New Age

So surely the term "New Age" has crossed your vocabulary before and therefore you know what it means, or have a preconceived idea of it. I think the general notion goes "Hippie like ideas", but to have a better grasp of it, from wikipedia:

The New Age movement is a Western spiritual movement that developed in the second half of the 20th century. Its central precepts have been described as "drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational psychology, holistic health, parapsychology, consciousness research and quantum physics".^[2]

The New Age movement includes elements of older spiritual and religious traditions ranging from atheism and monotheismthrough classical pantheism, naturalistic pantheism, pandeism and panentheism to polytheism combined with science and Gaia philosophy; particularly archaeoastronomy,astronomy, ecology, environmentalism, the Gaia hypothesis, psychology and physics.

New Age practices and philosophies sometimes draw inspiration from major world religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Chinese folk religion, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam,Judaism, Sikhism; with strong influences from East Asian religions, Gnosticism, Neopaganism, New Thought, Spiritualism, Theosophy, Universalism and Western esotericism.^[8] The term New Age refers to the coming astrological Age of Aquarius.^[1]

So....... New Age. Right... 

If for a moment we leave aside all these belief and have a more factual look upon it, what can we see, deduct about this New Age stuff? People started travelling around the world, and with travel there is an exchange of information, and for information to sink in it takes time. The moment we can probably pinpoint a hike of travelling  is the start of air-companies and more specifically the low cost ones: The start of low-cost flights indicates the change in paradigm between the flying is for people with money or just simply costly to anyone can fly and therefore travel long distances. That means that travelling in its current form has really existed for maybe the last two decades, where we've seen this bigger focus in travelling to exotic places, different continents and so on. Before that sure we had trains and whatever. Other technology such as mobile phones and computers has also opened up the world's oyster to younger people for we are able to remain in contact and quite frankly we are usually the ones with the ins and outs of technology so everything that goes from couch surfing to inter-rails we are usually the ones on top of it. But there's another very important thing technology did for the New Age Movement - The globalisation of information.  Essentially, today, a big difference between people is the information we carry with us, and the information we have access to. We all have access to the internet. But we don't all carry the same information. It is easy to find information about this, or that, but doesn't mean you actually know this or that, it just means you know where to find it. Go back a few centuries and if you wanted to know anything about the far east it would've taken a book months maybe even years of travel to reach your hands and there was no certainty that the information you were seeking would be in that book, only that some information from that culture would be enclosed in that book. So I think that a big turning point for New Age is in fact this worldly database of knowledge that now exists where if you are curious about Neopaganism or Theosophy or the sign of Aquarius it is but a few clicks away. Globalisation caused this.

My point is New Age is not some sort of bullshit that pot-smoking people made up. New Age concepts are in fact much older than most would have them believe to be; And if the western world is this place where we shed most traces of spirituality and religion and natural medicine to replace it with psychology and pharmaceutics, then the eastern philosophies are the counter parts where the fauna and the flora and the soul & spirit of a person still matter. The New Age movement brings out millenium old beliefs, and we see this movement sinking in slowly in yoga classes and acupuncture and group meditation. And so the first thing I'd ask is: Is there anything really wrong with this, and what good do we see coming out of it already? Are we willing to let it influence our society, although we can hardly fight progress, are we willing to embrace it?

Now I must say that since a tender age I have indeed read a few psychology books, not cover to cover, not extremely intensely nor have I studied them thoroughly, but out of curiosity and a belief that better understanding of self and others leads to a better life. Psychology seemed to be an obvious pace in this direction.  Obviously this reading has led me to many other pieces of literature, about the human brain, the conscious and the unconscious, attitudes & the psychology behind them, books on how to act & react better to certain situations and of course much of business psychology as that is one of my areas. I am not here to refute or even discuss New Age, not on this post anyway.

But there is one thing about it. New Age of course includes Lucid Dreaming which has been a much hyped topic as of late. I first bumped into it 3 or so years ago and experimented with it for a while without too much success truth be told. Then again most people don't have too much success but now-a-days dream theory is becoming all he more mainstream, from lucid dream apps, to lucid dream books and guides to "Inception" and another movie which I just read about and am yet to watch, 

I've somehow come to the conclusion that a life without dreams is unhealthy. I don't mean dreams in the sense of "I dream to own my own bar or company or be a big shot lawyer" or something of the kind, but the kind of dreams you have every night. Every night you have dreams, we all do, but you don't always remember them, they don't always make sense, etc. As a former pot smoker I accepted that during the time that I smoked pot it was highly unlikely that I would remember my dreams, after all it is a known fact that pot makes it much harder to remember your dreams. But you dream all the same, your subconscious brain never stops. I spent many years without being able to recall a single dream and this scared me, which might have been why I first started looking into lucid dreaming. Now for the past couple days the things I had read about lucid dreaming just happened to pop into my mind, and this post was mostly indeed just to share the developments that have occurred. The mainstream way of going about it now is getting an app that makes a sound when you enter REM sleep loud enough for you to hear it but not to wake you up, and this sound is supposed to alert you to the reality of your dream, meaning that you recognise the song and realize you are dreaming, very much how like in inception they used music to alert the need to get out of the dream. Here the music is designed to make you realize you are dreaming. The old school way is much harder and involves a lot of practice. The Old-School way is all about during the day forcing yourself to question your reality such as "If I'm dreaming then I want to have seven fingers" and then you stare at your hand and count your fingers. Honestly this was the example I learnt from, and it sucks. For the past couple of days I've been doing several things one of them being "If I'm dreaming turn this cigarette into a joint", which makes me question my reality 10-20 times a day. I've also been experimenting with small stupid stuff like "If I'm dreaming make all the lights go purple" or "If I'm dreaming make everyone get naked" or "Make the broom clean the floor by itself". I find this is much easier and funnier than staring at my hands. Also more discreet as I don't look like an idiot staring at my hands while having a conversation. The result is that I've been awake for longer and more aware in my dreams. I woke up as if I had hardly gone to sleep today, and by this I meant I had none of that morning laziness and slowness that usually overtakes me in the morning (I call it the morning brain) and I was more aware in my dreams. Usually what happened is that I only realised I was dreaming much closer to the end of the dream and had no conscious thought until then, while for the last two days I was having conscious thought although I wasn't fully aware that it was a dream. I had no real control over my actions, by this I mean I kept doing what I was doing, but thinking through it as if I had actually been there in person. I'm looking forward to tonight and will keep on doing this for long and plan to tell a few people about this, and alert them. My current plan is to wake myself up in dreams and make others realize they are dreaming. I hope to achieve this somewhat soon.    

A writer

It's been a while since I put this electronic ink onto electronic paper, it is said to be better to put real ink to real parchment for the feeling of the world is invaluably more real, but I am no longer from the age of pen-and-paper where my writings remain hidden in my under-the-mattress notebook although I've been there too. Is it that I fear not what I write or is it a restrained want to communicate my written thought to a bigger world? I don't know. But it might just be, for sometimes I feel that were I the only one to read my words, what good would they be? Whose life would they be changing, if they were changing even my own? Then again why do we write? Often, we start writing because we used to, and we know it used to make us feel good, other times, just as a hobby, and we search for a direction of our writings, whether it is a social critic or a personal journal or the sharing of an experience. And all these give us exquisitely different kinds of articles, and other times we write for no reason but to settle the swirling thoughts in our head. Sometimes we try to write better, for our texts to have a deeper meaning in between the lines of that which we read. Other times we write point blank, either because we are feeling raw, or because we just need to be stupidly clear. Whichever the reason why we write, we usually love to, and a writer goes through his life with his eyes open to the protagonist and the anti-hero, the sidekick and the villain, the secondary character and the small plot twist, the secondary plot and the total change of direction. And a writer cannot refuse reality, only embellish it and present it in a different light. Is the writer's world real, or fantastical? Is the writer any different to an engineer or a business man who see their live's through numbers and angles, through actions and reactions, possibilities and dreams? And does the writer push for his own vision, or does he merely and meekly describe what is going on around him, and if so, how does he do it? What is his emphasis, what is he trying to achieve?  Why do we so often sit in front of our typewriter and have our mind going blank? Do we not know what to think anymore, are we so lost inside our own lives we can no longer find the wire which connects us to the world outside our heads? Are we waiting for someone to throw us the rope back to our words? And so word by word, by reason or imagination every writer reaches a point where he has no more to go on but his own guts - "We truly start living once we are out of our comfort zone" and where we travel, future unknown, undecided because we have crossed the lines of fate and there is nothing written in front of us and it is now time to change our futures. When we reach the limit and have to push further into that part of ourselves of which we have only but dreamed about, we are in fact changing our future, our reality and essentially become a little bit more of ourselves than we previously were. When we face ourselves in the mirror and push through the picture within and without changes and you are meddling with the very innermost atoms of our universe. And some meddle with care, some meddle recklessly, some meddle in a sense of adventure, some meddle thoughtfully and other just let themselves go, and every time you reach that point, this point, you have the chance to do it differently. "If I were there again would I do it any differently?" - Many people say no, I wouldn't change anything about my life because my experiences have made me who I am. But if it is so, why would you not wish to push further and be even more? And the next time you get to that point? Will you push for more, or will you settle for your usual? And that is what not only makes you different from everyone else, but different from yourself as well for you wake up the dormant parts of you, the wanting parts of you, the infinite desires that lay deep within your soul awaiting discovery of this new exciting emotion which you have not yet had the chance to develop. And sometimes you tell yourself "I just couldn't explain it". Essentially everything has three stages - "I lived it, I understood it, I passed it on". When you reach the point of passing it on, your experience finally makes a story, and influence, an image that can drive someone else, and once you pass it on then you are truly ready for the next one, for your are not lost inside your mind trying to understand what or how or why something was this way. And so, word by word, every writer reaches the next point, and only by word will he move on.