eleven

I consider it significant that most of us find it impossible not to overeat at Christmas time. Likewise, we cannot avoid company on New Year’s Eve. It could be a proverb. Just try it—and afterwards, ask yourself whether you believe in free will. Look at all the women lined up and packing the halls in shopping centres before Christmas, purchasing last-minute presents for their kids and relatives. They are sweating in trolley jams. Their money drains away as their stress levels rise. There must be an enormous percentage of people who dread the festive season, yet they keep participating. Why? Don’t tell me it is free will.

I stirred and awoke to find myself seated on the couch. A glorious sun shone through everything, as if my surroundings were translucent.

The television was on and I was alone.

Santa Clause does exist. He exists in the Fourth Century, in the area that is now northern Turkey, under the name of Saint Nicholas. To say that he doesn’t exist is a lie, as much of a lie as saying he has magic reindeers and a home in present day North Pole.

   The obvious rebuttal is to say he existed—not exists—in the past tense. My argument is that this is not more truthful, just more ‘our-own-time-centric’. Biased, in other words, like a metaphysical prejudice. Saint Nicholas does exist in that time and place. Being biased towards our own time and place is closed-minded, and leads to illusion and even violence. A case in point: somebody once said that the world is flat, based on the fact that no one in his own time could prove that it was round. Somebody could prove it, of course, in the future. But some notable people went to prison or were tortured, or killed, because they did not cater to the time-bias (shall I say ‘timeism’?). Giordano Bruno, I hear, is being burned at the stake in 1590 for affirming the Earth's motion around the sun.

  JOKES usually have three main parts to them. Here is an example:

Buddha walks into a pizza restaurant and says, ‘Make me one with everything.’

   Imagine a robot that has a limited number of responses. If you say hello to it, the robot automatically reacts with: “Hi, how are you today?” If you keep greeting the robot, the repeated response would get annoying and it would not take long for you to recognise it as a machine. But say the creator programs it so that at every third time someone greets the robot, it changes its response to a second sentence: “Fine day, isn’t it?” In this case you would take longer to catch on it was a robot, but not much longer.

 The Silent Question

THE other day, when visiting my friend the Imam, I questioned him about a detail concerning Islam which has bothered me. The problem was as follows: Moses advocated the Eye for an Eye philosophy in the Old Testament. Succeeding him, in the New Testament, Christ advised moving on from the “Old Times” and now turning the other cheek, blessing those who hate you, and so forth. If we are, then, to accept Mohammed as a further evolution – through the Koran – why is it that the prophet (peace be upon him) has seemingly gone backwards, reinstating the Eye for an Eye attitude?

“I am the sceptre of the rulers of men.”

– Krishna.

WHILE he was sleeping, Citizen Uccello heard a ‘knocking’ inside his head. Uccello, like all citizens of his day, only had one dream. It consisted of a single pyramid of playing-cards, stacked high and peaceful on a coffee table. But the present knocking shook the image, and the cards collapsed in a heap.