what does it mean?

Those information videos that review the world and our seeming exponential change are proliferating. Find your favourite provider, sit back and prepare to be amazed at all the information blowing past you, like Laurie Anderson's storm (..."blowing the angel, backwards, into the future...). But here's one to consider. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQFTUJK9TkI

What does it mean? How much is real, what do we do with it, and does it really matter? No. It's brain candy for the clever. It's brain candy for those who like to think they are more cutting edge than a tabloid reader. But it is still like refined suger, designed to give you a buzz. It lasts just long enough to trigger the "more" neuron, and before you know it, 35 minutes have passed and all you can remember is that you have a vague uneasiness about China and India. Welcome to the world of "gotcha". It's not so bad really - its better than saccharin, MSG and aspartame - not much accusation of cancer or tumours levied at "simple" refined suger. Likewise the claws of the Murdochs are hardly being flexed in this arena, as yet, so the dangers of being influenced to suddenly switch to the artificial sweetness of Fox News ("Obama is an enemy of humanity") or of finding Rush Limbaugh on world radio, and enjoying his other perspective ("Obama is just an angry black man") - is not high. No, these whirling dervish vids are still Pleasantville, but with that slighly uneasy socially acceptable prejudice you might find at a conservative fundraising dinner. The danger in enjoying this kind of reality as truth, is that we lose track of inner knowledge; that part of us that isn't technical expertise or organisational confidence; that part of us that can change jobs, locations or even sets of friends in a Big Move, and still wake up in the morning knowing what we are about. These vids are distractions, just as much as tabloids, and they are designed to destabilise. Inner knowledge is from quiet, silence, reflection and observation. With that we get a sence of where our talents and beingness fits into the world around us.

In the words of Chapin, waiting for his Corey: reality is only just word. But its our word and our reality - when we let others possess us at hyper speed, we give them control, and the inner core, who we are; gets smaller and smaller until we might as well keep working past retirement because we don't know what else to do. Does Lucifer control the high speed vids? Probably not. That would seem a bit pedestrian really. I'm sure there are bigger things to do. But it's not the angels either.