eleven

THERE WAS ONCE AN ENORMOUS ROCK. It was smooth and round, and the only thing of its kind. As such, the local people loved and adored it. Streams of people came to visit it. Eventually they built homes around it, so that they could be close to it. Gradually a town formed around it. Everybody had the rock in common.

   The rock was so perfect and symmetrical that people said it could not possibly be natural. On the other hand, however, just as many people thought that it could not possibly be man-made for the same reasons.

On Media and Consciousness

   Neil Postman, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, puts forth the idea that different types of media are ideal for different types of knowledge. This is something of an expansion on Marshal McLuhan’s concept of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ types of media – that is, media which requires little participation (TV), and media which requires much participation (books, or even more, dialogue). This example of Postman’s idea I take from wikipedia—

Moons And Planets.

Levin A. Diatschenko

  Imagine a moon who revolves around three or so planets. Frustrated, he exclaims, “I am a planet too! I am not just your moon!” It is not true, of course; he is only a moon.

No Man’s Land;

Experimenting with a military approach to psychological evolution.

There are three barriers between you and the outside world. The first is your physical body. The second is your emotional body or ‘body of desire’. The third is your mind, or intellect, the mental body. Collectively, this is called the ‘personality.’[1]

'The Playing card Pyramid' is an excerpt from the forthcoming book 'The Rooftop Sutras' by Levin a. Diatschenko which will be launched during the 2010 NT Writers Festival as part of the 'Tales of the Undergrowth' event.

Click here for more information about this event.

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.