I thought I'd rap on about the spirit of service. It ties in with some ideas I've been having. As you know, ideas are one thing - articulating them is another.

I was sitting at home, bored out of my skull, watching a martial arts video on YouTube. For some reason they make me feel better... I don't mean a Bruce Lee flick either. This was much more practical; it was about the Japanese art of ninjitsu.

Anyway, after the fighting was over the protagonists met up in a Japanese restaurant. The ninjitu master was also a cook. Someone asked him, 'Do you think your martial arts have helped with your cooking, or the other way around?' This seemed like a very good question.

Without hesitation he said, 'My martial arts have definitely helped my cooking. I cook in front of people, and the focus I get from my fighting skills helps me to bring the same spirit of service to them.' Or words to that effect.

It struck me how un-western this comment was. Here in the west, we feel we have to know it all and climb the ladder. The idea of 'service' is instantly equated with being lowly. In case you read this and think, 'He has no idea', I'm afraid I do. In my 20s I did a few jobs which some people would have walked out of. Not scrubbing floors, but I was certainly underpaid and exploited. Virtually pissed on.

That isn't what I mean by service. Not in the slightest. The man I heard on that video had already learnt something special: if you freely give people some of your time and energy, you actively respect the life that is within them. When things are going well, they will respect you back again. It's a virtuous circle.

This is not an easy thing to do. We are taught to be selfish, and society conditions us to be go-getting and materialistic. This approach can actually work for a while: perhaps for half your life. Then, I think it falls apart. If you are very lucky you will just about manage to crawl away from the wreckage intact.

To serve is not to be servile. In fact, if you feel that's the case you need to walk away from the situation you are in. If you are made to feel lowly, then you aren't living up to the potential which definitely exists inside you. Someone wants you to feel that way, to increase their sense of personal control. I call that vampirism.

Let me personalise this. I provide people with information for a living. It's not necessarily what I want to do forever, but it pays the rent. I give people what they ask for, and in doing so I'm helping them out. They go away and use this information to improve something. You could call it a benign domino effect, though there is no guarantee things always go to plan.

If you are involved in this for long enough it changes your view of the world. I've met people who are very successful financially, but what they seem to lack is authenticity. I worked for a millionairess once, and she used to invite me back to her place 'for tea and a chat'.

I could see her coming a mile off. She would brew the tea and then - when she thought I was nice and relaxed - start quizzing me about the contract I was on. She wanted details. She was playing a game. Who's doing this, who said what this week...

I walked away from that contract. I'm not interested in office politics, and I will never be a millionaire or someone's poodle. The spirit of service isn't about vying for position or playing chess, using people as pawns. It's about giving and taking. Pushing, and yielding.

It is more subtle than the crude tactics of bankers, politicians and bureaucrats. If you give, you will sometimes lose badly and be disappointed, but you will feel better in the long run. Life will be far from perfect, but at least it will be real.

Good - it's stopped raining. Perhaps I'll go out later on...

- SleepyJohn

I like this subject, hello everyone. I think society has stress points; moments when the lies and illusions are starting to slip away and people start to question what the hell is going on with their lives. I'll mention this in a separate thread I think.

When people are unsettled I think its normal to look at a way to displace the anxiety (drinking or some kind of drugs, from the doctor or the dealer, to take the edge off the daily grind of living). The unsettlement I'm describing is something intangible, like sensing the whole infrastructure and value system of society is wrong, the realisation that you can't change anything, and then the choices you make to live each day. Its like waking up one day and discovering that the colour red has been stolen from your vision: everything looks kind of the same, but for some reason the picture is not right. You feel its wrong, like a very little death has occurred, but can't express it. This metaphor is quite useful in the context of supermarkets, because they have stolen flavour from you. I like to eat my own carrots, especially for fresh carrot juice, but the ones from the supermarket have no flavour. I was stuck the other day and had to use the supermarket to make chicken noodle s!
oup for some people with a standard chicken, and the soup was tasteless so I had to add a stock cube. If I'd played the supermarket game I would have bought the extra special chicken, and the best quality organic veg. In this way the supermarket gets consumers to buy status (extra special means the customer feels extra special) and also allows them to maximise their profits by selling total rubbish to the price sensitive, and partial rubbish to the wealthier.

So here's a scenario. I'm a mother with 2 kids, and I'm shopping for the family. I'm late getting to the supermarket because I've sat playing with my breasts in the car but I get there eventually. So I'm in the supermarket and I want to do the best I can for my family. Maybe I buy some free range eggs but I can't spend much money on the organic veg, so I get the value range. I see some price-reduced extra-special range ready-meals, so I pick them up. Its good to treat the family and get a bargain. Unfortunately the extra-special range is made from the same shit as the other range, still uses the battery eggs and processed meat. But still I've made the best decision based on the choices I had and the packaging is nice. I probably pick up some things to comfort myself, because I have a funny feeling that this is not the way life is meant to be. But what can I do. In this way I'm manipulated by the supermarket through unlimited choice of packaged goods, price targetting, and if!
I want anything of quality I have to pay more. There are so many contradictions in my purchases, I'm aware vaguely of the manipulation, but I feel powerless to change.

This scenario is difficult to change because there is a whole backdrop to our lives where collectively we have lost the colour red. Society is broken, and with one of the last illusions being destroyed (this idea that your rich because your house goes up in value) is making people very uncomfortable. The knowledge that as a nation we've collectively lost practical skills like wiping our own arses, we're sending children to school where they are being told that an estate agency career is good, and we're feeding them the lie about the value of a degree and charging them as teenagers so much to get an education that we are effectively enslaving them to the banks and pointless entry level jobs until the loans are repaid. In this way we make citizens or stakeholders of people, and mould them into actors in the masquerade of society. And on top of this scenario, that acts as backdrop to our lives, sits consumption. Whether it is clothes, food, cars or whatever, its the stuff that !
papers over the cracks in our anxieties. The simple substitute to a greater solution where we collectively create something better. And food is one of the simplest ways to reward ourselves when we feel low. The supermarkets thrive because society is broken. When people demand to see the colour red again, when they insist on flavour and meaning in everything and not only their food, the supermarkets will shrivel.

- Longtail

In a lot of "professions", expensive qualifications lapse after one or two years. When you're in work you're employer pays for you to get (or brush up on) these things, unless they're cheapscates like my last lot, but when you're oota work you're on your own. Part P for electricians, that sort o'thing.

I used to "believe in" work a lot more than I do now: I used to say it unites people, it brought women more rights, it gets you free from landlords/etc because you can get your own place, you learn stuff doing it, now I still sort of believe all that, but cancelling it out are two huge drawbacks with work as it presently is:
1. Most of it is pointless. Doubly so given that practically all commercial work involves directly or indirectly knackering the environment in order to provide people with goods-or-services that don't improve their lives, and a lot of "public sector" work involves cleaning up the commercial sector's mess.
2. Now more than any time since the war I suppose, working people are treated like machines. Even in fields like research, people are working to "targets" and suchlike, and really I think there are better ways, given that most of the vital physical work is done by energy/machines, that we could all be spending our time. The trouble is most people are so out-of-practice at doing so!

- Lunchista

well Mr. Wallace this is purely my personal experience and views on the subject, and I would like to hear from anyone else who has had a similar experience or(dissimilar)

this is a subject that I have only ever talked about with one other person in 26 years, and that was my ex wife, but apart from recounting the experience it was never discussed any further, and I found no reason to go any deeper investigating until a few years ago, and from what I have read all over the internet it is a common happening, not universal but those who "go and come back" have very similar stories, most are not documented, some are actual clinical deaths, others just an out of body experience, but what seems strange to me is that this "most personal of happenings to me" is shared with so many others, some have put it down to their religious beliefs, others it has made them religious, skeptics like me are less common, but still show a remarkable similarity in the experience itself, as you have probably gathered from some of my other posts I am based in science, its what I do! braking everything down into its components to understand what the whole thing "is" when !
it is reassembled, but I am stumped on this subject, it is greater than the sum of its parts, what I mean is that no matter how I analyze it, no matter how the doctors an scientists profess that it is simply a biological breakdown of the brains functions prior to actual death, I no longer "believe" (and that is the only word I can use) it to be so! for what I experienced goes far beyond my understanding of "life as we know it"

for a start I was only 24 years old, fit and healthy, a widower of less than a day, totally distraught at the loss of my wife who had died in my arms that evening, she was everything to me, I never loved anyone like I loved her, either before or since, I was alone in my bed sobbing silently (or so I thought) then I felt a pain in my left arm and shoulder that crept over to the middle of my chest, I couldn't move, not even an eyelid but I could still see and hear, but the pain got suddenly worse, and I was floating, up through the roof of the house into the dark night sky, the pain had gone, a dim light in the distance made me want to go to it, and I did, and as I got closer I could feel the warmth, I saw shadows of outlines of faces of people that I had known and some I didn't, but they knew me, and they were there to greet me, there was this overwhelming feeling of love and security, and compassion, it felt like I had been away on a long long voyage and I had finally come b!
ack home, but my wife was stood in front of them all , and though I could see her face her lips never moved but yet I heard her say to me inside my head,

“go back, go back, you still have life to live”I felt her let go of my hand , and immediately felt sad that I had to come back, but I had no choice,

then I was back laying on my back in the bed looking at the ceiling  wondering how I could have got through the roof tiles, and the pain in my chest returned, and my uncle was knelt over me, he shouted downstairs to my aunt “ yes he’s ok, he's just woke up,  apparently I had gone suddenly quiet ! and as they had been listening to me sob for quite a while from their bedroom , after a couple of minutes they decided to check on me, my aunt could find no pulse or heartbeat (she had been a student nurse when she left school), and I didn't respond to anything they did, so she went down to phone for an ambulance,  I remember every detail except them coming into my room, I assured them I was all right, and they both said  that I had freighted the willies out of them, the pain had eased and I rolled over and went to sleep.

I didn't know  until 3 years ago that  that was my first heart attack, and it left  damage that would show up 23 years later on my heart scan after my second heart attack, apparently that 1st one was a bad one and that I was lucky to survive, especially as I had no treatment for it whatsoever, but believe me when no2 happened I knew exactly what it was, but it was different there was no pain I just couldn't move, I had no feeling in my body, yet I could still see and hear, all around me , but I just couldn't do anything,  the  strangest thing to me is that you never notice your own heartbeat, until its not there!  then you notice the silence within your own body, that was scary!  this time I was not alone and I did get sent  to the hospital  with a 98% blocked artery to the left ventricle (I still have the x-ray pictures) and left untreated  it would have been fatal, my doc in the E.R sent me for a 3D heart scan and  when the 3D animation showed up he was more interested in !
my last heart attack than this one,  I said I hadn't had one before , and he showed me  a part of  my heart muscle that was not  pulsing as it should, and he said that it was evidence of major attack years ago,  in which that part of my heart had died,  then I was whisked away to the O.R  and the blockage was removed and they put in a stent,

so now I know how I am going to go!  so long as I don't get hit by a truck, but these experiences have left me with a feeling of comfort, that there is a place beyond death, and though I have no religious views  and the fact that my wife was a catholic, I still find no reason to have any religious views,  so, being a man of science,  what do I think now having analyzed all this stuff,

It is really simple, our body is a vehicle, just like a car in this realm, its what gets us from a-to-b, from one point to another, some cars are good and last a long time, some are not, and some just get worn out, like mine, but my consciousness is the driver, and  just like an old car when it is done we send it to the scrap yard, but we don't send the driver with it! it will die and be crushed and returned to its basic elements just like our bodies, but the driver moves on to something better, our physical presence is over but our thoughts and feelings of love and care of others lives on, and if what I have experienced is real then I will have gone home.  I have a feeling that those who have  done unspeakable horrors while here may not have the same greetings I got, but then again to forgive is divine (or so I am told) and I want to end on a simple note, yes you can love someone so much that you can die from a broken heart, I almost did. and as far as animals go I am sure !
that all the ones that I have loved and cared for and have gone on ahead will be there to give me back the love I gave them, in the end “all you need is love”

- Gadget