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Political, economic or religious groups don't exist in the real world. They're a product of our minds.
Of course, even though these groups are not physically real, they are treated as such, leading people to identify as members of one or more of them. These individuals do exist—they are real—and as they declare their affiliation with a group, we also assume the reality of the group itself.
That's where the delusion starts, but it doesn't end there. We profile groups, therefore we have a pretty clear idea of a set of characteristics associated with each one of them. As a consequence, we tend to attribute that set of characteristics to all the group members, as if they were not unique human beings but just repetitions of a certain pattern. A procedure that would appear unacceptable if it were applied to us, is light-heartedly used to simplify the rest of the world.
This might be fine under certain circumstances. However, we need to keep in mind that hardly any of those group members will be correctly described by that specific set of features. In fact, the majority of them might not showcase most of those attributes at all.
This distinction is not just important; it is fundamental. The consequences of this mental trap can lead to social disaster.
Groups can be very useful as conceptual tools. Be extra careful not to take them too seriously though.
I don't count on it much, but if the afterlife really existed, between heaven and hell I would choose the latter.
It must be a place full of souls that have fun, chat, yell, drink, smoke, get high, fuck, dance, sing, read irreverent literature, listen to tempting music, think, doubt, cry tears of emotion, laugh with delight.
Fire does not scare me, it's just a symbol: it represents warmth, joy, dance, love.
How about heaven instead? What a drag that must be. Those ashen faces, the haughty smiles, the straw-white skirts. The sad, political victim like look of the doorman, good old Peter, would be enough to sink me into the most oppressing form of depression.
Honestly, I prefer the carnival style, the cheekiness and the mocking grin of Satan.
P.S. I almost forgot: Amen!
These are two very famous abstract art paintings.
I'm not an art expert and I'm not gonna talk about art here. Yet I find art an extremely good tool to visually convey counter intuitive ideas, even those that have nothing to do with the artworks themselves.
I will use Kandinsky's "Composition VII" (the first one) to represent reality. Rothko's "No. 4, two dominants" (the second one) on the other hand can be thought to represent a polarized simplification of that same reality.
Now imagine trying to understand the complexity inherent in the first representation by using the second one as a model. Ridiculous, right?
Worse still, consider how stupid it would be to operate on the complex reality by using the polarized model.
Well, as absurd as it may seem, that is what many of us do every day, when it comes to pretty much everything we can think of.
In my opinion this is one of the main tragedies of our times.
The debate over the effects of smartphones on society and human mental health has been ongoing for quite some time.
The situation has obviously gotten worse in the last 2-3 years. Buses and trains are full of people who seem to be staring hypnotized at the screen of their phone, swiping their finger on it now and then, just like zombies.
New techniques, such as continuous video scrolling loops, have been introduced. They target some well known weak points of our psyche and they promote the production of some hormones that give us pleasure. If you feel guilty after having wasted hours watching some silly videos non-stop, well do not worry: it's not your fault. You're being manipulated like a lab mouse.
Fortunately (maybe) we're not mice, and we do have methods to preserve our mental independence, if we want to. So if you are happy with your hours of trance like state you can ignore the rest of this post. But if you want to get out of this mental trap you might find what follows useful.
The solution is actually grounded in some very old ideas. Good old Siddhartha Gautama, aka the great Buddha, had a very similar insight when he was trying to find a way out of our obsessive thinking about past and future, that distracts us from the only moment that matters: the present one. That solution is called MINDFULNESS.
Let’s clarify the problem first.
If the expectations you had
were never actually met,
you'd better exit virtuality
and start to manage reality.
All of the dancers
got off the stage:
a cool lighted volume,
like a transparent cage.
Two foreign tourists
wearing football kits
climb on the cubo
and start to feign fits.
A bottomless bottle of vintage champagne
that I want to eternally inhale and taste.
A carnivorous flower, a colorful bait
right on the fulcrum of a luscious face,
devouring my senses, my mind and my code
till my skeletal self spills out fossilized.
A prison of breath, of words, of lust,
my ecstatic fantasies behind carnal bars.
Rubber-like flesh, like a child I torment:
I bite, I press, I roll, I smack.
