Internet Dating

Hey Sexy-kitten 157. I saw your profile on the internet dating site and was very impressed with your description of yourself. I too am a fun loving person who lives life to the fullest. As you can see from my profile I am a sporty guy who knows what he wants from life. I’m sensitive but still a man. Compassionate but I will still kill that big hairy spider if you need me to. I’d really like to go out for a drink with you. Drop me an email some time and we can get together. Eagerly waiting your reply. Studmeister 239. Send.

Profile no 2. Hey Hot-Roxy-girl...um copy, paste, send.

Forgive me father for I have sinned. I have signed up on an internet dating site. I have allowed myself to send the same email to seven different girls in a row through just copying the body of the mail and changing the name. I even lied in the email. I’m not sporty. I wouldn’t know a rugby ball from a bowling ball. And what does it mean to live life to the fullest? That’s not even a word!

But girls all want the same thing. I should know. I’ve been reading millions and millions of their profiles. They want a guy who is a man. I think they mean they want a guy who watches sport… or plays sport. I know it has something to do with sport. They want someone who likes to go out and dance at a club, but also likes to stay home and watch DVDs. They want someone determined, ambitious, a guy who knows where he’s going, but he must spend all his time on them. They want a strong man, able to make decisions, but would really like it if he cried at the end of Thelma and Louise.

Maybe I shouldn’t tell them I enjoy going to the theatre. It might sound… pansy.

You might be asking why I joined an internet dating site. Well the reason is obvious, one would assume. The excuse is: “Where do you meet eligible singles now days?” It’s been statistically proven that you have a 65% higher chance of meeting your life partner in a super market than in a bar. It’s also been statistically proven that 96.3% of statistics are made up on the spot. But that’s besides the fact. At a bar there is just so much more risk. The rejection is instantaneous and direct.

“Hi my name’s Oded. Can I buy you a… “
“No you cannot.”
“… a heart?”

At least with the internet dating site you usually have to wait a day to get a return email. And by blanket emailing all 700 of your favourites your odds of success are increased.

And if you get a positive reply then comes the anticipation. The back and forth emails getting to know one another. Then the relinquishing of one’s cell phone number. Finally after numerous and numerous smses, the arrangement to meet.

The internet dating site does have a disclaimer on the proper precautions to adhere to on the first blind date. Safety rule number one. Meet the date at a public place. Under no circumstances give out your home address or let your date pick you up from said address. This would render you carless should you wish to make a hasty retreat not to mention that if your date turns out to be a psychotic stalker he then knows where you live. Safety rule number two: Choose a noncommittal first date. A quick drink after work or perhaps coffee over a lunch hour is advisable. This always allows you the excuse of having other commitments should you wish to cut the date short. And finally rule no three. Do not mention your cat.

And now we’re on the date. I’m sitting at the coffee shop trying to look casual and clam reading the menu for the 24th time. I arrived half an hour early. Mother always said punctuality in a man is a sign of good breeding. Every time a person walks through the door my heart jumps. I never look at them directly because that would seem over eager. And zealousness is uncool. But make no mistake; I see every movement with my peripheral vision. “Wow they have a salmon salad with fresh cream cheese and sliced avo (when in season). Hmmm that sounds great.”

“Hi are you Oded?”
Gasp!

I wave her down into the seat as if landing a plane while trying to recompose myself. She smiles sweetly as nervous and terrified as I am and says “You’re probably wondering why I don’t look like my picture on line? It was taken 10 years ago.”

And those years have been good to you.

I’m not a shallow person. All shallow people say that don’t they? But there is a certain caliber of partner that I’m looking for. As she drones on and on and on I first start devising plans to escape. Maybe I can somehow phone myself. Or maybe I can start coughing and wheezing and fake an asthma attack. Then I start devising plans of homicide. If I moved really fast she wouldn’t be able to stop me sticking this knife in her throat. I’m really starting to regret not paying attention to rule number two, have an excuse to escape.

And then she looks at me and says. “Have I told you about my cat?”

“Cheque please!”

Does it serve you?

You can do it! You are a precious flower who’s buds open up to the blossoming light of your life. Your power is now! Your time is now! Begin the rest of your life with one tiny step! Begin it now!

Yeah right. We’ve heard it all before. All the spiel about new paradigms, about freeing ourselves, about finding our goal, about being the real you, you were made to be. And it all tastes kinda stale in our mouths. I’m willing to bet there isn’t one person who hasn’t heard a motivational speaker. 

A while ago we had the minicon conference at Gateway. It was great. Very well run, excellent speakers, superb humorous competition and the photographer! Wow! A visionary! I was the photographer. But also at the minicon we had a guest speaker at the banquet. He was a professional speaker and he spoke very well. However how he said it was not as important to me as what he said. What he said laid me bare. It left me deflated. It left me uninspired. It demotivated me.

Let me quickly tell you what he did. He deconstructed motivational speakers. He logically and maybe correctly broke them up into different categories. There were the lazy motivational speakers who rely on clichés and factory produced stories that we’ve all heard before all the way to the threatening motivational speakers who aggressively ask the audience “Do you still wana be in the same place next year?”

And he was very good at getting the audience to agree with him. He turned to the audience and said,

“Do you know the one about the starfish?” as if it was some kind of bad joke. For those who don’t know the starfish story, a boy is throwing washed up starfish back into the sea and the speaker, who’s placed himself in the story, says to the boy “There are so many. What difference can you make?” And the boy replies as he hurls another starfish back to the sea “I made a difference to that one.” It’s a commonly used story to illustrate how a small difference is all it takes. But it is overused. As our speaker asked if we’d heard the starfish story he paused and looked at us expectantly. And guaranteed there were some people who groaned in agony at reference to it. He played upon a very common sentiment that pervades humanity. The idea that being a cynic is cool.
And, while he did make sense. And while he did find all the flaws and poke out all holes in the motivational speaking industry, his speech did not serve me.

Why do we go to the theatre? Why do we watch movies? Listen to music? Read books? Entertainment? Probably. Escapism? Definitely. To vicariously experience a situation through someone else?
When I think about it this is the point that I keep coming back to. Why do I watch Keanu Reeves freeing himself from the prison of the Matrix? Why do I watch Mel Gibson falling in love with Helen Hunt while hearing her thoughts? Why do I listen to Tony Robbins telling stories of other people’s success? Because I am able to see myself in them. Because I’m able to transpose my identity onto their situation. This is not something that I alone am gifted in doing. Everybody does this. That is why when we find a good medium who is able to convey emotion to us, like Jack Nicolson, we pay them millions of dollars. Because the experience of vicariously living a situation for us is real.

And so when someone stands up in front of us and delivers a speech, we’re not just listening to what he is saying, we are experiencing what he is feeling. That’s why we need motivational speakers. Because they stand up there in front of us and they show us how inspired they are. They stand up there in front of us and they show us how successful they are. They stand up there in front of us and they show us how significant they are.
And then they do one more thing.

They do one thing that none of the other forms of entertainment or escapism do. They validate our experience by telling us that we can do it too. That yes we can be inspired. Yes we can be a success. Yes we can be significant. And personally I don’t care how many clichés I have to listen to and I don’t care how by not looking cynical I might seem uncool. The value of knowing that I can make a difference is incalculable.

So yes we need motivators. Motivators in every walk of life, spiritual, emotional, financial. Motivators to drive us to succeed. Motivators to show us our grandeur. Motivators who through any means necessary get us fired up and excited about what we can be.

And no. Cynicism does not serve me. Does it serve you?

Scientia est potentia?

01001000
01101001

Or in more colloquial terms “Hi.”
I want to ask you to consider a question. A question that’s been on my mind for quite some time. A question that often plagues me. What I will ask you to consider is “Have we lost the ability to wonder at our world?”

I opened with the binary code for “H” followed by that for “I”. The 8 digit binary code is the way computers… think. For want of a better word. More specifically they think in terms of on and off. On is when an electrical current is passing through a circuit and off is when one is not, 1 and 0 respectively. So for a computer to think of the word “Hi” it needs to reduce it to 16 different states of on and off. Granted it does this in 1 millionth of a second but the point remains that the word “Hi” is reduced it to an elementary system.
This is where our curiosity as humans has brought us.
You remember how at one time in your childhood you wondered how something worked. You looked at the radio and said how does the music come out of it. Those of us with a more reckless spirit often wound up with the radio in pieces at our feet non the wiser but a great deal more fearful of when dad got home. Somehow it never fitted back together again the way it came apart. There was always one piece extra when you were finished.
This curiosity has driven us to explore our world. We have become so adept at opening things up, dissecting, investigating and reducing to component parts, almost everything seems to make sense. If not directly to us, we feel comforted by the fact that it makes sense to someone out there. Very little fills us with wonder.
Have we lost the ability to stand in wonder of our world?

1221 AD. Soren Bjornson has just stepped off his boat. His Viking army’s raid on the northern shores of Scotland was a great success and he’s returned to Hålogaland with a hoard of pillage. As he’s disembarking he sees the sky light up in a band of green fire. The billows of luminescence roll across the horizon. He looks up with fear and wonder knowing that the lights are the flashes off the Valkyries armor who had been riding with them and Odin is demonstrating his approval by granting him such an entourage. Soren feels connected, his wonder makes him feel part of something.

767 or so years into the future. Magunus Kvande is crossing the street to the local Strabucks in

Tromsa to get himself a low-caf-double-froth-single-pump-hold-the-cinnamon-mochachino. The light in the street has a green tinge about it and he glances up to see the Aurora Borealis. The northern lights dance across the sky. Magnus has seen it before. He looks up and remembers back to his physics 101 lecture at Oslo university. The solar wind pushes out bursts of electron’s, which burn against the troposphere up here near the poles where the magnetosphere doesn’t deflect them as much causing the ionization of the oxygen particles hence the green glow. The little bell on the door dings politely as he enters the coffee shop not missing a step.

Who had the richer experience? The Viking, caked in dry blood, holding his war axe, staring up at something he didn’t understand or the physics student, glibly sipping on his warm, comforting beverage?
As we dissect things and reduce them to their component parts in our world, we gain remarkable insight to how the world works. We develop fantastic tools that simplify our lives. We further our understanding of ourselves and extend our lifespan by decades. We also become overconfident in our knowledge. We become blasé. We become glib. We lose the wonder at how our world works.

As a teacher I see this all the time. The underlying common attitude of the children is one of nonchalance. Nothing amazes them anymore. They’ve seen it all. They know that if they don’t understand exactly how it works, it’s ok, science can explain it. There’s nothing, really, that we don’t have a handle on.
That’s when I like to throw them a curve ball and tell them that according to the maths involved with quantum physics the direction of time is arbitrary. In other words there is no real distinction in the positive as opposed to the negative direction of time. There is no reason, quantum-ly, why something that will happen 5 minutes from now has any less effect on this moment than something that happened 5 minutes ago.

Then you see it. The small ember of wonder briefly sparks in their eyes.

So have we lost it? Have we lost the ability to wonder at our world? I never said I would answer the question for you. I said I would simply pose it.

In the beginning there was but a word
as in the end there will be but a silence.
In the beginning there was but belief
as in the end there will be but science.
When we have unraveled the world
and torn the fabric to see how it works,
when we have pierced the essence
and bared the soul to see what there lurks.
Might that we find god and so rejoice
or find nothing and be faced with the choice
of believing all said but knowing it false
or believing none said and knowing naught else.

Let me translate for you.

Extra-extra! Read all about it.

“I had sex orgy with Brittany Spears” crazed fan tells all
Extra-extra! Read all about it.
Joan Rivers 75th facelift makes her look younger than her granddaughter.
Extra-extra! Read all about it.
Media is conning you into paralytic fear and abject despair expounding goals you can never attain.

Are you happy with your life partner? Do you find yourself paging through magazines and asking yourself “why can’t I have someone like that?” Well ask no longer ‘cos now you can. Welcome to the new age. The age of happiness, the age of prosperity, the age of having the life partner that you want, no, that you deserve. Welcome to Live-Science Airbrushing. Send us your old, used, broken-down life-partner and in a few short days we’ll return them to you, rejuvenated, revamped, renewed, reupholstered. It’s your life partner, only better.
And so it goes. And so we’re told. You deserve better. You deserve more. More money, more free time, more muscle, more car, more sex. You’re a unique snowflake. There’s no one quite like you so you should have the best. You should have what everyone else has; a Lexus 300 S.U.X.

And we listen, and we hear them, and we think
“Yes! I do deserve more. I do deserve a Lexus 300 S.U.X. I’m a unique snowflake!!”

But we don’t hear what they are really saying.
Let me translate for you:
“You deserve more.”
You don’t have enough.
“You deserve more free time”
Your job consumes your life.
“You deserve more muscle.”
You’re unattractive.
“You deserve to drop a dress size.”
You’re fat.
“You deserve more sex”
You’re unloved.

A prime example is the Ford Fiesta advert. It opens on a man sitting alone on a bench. Next to him is an open space which obviously used to be filled by his loving girlfriend and it follows him showing her absence. A bathroom scene with him, alone, at a 2 basin vanity wearing a "his" gown, an empty space next to him on the movie couch and him struggling on a 2 seater bicycle. All showing that what was once there is now no longer.

The final scene ties the story together. Our heartbroken loser is walking across the park pulling petals off a flower. The image immediately says “She loves me, she loves me not. She loves me, she loves me not.”
Suddenly out of a house across the street bursts his girlfriend, waving. He looks up as if heaven has answered his prayers, but, she laughingly jumps into the passenger seat of a new Ford Fiesta and speeds off with its new owner. The final insult to our intelligence is the catch phrase which burns itself white against a black background: “Live Sexy”

Let me translate for you.
If you don’t have a Ford Fiesta, a machine, a vehicle that transports you from A to B, then your girlfriend, who loves you, who you love, will leave you for someone who does. Your value as a person which we measure through how much we are loved is diminished by not having a Ford Fiesta.
On principle I will never ever buy a Ford ever in my life.

But it is not only in advertising that we are lied to. The media tells us of stars, celebrities, that are constantly going to parties, driving fast cars, living in 100 million dollar palaces, being adored by millions and we consume that information with a macabre fascination all the while turning a deaf ear to what is really being said. Your life is not as grand nor as interesting. You, by comparison, obviously are not as valued.

Do people like to hear that? Do people like to hear negative things? Because gilded in its hype about their lives lies the negation of your life.
Who are they to negate you?
Who are they to say you’re not valuable?
Who are they to make you doubt yourself because you don’t drive a Ford Fiesta?

Your value as a person does not depend on what the media tells you.
Your value as a person is what you chose it to be.
The only person who can value you is yourself and the only system of values you can apply is your own.

Unfortunately we live in a world in where the media attempts to model our value systems for a profit. Short of gouging out our eyes and ears with sharp sticks we cannot escape it. They say in the valley of the blind, the one eyed man is king.

I want to leave you with one last example. A woman runs through the forest. She passes other runners, cyclists, people doing yoga and swimmers using a pool ladder(?) to climb out of a lake. She then arrives at a water fountain, drinks from it and makes flirtatious eye-contact with a handsome, eligible man. The camera pans back as she returns to her treadmill to retrieve her towel and the logo for Virgin Active overlays the image.

In the Values of the blind the one-eyed man is king… open your eyes.

7 Spiritual Laws of Success

I read Deepak Chopra’s book “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success” and just wanted to summarize it for myself so I can have a record of it. I recommend reading it as there are aspects and ideas which I personally just take as generally known and so I haven’t bothered to reiterate them here. For example the principle that we are all one and separation is an illusion.

The Law of Pure Potentiality: The source of all creation is pure consciousness… pure potentiality seeking expression from the unmanifest to the manifest. Application: Take time each day to be silent, to witness nature and to practice non-judgment.

The Law of Giving: The universe operates through dynamic exchange… giving and receiving are different aspects of the flow of energy.
Application: Each day continue the circulation of potential by giving and receiving with gratitude, pure intention and no thought of retribution. Each time you meet someone wish them joy and happiness.

The Law of Cause and Effect: Every action generates a force of energy that returns to us in like kind. Application: Be consciously aware of the choices you make and the consequences that they will result in but trust your intuition and what your heart tells you.

The Law of Least Effort: Natures intelligence functions with effortless ease.
Application: Practice acceptance by knowing that each moment is as it should be and having accepted take responsibility of the moment. Remain open to all points of view.

The Law of Intention and Desire: Intention and desire in the field of pure potentiality have infinite organizing power.
Application: Consciously make a list of all your desires and meditate on it but relinquish it to the pure potential of the universe to manifest it as needs be. Accept the present moment as it is. Do not try to manipulate the manner in which the universe manifests your desires.

The Law of Detachment: In our willingness to step into the unknown we surrender to the creative mind that orchestrates the universe. Application: Allow yourself and all around freedom to be as they are. Accept uncertainty in the knowledge that solutions will spontaneously emerge. Uncertainty is the path to freedom, the more uncertain the more secure I will feel. Uncertainty gives rise to the field of infinite possibilities. Consciously detach yourself from results.

The Law of Purpose in Life: Combining our unique talents in service to others we experience the exultation of our own spirit.
Application: Be aware of the Devine that is a part of you. Awaken the deep stillness in your heart. Know your talents and find ways to express them to bring joy and happiness to the world. Daily ask “How can I help?”