Martin's blog

Well it has been a long time since I or anyone has posted on this site, perhaps 2011 just wasn't the year for deep thinking?
Guess I am going to have to look and see what I plan to do with this site, I would like to write more especially about more interesting topics but perhaps first I need to reorganise and restructure the site.

A friend of mine told me the other day that he made a bad choice and I disagreed with him, he made a choice at the time that he thought was best for him but it hasn't worked out the way he wanted. The choice he has to make now is whether to continue down the path he is headed or to change direction. The problem is if he feels that he has made a bad choice to start with why should he trust any of his choices from this point on. I know the mind is not always a logical entity but it does come with some standard logical features.

It seems on the rich can afford the time to sit around and contemplate life, well... probably also students because it has been over a month since anything was posted here. On my part it was mainly due to having to actually do some work, not that it matter in the end because the project was cancelled. Of course that raises another question: How many things do we give up just to do the things that we think we have to do? I would ramble on about this but I think I had better get back to what I was doing.

Have fun out there.

A friend of mine sent me a link to this article now while I agree with some of the things that are valid I see this article as a microcosm of the whole giving up freedom for security debate. If you know what you are doing and the consequences of what you do then you should have and deserve more freedom of choice. Otherwise yes you do need to be protected but for that protection you have have to be prepared to give up some freedom.

I live in a country where people like Eugene Terreblanche and Julias Malema pop quite often in the news providing people with a satisfactory stereotype of various race groups. Of course now that Eugene Terreblanche is dead there is a need for a new version of this stereotype, so far we have a good candidate in Andre Visagie to see what I mean you can watch here here.

Why is that so many people turn to sites like this one for answers to their questions? It is not exactly a new phenoma either, people have been using oracles for centuries does this mean that a large portion of humanity has the inability to choose for themselves? I think so, I think that the world that we live in is filled with the potential for doubt. Just like we have night and day, things that can seem apparently clear can suddenly become dark and vague. Our human perception is flawed and its weakness leads us to doubt and question things.

So the world is passing me by while I work at trying to get silly things done, where is the rhyme and the reason in that?

Carl Jung is quoted as saying, "Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism." Yes, addictions are bad and yet most of us seek comfort in repetitive behaviour. It might not quite be the obvious insanity that lies in the madman's rocking backwards and forwards but is is still madness. To quote another person who is a lot more clever than me, "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." That was Albert Einstein, of course people who are addicted don't neccessarily find themselves expecting a different result. They simply hope that the addictions will take away the pain, memories, time and uncertainty from which they are running.

Does everybody who want enlightenment have to hide away from the rest of the world to find it? For centuries monk of various religions and creeds have gone into solitude to find enlightenment and often stay out there to stop the world tainting their new found knowledge. But is this necessary?I am by my nature a solitary person but of course I have not achieved enlightenment so clearly being a solitary creature is not an automatic entry into enlightenment.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. "

These are the famous words of Hamlet in Shakespeare's play by the same name. Although we have come a long since he wrote those words I think that there is a lot of things that we still don't understand and perhaps this is actually a world of infinite possibilities.