You Keep The Sunshine, Save Me The Rain

Have you ever felt like the world is about to come crashing down around you? I feel like the more I read and learn, the more disillusioned I become about the fate of humanity as a whole. It seems almost as if we are programmed as a species towards self-destruction. I know that's a fairly pessimistic stance to take, but lately that's how I've been feeling about life on this little rock we call home. From the current ecological disaster in Japan, to the massive revolutions and civil war occurring in the Middle East, our world appears to be in shambles. War, famine, and disease run rampant throughout much of the Third World. Among the developed nations, social issues (poverty, homelessness), corruption, and government repression become more visible every day. So, in this mindset, contemplating life, humanity, and the meaning of it all, I began to talk a walk across campus to clear my head. I find that pondering and meandering often work a wonderful combination upon my state of mind. I found myself walking along some of Eastern's ponds, admiring the blooming trees and enjoying the nice weather, though still preoccupied with the fairly dark thoughts rumbling around in my head. Finally I look up, and see the most beautiful sunset. Streaks of light orange and pink stretched across the sky, broken only by the soft bruise-purple underbellies of the clouds. It was absolutely stunning. As I walked slowly across the athletic fields and watched the sun go down, a thought struck me: God is still in control. If He can instill such beauty, such majesty in a mere sunset- one small aspect of His work, then surely He must have a plan for the rest of His creation. All thoughts of strife and suffering were instantly banished from my mind. Now, I will be the first to admit that I'm not the most devout Christian. Lately, I seem to find myself denying God at almost every turn. Sooner or later, it gets to the point where I feel separated from Him, alone and lost. To be honest, sometimes I rejoice in this newfound independence. Mostly however, I simply feel apathetic, broken, and weak. Yet without fail, something always happens to bring me back to Him. Whether through a talk with a friend, an astounding worship experience, a Scripture that jumps out at me, or (more commonly) through witnessing an act of His creation, I get back on track. College has been a challenge for me, academically, socially, and spiritually. Yet no matter what happens, I know that God has a plan for me. Just as a sunset is a reminder to me of how beautiful and powerful our Creator is, so should we be shining examples of how loving and gracious our God is.

Love, Life, Music, and Video Game Analogies

Hmm.... haven't been on here in a while. Apologies.

So this song has been pretty much the chorus of my life over the last, oh, month or so. Thought I'd share it with the big wide world of the Internet. The name of the song is "You Be Tails, I'll Be Sonic" (which sounds rather silly, but on second glance is actually quite metaphorical as it relates to the meaning of the song.) by A Day To Remember. Here's the link and the lyrics. Instead of having them in typical listed format, I've organized them into some semblance of grammatical coherency. (Incidentally, I've found I tend to use more terse and articulate language when I'm pissed off or frustrated. Again, my apologies.)

"I’m a mess, that's the best way to describe it. Having no time to myself is the only way I can fight it... when I'm alone it's like I'm staring into a mirror, don't know the person inside it and that's never been any clearer."

"I miss your family and I miss all our friends... if you had it to do over would you do it over again? 'Cause I would, this meant something more to me... There's a hole in my heart where you used to be."

"I still wish you the best of luck, baby, and don't go thinking this was a waste of time: I couldn't forget you if I tried."

"You killed what was left of the good in me, I'm tired so let me be broken. Look down at the mess that's in front of me, no other words need be spoken. I've got nobody else to blame though I tried- kept all of our past mistakes held inside... I’ll live with regret for my whole life."

"I confess that I brought this all on myself, condemned to suffer alone, like there's nobody else.
When you're gone, it's like a whole part of me’s missing, so I'll keep living the lie and just hope that you're listening."

"I tried to make us a life here but our foundation was built on sand. No time to run until the damage was done, and I’ve never had the upper hand."

"All the things you love are all the things I hate... how did we get here in the first place?"

"I play it cool but it's hard to be... all my trust is slowly burning inside of me. Over what? There can't be anymore progress, I know our fate... the only thing that can heal this is time and space."

Quiet Night Drive

How beautiful the moonlight-

It reveals the essence, the core of this world of night
Leaving all else, the ugly, the broken, the truth, behind.
Cold, stark, unfiltered silver, defining the bare earth
Its shades and hollows eternally graven in liquid light
Treetops rimed with celestial frost.

Head on my shoulder, her breath soft in my ear,
She whispers an off-key melody to match the ancient requiem of the stars above us
As we drift down this avenue of temporary bliss
To home.

Two Sides, One Coin

One of my all-time favorite fiction series is by an author called Tad Williams. It is called "Otherland", and while the plot is extremely complex, the basics are that a group of people are trapped in a place known as Otherland, which is in reality an immensely intricate virtual reality. There is a character in the book who goes by the name Hideki Kunohara. He is an enigma; a scholar, poet, and scientist all rolled into one. He has a quote which I've found to be both intriguing and enlightening. Kunohara states, "Always these dualisms- mechanists or spiritualists. Always choosing one side of the coin, instead of simply choosing the coin itself. Both have so strongly rejected the others side that they will regret it one day."

Now, in the book, he is discussing two opposing forces, one mechanist (attempting to achieve immortality through technology), the other spiritualist (trying through more traditional and religious methods to gain eternal life). These two organizations are at continual odds with each other throughout the series.

Yet if we remove the quote from it's context (I know, I know, some literary traditionalist is rolling in his grave right now) and we take it simply at face value, it lends itself to a wide variety of interpretations. Here's mine.

Dualism: two opposing forces, in this case "mechanist" (read: material) and "spiritualist", or immaterial. Two contrasting viewpoints, one focusing entirely on the present: humanity, technology, physicality, this present moment in time, our lives as a whole. The other, attempting the opposite; seeking the afterlife, completely immersed in the spiritual, ignoring or rejecting this world and all it has to offer. Each side choosing one side of the coin, rather than the coin itself.

I know people on both sides of the coin. I have friends who live entirely in the moment, never concerned with anything even remotely spiritual or ethereal. I also know people who seclude themselves, turn within and focus wholly on the spiritual, rejecting the world outside them. I present an alternative: to live within the world, yet not be of the world. Remain aware of this world, enjoy your life, yet at the same time, keeping the ultimate goal in mind. As Christians, we are not only told but encouraged to live this way. We should not fall entirely into one camp or the other. We are told to embrace the coin, if you will. I see this quote as a challenge, a challenge to keep our minds focused on the spiritual while at the same embracing our physical life here on Earth. If we fail to do this, as Kunohara says, we will regret it one day. The ultimate outcome of our lives should be to enjoy and spread Christ's love and gift of salvation to the world. If we live entirely in the moment, focused only the physical and material, we get sidetracked away from that goal. Likewise, if we maintain a wonderful relationship with God, yet completely ignore others, we are failing just as hard. We need a safe medium, a reconciliation of both sides of the coin.

Likes and Retweets

There is a saying: "Absence makes the heart grow fonder." Over the years, I've found that I prefer another saying, "Absence sharpens love, but presence strengthens it." Love, friendships, relationships in general are easier to establish and maintain when you are actually with the person in question. Seeing someone face to face, having a conversation, being able to see and interpret body language, all of these play key parts in strengthening a relationship. My generation has removed itself from this level of personal connection, instead choosing to rely upon a variety of other social media interactions.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love texting, Facebook, Skype, and Twitter as much as the next guy. But there is still something more... corporeal, solid, something more elemental about being about sit down across from someone and simply talk to them one on one. The advent of the internet and wireless, instantaneous communication has created a generation of youth desperately searching for fulfillment, for interaction. Yet our relationships, whether online or physical, tend to lean toward the impersonal. We have become a quantitative, rather than qualitative, culture. We can have a person's vital statistics at our very fingertips: age, gender, interests, dislikes, hobbies, friends, organizations they belong to, their taste in music, clothing, literature. We can view countless photos of them, see how they live their life, who they hang out with, what they do. We can read Facebook status updates and Tweets to get a feel for someone's emotional state. We can do all this... and yet never really know this person. They become a nonentity.

To put a different spin on this whole situation, let's take a look back at this beginning of this post. In it, I mentioned a need for contact in a relationship. I've had several relationships suffer (and die) because either I or the other person involved have simply not had contact for a long while. This same is true for our spiritual relationships. If we don't talk to God, if we don't communicate with Him, spend time with Him or in His Word, then we can't really get to know Him. And likewise, He suffers a disconnect from us as well. We need to constantly be with Him in order to foster a solid relationship. It's not simply tagging Him in a status update, or mentioning Him on Twitter, we need to sit down and have an active, engaging dialogue with Him. Otherwise, God to us becomes a nonentity. Worse yet, a nondeity. We forget about Him, and continue to live our lives, shallower and for the worse off because of it. The relationship suffers.

"Absence sharpens love, but presence strengthens it." This rings true in all relationships, whether material or spiritual. A good relationship needs to be relational. It's simple and cliche, yet true. I'm trying to put these words to action in my own life, and I'd encourage you to do the same.

Grey Day

I love days such as these.

Where grey skies meet grey earth and
Clash, against a backdrop of autumn's last dying embers

Where the hollow groans of a wistful bagpipe
Echo softly throughout the world

Where light, diffused and cold,
Trickles through the ash-laden clouds, quietly,
Onto the hardened ground below.

It is a day for strong words and cold acts.
It is a cigarette day, a rusted steel day.
It is another day in this broken cycle of the machine we call our lives.

I love days such as these.

Space Goats

I've begun doing a little research on an interesting internet phenomenon known as "predictive linguistics", run by a group known as "Half Past Human". (Kudos to Jon for introducing me to this whole thing, by the way) What I learned about the project immensely intrigued me. Now, the concept of how this works is a little complicated, so bear with me.

Simply put, this technology searches the internet for specific kinds of words, usually posted on discussion blogs, forums, news sites, etc. Incredibly large amounts (we're talking terabytes of information, here) of these words are collected by programs known as "web bots", along with a snippet of their surrounding text. They are reduced to series of numbers and plotted on graphic charts as dots. These dots tend to cluster in specific areas around certain words.

Now, every word in every possible language has a meaning (barring some random, obscure, or relatively unknown dead language). In order to define meanings, one has to essentially boil a word down to its essence, what the word conveys. When broken down in such a way, we can cluster words together under common conveyances or meanings.

Okay, now that we've gotten past the "simple" parts, here comes the creepy stuff.

What the people running this project have discovered, is that for whatever reason (more detail later) certain groups of words or phrases repeat themselves in a kind of pattern over time, based on the change in the word's meaning. These patterns tend to develop around a specific event or occurrence, in the future. That's right. Using this web-searching and filtering technology, these researchers can isolate specific traumatic events in the future, based off of web chatter occurring previously to said catastrophes.

To break all of this down into a few sentences, here's a quote seen here, "It's like changes in language precede large emotional events. The larger the emotional impact of the event, the more advance notice the bots seem to give."

They use the example of a rock being dropped into a pond, creating ripples. If you approached where the rock was dropped, you would get stronger and stronger ripples the closer you came. These events tend to create "ripples" in web chatter before and (obviously) after the events occur.

Now the problem arises in that in this day and age, there is a LOT going on in the world. To continue the analogy, it's like pouring a dump truck full of gravel into a pond, then sorting through the ripples to find the biggest rocks. Not exactly an easy task.

The wonderful folks over at HPH have also separated the data into different categories, such as "terra" (ie, anything involving the earth, ground, life, biosphere, etc) "globalpop" (world population sans U.S.) "USofA" (specifically the United States) and a host of others, including "SpaceGoatFarts".

...yeah. Basically this category is for anything involving... well anything we don't understand. Things from space, the unpredictable, things we have never heard of or seen before, aliens, etc. ...and apparently, Space Goat Farts. As you can see, even the creators of this project treat it with a certain level of humor; they don't take everything they learn as the absolute word of God Himself. Yet, while their predictions are by no means completely accurate and all-encompassing, many of the timing and indicators given seem to align with real-world events fairly accurately. Here's a quote from Half Past Human's affiliates, Urban Survival:

"We have friends who have developed a groundbreaking predictive technology which we simply call "web bot" technology... The technology, which samples large portions of the public internet with an eye toward "sensing the future" based on subtle changes in language, seems to have given indications before-the-fact of a large number of major news events, including but not limited to our reports before the fact on things like:

• 9/11

• Sumatra/ Banda Aceh quakes

• New Orleans Katrina/Rita

• Cheney and his "accident"

• Degrading of Iraqi's and Iraqi youth rebellion against US

• Silver (prices) exploding, followed by Gold

• Pakistan earthquake

• Climate change (the life-changing event)

• The multiple extraordinary hurricanes (with another season coming like the last)

• The increasing unpopularity of the Bush Administration leading up to the inevitable meltdown

• Space Shuttle explosion

• The unfolding disaster in Iraq

• Commodity shortages with more coming this summer (2006)

• Emerging and ongoing, oil price increases

• Then there's the more recent China Quake warning 72-hours before events, and the forecast of a major economic crisis to arrive around October 7, 2008..."

Makes you shiver, eh? Kinda creepy. Now, by no means is this an exact science. Even the founders of the project advise people not to base decisions off of their technology. But still, the fact remains that many of their predictions have come true.

Now, how is this possible? Is there such a thing as a collective human consciousness, as some would suggest? Is it mere coincidence? Or something bigger than us? The evidence is controversial at best. Dean Radin (PhD, Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences) has conducted tests determining that human beings have the apparent capacity to see or sense a few seconds into the future (see pages 6-15). Interesting.

Oh, and by the way, apparently there's a large "tipping point" scheduled to occur on November 14th. That's this Sunday.

I leave the conclusion up to you, dear readers.