwarf, Sirius B, which was then a Red Giant, shed its outer layers. Because it is estimated that at that time, it had 5 solar masses, most of its mass was therefore expelled. Perhaps part of these outer layers remained in orbit around the star in the form of gas. Because the two stars were in motion relative to one another, part of the gas was reabsorbed. The interplay of gravity between the two stars, however, may have prevented part of this gas from being absorbed immediately, and temporarily entrapped it in between the stars, for instance near Lagrange points where the gravity of the the two stars cancelled one another. Because blue light is easier broken than red light, only the red light passed through the gas which once surrounded Sirius, so that from Earth it looked red.

However, because the two stars have relatively similar masses (Sirius A is about two solar masses, while Sirius B is about one solar mass), the barycenter around which the two stars revolved lay well in between them, rather than slightly above one of the stars. Because of this, the distance between the two stars therefore varies (Sol Station) between 8.1 and 31.5 AUs. Because of this, the gas trapped near the Lagrange points did not remain inert relative to the two stars for long, as the Lagrange points themselves were stable. Thus, more and more gas was absorbed by both stars. When the white dwarf, Sirius B, reached its Chandrasekhar limit, a nova occurred.

Considering astronomical timescales, It might seem unlikely that humans would ever live to witness such a transition, but while stars are slow to evolve, there are also a lot of stars. Humans have witnessed several supernovas throughout history, one being that which in 1054 gave birth to the famous Crab Nebula, the first nebula catalogued in Messier's catalogue. As humans have witnessed supernovas several times, it is not necessarily improbable that humans never witnessed the far more frequent novas, though, admittedly, these are also far smaller. It's just a coincidence that Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, happened to be one that was at some point subject to novas.

It may be that this nova itself was actually the star in the east. Later, the resultant gas cocoon around Sirius cooled and thus might have become red in color. Thus, Jesus' birth might have been associated with the eruption of the nova, and his resurrection with the cooling of the cocoon.

This doesn't have to mean that this nova was used as a sign by God. Consider, for instance, that every time a Dalai Lama dies, the High Lamas keep finding another, and every time, he becomes a wise man. This does not have to mean that the Dalai Lama actually reincarnated: it simply means that another person is given the title of Dalai Lama. Likewise, when people in the ancient era saw the occurrence of this nova, they knew a prophet would come. But throughout history there have always been prophets. It might be that the most renowned prophet of that time got more credit than the most renowned prophets from other times partially because of this nova.

When people saw that the brightest, most symbolically powerful and most mythologically charged star in the sky flare up, it is not unthinkable that this affected them so profoundly that this in itself moved them to form a new religion. So much for just another nova in the universe.

All this is, of course, highly speculative, and I would not have mentioned it were it not that this possibility came to my mind. Whether this possibility is actually true I do not claim to know.

It has been claimed that, like Horus, Christ was crucified and resurrected after three days. While it is true that he was resurrected, this was when he was bitten by a scorpion as an infant, and he was resurrected by his mother, Isis. (Donna Rosenberg, World mythology: an anthology of the great myths and epics, page 166) The only mention that could be found of the time it took for Horus to be resurrected from the scorpion bite is on Tour Egypt, which may or may not be a reliable source. According to this site, Isis restored her child to life on the dawn following the night the child had been stung.

It is my own speculation that this myth may be connected to the constellation Scorpius. Every year, the sun passes right past the sting of Scorpius, and in Egypt, the Scorpion can then be seen before sunset, with its sting beneath the horizon, pointing at where the sun would be. Of course, as the sun rises the Scorpion is no longer visible.

This year, the distance of the sun to the "tip" of the sting, Lambda Scorpii, reaches its minimum on 18 December, which is very deceptively close to the solstice, but make no mistake: this date has varied over the centuries. Thus, even if there is a connection between Scorpius and the scorpion that bit Horus, it has nothing to do with the solstice. Either how, it does not seem that Horus' death and resurrection had anything to do with the crucifixion of Christ.

This can be observed using a freeware application known as Stellarium. Note that while such simulations might seem unreliable, they can can predict and retrodict the position of the stars with perfect precision because the stars follow such perfectly predictable pattern.

The myth that Horus was crucified is apparently due to a premature inference based on the fact that, seen from southern Egypt, the Southern Cross or Crux rises in the south at night. However, the southern cross is visible for several months in fall and winter. (Again, this can be observed using Stellarium.) The sun does not pass across the Southern Cross as thought by some, nor would it have much significance if it did, since the sun would then make the Southern Cross invisible. It may be possible that the Southern Cross inspired the crucifixion of Christ, but no more than possible.

It is more or less true that the sun stands still for three days around the solstice, but this is only a matter of interpretation. Seen from Cairo, in 2009 the day shortened by 4 seconds from 19 to 20 December and 2 seconds from 20 to 21 December, while lengthening by 3 seconds from 22 to 23 December and 5 seconds from 23 to 24 December. 2 or 3 seconds is hardly still observable with the naked eye, but then, 4 or 5 seconds is hardly still observable either unless one can immediately compare the two days, as with Stellarium. On the other hand, while the latter can still be observed with some difficulty, the former can no longer be discerned at all with the naked eye.

While the most striking apparent between Horus and Jesus is apparently the date of birth, it must be noted that in contrast to Horus, Jesus' birthdate was never known, and 25 December was only later chosen as the date to celebrate his birth. If Jesus was a myth rather than a historical figure, it is strange that no date of birth should have been given, for if he was indeed based on Horus, his date of birth could simply have been copied at once. Instead, it apparently took several hundreds of years before December the twenty-fifth was established as the date of Jesus' birth. (Catholic Encyclopedia: "At Rome the earliest evidence is in the Philocalian Calendar […] under 25 December is found "VIII kal. ian. natus Christus in Betleem Iudeæ".)

Striking is that this is 17 years after the death of Constantine in 337, and 29 years after the Nicene Creed was formulated…

Perhaps Jesus was actually a real historical figure, a prophet who only later became associated with Horus after he became deified. If this is the case, then this would apparently most likely have been around the time that the Nicene Creed was formulated.

There have been many, such as professor David Dungan (author of Constantine's Bible), who have argued that Constantine has manipulated the Bible into a sociopolitical weapon. After all, the Empire as a whole became more powerful once Christianity became the state religion, because this unified the entire empire under one religion, by a common purpose. At the time of Constantine's reign, the Roman Empire encompassed a variety of different subcultures, many of which still had at least some bond to their own original religion. In many religions, deities similar to Horus are found, including that of Egypt itself, which at that time was part of the Roman Empire. In order to unify the people under one religion, it may be that Constantine conflated these religions.

Since the dawn of their civilization the Romans have been particularly syncretic in their attitude towards religion, seeing the gods in other cultures as local variations of their own. Most of their own gods had been derived from Greek religion, but the Romans kept syncretizing their gods with gods from other cultures as well.

Because they had so many gods, most ancient cultures were generally quite open with regards to religion. If one already has several hundreds of gods, it is no problem to introduce another few. Also, each god is less defined, so that if there are some similarities between the gods, there will only be few differences. If one believes there is only one God, however, it is much harder to syncretize them. For this reason, polytheisms tend to be far more open than monotheisms. Indeed, Isis herself had spread to Greece, Rome and across Europe, becoming one of the strongest. Rome, however, was especially open to other religions, partly because of the origins of its own religion lay in Greece, and so it had little authenticity to begin with. In addition, Greece had the view that all cultures worship the same gods with different names, and this view apparently passed from Greece to Rome. (A New Dictionary of Religions, John Hinnells)

It is, however, quite another thing if a polytheism is confronted with a monotheism. The Romans had to switch from believing in several hundreds of gods into just one. Because Christianity was becoming the dominant religion at that time, the Christian religion of that time might have become the basis of the new religion. If this is the case, it is possible that Christ was only then associated with Horus.

If, however, the Nicene council did indeed syncretize the religions in the Roman Empire, it did more than just combine different polytheisms into one monotheism, as, at that time, there was already another monotheism in the Roman Empire: Judaism. In order to fully unite the Roman Empire under a single religion, the Romans therefore needed to syncretize several monotheisms with several polytheisms.

It is possible that Emperor Constantine viewed these religious disparities as a threat to the integrity of the Roman Empire, and the Roman Empire was in a state of accelerating decline (decades after his death, the city of Rome was sacked). In order to remain stable, the Roman Empire needed to stand in unity, and with the Germanization of its military and population, unity was a major issue.

Because of the many ethnicities the Roman Empire covered, it was divided by culture. In order to be unified, it had to be united by a common goal. But how could all these ethnic groups serve the same goals if they had different ideals? The Roman Empire had always fought not simply to expand its power, but to spread its culture. But the empire had spread so fast that the spread of its culture could no longer keep up. Rome had overgrow itself.

At the edges of the Empire, everything that had made Rome so impressive to the barbarians it conquered was now far away. Even the army was becoming increasingly barbarized. It was no longer Rome that was conquering the barbarians: the barbarian were conquering their own kind.

The richest and most powerful aspect of culture, by far, is religion. It determines its followers' lifestyles and ways of thinking, even the very way they view the world. Yet, at the same time, it is also its most immaterial aspect, and so, unlike the amphitheatres, aqueducts, highways and other feats of engineering that inspired so much awe in the barbarians, it could be spread quite easily.

This is, perhaps, why the Romans had such a practical attitude towards religion: to the Roman Empire, religion was a means of gaining power over a people. In order to spread this instrument of power in the fastest possible way, the Romans therefore syncretized their religions with others, so that they could assimilate the barbarian cultures without them even suspecting as much. They started out stating that they in fact believed in the same gods as they, and merely called them by different names. Later, the attributes changed as the Romans built new temples, and eventually the entire mythology of the gods became merged.

It is partly through this syncretism that the Roman Empire truly conquered Europe. The irony is that the real conquest only began after the invasion, a conquest of a very different kind. This wasn't about dominating the people they had subjugated: through domination one can keep a people under control, but one can never fully control them. But the purpose of conquest isn't to merely keep people under control. If the conquest is to go on, the conquered must in turn become the conquerors.

It does not appear to me probable that the Romans were themselves aware of this mechanism, but it is possible that Constantine I was an exception. In fact, he even claimed to have had a vision of a cross inscribed with the words "CONQUER BY THIS". (Charles Matson Odahl, Constantine and the Christian empire, notes 285; Sean McLachlan: Byzantium: an illustrated history, page 14, also Joseph Cambray, Linda Carter: Analytical psychology: contemporary perspectives in Jungian analysis, page 194)

Now, Constantine was not the kind of person one would expect to have visions. As an Emperor, Constantine was not preoccupied with spirituality, but with politics, and as it happens, Constantine's purported vision seems to fit far better in the context of politics than in that of spirituality. Whether you see visions as a hallucination or a manifestation of the divine, one thing that history seems to make clear is that visions were a privilege of highly religious people. But at the time Constantine had this vision, he had not even professed Christianity. Whether his Christianity was real or not, it seems unlikely that he truly had this vision.

Even if we assume that God would have made an exception for the Emperor, since he did, after all, play an important role in Christianity, does it not seem strange that God would have used such politically charged words as "CONQUER BY THIS"? Would a God that had earlier commanded men not to kill later command an emperor to use his religion to conquer (read kill)?

This vision would have been revealed to Constantine at the time he was conquering Rome, and just before the decisive Battle of the Milvian Bridge (Mary Jo Weaver, David Brakke: Introduction to Christianity, page 61). At that time, he worshipped the sun god. Why would God have manifested such vision to a heathen, and so someone who had already broken the first commandment, rather than to Maxentius, who was already favoring Christianity (Timothy David Barnes: Constantine and Eusebius, page 38). In this way, God would only have senselessly caused more deaths. Be it from a Christian or non-Christian viewpoint, it would seem more likely that Constantine had invented this vision than that God became interested in politics.

Constantine realized that in order to succeed in winning their favor, he had to become, in their eyes, one of them. Not only this, but he had to seem as though he was their savior, chosen by god to deliver them. He called himself a "bishop ordained by God to oversee whatever is outside the church," and placed himself among the apostles (E. Glenn Hinson: The church triumphant: a history of Christianity up to 1300, page 149). This hubris went so far that Eusebius personified Constantine's three sons with the Holy Trinity. In the face of this, many claim that Constantine kept worshipping the sun at the same time, but this is disputed (Christopher Bush Coleman: Constantine the Great and Christianity, page 33).

By the time of Constantine, Christians are estimated to have constituted only 10 percent of the population (Jeffrey Brodd: World Religions: A Voyage of Discovery, page 237; Robert Bruce Mullin: A short world history of Christianity, page 48). What made Christianity so intimidating at that time was not their current numbers, but the speed at which this number increased. According to one author, this increase was as high as 40% per decade (Rodney Stark: The rise of Christianity: a sociologist reconsiders history, page 6). With such dramatic rate of increase, one didn't have to be a futurist to see that Christianity would soon predominate over paganism.

By uniting the religions of its provinces, Rome united them under a common purpose. This was possible as long as the provinces all had a polytheistic system of beliefs, but this was no longer possible with the Jews. This may be one of the reasons that Judaism, and later Christianity, had been less tolerated in Rome than the other religions.

Thus far, Rome had always been able to syncretize its religions, but now it was faced with a dilemma: how can one believe in one God and at the same time several simultaneously?

Possibly, it was as a solution to this problem that the Nicaean creed affirmed the divine trinity (Alister E. McGrath, Christian theology: an introduction, page 15). The trinity between The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit has by many been associated with the triad of Horus, Osiris and Isis, but Isis was not identified with Horus or Osiris. Instead, if any such association exists, it would be more likely that it is that with the trinity of Ra, Osiris and Horus, who had, in effect, all merged into one and the same god: Horus was identified with both Osiris and Ra. As said before, according to some myths, Isis had become pregnant, indirectly, through Ra's powers, while, according to another myth, she had become pregnant through a bolt of lightning. A connection between Ra and the "Holy Spirit" is therefore not impossible.

Ra is the older version of the sun god, which was considered the king of the gods, so that a connection with the Holy Spirit is not impossible. Furthermore, if Christianity was indeed syncretized with Roman paganism, then a syncretism between the Holy Spirit and the Roman king of gods, Jupiter, is also also not impossible. Considering that Jupiter was associated with lightning, a connection is easily made — though whether or not such connection was made is speculative.

Whether or not the Christian trinity was syncretized with the trinity of Horus (the Son?), Osiris (the Father?) and Ra (the Holy Spirit?) is hypothetical, and I present this more for the sake of propounding new possibilities than because I believe it to be true.

Prior to the Nicene creed, there was no consensus about whether Christ was a god or human, an Arian belief posited that Christ had not existed prior to his conception. In fact, it is possible that it was only after the Council of Nicaea that Christ became deified. For Constantine it would have been a far more favorable course of action to deify Christ than to merely tolerate his followers, as turning him into a god would cause far more people to follow Christianity, and, more importantly, they would do so far more devoutly. Deifying a historical figure meant that God had walked on earth amid the living, and therefore could do so again. This turned God from an abstract concept into a real figure.

Jesus' mortality did not take away from his perceived divinity, as Christians understood that his body had been but an avatar, but in the meantime, it made him seem all the more real. It was made clear that God was someone who could affect them not only in death but also in life, right then and there. Moreover, the fact that humans had killed him made them fear that God would punish them, and so devotion to Christ was all the more important. Thus Christianity came to inspire far more fear and awe than mythologies had before, and this may well have helped to turn Christianity into the most powerful religion on Earth.

That he was associated with Horus, however, does not mean that Christ did not exist, and the only reason why many Christ myth theorists are so eager to believe this is because they want to attack Christianity at its very heart. Remember that the pharaohs were associated with Horus, while this does not mean that the pharaohs weren't real.

However, if Christ was real but was merged with Horus and other religions, then anything the bible tells about him might be a lie. Yet, if he did exist, there is one message, perhaps the only one, that we can be sure was authentic to Christianity, partly because it is not seen in any other of the ancient European religions. Furthermore, the Roman emperors not only had nothing to benefit from it, but, even more, it might hinder them. Not only would it be the last element they would introduce into Christianity, but even more, if they could, they would likely have removed, were it not that it is so central in Christianity that this was impossible: for this message was that of unconditional love, and everything that rulers have done in the name of Christ has ever been in contradiction of this message, this one message of which we can assume that it was indeed his. This message was in fact the only that mattered, and yet it was the only that was never taken to heart.

The similarities between the Biblical Jesus and Egyptian Horus are proof that Christ was merged with Horus, and that the Bible had been rewritten to syncretize Christianity with Egyptian mythology. Thus, whether Christ was real or not, the Bible cannot be adduced as proof of this. Even if the Bible was divinely inspired, the original Bible has been destroyed, and thus, even with this viewpoint, we cannot depend on it.

Yet, generation after generation people depended on it for their lives and deaths, and this was exactly what Constantine wanted. This single book made all the difference between hell and heaven, infinite suffering and infinite bliss, and so, even the smallest chance that it might be true would be enough to believe in it. And how could they not, if everyone else already believed in it? How can one believe something that is contrary to what absolutely everyone else one knows believes? In this way, through a single book Constantine, and countless others after him, could control his people.

It would never have come this far if such religion had been made from scratch. But this religion had been modified from another, a religion that had already been widespread. People kept on passing their religion as they had before, but the religion had now changed. And without their knowing, it had changed far more than they ever dared to imagine.

It had turned from a faith of love into a faith of power. In the name of love, wars were fought, witches burnt, heretics tortured, discoveries recanted. Christ would turn in his grave if he knew all the horrible things that had been done in his name.

Christ, whether you believe him a god or a prophet or an idea, has been put to disgrace. Christianity is the worst possible abuse that Christ could ever have been put through. If you love Christ, whoever or whatever it might be, then you cannot be a Christian.

Christianity inverted the meaning of Christ's words. Words of love became words of control. Perhaps few ever realized that such transition was being made, for it came far too subtle. By the time anyone realized what had happened, it was already to late, and the new world order was already in control.

And thus it remained for two thousand years. Shall we allow it to continue? No, I'm not talking about Christianity now. Christianity lost most of its power long ago. Once it could no longer be used, it was left behind for something else, like a virgin that had been raped so violently that she died. By now, the animal has found other victims. Education. Industry. Politics. It's infected our whole society: unconditional control rather than unconditional love.

True Christianity has been made undone millennia ago. We are but clinging to a falsification. Christians have been fooled by a facsimile of the true faith of Christ.

No matter what did happen, it is clear that this religion cannot the religion of Christ. Christ, if he was real, would not have shed so much blood for his own religion. Was he not said to pray, even as he hung in agony on the cross, "Forgive them father for they know not what they do"? What cross are we ready to bear before we resort to waging wars in his name?

Most people keep to just one commandment at all times, and it is not to murder. If all those people will go to hell, where a fate awaits them that is worse than murder. Would we not rather go to hell together than to submit to a God like this? If that is how God is, then the entire universe is meaningless. Let us at least, then, in such meaningless universe, love one another, even as we would go to hell.

Most people break all commandment but that not to murder, which is the most terrible. But who are the people that are most likely to break this one commandment? It is those that keep themselves to all others. Who are they but pharisees?

It was Jesus' intention to overthrow a system of greed in the hope to replace it with love, and he failed. He ended up becoming instrumental in that same system that he had tried to overthrow.

He failed because his message was too far ahead of its time to be understood. But after all these thousands of years, haven't we learned still? Haven't we gotten the message of not only Jesus but also of others long before him, such as Buddha.

The individual cannot win a war against such entire system if none will follow in it. The system keeps on telling us that if we do not do so, we will suffer. We will suffer because if we do this, we will go to hell, or to jail, or to a mental hospital. But would we not rather, as Jesus, risk suffering to resist a system of control? If we are truly to follow him, or it — this man, or this idea, or whatever you might wish call it — then we cannot be part of such system, any system, even a system that claims to follow it. Love cannot be a system because it is a feeling. It cannot come from society because it needs to come from within ourselves.

No one can force that upon us because love cannot be forced, and aside from love nothing in the entire universe is of any value.

Jesus never spoke of a hell, and yet there surely is one. It is right here, and we have created it. This is the garden of Gethsemane, and the choice is ours. Will we drink this cup? Will we weep with tears of blood for what we have done, for what is happening to us, for each other? Or will we forget, turn back, and be cowards?

Whatever God may be or not be, all that God is to us, here and now, is an idea. God is an ideal towards which we can strive, and right now, our ideal has become control, and so our God is control; not love.

God is dead because most of us have no more ideals, and no love. We have killed God because we have killed our ideals, because we have allowed our ideals to be killed by that control. We control our lives in the hope that our lives might be used for something else, something outside of our lives, but what for? By doing this, we only succeed in ceasing to live at all, even while we are yet alive.

God is nothing but the faith we have in our lives, not the faith in something beyond our lives. Our lives, right now, is all that we have. Will we let other people tell us what to do with our lives for the sake of something beyond that of which we know absolutely nothing?

Many amateur Christ myth theorists have discredited these theories through exaggeration, while convincing others of fallacies. Through this article, I hope both to restore the reputation of these theories and at the same time point out that, while not excluded, they have at the same time not been proven, and further research is needed to prove or exclude them.

It took many days of research for me to be able to find all of the sources mentioned in this article, and I believe that many people can learn from this. Despite this, it is still possible that, speculations aside, I have made errors. I am not an Egyptologist and any knowledge of Egypt mythology I did have, I owe entirely to the research involved in writing this article.

Do not believe this article; do not reject it based on what others believe; but think for yourself.

But do not think that thinking for yourself is so easy. When thinking you are thinking for yourself, you will often instead let others think for you. Perhaps, after reading this, you still believe whatever others have told you to think, or perhaps you are now believing what you think that I believe, but it is unlikely for anyone to believe anything at all unless so told by others. A belief, I think, can only be formed by a group, not by an individual. An individual may be able to form an assumption, but not a belief. A belief is a symptom of excessive conformism.

Perhaps at this point you are thinking about all this whatever you need to think to keep your beliefs safe, because all this time those beliefs have kept you safe, or seemed to have kept you safe. I do not care what it is that you believe, whether you are a fundamentalist or pagan or nihilist or existentialist: you are unlikely have not formed those beliefs yourself.

Destroy those beliefs. Whatever you believe, destroy your beliefs before they destroy you. Have faith, have assumptions, but do not hold beliefs! Beliefs are an excess that leave no room to have an open mind, and dominate your thoughts. Beliefs are poison, a poison that maddens our minds into battling one another. Viewpoints are another matter, but to sanctify those viewpoints into beliefs, into virtual certainties, is dangerous.

Think for yourself, and do not do so simply because I tell you so, because then you won't. First of all, think for yourself whether or not you should think for yourself, or perhaps whether you should even begin to do that at all.

Maybe some who read this will be stirred by those words, but likely you will only do so as a mindless slave, used to nodding at every word it hears. Perhaps you will even go so far as to formulate the thought: I will think for myself. But you will likely only do so mechanically, because we have been reduced to mere mechanisms — or were we ever any better than now?

What are we to let others think for us? How can it be that they can control our very thoughts? Are even our thoughts no longer free?

Because observations show that all galaxies move away from one another with the same speed, mainstream scientists believe that there is no center of the universe, and that this is a direct result of the spacetime metric.
There is, however, another possible explanation: it might be that what we believe to be the entire physical universe, our observable universe, is but a very small part of it. The universe does, after all, expand at a speed faster than that of light. If so, it might have expanded far more than we think.
All our theories of the universe have been made with the assumption that the part of the universe we can observe is all there is to it. We therefore assume that the universe is no larger than were light can have travelled since the Big Bang. We believe the universe to be 14 billion, thus, taking into account the expansion of the universe, the observable universe is now ninety billion light years across. But beyond that point the universe might well be trillions of light years greater than we think.
How likely is it that the observable universe happens to be the entire universe? How great would the coincidence be that the universe would end just there were it is too far to be seen? If we do not know the real dimensions of the universe, they might be pretty much anything.
And, if the universe is far greater than we believe, than the center of the universe would be much farther away from us than we believe. The farther away we are from the actual center of our entire universe, the more uniform the motion of the galaxies relative to one another would be. That no deviation is observable in this uniformity would indicate that the entire universe is much larger than the observable universe.
Since the universe was once a plasma, and the expansion it has now is partly a continuation of this expansion (and partly due to the influence of dark energy), the universe still expands partly like this plasma, meaning that areas closer to the center will expand less than those farther away from it.
Since the center of the universe would lie outside the observable part of it, it could obviously not be observed, but it is possible that subtle deviations in the expansion of the universe could still be observed.
This would not affect the cosmic microwave background radiation of the universe, as the light from the background radiation comes from a time that all charged matter was coupled to photons into a plasma which spread throughout the universe. The light of the background radiation does not come from the outer reaches of the universe, but from everywhere throughout the universe. However, only the background radiation coming from beyond the edges of the observable universe hasn't reached us yet. As the universe has expanded since the decoupling event, it would otherwise be illogical that we could still observe background radiation at all, as the universe was relatively small at that time than it is now, and so, if we would be able to observe background radiation at all, it would not come from the background but from a small dot in the distance.
That the place where the Big Bang occurred is too far too be observed is a far more logical explanation than that it didn't occur at any particular place at all, but rather everywhere at once.
The explanation of spacetime metric is basically that "we cannot understand." Unfortunately, because mainstream physicists believe that spacetime metric cannot be conceived, no one tries to understand it, and so they are likely to use it as an explanation for anything that they cannot understand. The reason why spacetime metric cannot be understood is because there is simply nothing to be understood about it. The universe behaves as if time is a fourth spatial dimension because time influences space, not because time is an actual spatial dimension.

The entire universe is as a fractal, in that it is self-similar. The more complex a fractal is, however, the less the self-similarity is visible. The most evident fractals are only visible on a very small level. The fractals that comprise the universe are most obvious in biology and geology, but the truly significant examples, I believe, are potentially to be found in the world of physics.

The laws of physics are a case of self-similarity, perhaps because they are a a manifestation of the fractal nature of the universe. The laws of physics are self-similar in that they are invariable: objects always fall at the same speed, for instance. This is because they follow the same patterns, and this, in turn, is because the systems in which matter organizes, on a very small level, likewise follows the same patterns.

By combining a highly advanced physics engine with the right fractal generators, it might be possible to accurately recreate any physical phenomenon if we know how it is brought about, since the entire universe is on some level self-similar like a fractal. The same might apply to biological phenomena, if the physics engine was replaced by a "chemistry engine."

It might therefore not be needed to program everything about our world in virtual reality to replicate it: if we simply replicate its physical, chemical and biological laws, everything else might happen by itself, so that anything could form spontaneously, including organisms.

Evolutions are usually more permanent than revolutions, because they are so subtle that there are fewer reactions against it. This usually, though not always, makes such evolutions more effective, but, on the other hand, it also makes them more dangerous if they are negative.

Normally, in an evolutionary process, such reactions, like the original actions themselves, come steadily, and so both action and reaction are more subtle. In a revolution, however, both come far more abrupt, one following the latter. However, as in a revolution, reactions follow actions, and so the former resonate longer than the former, revolutionary change is not as stable as evolutionary change. The only way to prevent the change of a revolution to be largely offset is by preventing any reaction from occurring, but to do this usually requires despotism; but even such despotism would eventually fall, so that the eventual reaction would only be all the more fierce.

The only other way of preventing such reaction from reducing the original action is to respond to them in advance, so that the entire process of evolution can happen on a shorter time. To do so, however, one would need to foresee how this evolution would normally process, which in itself usually takes time, as it is hard to extrapolate a trend without knowing its beginning.

The only way one can therefore respond to reactions is by making the reactions oneself, combining action and reaction at the same time so as to achieve moderation.

That is to say, to defend having one's actions attacked, in a way one has to attack them oneself. Some issues can only be addressed from a distance, and so, either someone else must address, or one must oneself take a distance from oneself, lest others would take an even further, excessive distance from it. If one does not take down the hovels in one's own city, others will bombard it whole.

If we each deal with our own weaknesses, we will be sure, because we know ourselves, that we do so in just the right way, whereas if we leave this to someone else, it might happen in a far more brutal way, and we might be left crippled in the process.

Because nothing we do is perhaps, counterreactions are almost always needed to some extent to remove impurities from the original change that was brought about. If we carry out these counterreactions ourselves, however, there will be more cooperation both in action as in counterreaction, and by so doing, those that would otherwise be our opponents could then help us more in the action itself.

By becoming more open to other's views, one causes other people to become more open to one's own views. Thus not only will one learn more by being open to others' views, but also can one teach others more. One will learn more arguments both against one's own and against others' views by being open to theirs.

Darkness has for so long been condemned while light has so long been praised, that people have come to use the words dark and light to mean good and evil. And yet, despite these judgments, we need both. Darkness helps to purify us; light helps us grow. But we have become both overgrown and impure. This shows how we have strayed from our balance towards light, and away from darkness, and in order to regain that balance, we must learn to overcome our fear of the dark, and to love darkness as well as light. Neither need to mean suffering, but we suffer more in darkness than in light because it has become strange to us, so that we have come to fear it.

Everything is infinitely imperfect, yet everything is still infinitely valuable in itself despite that imperfection.

Nothing always remains in balance. When we have more or less achieved our balance, the most likely way we are to lose balance is by becoming so afraid to lose it that we will no longer dare to change anything, because we might thereby lose the balance we already have; in doing so, however, we already lose our balance, for we then become too stable.

Balance is not the same as stability: stability is merely one aspect of it. There can never be only stability for there to be balance, and so balance will in itself not be fully stable. The point of balance ever shifts from one place to another, and so we must seek to follow it as it does; or rather, there are several points of balance, in fact infinitely, each depending on what our intentions are: each of our intentions has its own area of balance. To achieve balance we too must often change as our balance changes, though our change be at the danger of losing stability.

If we realize this, the most likely way we are to lose balance when we are at balance is by becoming too self-conscious of what we must do to retain our balance. We become overanalyzing about just what we must do and to what extent, so that we try too hard to retain our balance and thereby only end up losing it.

Achieving balance comes at the danger that one loses it through the fear of losing it; if we fear to lose it, however, we already have, so that we no longer have to fear it.

Education may perhaps be the single most important system in our society. Not only is almost everyone in our society is subject to it, but our education also affects us in a way incomparable to any of the other systems in our society. Unlike any other of these systems, it does not merely set a system of rules for us, but actually sets it into our mind. In this way, education can control us better than any other system, better even than the law. It sets the rules of our thinking, the rules according to which we think.

Such conditioning is necessary in a system as the one we live in. Our world has to be extremely well organized, and therefore, our thinking must be equally well organized. We live in a system where, as in a computer, a single broken rule will result in fatal error. Thus, to make sure that no rules are broken, the rules are integrated into our very thinking. The rules are no longer something our lives are part of: the rules are part of us. Thus the rules truly come to their effect. We can no longer break the rules without breaking who we are, without breaking patterns of our thoughts that have been there for most of our lives.

Compared to education, even the higher authorities, including the government, are only relative in their significance. Despite their greater authority, they may well have less influence on our society, and even that influence they do have is in turn determined entirely through education; for even police officers, even politicians, have themselves been though it. Through education, indirectly, the whole of society is formed. The real power, then, is collectively in the hand of our educators.

Education controls the development of our very minds almost since our birth, and because of its compulsion, this applies to all of us. Every mind in our society develops in education, and our education is meant to control that development. By controlling this development, our education controls who we are. As such, it can be said to be a kind of mind control. But our society thrives on control. In a society as complex as ours, it is a necessity.

One might ask, then, in how far we still have any choice for ourselves. The question is no longer simply if we have the choice what we can or cannot do; the question is if we still have a choice to be who we are, or even think what we want. Who we are has always been in the hands of other people, and now we have become what we are, it is for many too late to choose to change who we are.

Our personality is almost entirely formed in our childhood, and that is when we are subject to education. Only those strong enough to resist their education can still choose for themselves who they are. With so much control from our education, there is only little choice we have left as to who we become. Yet, our society itself has little choice but to leave us so little choice, as there is little room for choice in it.

There is no place to be left in our minds to such things as our nature, for we do not live in a world that is natural. There is no place for it in our minds just as there is none for it our environment.

When atoms crystallize, they will rearrange themselves into a grid, often one that is rectangular. Our society has become like such grid. Our society is so overpopulated that in order for everyone to get what they want, everything must be well ordered to that purpose, including our own thoughts.

But the fact is that even what we want is controlled, because so are our thoughts. We learn that everything we do must be controlled. We live our lives in control, and because it gives us safety, we will always keep seeking for that control. We find that control primarily in wealth, which allows us to control the actions of other people, and in custom, which allows our actions to be controlled by other people. In this way, society's need for control has in itself gone out of control, because it controls itself to further seek control. Society controls itself to control itself to control itself, but what for?

The original purpose of this control was power, but today no one still has any power. Now, the only reason why we control so much is because we have been taught to do so: we have been taught to control by people who have been taught to control by people who have been taught to control. The powers that created this system to control people are long gone, but with no one to stop it, the system is left to work on by itself. Now, the only reason we still seek to be controlled is that we have been taught to do so.

By controlling our minds, education controls our entire society. But who are teachers to have such power over us? Can this system be trusted with that power?

Even though it is the most important psychological system in society, there are no psychologists involved in the organization of education. The psychology of our minds lies in the hands of people who for the most part have had absolutely no psychological education. They have not an inkling of the psychology of education because they are simply not supposed to. All that they have to know is how they are to control us.

This is so because compulsory education was never meant to do no more and no less than this. Over the millennia, the state has always needed ways to control its people, and compulsory education was one such way. Before there was compulsory education, there was the church to control people. Emperor Constantine, who made Christianity the Roman state religion, declared himself the "Emperor of the Christian People," even though he was likely not a Christian himself. Ever since, religion has been involved in the state. In a time where almost everyone is religious, organized religion is a very powerful. But Christianity lost many of its believers during the Scientific Revolution. Compulsory education was introduced in the nineteenth century, in a time when the church was losing its power, because it could no longer be used as a means of social control, and therefore had to be replaced.

By introducing a system of education that was compulsory, the government not only made sure that people would use it, but also that they would not and could not use any other. Because everyone was forced to attend this system, the government made sure that they did not have much time left for any other education. This made sure that the people would grow only as the government wanted to, and no further. The government acquired a monopoly over education. For some time, it thereby took control of the most important sources of information — teachers, mostly, but also a lot of literature. Of course, the Internet today has, fortunately, put an end to this monopoly.

Education has never been there to further our growth, but on the contrary to keep it in check. We are like bushes in a hedge that needs to be pruned. Within a certain course of study, we are all to study exactly the same thing, so that we all become exactly alike, like the bushes in the hedges, and our entire society is an endless park of hedges. This is necessary, for if the bushes grew wild, the park would become overgrown.

Compulsory education was not meant to educate people but to condition them. This is why Hitler banned home-schooling in 1938. The irony is that because people are so tightly controlled, they are unlikely ever to take the initiative to change anything, even if the change was introduced by the most despised figure in history: home-schooling is still illegal in Germany.

The wheels, once set in motion, keep turning until they are stopped. That is why no change is still brought about in our society: we are but wheels that keep turning as we were set turning by others. We can control ourselves, but not direct ourselves. We can turn onwards, but not sideways.

The system controls all of us, but no one controls the system. The system is all of us, and at the same time it is no one at all. It is but the phantom of those that used to rule over us. Now, no one rules us, and even our apparent rulers are themselves but ruled by the system.

The government is made, for the greater part, of those people who are most controlled by the system, as no one else could otherwise climb so high in it. When they control other people, their control merely comes from the system itself. In truth, it is the system that controls through them. All the system wants, however, is to further increase its control. Being more controlled by the system, politicians are more controlled by its need to control. Thus, politicians will seek to further increase control; not to increase their own control over the system, but to increase the system's control over itself. There are only few politicians who have an actual ideal. Most politicians are but the spokesmen of the system.

It is necessary for the system that we are controlled. Without control, the system would collapse. But the system itself is no more than this: control. The system needs to keep itself alive through control because control is its very substance. But why, then, should that system not be overthrown?

We spend most of our energy seeking control, which we then mostly use to further increase our control. Control over what? What is there left in our lives to control, except for control itself? Work has become a way of gaining control through money. Romance has become a way of gaining control over someone else. Pastimes have become a way of gaining control over one's emotions.

Control is valuable, but only if it is over ourselves. Now, we do not control ourselves: we are controlled by others, and even the control we seem to have over ourselves is but the control of the system, the control that the system taught us to have over ourselves. If we would only spend that energy on actually creating something — if only we were allowed the time to do so…

The only control there should be of other people is to prevent them to harm others. All else should be people's own control.

Since compulsory education spread from Prussia as a means of social control, some changes have been made in the attempt to adapt it to the needs of the individual rather than the needs of the state, but its role still remains the same: control. As long as education is controlled, it can never be truly adapted to the needs of the individual, as only the individual can know what is best for them. One cannot convert a system that was meant to control people into a system meant to help them. We simply need to start over.

Schools are factories in which we are turned into machines. The only changes that can be made to such factories is that rather than one sort, they produce several kinds of machines. But people cannot be turned into individuals, because that, they already are.

Why is it, that we no longer trust nature to let us grow? Why should we all be placed into psychological incubators as though we are all prematures that are incapable of surviving on our own? Why would we be unable to find our own way in society? It worked fine for thousands of years. Would we really become unable to write or read in a society where our lives depend on reading and writing? Would we become unable to learn to do our jobs even though we need them to make a living? Would we become unable to think analytically although it is a vital process in our everyday lives? Did we really but evolve our brains when compulsory education was invented?

Why should we be programmed like computers? Are we without any will at all, depending on others for input? After we've been educated, it might well be true. Education makes us so used to dependent on another's guidance that it cripples us, so that we always depend on some other organization to take care for us. It reduces independence, and in our dependence on society we are easier to control.

Yet before our education, we certainly do have the abilities of ourselves to learn whatever we need or want to learn. All of us have teachers of our own in our minds, our curiosity — or, at least, we had them at some point, before they were silenced and replaced by education. Our innate teachers are perfect for us: they know exactly what we want and who we are. Why, then, should we try to replace them by second degree versions of them?

We always need two teachers, one without, and one within, and the the teacher without must always answer to the teacher within, and not the other way around. Our teacher without may be anything: a person, an object, an environment. Our inner teacher, however, can only be our curiosity.

But rather than trying to adapt our teachings to our curiosity, we mostly try to adapt our curiosity to our teachings. Curiosity is a feeling, however, and feelings cannot be forced. Curiosity can be encouraged, but never forced.

Our current education can mislead us that we need it, because there is no other, freer form of education, but this does not mean there cannot be. The students of today's education have no curiosity of themselves, but that would not need to apply to students in a freer education. There are, of course, degrees in curiosity, but those that have the least curiosity are those that least need them. People with less curiosity will choose for menial jobs, no matter what education one forces upon them. People with greater curiosity, if their curiosity survives, will choose for more complex jobs. We always have enough curiosity for whatever job we want to choose.

It has no use whatsoever to teach people things that do not interest them, for as soon as the exams are past, they will be certain to forget most of it, or if not forget, then never think of it again, and so have no use for it. We remember language and arithmetic because we need it and in this there is interest in them for us, not because we once had exams for them. Of the things that that did not interest us, there is close to nothing that we remember, and far less that we thought of afterwards.

Education is useless if it does not teach us to learn for ourselves. To teach us this, the only thing that it can do is to encourage our curiosity. But rather than doing this, it kills our curiosity through force, as force will destroy any emotion.

Education teaches us to answer questions and not to ask them. It is no surprise, then, that once our education is concluded, we have become unable to think for ourselves, depending entirely on the control of others to think.

Making us give only answers and not asking questions turns us into perfect machines, but it does nothing to make us grow. Instead of teaching us to think for ourselves, it unteaches us to do so, and in this, it is similar to the army: the attitude is that the army will think for us: for society itself is nothing but an army of machines. This is not just an issue of control, but of everything that is forceful. Our society knows only force, but no gentleness, and so no love.

You may say that if people weren't educated, there was no way to know if they had learnt the skills to do their jobs well, but that is what training periods and internships are for: these and the only part of today's education that is as it aught to be.

If education were free, then students who thought they were ready for their jobs could ask their teachers for a training period. The teachers could then discuss this with the students, and if they thought they were ready, they could start their training period. Should it appear the student isn't ready at all, the training period would be delayed, not because the student could not be allowed to train further, but to save both the teacher and the student time. This would be very rare, however, as the students would usually themselves feel themselves when they would be wasting their time on something that is still too advanced for them. However, such rare examples might include, for instance, bipolar people in a hypomanic episode, who might not realize that they are wasting their time.

For the internship, the final phase of the student's education, the decision would be made by a board of teachers, including, but not limited to, the teacher or teachers who trained the student. This would prevent any single teacher from being able to abuse their power. The internship would begin with minor cases. If things went wrong at minor cases, then not much could be lost, and the teacher could tell them they weren't ready yet. For instance, a psychiatrist intern could begin with mild neuroses rather than severe psychoses, a surgeon with slight minimally invasive surgeries rather than with crucial internal organ operations, etc.

If the student was disallowed an internship and disagreed with the board, he or she could go to another until he or she either gave up or found one that agreed. This, too, would prevent bias from teachers based on overly specific aspects of the student's knowledge.

For the rest, the students would be learning entirely from their own initiative, either at home or together in a free school, whatever they wanted in whatever way they wanted, be it with the help of a teacher or using only other sources such as encyclopedia.

In the beginning of their studies, they would be studying whatever caught their interest. Later, their interests would automatically become more specialized, and they would commit themselves to one or several areas which they would later turn into their profession(s). The students would be learning whatever they wanted or needed to learn entirely out of motivation, and not because they were forced to. Curiosity, and the need of a profession, would be their drives.

Curiosity would be inspired, not just in schools but throughout the world, en lieu of the advertisements that seek to control us. People would be encouraged not just to learn what others have done before but also to think for themselves — both in balance — and through that balance to add some part of themselves to the world, be it their thoughts, their feelings, their actions or their wishes.

Through such education, the mind could truly flourish, for it would then do so of its own power, and not become like ivy against a wall, able to grow only where the wall does, and to grow only as high, though we would once have had the wish to grow further. That wish could then be the true seed of knowledge, of personality, of whatever promises that wish held; a seed that would be cherished, and not trampled upon and left to die. What we feel would become who we are, and who we are would become the beginning of who we would become. In being truly ourselves, we could truly use our potential to truly achieve what we want, something substantial.

We would grow up to become individuals, and not merely cogs in a machine that turn and turn without ever knowing what for. We could give more to the world than just another human to be used as a tool; we could give our souls, and let them shine in their unicity. The mind would once more breathe in a more natural habitat, and grow by itself, like a flower, and not a house of cards that will only collapse almost as soon as it is built. Curiosity could be sustained throughout life. What was a bush in a hedge could reach as high as it wanted to grow. Then, the mind could truly fly. But a mind cannot not be taught to fly in a cage.

"Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel."

— Socrates

The most dangerous problems we can be faced with are those that are moderate, for these are the slowest to be changed. If a problem is not very severe, we will not dare to try to change it. We resist change, not only because it is in our nature but also because change can only be brought about by people in power. Despite their power, these are especially slow to change a problem, for unless they find themselves affected by it will there never be any agreement amongst them, as the people who are affected by those problems have no power over them. For a problem to be bad enough that it affects even the most powerful, for it to be bad enough that even they are powerless to avoid that problem for themselves, it must be very severe indeed.

Whether you know the truth or not, it is still better to assume that you do not. Either how, this will give you deeper insight into both your own and others' views.

When you are honest with one another, the more you are together. You will sooner connect to one another and you will sooner hurt one another, you will sooner like one another and you will sooner tire of one another. Through honesty you will feel more pain as well as more beauty together than you would otherwise, but that is what it means to be together.

Like time, space has no physical existence. Space is but emptiness, whereas time is but movement. Neither can be defined without matter, yet it nonetheless still exists outside of matter, meaning that an object could be removed infinitely far from matter without encountering an end of space or time.

Unlike matter, space and time have no substance. They therefore cannot have been created, nor can they be destroyed. The Big Bang did not create space or time, as the Big Bang itself needed space and time to be created from whatever was its cause. For space and time to exist, there cannot be have been a beginning to them.

Having no substance, space and time cannot be subject to physical laws. Matter, however, can be, and as it is matter that defines time and space, it can seem as if time and space are changeable because matter is changeable. Size can be subject to laws, and so give the illusion that space is. Movement can be subject to laws, and so give the illusion that time is. In fact, length contraction is but the contraction of matter, and not of space, whereas time dilation is but the slowing of particle movement.

Both space and time arise from movement: that is, they arise from the interactions of energy. Without the interactions between objects, every object, and whatever state it was be in, would only exist in itself, without connecting with other objects through space, and without connecting to other states through time. These interactions happen through movement, which takes time to pass over a certain space. Because of this, this interaction depends both on time and space. The greater the space, the more time it takes for this interaction to happen. The more time passes, the smaller the space will become.

Space and time are linked through movement, and as movement is bound by the speed of light, so are both space and time, which accounts for the effects encountered in relativity, such as time dilation and length contraction.

Yin and Yang.pdf

This is a schematic overview of 130 complementary qualities of yin and yang, and how these are caused and connected to one another. Based on nearly a year of contemplations of yin and yang, this overview tries to succinctly capture an almost mathematical pattern that is found universally in all phenomena. When reading these, remember that in there must always between a balance between the two. Also, note that in almost all of these opposites, society, in particular in the West, seems to be shifting towards an imbalance of excessive yang, and too little yin.

Arrows indicate that the property is caused by the first property to the left above it.

To have peace, both yin and yang are needed, for while yin is more flexible, yang is more stable. Yin and yang together form a peaceful awareness. For true peace to be achieved, it does not suffice to forget, no more than there is peace between nations that have never had contact with one another.

Depression may not always be an illness. Sometimes, it may be a natural emotional state, caused by the sudden upheaval of suppressed emotions. Since we are often inclined to repress negative emotions, we may often accumulate negative emotions over time; not only over several days or weeks or months, but often over many years or even our entire lives. Many of the sources of negative emotion in our lives have been there all our lives or for a considerable portion of our lives, and either came too subtly for us to become aware of it, or were there before we were old enough to be aware of them.

Our coping mechanisms are powerful; sometimes too much so. In trying to deal with our negative emotions, we often try to forget them. Over time, we may be able to completely subdue our awareness of them, and therefore, to subdue those emotions themselves. Our unawareness of our own negative emotions usually prevents those emotions from growing, as the more we are aware of those emotions, the further they may grow. The more one is aware of an emotion, the better one gets to knows the emotion, so that later it is quicker to come back to one's mind. We remember the emotion, it becomes stored in our memory, and from there, it may spread further across our mind if we fail to suppress it. By and by, the emotion would become so intense that it would no longer be possible to suppress.

Moreover, as we become aware of an emotion, this may cause us to think about its cause, so that we become more aware of its cause, which in turn causes the emotion to grow. An emotion in our mind is like the voice of a citizen in society. Our coping mechanisms are our censorship. The emotion may try to express itself through the press only to end up being censored in our minds. The more we are aware of our emotions, the more freedom of speech there is in our mind; or, shall we say, freedom of thought. As long as an emotion is silent, it has no power. As soon as it is heard by the rest of the mind, however, it may spread, like the voice of a citizen once it is heard by society. In many respects, the mind can be said to be a society of thoughts.

However, often we suppress a negative emotion as soon as it occurs, before it has the chance of growing any further. If we repeatedly suppress the same emotion, over time our brain becomes familiar with it, so that when it occurs again, it recognizes its pattern and knows that it should not process it, but suppress it. At this point, suppression has become an automaticity, and we no longer feel the emotion at all.

We narrow our own unawareness in order to be able to deal with it, as we would otherwise be overwhelmed by our emotions. Often, the more negative emotions we have, the more we will narrow our awareness, so that we remain capable of functioning. As long as our negative emotions come only gradually, our brain is able to suppress them in time, as it then has the time to become familiar enough with them to turn their suppression into an automaticity. If, however, at some point of our lives we go through so much negative emotion that our coping mechanisms cannot suppress it fast enough, it will overwhelm us. At this point, we have no choice but to think about its cause and try to deal with that cause. However, as we do, we may find that the cause is connected to something else, to something far too large for us too deal with: it might concern our identity, our society, even our entire universe.

For example, when we first find out as children that we will die, we might be terrified. By and by, we are able to suppress this terror, but later in life, someone we greatly loved dies. At this point, it is possible, if our coping skills are weak, that we will be faced not only with the grief for the loved one, but also with a great deal of suppressed feelings concerning death and transience. Our brain cannot tell the difference between the feelings of grief for the loved one and the more general feelings we suppressed easier. Our grief is so great, however, that our brain cannot suppress it, so that it sees this as a sign that it has no other option than to deal with its cause.

Now, our strategy is reversed. At first, it suppressed the emotion because it thought it could not do anything about its cause. Now, it finds that it cannot do anything about the emotion. That is, it could suppress the emotion, but not without completely shutting down our emotions. It does sometimes happen that, in order to cope with emotions, we shut down much of our emotions — however, if the emotions have become too deeply entrenched, the only way of coping with them would be to shut down all our emotions altogether. Without emotion, however, the organism is unable to survive, as it gives us the desire to live. We need it to know what we are to do to survive. It gives us the desire to survive, and so our survival instinct depends on it. Without it, we can only depend on our more primitive mechanisms of pain and pleasure. These are enough to keep a reptile alive, but they're not enough for a higher, more complex organism, at least, not unless we depend on others for food. Such emotional suicide is tantamount to depression, so the brain might as well try to deal with its emotions by dealing with their cause. To do so, however, it needs to gain insight into how the cause is effecting the emotions, and to do this, it needs to gain insight into the emotions themselves. Thus, whereas earlier it did everything to suppress the emotions, it now calls them back.

We now helplessly ask ourselves questions. Why did he or she they die? Can he or she be brought back? What happened when he or she died? Will I ever see him or her again? As we think, we hope to find a way to revert what happened, and because it cannot be reverted in the present, we will even resort to such questions as, "Could I have done something?" Asking this might prevent it from happening again to someone else in future, but the real reason why we ask this question is because we desperately try to find a way to do something about what has happened. When we find there is no answer in life, we seek one in death, which makes us think about life and death, and about the way the world works, or, in religious people, about God. The brain now employs its entire arsenal of suppressed emotions — anything to change what happened. But eventually, we connect what happened to many other things, so that a psychological depression results. Depending on how vulnerable one is to such depression, it may take far less than the loss of a loved one to become subject to such current of suppressed emotions, depending on one's sensitivity, neurochemistry and coping mechanisms.

Throughout such depression, we will try to find a way to change the way things are. When we find we cannot, over time our brain will yet try to suppress our emotions. Usually, it does this when our pain has brought us to self-destructivity. It is an emergency measure, meant to prevent us from hurting ourselves or others, for instance through suicide. This operation leaves us totally drained, however, so that everything becomes an effort. Drained of energy, our ego will become incapable of caring for itself, and we come to depend on others for support. However, now we have suppressed our emotions entirely, we can slowly begin to recover from our depression, at least, given that we let go of our emotions. The brain then slowly tries to recover its emotions, at such rate that it is capable of dealing with the emotions as they slowly return.

At this point, the depression will usually pass, but there are exceptions. Sometimes, people will deliberately resist recovery. This may seem like a strange reaction, but to recover from depression by once more having to suppress one's emotions means that the depression has failed. Usually, these people will be unwilling to return to a state in which their emotions are suppressed, and prefer instead to face the full intensity of their emotions. They may wish to better understand their emotions, or whatever is causing their emotions, so that in understanding them, they may be able to deal with them in some better way than suppression. By confronting one with one's negative emotions, psychological depression may bring one psychological insights; the most important of these insights may be either about one's emotions or one's purpose in life.

Usually, the emotions one is faced with in depression are of such nature that one cannot change their material cause; if one cannot change them, and chooses not to suppress them, one eventually has no other choice than but to accept them. This is easier said than done: death, fate, suffering, transience, unfreedom, imperfection — these are all issues that most people who are severely depressed are at some point faced with. But no matter how long they remain, the choice always remains: suppression, or acceptance.

Whereas suppression is remarkably easy, however, acceptance is extremely difficult. To suppress something, all one has to do is to forget how it feels. To accept something, it is not merely resign oneself to it; one needs to be actually aware of its meaning, feel that meaning, and yet be able to live with it.

Yet, suppression of emotions, I believe, is never a desirable option in the long run: it not only leaves us with the danger of unleashing an avalanche of emotions upon us, but, what's worse, it also severely constricts our consciousness. Yet most people are so used to suppressing the current of negative emotions in their lives that they live on almost without emotion. With so little emotion left, they have only just enough to invest into making a living; for the rest, they prefer to spend our time searching distraction, hoping that this will further stave off their emotions.

Depression is not always an illness. Often, it is a process of awareness and acceptance. That 17 percent of the population goes through clinical depression at some point in their lives may indicate that depression is not necessarily an illness of the individual, but can just as well be an illness of our society.

With the pressure, compulsion and perversions of society, and the alienation from the serenity, freedom and beauty of nature, it is often natural to be depressed. Perhaps people need to be depressed. Perhaps they need to reflect and think of what is happening and why, and what can be done. It would hurt them, agonize them, excruciate them, but in the wake of their pains, their minds would be transformed, and with them, the entire world.

Sometimes, depression is an illness. But sometimes, it is an attempt of the mind to free itself of another illness, one that may well be worse: the illness to live without consciousness.

Our feelings are trying to communicate to us that something is wrong, yet we are trying to stop that, because we simply do not want to know that there is anything wrong, and in this way we suppress yet another way in which our feelings are trying to cry out against what we have become, and what we are doing to the world. Much as our feelings try to make their stand, we always find a way to silence them.

When an insect is pulled from a spider's web in which it is caught, so strongly is it glued to it that the silk will tear open its body. We must not let our desires become as a spider's web, and let them tear us apart when they are taken away from us — unless it is our wish to be torn apart in desire.

An excess of either will not only destroy its opposite, but also itself. But the point of balance in between may vary according to place and time, and may sometimes even lie in extremes. In that case, however, it is later to be combined in some way or other with its opposite extreme, though this need not be at the same time or place. Extremes are not necessarily excessive, but in order to be balanced must eventually be compensated by their opposite. Balance therefore does not necessarily mean neutrality. Balance can never be constancy because the point of balance we are to achieve is in itself never constant. Throughout our lives we try to achieve this point of balance, but because it is both so subtle and variable, it keeps eluding us. As we try to find it, we repeatedly go through a process of creation and destruction as we first get closer towards it and then farther away from it. To manage to perfectly achieve this balance, we would need to be perfect.

Like hope, despair will become its own proof. Despair can then only be undone when we accept its truth; as soon as we have, hope can then return, and our despair will no longer hold true.

Everything that we create replaces something else, be it the space in which it is created, whatever else there was in that space, or whatever it is created from. All creation comes at the cost of the destruction of something else. To create more than we destroy by doing so, what we create must therefore be more valuable than what it destroys.

That it should be more valuable means that it should be more beautiful, meaning that it should contribute to the beauty of the whole. Beauty is complexity, and is therefore formed through a balance between the variety of elements and the connectivity of those elements: it is the combination of the diversity of the elements and the harmony between them that makes something beautiful. Thus, to create beauty one must add to this complexity, meaning that variety and connectivity must be increased.

Replacing a very rare kind of beauty with a very common but rather intricate kind of beauty, for instance, will not add to the beauty of the whole because it will take from its variety. On the other hand, replacing a very intricate kind of beauty with a very simple but rather rare one will not add to the beauty of the whole, either.

However, we often replace both rare and intricate kinds of beauty with both simple and common kinds of beauty because they are our own, and we know them better, whereas the beauty we replace, while far greater, is also stranger to us. This is why we replace nature's rare and intricate beauty with our own, simpler and commoner beauty: it is because we no longer know nature's beauty.

While those who live closer to pristine nature might better know its beauty, they are not aware of its rarity (only 17% of the Earth's landscapes remains untouched by human activities). To them, it is not rare because they live amid it. To them, the rarer kind of beauty is that of civilization, whereas nature is plentiful to them. And while they might know nature better than those who live further away from it, most of them are still relatively estranged from it, and so will still incline towards civilization. Because nature is common to them, they will often destroy it carelessly whereas in the center of civilization, people often take the greatest care to preserve what little nature there is left, and so civilization keeps on growing at its edges, and nature is further and further driven back.

We create greater beauty by adding to the beauty of the whole; but what we define as "the whole" depends on context. We may see the whole as our direct environment, or we might see it as the entire world. However, people who live in civilization and can afford to journey across the entire world (fast transport and media) will be more likely to see the whole as the entire world, whereas people who live further from civilization will not see a whole further than that of their direct environment. Nonetheless, in the long run they, too, will benefit from the preservation of nature: partly, because the remaining 13% of pristine nature will eventually run out, and partly because, eventually, most people will have access to better transport and media.

The greater the context, the more complicated beauty becomes, and in the context of an infinite universe, nothing we do will add or subtract from the beauty of the whole.

The best way to open a closed mind to another view is to talk in terms of their own views, for this is the only thing that they will listen to. A closed mind can only be opened from the inside.

Sadness is a time to let go of attachment, for doing so is easier when one is sad. In this way, it can come to its purpose. Sadness will only be painful when you resist it. The faster you can accept it, the faster you can move on. Sadness is meant to make you accept the things that you resist, including sadness itself. Only once you can accept your sadness can you accept the things that cause it.

When you are sad, let go of all the things you tell yourself must or must not be, and simply let things be as they are. In this way, sadness will purify you, just like winter purifies the land of insects. It will cleanse you of craving, of greed, of fear. In that emptiness, you can find new beginnings. Sadness is a time to let go of control and merely feel how things are, and in feeling how things are, feeling what you want.

In that silence, listen to the things that you could not otherwise hear; it will whisper your deeper feelings, and in so doing reveal what you truly wish for. Sadness is a panorama that reveals your true goals and reminds you of what they really meant, and so rejuvenates your desire to pursue them. Contemplate that panorama.

Research indicates that we need 3,2 liters of water per day. This has led to the myth that we actually need to drink this amount of water per day, though very few actually need to drink more than a single liter per day. This myth is now often answered by the statement that we derive much of our water from food, but this accounts for only 20% of our fluid intake, about half a liter, which still leaves about 2,7 liters.
Yet we lose 1,5 liter per day in urine, an additional liter through breathing, and close to another 0,8 liter through sweating — a total of 3,2 liters. Yet we take in a total of only about 2,7 liters of fluid per day (Cristina M. Villanueva et al.: "Total fluid consumption in the overall study population was on average 2.66 l/day"), 2,2 liters of which are from drink. This means that 0,5 liters are missing. It seems that we are all dehydrating at a frightening rate, and yet, most of us seem to be healthy, rather than being about to die in a matter of days.
The question is, then, where does the other half liter come from, if not through fluid intake? It is as if our body magically conjures up several liters of water inside itself. How does it do this?

It becomes even stranger when one considers, for instance, the traditional Inuit, who drank considerably less, not only because the water is too cold, but, more importantly, because, being sea ice, it is also salty. Fresh water is very hard to obtain in the north pole. It's quite possible that the Inuit, and to some lesser extent ourselves as well, depend not so much on fluid intake for water and instead derive it partly from something else: glucose.

Carbohydrates are so called because they consist of carbon and water atoms. That is, in addition to carbon, a carbohydrate always has twice as many hydrogen as oxygen atoms. Glucose, for instance, is C6H12O6. When glucose reacts with oxygen, the six carbon atoms oxidize to six carbon dioxide molecules, and the hydrogen and oxygen atoms combine to form six water molecules.
This means that for every mole of glucose we use, we produce six moles of water. Glucose has a molar mass of 180 grams per mole, water 18 grams per mole, meaning that if we use 180 grams of glucose, we will produce 108 grams of water (6 · 18 grams), or about a deciliter.
On average, we use up 12.000 kilojoules per day, whereas a kilogram of glucose produces 16.000 kilojoules. This means that we daily use up 0,75 kilograms of glucose, which produces 0,45 kilograms of water — and there's the missing half liter that is to save us from dehydration.
During very active days, however, we may be able to use up twice that amount of energy. During rest, we use about 100 watts. While hiking, this may be up to 600 watts. Thus, suppose that we are hiking for 8 hours, we use up 4800 watt-hour, or 17.280 kilojoules — more than as much as we normally use up in an entire day. Supposing we spend eight hours more or less at rest (120 W), we use up 3500 kilojoules, and during 8 hours of sleep, 2160 kilojoules, so that we would use a total of about 23.000 kilojoules, 1,4 kilograms of glucose, and produce 0,9 liters of water. Normally, this water is transpired, but suppose that it is very cold, so that we transpire very little, we lose 800 milliliters less than on the average day. Combine this with the 0,5 liters from food, and we're at 2,2 liters. This leaves just a liter of our required fluid intake through water.
However, water loss may further be reduced through breathing may be reduced due to cold, which condenses the vapor in the nasal cavity into mucus. Most of the mucus is then swallowed through the pharynx (Encyclopedia of Nursing and Allied Health). (Most of the rest is then actually meant to flow back over the philtrum into the mouth, although unlike animals, who have no choice, most humans consider it beneath their dignity to swallow it.) It is therefore not surprising if, when hiking in the cold, we drink only very little. In the circumstances described above, two thirds of a liter might sometimes be enough.

However, if the organism already has enough water, this produced water may be excessive, and in some cases, the body may be unable to collect it in the bladder fast enough, for instance during exercise. In this case, the body may secrete this as extra sweat, or, if it is too cold to do so, through breathing. The secretion of excess water through breathing may be partly responsible for running noses. Normally, the body would secrete this water through sweat, but this is not desirable if it is too cold to do so. It is also possible that this water is partly or entirely secreted in mucus, but this water is not meant to capture bacteria as mucus usually does. If this were the case, the secretion of water would not increase with activity.

Now, to return to the Inuit: the Inuit, at least those few who still live in traditional ways, depend on hunting and fishing for food, which not only requires a lot of exercise, but also a lot of shivering. Even when still, we can use four to five times more energy when shivering — about the same amount of energy as that of heavy exercise. It must be noted that the energy of exercise will itself also partially be converted into heat.

With so much glucose converted into not only energy and carbon but also water, the traditional Inuit had more than enough water from food, all the more because they ate all their food raw, so that the fluids did not escape from the meat during cooking: the only fluid they took in was therefore the fluid of other animals. On the other hand, without other wet foods such as fruits and greens, the fluids from their meat would still amount to far too little volume to sustain them. The same might count for any terrestrial animal living in the north and south poles.

With so much glucose converted into not only energy and carbon but also water, the traditional Inuit had more than enough water from food, all the more because they ate all their food raw, so that the fluids did not escape from the meat during cooking: the only fluid they took in was therefore the fluid of other animals. On the other hand, without other wet foods such as fruits and greens, the fluids from their meat would still amount to far too little volume to sustain them. The same might count for any terrestrial animal living in the north and south poles, or colder regions in general.

It must be noted that the water that is produced in the metabolization of glucose will remain inside the cell, because per cell it amounts to so little. This water does not, therefore, circulate. However, this also means that less water needs to enter into the cells, so that there is still increased water in the blood.

To feel, one must let go of perfection, for feelings are in themselves imperfect. Perfection is but ones and zeroes, but feelings aren't digital, but analog. Feelings are always somewhere in between, never complete, never perfect, all the more so because it is hard to control, and control, without serenity, will often destroy them. Feelings are not mathematical, and therefore do not have numerical perfection.

Perhaps the reason people are so conformist is because they were already very similar to begin with: at some point in our evolution, human population went through a bottleneck, which reduced the population to several thousands of individuals, which reduced the genetic diversity of the human gene pool. This was only several thousands of years ago, so that there was not enough time for evolution to increase this genetic diversity again through mutations.

As a result, we are genetically extremely similar, far more so than most other species. Being so similar, we associate very closely with one another, which also causes us to conform to one another to a high degree. The more similar we are, after all, the more common our interests are: we all have largely the same genes to preserve.

Also, in their conformism, people conform to other people who in themselves conform to other people, meaning that they also conform to conformism itself. As a result, conformism is therefore a continual process — a mediocrity shift.

Though this shift towards mediocrity was Nietzsche's worst nightmare, this is, however, still a relatively slow process, and one that may be offset by other, countervailing trends, for instance those of democracy, which stresses individuality.

However, there is the danger that in future, mediocrity shift might be accelerated through technology. Our society is still conformist enough that, regardless of the dreams of the individual for him- or herself, it has seldom been the dream of a parent to have a child that is original — and, in a time where the parents could choose the right genome for their child, it is possible that most would choose to have a child that is free not only of handicaps, but also of any disorders at all, including mental disorders such as autism. These disorders, however, contribute to the diversity of the human population, and, importantly, many of the greatest geniuses in history were mentally disordered.

Fortunately, mental disorders are usually not caused by single but multiple genes, and the mental illness is only caused by their combination. Separately, these genes cause other, healthy qualities, and it is only the combination that causes the mental illness. In this case, mental illness is but an excess of these healthy qualities — so that, rather than eliminating all genes, it is possible that some parents would choose to eliminate only some. Nonetheless, upon hearing from the geneticists that "your embryo has genes associated with schizophrenia," most parents would, in their ignorance, order all of them to be removed. Parents might choose to have a child that is intelligent and beautiful, but also for one that is otherwise perfectly normal. Worse, they might prefer a child that is compliant, and therefore conformist.

If parents were allowed to select whatever genes they want for their embryo, mediocrity shift would accelerate to a disastrous extent, and many of the future's greatest geniuses would never be born. Therefore, it would perhaps be best to disallow the exclusion of genes from an embryo if more than 50% of individuals who possess these genes are content with the quality associated with them, as the parents would otherwise be disadvantaging their child for their own sake. Rather than letting the parents decide, the geneticists could speculate about what the embryo would decide if it had grown up. An exception could perhaps be made for severe psychopathy.

Of course, this could only be applicable to the genetic modification of an embryo that has already been conceived, and not to the selection of a specific ovum and spermatozoid for in vitro insemination. It is perhaps unlikely that many people would want to conceive a child in such an unromantic, unnatural and impractical way. If this is not the case, however, the latter technique would best be forbidden.

Pareidolia are random patterns perceived in information that has no relevance to these patterns, such as, for instance, in clouds. Pareidolia can be said to be similar to hallucinations, though occurring in healthy people.

While apparently an irrelevant error of our mind's attempts to make sense out of our perceptions, however, pareidolia may actually have a significant evolutionary purpose, be it a side effect or more than just this.

Not all pareidolia are actually irrelevant. Sometimes, upon closer inspection, a pareidolia may actually turn out to be a camouflaged animal. Pareidolia might in fact be the only way that one could see through more sophisticated camouflages. Dead objects sometimes look like living beings, but some living beings sometimes look like dead objects. While a cloud might not actually be a bird, less subtle examples of pareidolia may actually reveal very real things that we would otherwise overlook. The yellow spot in the yellow savannas that looks like a lion might in fact turn out to be a lion.

Imagination increases the likelihood of perceiving pareidolia and therefore camouflaged animals, and imagination means creativity. This could be one of the first ways in which our creativity helped us to evolve from primates to humans, and, in fact, it may well be that it was partly because of this that we developed our creativity in the first place, for there was little use for creativity in any other way when we first stopped climbing in trees. Walking across the savannas, however, where we were exposed to predators, we at once had a reason to become more creative, as we would otherwise be an easy target to the predators, completely unable to keep up with the fast gazelles and other ungulates in trying to outrun them; if, however, we saw them stalking towards us in time, we could just in time flee into a nearby tree. Less imaginative animals, who are less likely to perceive pareidolia, might be less likely to see the prowling predator even though it would be obvious to humans, or, if they would sense it, it would only be subconsciously.

The first hominids started to walk upright partly to spot predators. Perhaps it is, at least partly, for the same reason that we first developed our increased intelligence. Had the Sahara not turned from tropical forest into savanna 7 to 3 million years ago, at about the time the first hominids evolved, mankind might never have evolved. And had there been no predators, it is very well possible that we would not have either. We might owe our existence as humans to the harshness of the savannas that are now the Sahara. Without the rain forest to offer us protection, we needed to be creative.

Perhaps all the symptoms of schizophrenia are a direct result of ego disintegration. The ego, our sense of self, is at the same time the sense of reality, because our material self is the part of us that is real. We know what is real by knowing in what part of our consciousness our ego is. If we can no longer tell what part of our consciousness is in reality, and what part of us lies in our imagination, neither can we tell the difference between reality and imagination. Our consciousness becomes a continuum between the two. Moreover, as the ego disintegrates, neither can we tell the difference between ourselves and our environment. It separates our selves from the rest of our consciousness, and thereby separates our consciousness in three parts: in the middle is the ego, to one side of the ego is reality, and to the other side is imagination. More accurately, on one side is everything that is external, on the other side is everything that is internal. The ego serves as a wall between the two, and controls the interaction between the two. Without the ego, the two will flow into one another and overlap.

The ego is our medium between imagination and reality, but at the same time a dividing line; more accurately, perhaps, it, an umpire which determines which thoughts are allowed to pass this dividing line, which have relevance in reality, and how. It commands our thoughts and assigns roles to them, and as such it is the command center of our mind.

Elyn R. Saks, a professor with a history of schizophrenia, wrote a book titled, "The Center Cannot Hold." In an interview she mentioned: 'There was no center to take things in, put them together, and make them make sense. Hence, following Yeats, I call my book “The Center Cannot Hold.”'

Many people see depression as a weakness, in contrast to other illnesses, which, today, are usually tolerated. By communicating this, they are in fact likely to assist the mechanisms that cause depression, as depression is brought about largely due to shame. Shame drains the ego of energy, as it no longer wants to care for itself when it is ashamed; the ego only rewards the organism if it thinks itself deserving of reward.

This is because reward and desire are two forms of pleasure, in psychology called consummative and appetitive pleasure, respectively, and these form of pleasure are both mainly caused by the same chemical, dopamine. Shame causes the reward centers to become less active, so that less dopamine is produced, so that the person feels less desire. Less desire means less initiative.

The purpose of this is to motivate the right behavior and discourage wrong behavior, but unfortunately, this has a drawback in humans: because humans are so emotional, it is easy for them to lose balance, and one way in which they may lose balance is through an excess of shame. If this occurs, the person loses so much dopamine that they have too little left to feel the desire to care for themselves. With so little desire, the ego becomes depleted.

If the ego no longer cares for itself, it will no longer care for anything it wants to do, and so will no longer care to do anything. The ego is the mind's convertor of energy into action, because all action a person does is done by and through their self, their organism, and so requires an ego, a sense of self. In schizophrenics, the ego has become so drained that they no longer even realize who they are, where their organism ends and where their environment begins.

Because of this, it may be very damaging to communicate contempt to people who are depressed, be it for their depression or any other reason. Punishing people who have tried to commit suicide, as is sometimes done, will not prevent them from doing so and is in fact likely to encourage them.

It is even more damaging to call a suicidal attempt they might have tried cowardly, as suicide is at least in part motivated by self-destruction, which, in turn, is motivated partly by shame. Adding to this shame may only worsen their self-destructivity.

Worse still is to call people who are depressed lazy. People who are depressed are often so detached from themselves that they no longer know what they feel, so that they might in fact readily believe people when they state that they are lazy.

Moreover, in their self-loathing, they might willingly use any excuse to hurt themselves, even if they know whatever they tell themselves to hurt themselves is untrue. Because they have become an enemy of their own, they will treat themselves as an enemy, just as though they were someone else. If they feel detached from themselves, this will make this even easier.

Moreover, their pain justifies their inactivity, so that they might, in the inability of action, try instead to hurt themselves, so that they would feel less ashamed, and, in their self-loathing, even feel a certain satisfaction at their own pain. But this only further drains their ego. In time, this may cause a positive feedback mechanism, which only ceases when the ego has too little energy left to hurt the organism, so that it is finally stopped by a negative feedback mechanism. Sometimes, when the person no longer has the energy to hurt him- or herself, he or she may then get better.

In rare cases, however, at this point the ego has not only completely drained, but also disintegrated, in which case the depression turns into schizophrenia. This is one reason why depression often precedes schizophrenia, and is listed as one of the symptoms of prodromal schizophrenia.

See also:

The Evolutionary Psychology of Self-Destruction

Ego disintegration seems to play an important role in the development of schizophrenia, and, in a less severe degree, of depression. One mechanism through which the ego may disintegrate is through self-destruction. In self-destruction the purpose of the ego is inverted, as instead of caring for the organism it then destroys itself.

As it invests more and more energy into destroying itself, it invests proportionally less energy in caring for itself. Due to their contradiction, moreover, the two cancel one another out. As the ego stops caring for the organism, it loses its function and therefore disintegrates. This is one reason why schizophrenia is often associated with sense of guilt and self-destruction.

Self-destruction results if someone's death drive is directed on the ego, usually due to shame. Originally, the evolutionary purpose of death drive was apparently to kill or harm enemies or rivals. However, if someone feels like a failure, they may cause themselves so much pain that they will come to see themselves as an enemy. The death drive is a relatively primitive one. It seems to make little distinction between the self and others because until recently, such distinction was not necessary due to lack of self-awareness.

Self-destruction is therefore likely the result of an error. One possible explanation why evolution has not corrected this error is that self-hatred occurs only relatively rarely, and so it has not yet been a necessity for the survival of the species. It is possible that it would become necessary over many millions of years, but self-hatred has likely only existed for a short period of time, because self-hatred requires self-awareness, which is still a relatively new phenomenon that so far, only a few species on earth appear to have.

Another possible explanation is that in some cases, self-destruction of the individual may actually help the group to survive if the individual is a danger to the group, for example because of aggression. Because the individual shares many genes with the group, the individual can therefore still preserve part of his own genes by preserving those of the group; said another way, the group as a whole tries to preserve itself. Suicide, in nature in the form of reckless endangerment, would then be similar to the apoptosis of a cancerous cell. If an individual has, for instance, killed other individuals in the group, for instance, suicide may actually be an evolutionary advantage. In times food supplies were low, it might also have been an evolutionary advantage if the individual could not provide food for the group, for instance due to chronic illness.

This would be more likely to occur in humans because our genetic diversity is lower than that of most other animal species, and so preservation of the group is all the more important to the preservation of our own genes. In fact, it is likely that we are such social animals as we are because our genomes are so similar, and so we have the common purpose of preserving the same genome.

To some extent, self-destruction may therefore have had its use or still have its use, but it is unlikely that evolution designed it for this use. Instead, evolution likely designed a death drive that did not discriminate between others and the self. In humans, the tendency to self-destruction has become excessive due to increased self-awareness, but not so much as to become a threat, so that evolution has not eliminated it.

Everything causes some sort of reaction. Since this reaction can never be perfectly neutral, it must be either positive or negative. This is why almost anything will eventually lead to a vicious circle sooner or later, but most of these are so slow that they are stopped before they ever become noticeable.

The word "consciousness" is the only that ultimately covers all things in the universe, even matter, which can be seen as the mechanisms in which our consciousness behaves.

Consciousness is so the only ideal that we should always strive towards. The only thing that is opposed to consciousness is oblivion, which is the only thing we should never strive towards.

There is nothing that complements consciousness, and so consciousness is in itself always complete. Of course, in order to remain stable, there are a lot of things that consciousness needs, but the end result of all we do should always be consciousness.

Things tend to start with yang and end with yin. Yang is solid and therefore stable. Stability is the solid ground upon which one can build, like a plain. There cannot be only mountains and valleys, nor can there be only plains.

Emptiness has a way of eluding us with its subtlety, eluding us into seeing it as nothing at all; but if we are conscious of emptiness, it is no longer just empty, but also, in its own way, full, and so complete, as one's full view of the land when one gazes across plains.

When faced with suicidal urges, one must realize that they always have the choice between suicide and medication, and, importantly, that while at such time they are unable to imagine feeling normal, they can. The choice is then between suicide and feeling normal, keeping in mind that this normality does not need to be permanent. In fact, one could use medication whenever close to suicide and then stop as soon as they are past and repeat this process indefinitely.

If one believes death in the end, medication could then be thought of as a partial suicide, a compromise between life and death: using medication, one could lose part of one's feelings, but not all, as would be the case if one would die. In case of depressive emotional flattening, medication might in fact only help to increase one's emotionality.

If you are in severe pain, you can even ask your psychiatrist for a benzodiazepine to use until the antidepressants start working (which can take several weeks), so that your pain could cease almost immediately, as it would in case of suicide. Moreover, this is far safer than suicide in this respect, which may, in case of failure, leave one quadriplegic but very much alive. Thus, if you seek to be free of pain, antidepressants are the safest way of doing so.

Many people who are mentally ill choose not to use medication to treat their condition and, because of this, eventually end up killing themselves. While medication is no necessity to live with mental illness, however, mental illness does not pass by itself if it is part of one's personality, and can only pass if it has some other underlying cause, such as drugs or stress.

It is, however, very hard to know when there is such underlying cause, as mental illness may both be caused by stress as causing stress (such as through isolation or unemployment), and the presence of an underlying cause can only be reliably determined by a psychiatrist. Even if there is an underlying cause, however, a psychiatrist may still help one cope with it, and, if needed, one could use medication until the suicidal urges are over.

Some people feel they should deal with their difficulties in a natural way, but if one goes so far as to resort to something as unnatural as suicide, perhaps it would be more reasonable to let go of this principle than to let go of absolutely everything.

The problem here is that depressive people are often too ashamed to face their own failure, and in killing themselves hope both to escape their shame and to rid the world of the failure they think themselves to be. It is important to note, however, that this sense of shame is symptomatic of depression and that this will pass with depression. Thus, to escape one's shame, one can just as well use medication, again, keeping in mind that in asking one's psychiatrist for tranquilizers, one can, if needed, stop the shame very quickly.

This requires a very practical view towards emotions, however, and many will prefer to believe that their emotions are telling them the truth and that antidepressants would only hide this truth. Emotions are, however, relative, and know neither false nor true. People only believe an emotion to be true when they favor it, which means that if someone who is suicidal believes their emotions to be true, this means that they favor their suicidality; that is to say, given the circumstances of their life, they prefer to feel suicidal rather than happy.

In this case, they may believe that the circumstances of their life will never improve, so that if they would ever be happy, it would feel like a very artificial kind of happiness, but it must be noted that the circumstances of one's life are something that one maintains oneself, and that while this is hard to do when one is mentally ill (as it would be hard to do when one is physically ill) this can become a lot easier once one is better. It may be very hard to image how one might ever be able to improve one's life, but one must trust that as soon as the antidepressants start working, things will suddenly become remarkably easier.

Suicide to avoid a low quality of life, therefore, is unnecessary, at least in the West, where there are plenty of jobs to make a living. Remember that using if one is relatively healthy due to antidepressants, one might still be happy with jobs that one would otherwise dislike when depressed. People who are aware of this yet prefer suicide above a happy life do so for other reasons.

For many people, depression is something they enjoy, and suicide may be just one last way of expressing those feelings. Unless they believe in life after death, this is a very final way of expressing these feelings, however, as they would afterwards be gone, so that, in this case, they either do not expect their suicidal attempt to succeed or otherwise do not think about the consequences should they die (again, unless they believe in life after death).

There is, however, an exception: some people are actually attracted to suicide because of the thrill of dying. To them, death, and even the very thought of death, is as a kind of drug. This actually has nothing to do with near-death experiences, except in case of previous near-death experiences which the person wishes to repeat. In case someone is simply curious about near-death experiences, suicide will usually only be accidental, as curiosity alone will otherwise usually not be a strong enough motive to incite suicide, except in case of prefrontal inhibition.

It seems strange that people would enjoy suicide, but it can be easily explained by the concept of Thanatos — death drive, the drive towards death, destruction and oblivion. To people who actually enjoy suicide, death is more than an escape: to them, it is a compulsion, inborn in their most primary instinctive drives. Many people who are depressed are driven by a death instinct, which, instead of being directed on others (as in murder), is directed on the ego, resulting either in ego disintegration or self-destruction.

The former will usually occur if the person's Eros offsets his or her Thanatos, so that, as the two contradictory desires struggle in the person's mind, the two will eventually cancel one another out and neither remains. In the latter, however, the ego still has a well-defined purpose, the purpose of destroying itself.

Contrary to ego-disintegration, in self-destruction the ego remains extant, but its purpose become reverted: rather than caring for the body, it is now focussed on destroying itself. This is because the person feels so ashamed that they come to see themselves as their own worst enemy. Normally, if we have an enemy, our instinct will be to kill him or her. Our instinct, however, did not prepare us for the relatively rare incidence that this enemy would be ourself, something which, after all, normally appears only to occur in highly sentient animals such as ourselves. Through an excess of shame, the organism thereby sabotages itself.

However, beside self-hatred, another thing that can also drive self-destruction is a hatred not of oneself but of life. If one hates one's life enough, one will want to destroy it as a means of revenge. If one is to destroy life, one simply destroys its source, that is, oneself. This, in a roundabout way, will likewise lead to another form of self-destruction, a form not so much intent on hurting the self but on undoing it.

In this case, the person wants to be reduced to nothing at all, absolutely nothing, and so the emotional blunting of antidepressants is certainly not an issue. However, it is rare that someone would want to kill themselves purely out of death instinct, and not also for other reasons.

Finally, in addition to an escape or death instinct, one reason which is in fact a very common and often subconscious contributing factor is the belief in an afterlife, (such as nirvana). However, unlike the other two, this reason can be neither justified nor falsified. Since we have no proof of what happens after death, no one can be convinced of whether it is right or wrong.

Because of this, it is prejudiced to see death or suicide as a negative thing to the individual, as we know nothing about death. With regard to death, we tend only to see the loss of life, not whatever, if anything, there might be after death, be it temporary or permanent. Since we do not know what it is, it can be anything from nothing at all to infinity. Suicide is and remains a total guess; this guess, however, should be the only reason why someone should kill themselves, and not as an escape — for medicine offers better means of escape.

Not knowing how consciousness is brought about we cannot know how or when, or even if, consciousness is brought to an end, or what happens to it after death. People see their death as something negative because they are afraid of it, but the reason they fear it is that it is unknown to them.

We have no obligations to the people we know to live, as little as we have obligations to them to live in a particular place near to them or even to know them. To live is something one gives to others, and nothing one gives should be taken for granted.

You cannot give without taking, nor can you fully take without giving. If you give without taking you cannot know the other's pleasure of taking and so know how to give them that pleasure, nor can you give them thankfulness if they give to you. If you take without giving you cannot feel the other's pleasure of giving, and so cannot take that pleasure, nor can you take the other's thankfulness when giving to others.

We need to feel pleasure ourselves if we are to give  it to others, and to accept it from others, we need to feel it in others. Sharing is a connection between oneself and the other. Feelings come from inside us and so need to grow inside us before we can give them. At the same time, feelings are caused by something outside of us, and so, if they are to grow, we need to take. In this way, giving and taking form a cycle, like breath.

We take from the world, then do something with what we are given and finally share it with the world. What we truly give, then, is ourselves.

Sometimes it is hard to tell apart what feels right from what feels merely enjoyable. Once one realizes this, however, it can sometimes be equally hard to tell apart what feels right from what feels painful.

What is right is never easy. But this does not mean it is always painful. It is hard not because it is painful but because it is often unknown. The unknown can often be painful because in our unknowingness, we make mistakes that hurt us. We tend to seek safety in the things we already know, but this will never bring us farther onward.

That our free will is caused by chemicals does not mean that it does not exist, for our free will is those chemicals — we are those chemicals. Our free will merely has a material existence: whatever matter causes our free will is our free will.

It is true that we cannot fully control that material existence and therefore cannot fully control our will, that is, we cannot always control what we want, and addictions are exemplary of this. However, what this actually means is that we do not always wish what we want, so that our wants are but our desires and aside from these there is something still more central, our actual wishes. These, our wishes, would be our actual free will. If we make a distinction between wishes and wants, then it is possible for one part of us to want something that another part does not (contrary desires), or it is possible to want something we do not wish (suppressed desires), or even to wish something we do not want (demanding goals), but it is not possible for us to wish something we do not wish.
In that sense, our will cannot be but free because it will always wish what it wishes, and whether our wishes are changed through chemical or psychological means, this always remains the case. Our free will always agrees with itself, no matter what it is that causes our free will, or causes it to be what it is.
At any given moment, whatever we wish is always controlled by our free will. However, our free can never control what it will wish in future, as it might always change. In this, our free will only has control over itself, not over what it will become.
While this may be the most objective view, however, what many people view as free will is largely emotional, and not objective. The view that we have no free will is likely merely the result of a sense of depersonalization. The question what is free will is mostly a question of who we are, since we usually associate who we are with what we wish. If, however, we no longer have a sense of either who we are or what we wish, as in depersonalization, we will be likely to feel that we have no free will. However, this is a purely psychological matter and has no relevance either in reality or in philosophy.

Our free will is but a concept, and this concept exists, since we have created it. We cannot say, therefore, that it does not exist. There is, however, some ambiguity on what free will is.

In all things there is a duality, whether it is real or perceived. Either how, as perception is all that is real to us, to us this duality is certainly real, and outside of perception nothing is relevant. This duality applies on free will as well as on anything else: our free will is both something we perceive as something real.

Our free will is both spiritual, because we experience it, as material, because we can observe it. We can therefore not define our free will as being independent of matter, for that matter is both part of our free will as that our free will is part of matter.

We cannot define free will as being independent of our environment, either, as whatever we wish is based on our environment, and without our environment we could not even exist. Even so, we still control how we react on our environment because our free will is our control. It therefore does not make sense to feel that we have no control over our free will.

Some define free will as not depending on fate, but this only begs the question: what is fate? According to American Oxford Dictionaries, "the development of events beyond a person's control (…)". In other words, the definition of fate is based on free will, and the definition of free will on fate: free will is whatever control we have independent of fate, fate is whatever is outside of our control. It would follow, then, that whatever is in a person's control is their free will.

That leaves but the question: what is a person? Who are we? Are we our body, our mind, our choices? It would seem that this, too, depends on our control. The greater the control we have over something, the more we identify with something (which may be why some people seek to control those they love). We do not fully control our body, and so we usually do not see it as who we are. Neither do we have full control over our mind. The only thing full control we have is our choice itself.

Another way of defining what we are could be inseparability. If something can be separated from us, it is not who we really are. Parts of our body could be separated from us, and, theoretically, even our entire body could be. The same counts for parts of our brain or even our entire brain. All matter in both our brain and our body are replaced constantly, and the same counts for the patterns in our brain and body. Eventually, everything can be separated from us except for our own choice, our free will. What we really are, then, is our free will.

Perhaps, then, if we can separate from everything else, it is really our free will that determines who we are, and, therefore, what we are conscious of.

That our free will is caused by chemicals does not mean that it does not exist, for our free will is those chemicals — we are those chemicals. Our free will merely has a material existence: whatever matter causes our free will is our free will.

It is true that we cannot fully control that material existence and therefore cannot fully control our will, that is, we cannot always control what we want, and addictions are exemplary of this. However, what this actually means is that we do not always wish what we want, so that our wants are but our desires and aside from these there is something still more central, our actual wishes. These, our wishes, would be our actual free will. If we make a distinction between wishes and wants, then it is possible for one part of us to want something that another part does not (contrary desires), or it is possible to want something we do not wish (suppressed desires), or even to wish something we do not want (demanding goals), but it is not possible for us to wish something we do not wish.
In that sense, our will cannot be but free because it will always wish what it wishes, and whether our wishes are changed through chemical or psychological means, this always remains the case. Our free will always agrees with itself, no matter what it is that causes our free will, or causes it to be what it is.
At any given moment, whatever we wish is always controlled by our free will. However, our free can never control what it will wish in future, as it might always change. In this, our free will only has control over itself, not over what it will become.
While this may be the most objective view, however, what many people view as free will is largely emotional, and not objective. The view that we have no free will is likely merely the result of a sense of depersonalization. The question what is free will is mostly a question of who we are, since we usually associate who we are with what we wish. If, however, we no longer have a sense of either who we are or what we wish, as in depersonalization, we will be likely to feel that we have no free will. However, this is a purely psychological matter and has no relevance either in reality or in philosophy.

Our free will is but a concept, and this concept exists, since we have created it. We cannot say, therefore, that it does not exist. There is, however, some ambiguity on what free will is.

In all things there is a duality, whether it is real or perceived. Either how, as perception is all that is real to us, to us this duality is certainly real, and outside of perception nothing is relevant. This duality applies on free will as well as on anything else: our free will is both something we perceive as something real.

Our free will is both spiritual, because we experience it, as material, because we can observe it. We can therefore not define our free will as being independent of matter, for that matter is both part of our free will as that our free will is part of matter.

We cannot define free will as being independent of our environment, either, as whatever we wish is based on our environment, and without our environment we could not even exist. Even so, we still control how we react on our environment because our free will is our control. It therefore does not make sense to feel that we have no control over our free will.

Some define free will as not depending on fate, but this only begs the question: what is fate? According to American Oxford Dictionaries, "the development of events beyond a person's control (…)". In other words, the definition of fate is based on free will, and the definition of free will on fate: free will is whatever control we have independent of fate, fate is whatever is outside of our control. It would follow, then, that whatever is in a person's control is their free will.

That leaves but the question: what is a person? Who are we? Are we our body, our mind, our choices? It would seem that this, too, depends on our control. The greater the control we have over something, the more we identify with something (which may be why some people seek to control those they love). We do not fully control our body, and so we usually do not see it as who we are. Neither do we have full control over our mind. The only thing full control we have is our choice itself.

Another way of defining what we are could be inseparability. If something can be separated from us, it is not who we really are. Parts of our body could be separated from us, and, theoretically, even our entire body could be. The same counts for parts of our brain or even our entire brain. All matter in both our brain and our body are replaced constantly, and the same counts for the patterns in our brain and body. Eventually, everything can be separated from us except for our own choice, our free will. What we really are, then, is our free will.

Perhaps, then, if we can separate from everything else, it is really our free will that determines who we are, and, therefore, what we are conscious of.

Contrary to antimatter itself, the engines to convert antimatter into energy might in fact prove to be relatively simple to design.

Antimatter could best be stored in the form of antiprotons, which, being charged, could be levitated in a vacuum through electrostatic repulsion, so that it would not react with the surrounding matter of the container. The force these tanks could endure without such reaction would be equal to the force of this electrostatic repulsion, so in case of high quantities, as in a reservoir, this force would have to be very strong. Also, reservoirs should not contain too much antimatter: rather, the antimatter should be spread over several. In an aircraft, the antimatter tank should be at least as strong as the flight recorders (black boxes).

If no such safety measures where taken, then in case the airplane would crash, or something would crash into a reservoir, it would unleash an explosion worse than that of the worst nuclear bomb. The energy of antimatter is often overestimated, however: an arbitrarily large antimatter explosion would not necessarily destroy the entire world, as is sometimes said: the Tsar Bomba, the largest atomic bomb, produced an energy equivalent to 3 kilograms of matter and antimatter combination, 1,5 kilogram of each.

At one end of the antimatter tank, an opening could lead into the reaction chamber, closed by a valve which on the inside is likewise magnetic. Opposite this valve, either an extendable permanent magnet could be used to push the antimatter in the direction of the reaction chamber, or an electromagnet built into the wall of the tank could be used for this purpose, which would convey a current produce an electromagnetic force.

A valve, which is also a permanent magnet, would then opened to allow the antimatter to flow through. The matter in the opposite tank would preferably be pushed into the reaction chamber in a similar way, as a valve is much easier to build entirely out of a permanent magnet than a pump.

Since it levitates, the antimatter will not undergo friction and therefore will not lose momentum, so that once it has gained momentum, it will float into the reaction chamber by itself. Nonetheless, it is important that it has enough momentum, so that most of the particles will react at the same time, before part of them are deflected away by the other explosions of the other particles that have already reacted. Possibly, to reduce the number of particles that are left over, the rays could be widened using magnetic deflection, much like electrons in a cathode-ray tube, so that the particles will not be deflected by the explosions of the other particles. It is nonetheless inevitable that some of the particles will not react immediately and will collide with the walls of the reaction chamber, so that the reaction chamber, as well, should electromagnetically repel them so as to avoid damage. In fact, the magnets in the reaction chamber should be even stronger than those of the tanks, because the particles it is to repel will have high kinetic energies.

The greatest challenge would be to combine just the right amount of matter and antimatter, since even the smallest amount of antimatter that is left over could be dangerous. Since it will never be perfectly possible to combine just the right number of particles, it is better to eject just a little more matter than antimatter into the reaction chamber, since the matter that is left is relatively harmless. Still, some of the antimatter will be deflected before reacting, so that magnets to repel them are important.

Upon reacting, the protons and antiprotons will convert 100% of their mass-energy into light — photons: more precisely, X-rays. It may seem like a hopeless task to reflect these X-rays, which penetrate straight through our flesh, but the truth is that it can be done relatively easy using multilayer mirrors. Multilayer mirrors are anything but science fiction, and the first prototypes have been built as early as 1940.

These mirrors work with different layers of different materials, each of which having different refraction indices. Where the light meets the interface between these materials, some light is reflected and some transmitted, because the light is deflected by the change in magnetic properties. If there are many of these interfaces, this process can be repeated until all light is reflected.

Surprisingly, despite consisting of several layers, these mirrors can actually be very thin, due to the low wavelength of the X-rays, and are typically only a few dozen nanometers thick.

In order to achieve a full hundred percent efficiency, one would need a perfect mirror, a mirror that reflects without any energy loss whatsoever. Perfect mirrors have already been designed in the visible spectrum for optic fibers, and the latest X-ray mirrors already reflect nearly 70 percent. It is only a matter of time  before we manage to build a perfect X-ray mirror. Once we have, we likely have all the materials we need to build a perfect antimatter engine — everything, except for antimatter itself.

Antimatter has been produced in CERN, however: in the 2006 ATHENA experiment, CERN could produce 10 million antiprotons per second, and research will now be continued in the ALPHA experiment. It would be possible that antimatter could hold the solution for global warming in a not too distant near future, were it not that no one would dare to fund such an exotic project — yet. This may change, however, as we learn more about antimatter.

The design of an antimatter engine is so simple that it is possible that, over time, it could be miniaturized so that antimatter could be used as an energy source in practically anything. It is even possible that it could be miniaturized to microscale and eventually nanoscale, so that they could be used in micro- and nanoelectromechanical systems, and, eventually, nanorobots.

In fact, nanoscale antimatter engines could even have advantages over macroscopic ones: for one thing, it is easier to measure the right numbers of protons and antiprotons, and over time, they might actually be counted. Also, being less in number, the protons and antiprotons would not deflect one another as much upon exploding.

Being only nanometers thick, the X-ray mirrors could be reduced to nanoscale. Ironically, it would be far easier on nanoscale to reflect X-rays than to reflect visible light, since, because of its wavelength, visible light would tunnel straight over most nanomirrors.

The magnets used in the tanks and reaction chamber could be replaced by nanomagnets. Nonetheless, these nanomagnets would likely make the antimatter engine the largest part of the nanorobot.

The most important problem with miniaturizing the antimatter engines would actually be to get the antimatter inside the tanks, since it would have to be compressed to nanoscale to get inside. One way of doing this could be by pushing the particles into the tanks using focussed lasers, which would then compress the particles within the tank through radiative forcing. Placed in a larger container through which this laser is fired into a smaller tank, the particles will at random hit the beam and be either repelled or dragged along into the tank. It is possible that it would hit the beam often before it would do so with the right speed and angle to be fired into the opening of the tank, but because of the particles' speed, this would necessarily need to take long. The more the antimatter would be heated, the faster the particles and therefore the faster they would be pushed into the tank. The laser beam could be tapered towards the end of the tank, so that it would be more likely to be pushed in the right direction. The antiprotons would repel one another as soon as the lasers stopped, so the tanks would have to be sealed first.

Why is it relevant that antimatter engines could fit into nanorobots? First and foremost, nanorobots could not move any great distance on their own power. The smaller the object, the more friction it undergoes because the atoms it collides against are more massive relative to the object. Inside the body, nanorobots would therefore depend on blood flow for transport. Outside the body, they could not get anywhere at all. In addition, they would be swept along instantly by the least air displacement, not to speak of wind. With antimatter engines, this would not be an issue.

Counterintuitively, other than through friction, their small size would not reduce their speed, as in being smaller, they also have less mass to transport. A billionth the vehicle's mass converted into energy would be enough to give it a speed of a hundred kilometers per second. With an zeptogram of matter and antimatter (10^–21 kg, thirty million protons and antiprotons), a picogram machine (10^–12, five thousandths of a mite's mass) could therefore achieve a speed of hundred kilometers per second in vacuum.

Don't try to convince those who do not have an open mind, for in their closed-mindedness they are unthinking, and in their unthinkingness they would have no use for whatever wisdom you would try to teach them. Don't try to convince those who do not have an open mind, for in their closed-mindedness they are unthinking, and in their unthinkingness they would have no use for whatever wisdom you would try to teach them.

Wisdom, even when it is already known, must still be learned: it is not enough to merely know it, as one must also have awareness of it. Only in that awareness can one use wisdom, and otherwise, it is merely information. Wisdom is a skill that needs to be learned, just like any other, and it is never enough to know a skill to be able to use it. Wisdom must be more than a memory; it must be a part of our consciousness. Information is only useful if it is connected to other information, so that we are aware of how it connects to everything and therefore, when, why and how it is true.

Neural networks can only take part in our consciousness if they are connected to the rest of our brain, and the more they are connected to it, the more we are conscious of them. Memories that we rarely think of are contained in neural networks which are less connected to the rest of our brain, so that whatever neural networks become active, they will rarely be connected to these networks and so these will rarely be involved in our consciousness — whereas compulsions lie in neural networks that are excessively connected to the rest of our brain, so that, whatever neural networks are active, they will be connected to the neural networks that contain these obsessions, so that whatever we think of, it eventually lead back to them. Wisdom is no use if it is either obsessive or, in case of the closed mind, would be banished to some remote corner of their mind that their consciousness never touches upon.

Learning is an infinite process. There are infinitely many ways in which a piece of information needs to be connected in our minds in order for it to be integrated into our consciousness. If someone's mind cannot do this for itself, no one else can make them do it.

One cannot teach the closed mind wisdom for the closed mind will not teach itself. Try, rather, to open their mind, not by arguing with them but by inspiring them. In the meantime, use them to learn from them about your own closed-mindedness, for no mind is open to all things.

To be mindful is something very delicate. To remain mindful, we need to focus on what we are experiencing on a given moment, not a moment afterwards or earlier — yet even as we do focus on a given moment, it is gone in a moment in the past as another moment replaces it, and we need to start all over again and focus on a different moment. To remain mindful, one constantly needs to move along with the flow of time, and if one straggles behind or moves ahead for a moment, one is no longer mindful.

The current is infinitely small and so can never perfectly be reached: we can only try to approximate it. An infinitely small target is hard to hit, and if our attention is only a moment shy of its target, that's too much.

Our attention can be compared to a clock that measures infinitely small units of time. Time and time again, we need to adjust the hand of this clock, but before we've reached the present, the present has already moved a minute. We then try to adjust it once more, but again the present has moved a few seconds. Our attention can never perfectly reach the present. But if it's only a second shy of its target, that's already too much.

Fortunately, the information we perceive remains in our brain for some time, but they are the most defined when they are just perceived, upon which, as new information flows in, they rapidly become more and more vague until they are but memories, and only come back to our mind when we remember them. But even when we remember, the same thing happens again.

Our attention may easily get stuck at one moment as it becomes the past. The present is like a treadmill: go only a bit too slow, and you will fall off. It's easy enough to stay on the treadmill in the gym if it's for just an hour, but for your mind there is no such mercy if you are to be mindful: all mindfulness there was in the past is irrelevant in the present; the only thing that is relevant in the present is your mindfulness at that moment.

The mind is never still. Ever moment that passes, our mind acquires new information and reacts on that information. Our mind is constantly on the move, constantly switching from one moment to the next. To be mindful is therefore a very active and complex process which requires constant alertness.

Anything we experience is in the current, including memories, but often, when we try to be mindful of our experiences, we end up focussing not on our current experience but on an experience that's just past — perhaps only a second or so, but that's enough for our efforts to be in vain. If we try to focus on past experiences — experiences that we no longer feel, not even in our memory — and fail to do so, we stop being mindful.

Our mind is a machine that needs to be calibrated with utmost care. The receiver of our attention must be fine-tuned with infinite finesse, or we will keep on failing to enjoy the value of our experiences of every moment. To be aware, we need to aim very carefully on that which we feel right now (even if it is in a memory), not a moment later and not a moment earlier, and to do so, we must be both open to the very next moment and willing to let go of the previous moment. Every moment that passes, our consciousness needs to leave behind the past moment and update its focus on the new moment.

Many people who seek to achieve mindfulness are often under the impression that they are mindful whereas they do not really enjoy their experiences, but merely keep track of them. Rather than something to feel, it becomes more as if it is something they merely needed to know. It is, however, not enough to merely acknowledge once in a while that your experiences are there: one must feel them, this very moment and only for this moment. One must actually feel their value in the present moment, and only its value in the present moment, not as a means to an end but for how it feels at that very moment.

Mindfulness has practical advantages, such as increased creativity, but this can be a trap. Mindfulness is not a tool. If one seeks to use mindfulness purely for its benefits, then it becomes more like a chore, and so the mindfulness entirely loses its effect, for mindfulness itself then becomes nothing more than a concept. Unfortunately, whereas sports can be done without enjoyment to the benefit of one's health, it is impossible to be mindful without enjoyment. Seek to be mindful only when you want to enjoy being mindful, and not otherwise. At other times, try instead to convince your mind to want to enjoy it.

Mindfulness should not just be something we merely try to achieve over the long term but something we try to achieve for this moment, just for this moment, without needing it to last any longer than that; for if we do have this need, this need will stand in our way to become mindful. The more we will achieve mindfulness just for this moment, the more mindful we will be over the long run.

Mindfulness is very fragile, and under pressure, it will break down immediately. Mindfulness should not be expected to last. It is enough in itself just to be mindful right now. Do not be mindful merely so that you will still be mindful later on, not even to be mindful the very next instant. To be mindful, you need to let go of the goal of being mindful.

In future, nanorobots will be built partly out of nanocrystals, mostly, out of carbon allotropes derived from graphene, such as carbon nanotubes and other fullerenes. Like the graphite they are derived from, these structures have their atoms arranged in a regular pattern, and are therefore crystalline.

The geometry of a crystal is determined by its chemistry. It could therefore be possible to alter the geometry of a crystal by altering its chemistry. As the chemistry of the molecules changes, so do its the chemical bonds, which could cause the nanocrystal to reform.

For instance, suppose that in graphene, each pair of carbon atoms on a line was substituted by a single atom, then the graphene could be folded around these atoms. The graphene would now contain a line of pentagons which would serve as a "hinge" between two parts of the graphene, so that, the graphene could be folded into complex solid structures, such as cubes or tetrahedrons or parallelepipeds. This could open many new possibilities in nanotechnology, and, in particular, in nanorobotics.

One way to do this would be by binding the needed reagents to very thin nanorods, the thickness of a single atom, and colliding the nanorods onto the surface of the graphene. Because nanorods are straight, they will be likely to hit all the sides of the hexagons on a line. A naturally occurring example of such nanorods could be the tails of very long chain fatty acids (over 22 carbon atoms long), and if even longer of these tails could be made, perhaps through processes similar to those that create these unsaturated fatty acids, these could prove to be suitable for the job. The reactants could be bond to the carbon atoms in the tails.

This process could be reversible, and, what's more, it could happen extremely quickly and conveniently. Because of this, it could be used not only to create the nanorobot, but also to modify it later on. The nanorobot could either modify itself or be modified by another. In accordance to different functions, it could assume different shapes. For instance, to pass into the smallest capillaries, it could thereby become more elongated, so that its cross-section is small enough to pass through, as red blood cells do. By modifying itself, nanorobots could achieve a flexibility which is closer to that of the organic, while otherwise still retaining their durability as machines.

This might also be useful should nanorobots one day be used as nanoscale analogues of foglets. Counterintuitively, nanorobots would be more durable than the larger foglets because it is harder to destroy them using mechanical stress.

If nanorobots could connect to one another and then change their shape to cubes, they would leave out almost no blank space in between them, which would make them more compact. If they would then combine to form an object, this increased compactness would make the object all the more durable.

The geometry of a crystal will often try to imitate the geometry of the molecule, at least partly. Crystals, being fractals, tend to be self-similar. The crystal is often a more complex version of the molecule. Snow crystals are thousands of times larger than an ice molecule and yet still hexagonal. One can see the crystal's molecules in its macroscopic structure, as if the geometry of the molecule was magnified: it is a visible link between the chemical and human world.

However, the molecule is but the first step in the fractal function, whereas in the crystal it has been repeated many times, so that the crystal is far more complex. The crystal will continue to grow in function of its fractal as long as there are no other factors in the crystal's growth — but of course, this is almost never the case, because of convection.

Usually, crystals are imperfect due to gravity, but in a microgravity experiment in the ISS, perfect crystals have actually been created. These perfect crystals grow perfectly according to fractals. If these fractals could be calculated for specific crystals based on their chemistry, one could produce computer simulations of them. Using these simulations, one could compute the geometry of specific perfect crystals. In this way, the chemistry of the crystal would be the only thing one would need to compute its geometry.

Of course, it could be much easier to simply observe this from microgravity experiments in which perfect crystals are actually being formed, but only if one wants to know the geometry of a specific crystal.

However, theoretically, the opposite could also be done: using an algorithm which would simulate their chemistry, computers could find crystals that have a specific geometry or pattern by combining elements at random into minerals and then turning the minerals into crystals using fractals, repeating the process until the right crystal is formed, changing parameters such as temperature, pressure and so forth all the while, within a certain range.

This could be useful in nanotechnology, as on nanoscale, gravity is not relevant and so convection does not occur. The computation involved in simulatin