Daniel Jeffries's Blog

Learning AI if You Suck at Math

If you’re like me, you’re fascinated with AI.

Maybe you’d love to dig deeper and get an image recognition program running in TensorFlow or Theano? Perhaps you’re a kick-ass developer or systems architect and you know computers incredibly well but there’s just one little problem:

You suck at math.

That’s all right! I share your dirty little secret and I have some books and websites that will really help you get rolling fast.

Like many folks, my love of intelligent machines didn’t come from calculus class. It sprang from science fiction. I remember reading “I, Robot” one beautiful summer evening and imagining ways to trip up Asimov’s Three Rules of Robotics. As I watched masterpieces like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ghost in the Shell, it seemed that any day a gestalt consciousness might surge up from the glittering sea of information and declare itself sentient.When I grew up and started publishing my own sci-fi I imagined AI as a pervasive, ambient force that’s always there, like electricity, touching every aspect of life.

Turns out, we have a few things to figure out before General AI can pop from the primordial digital goo. Mostly nothing ever came of the early AI promises in the 80’s and 90’s. Hype never lived up to reality and AI winter followed AI winter.

All that changed in the last few years with the sudden success of Deep Learning.

Maybe you saw the story in the New York Times that showed how Googletransformed its translation services almost overnight delivering accuracy that rivaled professional translators? In a mere nine months they outpaced what the platform managed in the seven previous years combined.

Perhaps you read about the kid who built a self-driving car in his freaking garage with open source tools? You might have also seen this amazing slide below that shows how DL ripped through the Imagenet image recognition competition in just a few years, dropping the error rate from 25% to something that performs better than humans in 2017.

No matter how you cut it, AI solves big, intractable problems that have eluded us for decades. We know how to drive a car yet we can’t tell machines how to do it. But we can let machines figure it out for themselves.For once a technology coming out of Silicon Valley is not just hype. It’s real. AI is hot for good reasons.

Top AI researchers are earning more than NFL starting quarterbacks and you want to get in on the gold rush. Then again, you probably saw the big scary stories that AI will eat all the jobs and as a traditional software engineer or sys-admin you want to make sure you have the skills to compete in an AI-centric world. No problem. There are tons of tutorials out there. You just have to get started, right?

Then you get to a passage like the one below in Ian Goodfellow’s seminal Deep Learning book and you have no idea what he is talking about at all.

 

Uh-oh.

The problem is you have to understand a nested layer of logic, terms, symbols and ideas that are all interrelated but you have no foundation for any of it. So it basically sounds like an alien language. You probably understand all the text leading up to it but the rest is just gibberish. It can turn really disheartening fast.

But have no fear! All is not lost.

I’m here to help you wade through the swamp with some books that will get you crunching numbers like a savant. All right, well maybe you won’t be Daniel Tammet, but you can put aside those painful memories of times-table memorization and get cranking. You CAN learn math as an adult.

I’ve tried to read a number of AI texts and tutorials. I understand the concepts intuitively. They make perfect sense to me. It’s just that when I see a string of symbols my brain glazes over and I have no idea what I’m reading. As a systems architect for much of my life I didn’t need much math. There are IP subnet cheat sheets and as long as I knew how far electricity could reasonably travel along the length of cables I could cut them andcrimp them appropriately. For most of my life, I needed to understand how systems get setup, how they work together and how they stay running.Systems administration is very boolean. It either works or it doesn’t. But AI and math works on a different side of the brain.

What I needed were some primers written for adults that treat you like one. I also want books that answer questions about why math works. In school, your reason for learning was probably “shut up and do it or else.” But as an adult you need more. You want to know how things work too.

The very first book you need is Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction by Timothy Gowers .

This book breaks down the “why” of math beautifully. It relates the subject to the real world, gets into the philosophy and then quickly leaves thephilosophy behind because you don’t really need to understand whether fractions actually exist in nature or at the Platonic level. Instead, Timothy helped me understand that math is an abstraction layer. It breaks problems down into simpler, cleaner steps. The complexity of working out a model that precisely simulates particle interaction in a box would need to take into account an insane amount of real world physics properties like magnetic interference, gravity, the force of the collision, the particles initial direction and speed as well as much, much more. It turns out life is a complex series of algorithms. But here’s the trick. In practice you don’t need a perfect model. Instead, math looks to break the problem down into its essential components. What are the critical factors? Math gives you a general abstraction of the problem that can work with other problem sets as well. In essence, the numbers themselves don’t matter all that much. They are just variables. Math boils down to variables and rules. You can learn those variables and rules!

While you’re reading the book you will want to have this website’s handy dandy guide to the major math symbols. You can also pick up this super concise guide for engineers called Mathematical Notationby Edward R. Scheinerman. If you’re like me, you’ll have to see these symbols hundreds of times before they stick. You may find yourself forgetting various symbols the second you turn the page! Not to worry. This cheat sheet is perfect. Take a deep breath, slow down and go through the symbols one by one until you start to understand that string of crazy looking glyphs. Even if you have to look up every symbol a thousand times do it! There are no shortcuts to learning in life. You just have to do the work.

Now there are two other strong contenders for getting your math foundation built. The first is Mathematics for the Nonmathemetician by Morris Kline. The second is the No Bullshit Guide to Math and Physics by Ivan Savov. Each appeals to a different mindset. I prefer the very short intro because it gets down to brass tacks quickly and still manages to stay very relate-able. The “Math for Nonmathematicians” book is much longer and goes into more detail about the history of math and how it works in the world. Some people will really enjoy that approach. The “No Bullshit Guide” is quick and gets right into the equations fast with no answer as to why anything works the way it does. It’s basically a primer on the rules. That will appeal to folks who have less of a philosophical bent.

The next book you will want is Algebra Unplugged by Jim Loats and Kenn Amdahl. Now there are a few typos in the book but I don’t find them all that distracting. I appreciate the book’s approach to gentle learning that quickly accelerates. Some people get worked into a lather over typos but you’ve got bigger challenges to worry about. You’re trying to learn math when your brain isn’t quite as plastic as it once was in your youth! So let the typos go and see the big picture here. This book will really help you get moving in the right direction.

After you’ve got the math down you’ll want to dig intoMake Your Own Neural Network by Tariq Rashid. It also has some typos, but there is a great Github repo with updates that fixes most of them. This book is incredibly gentle and intuitive. It seems to anticipate your objections and fears the second you have them! The author is uncanny in how he spots your resistance as it happens. The book walks through only the math you need for neural networks specifically. It then works through Python, assuming you know nothing aboutprogramming. Finally it gets you coding your own neural network from scratch. Now while there are certainly tools out there that will work better for professional programs, it helps to try your hand at your own first, so you understand the basics.

After that book, you’ll want to start browsing the web. There are awesome new tutorials coming out every single day. Maybe check out Tensorflow for Poets or Recurrent Neural Networks for Artists.

Medium itself is awesome for learning about AI. For example, check out this article on a roundup of various classes you can take to get deeper than you could on your own. Then again, maybe you’re not the class taking type and prefer to work through things yourself? No problem. Instead, check out this eight part series from AI researcher Arthur Juliani. There is also this one called Machine Learning is Fun, another great series right here on your favorite site.

Lastly, you may want to move on to a more advanced book, confident in your ability to understand more challenging concepts. That book is the  one I already mentioned earlier, Ian Goodfellow’s Deep Learning book , which you can read online or grab yourself a hard copy on Amazon .

That’s all for now. Feel free to add your own books in the comments. Everyone learns a little differently and there are bound to be other books worth sharing.

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Be sure to check out the rest of this ongoing series. Feel free to follow me because you want to be the first the read the latest articles as soon as they hit the press.

Learning AI if You Suck at Math — Part 2 — Practical Projects — This article guides you through getting started with your first projects.

Learning AI if You Suck at Math — Part 3 — Building an AI Dream Machine — This article guides you through getting a powerful deep learning machine setup and installed with all the latest and greatest frameworks.

Learning AI if You Suck at Math — Part 4 — Tensors Illustrated (with Cats!) — This one answers the ancient mystery: What the hell is a tensor?

Learning AI if You Suck at Math — Part 5 — Deep Learning and Convolutional Neural Nets in Plain English — Here we create our first Python program and explore the inner workings of neural networks!

Learning AI if You Suck at Math — Part 6 — Math Notation Made Easy — Get started with understanding those funny little symbols at a deeper level.

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If you enjoyed this tutorial, I’d love it if you could hit the little heart to recommend it to others. After that please feel free email the article off to a friend! Thanks much.

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A bit about me: I’m an author, engineer and serial entrepreneur. During the last two decades, I’ve covered a broad range of tech from Linux to virtualization and containers.

You might like a copy of my first novel, The Scorpion Game, because it’s free. Readers have called it “the first serious competition to Neuromancer” and “ like a double shot of fine whiskey after drinking watered down beer for weeks. ”

You can also join my private Facebook group, the Nanopunk Posthuman Assassins, where we discuss all things tech, sci-fi, fantasy and more.

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I occasionally make coin from the links in my articles but I only recommend things that I OWN, USE and LOVE. Check my full policy here.

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Thanks for reading!

The post Learning AI if You Suck at Math appeared first on Me Uploads.

Nine Ways Legendary Writers Achieved Mastery

This is an early excerpt from my forthcoming book on writing: The Fire of Creation

I recently re-read the amazing book “Daily Rituals: How Artists Work” and it got me thinking about what master writers do differently than everyone else. What does it take to do something that will be remembered after you’re dead? What do they do differently from everyone else on the planet?

I won’t pretend to have all of the answers, but I’ll share a little of what I do know about perfecting your art.

1) Focus on Craft

First off, you have to do the work.

I know you’ve heard this before, but until you really understand it nothing changes.

The steps to mastery are the same for anything in life: Put in the hours. Put in ten thousand hours and don’t stop there. Even that is not enough. Put in as many as you can and then put in more. Whether you want to be an eighty-year-old Kung Fu master with a lightning kick, an artist whose paintings sell for millions of dollars after you’re gone, or the next G.R.R. Martin creating epic fantasy of mind-numbing detail, the process is the same:

You have to keep at it day after day.

The problems of writing can only be worked out by the act of writing. I know you get creative flashes while you’re on your daily walk or when someone is droning on in some boring meeting but the real work is still done at the keyboard. You can’t work through creative challenges by thinking about them or dreaming about them. You fight through them at the page.

Only when you’re waist deep in a scene with two characters arguing about their marriage can you really figure out that perfect nasty line the husband says to the wife. How can you figure out the color of the trees in your battle scene without swimming through the blood streaked mud with your soldiers as bullets smack the ground around you?

Steven Pressfield, author the War of Art and Do the Work, has written extensively on this idea. The truth is, you don’t really need to read beyond the title. It’s simple. Just do the damn work. Seriously. That’s all you really need to know. Once you start doing this every day, the rest will take care of itself.

You’ll learn everything that you ever wanted to learn about writing through the act of writing.

You don’t need another book or seminar or support group. Just write. When you forget it and you find yourself signing up for yet another talk or reading another book on character development, stop and write instead.

2) Forget Marketing

In our modern world of social media and the mad scramble to break through the noise it may seem crazy to just say screw marketing but screw marketing. Go ahead. Say it loud. It’s liberating. What’s amazingly clear in the “Daily Rituals” book is how few of those legendary creators did any marketing at all.

When it comes to writing, your fiction comes first before all else. No exceptions. It comes before everything else in your life. Only when you are done with your fiction for the day should you write an article or an email or head to the mall with your kids.

If you’re writing another article or watching CSI, then that means you’re not writing your next book.

I took a recent look back at my blog. When I started it six years ago, I was writing articles constantly. I’ve deleted more work than some people write. But recently posts have gotten more and more infrequent. That’s not because I don’t have a lot of things I want to write about, it’s just that when I have to make a choice between my fiction and writing another article, I choose my fiction every time. You should too.

Forget pumping out listicle after listicle (ironic I know, because this is one) or getting 20 million subscribers to your blog. The only reason I’m writing this one right now is because I woke up with a burning desire to put this to the page. That’s how I know something has to get written. If I don’t feel that it doesn’t get done.

Now if you want to figure out marketing then go check out Benjamin Hardy on getting a ton of subscribers through Medium. I loved Ben’s article. It’s inspiring but unless you’re a marketer, article writer or a life coach like him, you shouldn’t be pumping out more stuff just to pump it out. The world has enough listicles. If you’re a fiction writer, then work on your art instead. Here’s the thing:

When you write something truly amazing, people will find you.

And frankly, writing so many articles is freaking exhausting. It’s unsustainable. You’ll never be able to keep it up year after year unless you were born with an excess supply of serotonin and dopamine.

When you do write an article, make sure it’s something you really care about and want to share. Like I said, when there’s a fire burning under your ass then get it done. How do you know something is really worth sharing? Because you earned the knowledge through dedicated time and effort. I don’t agree with Hardy’s article on Impostor Syndrome. The world has enough fakers. If the article is something that you know better than anyone, something very few people will ever figure out, then go ahead and share that. That’s real value. That’s worth sharing with others. If it’s not, then keep it to yourself.

I read an interview in Wired about Hugh Howey, bestselling Amazon author of Wool. He went to yet another writing conference instead of working on his writing like he should have been and a woman got on stage and said:

“You stop dreaming of writing. You stop talking about writing. You stop wishing you were writing. And you write!”

I interviewed Hugh Howey myself later and I asked about what happened there and he said:

“She shamed me. That’s what happened. She shamed the entire room of us, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I realized that the only thing preventing me from writing a novel was myself. I was getting in the way. Mrs. Todd slapped that person inside of me, knocked him down, and I stepped over his lifeless body and got to work.”

Paste those words up on your monitor. Look at it every day. Let it shame you too. And get to work.

3) Kill the Time Thieves

You need to take control of your life and to do that you have to take back your time.

Time is all you have in life.

If you are not making as much time to write as possible, then it doesn’t matter how many listicles you read or how many seminars you show up at or how many writing groups you join. This may sound simple, but without making time nothing else matters. Without it you won’t write. If you don’t have bricks, you can’t build a house. You can’t write a book by thinking about it, talking about it, or wishing it would happen. You must physically write. Move your fingers on a keyboard. Grip that pen until your fingers go numb.

Doing that means taking back your life. That means getting things out of your life that don’t matter like you’re Ripley blowing the alien out of the goddamn airlock. Take back your time however you can. Cancel extra-curricular activities, turn off the TV, and stop drinking so your brain is mush for your late night writing session.

Maybe you’re thinking that tons of great artists were drunks and drug explorers. An unofficial count of the artists detailed in “Daily Rituals” shows that about half of them were serious drug users. This is no surprise because mind-altering substances help you get out of your own personality silo and see the world from someone else’s eyes. If you can only see the world through the eyes of a suburban house dad, then you can’t get into the head of a hard boiled detective or a serial killer.

If you use mind-altering substances, then you better learn to use them wisely. If you’re working a job and you have kids and responsibilities and you can only write late at night, then drinking so you’re dead tired when you get there means you’ve wasted your only chance. You cannot create when you are barely able to keep your eyes open and you’ve exacerbated that with half a bottle of wine or a joint.

Do your writing and then get drunk or stoned.

What I’m really saying it take back your time and protect your time. If you only have a few hours late at night to change your life, then you better make the most it. Don’t screw this up. There are no extra innings in life, no reset button. Once your life is over, it’s over.

So take back your time by any means necessary. If that means lying, then do it. If that means being an asshole, then do it. Have to fight with the significant other? No problem. Kids need to find another ride to their friend’s house for movie night? Here is the cab money. If you have to sneak out of the last hour of your job and plug some words into Evernote, then do it. I am not kidding about any of this.

Writing has to become the focus of your life. Everything else is in your way.

Get rid of distractions. They are eating up the only chance you have. Take back your life from all the time thieves that surround you. Time thieves are the real demons in life.

As Pressfield said in his books (Ok maybe you should read them) demons are not here to defeat you. They’re here to bog you down in a war of attrition, to keep you from doing what you really want to do.

Demons are your friends and family, the TV, movies, late night drinking with co-workers. Demons are always in disguise. They don’t want to beat you. They want to tie you up just long enough to run out the clock.

And here’s the worst part: they think they are doing a good thing. A demon never thinks they’re a demon. They always think they’re on the side of the light. They believe that socializing and whiling away your time together and idle chit-chat about politics or the game last night is an actual honest-to-goodness use of your time. They believe it matters. They need to believe it matters. It doesn’t. Not if you want to do something great, that people remember.

Don’t get me wrong. There is a time for friends and family and drinking and fun.

That time is after you’ve written today.

Remember, in this game, you get no credit for yesterday. You start fresh, with a clean slate every day. What you did yesterday means nothing. Wrote 3000 words last night? Great. Today write some more.

For some artists this may even have to go further. You may have to extricate yourself from a true demon: a nightmare of a job that saps your will to live or a partner who is not only unwilling to support you on your journey of creativity, but actively belittles you, tears you down, and destroys you.

You have to get out of there as soon as possible.

How? The best way is the fastest way. Tear it off like a Band-Aid. Just slip out the back, Jack. Make a new plan, Stan. In short, get out. Now.

4) Write What You Know

This is a tremendously misunderstood writer’s maxim. Most people take it to mean only writing about things they already know. Instead, I take this to mean something completely different. Research. Figure it out. Do it, as you are writing, not later. Don’t just crank through a whole section of your book when you have no idea about the setting or the people who live there. You’ll only have to re-write it.

When I come to something I don’t know, I stop and figure it out. In my current work about a Chinese civil war, I came to a point where my characters retreated into the mountains and met the people who’ve lived there for thousands of years. The only problem was I didn’t know a damn thing about who lived in those mountains in Yunnan province.

So I stopped. I read some obscure, scholarly anthropology books on the indigenous people in southern China’s mountain ranges. I consumed them ravenously. I found some incredible photographer’s blogs and I stared at the faces of the people in those pictures, dreaming about their lives and their hand made smoking pipes, each one unique and treasured their entire lives.

When I got back to the story, I knew exactly who those people were. I didn’t have to guess or make it up and then go back and fill in all the details. So if you don’t know, no problem. This is the age of information; go figure it out. But don’t skip that step.

Don’t pretend to know. Know.

5) Breathe

Once you start down the path of the artist, the things you value in your regular life: a career, aggressiveness, quick thinking, forcefulness, being on time, have very little place in the creative world. Well, being on time still matters, but the rest of that other crap should be forgotten as quickly as possible. Instead, little things you have never thought about matter a great deal. For example, you need to re-learn how to breathe.

Breathing is essential as you write. It’s probably something you’ll skip or gloss over. It seems simple. What could be simpler than breathing? In regular life you don’t think about breathing. In creative life, make it your primary focus until you get it down perfectly. A Zen archer cannot hit his target without breathing perfectly. You can’t get to the place where you mind shuts off and you write in a torrential flow until you learn to control your breath.

Here’s how to do it right: breathe from your stomach.

Do this all day. You spent your whole life breathing little weak mousy breaths from your chest. This is completely wrong.

Push your stomach out like you are a 300-pound fat guy. Keep doing it.

Every time you forget, remember it again. If you find yourself breathing from your chest, stop it. This will cleanse your mind of useless things like your schedule and bills to pay and yet another thing that came undone that needs fixing. You cannot focus on your art when you are scattered into a million shards, thinking about so many things. You have to turn off your mind. Your mind is another one of your enemies. It is in your way.

The thing is, when most people realize this, they will do absolutely nothing to correct it. It will just pass through their consciousness and wind up forgotten on the side of the road a few days later. Don’t let that happen to you.

Breathe.

6) Find a Quiet Space

You also need a place to write that is away from everything. Coffee shops and other public places suck. They will have to do if you have nothing else, but you need a quiet place with no people milling around and making noise to distract you.

I know what you’re thinking again. You’re thinking J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter in a coffee house. Great. I guarantee you she did not do that by choice. She did that because she needed her kid to fall asleep and that was the only place it happened.

No, no, you think, I like coffee houses.

What you like is distractions.

What you like is feeling like you are not alone in this thing. You are alone. Hemingway said, “Writing, at its best is a lonely life.” At its best. This is not a team sport. If you want to drop into the depths of the creative spirit, if you want to find out how deep the rabbit hole goes, then find a warm, safe, quiet spot.

What Rowling’s example demonstrates is not that quiet is not essential. It demonstrates that you write no matter what. If you don’t have ideal circumstances then you do whatever it takes to keep writing anyway. That’s what she did. She did not use her child or her lack of a room of her own to skip writing. She did not wait to get started. She made time. If you still think she liked writing in coffee houses so much then ask yourself if she wrote her second book in one after she was a millionaire? No. She wrote it in a quiet room in her house.

Of course, if you have no choice but writing in a noisy room, then do it. Jane Austen had to write in a noisy house because society was not enlightened enough at the time to give women the space to be anything but a mother or a cook. She wrote anyway and you should to but if you have the choice find a quiet place away from everything.

Test this for yourself. If you truly like writing with noise all around you after you’ve had a chance to do it in a clear, perfect spot, than so be it. But I say turn off the TV. Invest in some noise canceling headphones, good ones, the kind that put out their own white noise and blot out the world around you. They’re not cheap, but they’re worth it.

Writing is an inward journey. It has to be quiet. The slightest distraction will rip you right out of your flow and slam you back into reality. Any distractions need to be cut off mercilessly.

Tell your family to stay out. Hang a big sign on the door that says do not enter. Push them out if you have to. Yell at them. Plead with them. Cajole them. Bribe them. Whatever. Just get them the hell out of your writing space.

7) Take Your Hand Off the Steering Wheel

“Through unconditional surrender I have mastered the universe. By releasing all control, I am in perfect control. Controlling nothing, I control everything. Only by taking control could I lose control. -Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare (The Enlightenment Trilogy Book 3)

Anyone who’s been at this long enough understands that great writing does not come from you but through you. You are simply the conduit.

If you ever want to write something that truly matters you have to get over the idea that you are writing it. You have to let go.

I often think of Kahil Gibran’s The Prophet when I mistakenly begin to believe that I am in control of my creativity. In his poem “On Children” he wrote:

“Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.”

Meeting the creative spirit means surrendering absolutely. Understand that you work for her, not the other way around. Every day before I begin my writing, I say a little prayer to the Muse. I say it with absolute sincerity and a belief in something greater than myself.

Trust the Muse. She will give you the hard work that must get done. Listen to her. She is always right.

If you’re refusing to change a scene because it is too hard or would require changing too many characters or take too many rewrites then you are not working with her. You’re not listening to her instructions. You are cheating yourself and your readers.

If something needs changing in your story then change it, no matter how hard it looks. In the end, it will only make your story stronger. You must surrender to the Muse’s absolute will and trust that she knows better than you. Ride into the abyss on her winged back. Soar over the flames and let her plunge you into them. She will tell her story through you.

Maybe you thought you were the director? You are just in the way. The spirit has the pen and your only job is to filter it as little as possible. She has a plan that your tiny little monkey brain cannot understand. This is not an insult to you; it is just a fact. We are specks of dust in the universe and the creative spirit was around before time began. It knows how to set things in motion that make no sense to you now, but make perfect sense later.

Let me give you an example from my own life.

When I started writing my current book, I took the names of my characters from Chinese mythology. I grabbed these names before I knew much of the plot of my book, much less the book’s themes. Of course, as I wrote, the themes slowly began to emerge as they always do. One of them is “things fall apart and come back together again.” In other words, life is cyclical.

A year later, I took a trip to China and picked up “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”, an ancient Chinese masterpiece, to read on the journey. I didn’t think much about it. On the plane ride I flipped to the back cover and realized I’d taken the name of one of my main characters from this very book. I certainly didn’t remember doing it. I’d just scanned Wikipedia for Chinese myths and didn’t think much about it once I had the names. And yet, as I casually opened the book and read the first line my mouth dropped open. It said:

“The Empire, long divided, must unite: long united, must divide.”

In other words, the very first line of a book I hadn’t read, that I took my character’s name from just because it sounded good, turned out to be the central theme of my book before I even knew what the central theme of my book ever was.

This is how the creative spirit works in your life if you let it.

That is when you know you are aligned with her plan. She sets things in motion for you to discover that are simply not coincidence. The chances of my picking a name from that book, with just that theme are nearly impossible.

And yet it happened.

The creative spirit is not bound by the same rules you are.

I can’t explain that. I don’t need to. Nor do you. You can ascribe some mystical aspect to it or call it coincidence or post-quantum mechanics. I call it a spirit and it may be or it may be some algorithm in the math of the universe. It doesn’t really matter. All you need to know is that this is how creativity works through you. It has a plan that you cannot see or understand. You just have to go with it.

I can give you a thousand other examples. This happens to me in small ways nearly every time I write. I get the exact thing that I need at the exact time that I need it.

8) Writing as Spiritual Pursuit

The great writers of the past saw writing as a spiritual pursuit, even if they didn’t call it that. Notice I didn’t say religious, I said spiritual. Don’t get them mixed up. They are not the same. A true artist knows that progress in the spiritual world is the same thing as progress in the physical world. They are the exactly the same.

Note that I did not say success. I said progress. Progress and success are very different things. Success follows progress, not the other way around, ever.

You can have much progress without success. Progress is the little victories every day. It is finding time to write even when you are tired. It is working through an impossible scene for the tenth time when you thought you couldn’t do it. Progress is slow and steady. It is made every time you touch the keyboard.

To make progress you have to make real changes. You make changes by taking action in the real world.

You can’t change by standing in the same place that you are in. You have to actually change. You have to do something. If you want to be a writer, then you have to write. If you want to be creative, then be creative.

Let me give you an example of a person who really embraced their creative potential. My friend, Nadia Aly, who I interviewed on my blog, was living a typical American life. She worked at big companies like Google and Microsoft. She made a great living, but she hated it. She looked around and could not understand why everyone was so proud of her, because she was miserable.

Then her friend died in a motorcycle accident.

It slapped her awake.

She realized life is too short so she quit and took off running to get as far away as she could. She spent a month figuring out her life and then she embraced what she really wanted to do: start a scuba diving website and company.

Now she travels the world going to exotic places that look like postcards that most people will never see. Interspersed between people’s useless crap on Facebook, I see her wonderful life. In between my friends and family’s little e-cards, their pictures of their pets and family are far away islands that Nadia sees because she took her camera and went there, herself, physically, in the real world. That is a creative life. That is spiritual progress. Creativity is not a weekend retreat. Your job is not to slide into the end of your life with a perfectly preserved corpse but to burn up like a meteor.

Make Jack London’s credo your credo:

“I would rather be ashes than dust!

I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.

I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

The function of man is to live, not to exist.

I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.

I shall use my time.”

9) Plunge into the Abyss

“Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream…

Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void…

It is knowing, it is knowing.”

– Tomorrow Never Knows, The Beatles

Creativity is a kind of madness. It’s a searing fire. And you have to plunge into it.

After you’ve done all of the things we talked about here: taken back your time, dismissed your distractions and demons, found the perfect writing spot, then the real adventure of writing begins.

The first hour of any writing session is usually a complete waste of time but if you stick to it and don’t browse Facebook and read another listicle you will get to the real place where art comes from.

To do that, you have to let go. Surrender. You rational mind will jabber at you. You have to get it to shut up and turn off. It will remind you that you have to call Bob and do the dishes and pick up Jenny at daycare. Your mind will cycle and spin and get in your way. Just hold on. Stick around long enough to get to the good part, which comes after that first hour, when the distractions of the day burn away and you plunge into a place where time disappears.

This is where true creativity lives. Your mind falls away. Your fingers dance without you having to think about what they’re typing. You’re in true flow. You’re free. This is real freedom. Beneath you is the Void. You stand on nothing. Look into it. Be afraid. Be ripped apart but above all: keep going. This is where all real art comes from.

All things come from this abyss, this place beyond self and time: the psychopath stalking children in the night comes from the same place as your loyal dog that you cuddle in the darkness. Down in the Void is everything that you ever wanted to create, as yet unmade and waiting for you to unleash it. Your characters and plot are down in the fire, unborn, waiting for you and only you to free them so they can terrorize reader’s minds or make them weep with joy or teach them what real love is and how to find it.

Real creativity comes from beyond the mind. Peel away the layers of yourself. Become other things. How can you think like a monster if you’re a suburban house dad? Let go. Turn off your mind. Art is meditation in motion. The suburban house dad is gone. He dies in the fire of that first hour of worry and distraction. Out here in the whiteout, he is lost. You are not you anymore. Other people lurk down here and you will bring them to life by embracing them, by becoming them and putting their thoughts and feelings on the page, not yours. See through your characters’ eyes.

This is the white-hot center of the volcano. Volcanoes erupt and melt the world. The creative Void melts you. Let it. Here is where you do your work, hovering above this swirling chaos, this shimmering surge of sulfur and flames.

And then all of a sudden, it’s over.

You’ll be done suddenly. You’ll run out of gas, complete a scene, run into a problem that you can’t fix today.

That’s all right.

You don’t live in the abyss: You just visit there.

When you come back, drink a little water. Stretch. Take some deep breaths. Walk a little. Spend time with pets and family. Now is the time to let them back into your quiet room.

Come back to Earth but understand that you are going back there tomorrow. And you are going back there every day for the rest of your life. Consistency leads to mastery. Every day pick up the pen again.

There are no real secrets in the world. We just wish there were. The answers that the great writers of the past understood are right out there in the open for you to see too. You just have to open your eyes and you can see them.

Write every day for as long as you can. Never give up. That is how mastery is achieved.

One step at a time.

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Scorpion Game Illustrated Edition is Coming this Summer!

I’ve linked up with awesome concept artist, Chen Liang, who’s done a bunch of work for Epic Games, makers of “Gears of War” and we’re putting together an illustrated edition of my gritty SF crime saga the Scorpion Game.

The first images are coming along beautifully.  They are still WIPs (works in progress) but I love to let fans in on the inner workings of how art gets made.  Check out these early pieces below.

New Diamond City – an organic city inside a massive starship

Sakura, the seductive and dangerous femme fatal of Scorpion Game with her holographic tattoos

The book is a mashup of the noir detective genre and sci-fi (or SF for you purists) so Chen had the idea to do some old photo style prints of his city sculptures. They came out awesome.  See them below.

City at night

Organic building designs

City designs

Check out some of Chen’s other work at his personal blog. I picked a few of my favorite pieces of his below but he has a ton more worth seeing.

Cyberpunk babe. I love this one. This is the one that made me want to work with Chen.

Military drone.

Post Apocalyptic Wasteland.

Chen’s weapons design

Chen – Space port

Chen – cyberpunk city

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The Three Most Dangerous Books Ever Written

Ideas are dangerous things.

Wherever there are ideas there are people who want to destroy them.  You can’t kill an idea but you can burn the paper it’s printed on.

Since ancient times, when monks first scribbled on parchment, people tried to suppress ideas by suppressing books.  The Nazis and every other authoritarian regime burned them.  In many places in the world books will get you executed or thrown in jail.  The Chinese government recently abducted a book publisher from Hong Kong who planned to publish a tell-all look at current president Xi Jinping’s private life.  The publisher later “confessed” to an old hit-and-run crime on TV and he will likely disappear into the brutal Chinese prison system known as the Laogai or “reform through work” prison.

Ideas are dangerous things indeed.

Even when people aren’t getting killed or tortured over books there are people who want to keep them out of the hands of impressionable children for fear that it will corrupt their ideals and, God forbid, let them think differently than their parents or the people in power.  The American Library Association keeps a record of the most banned books over the last few decades.  You’ll find some familiar ones on there such as “Catcher in the Rye”, “To Kill a Mockingbird” and even “Harry Potter” which is seen by some evangelical Christians as promoting magic and witches.

All of this comes down to fear: fear of ideas; fear of change; fear of others.  Ideas congeal into belief systems, at the personal level and at the societal level.  The history of the world is the clash of belief systems.  Capitalists battle communists.  The Romans hurled Christians into lion’s dens.  The Christians burned witches and tortured heretics.  Fascists killed liberals.  And on and on and on.

If you really boil it down, books get banned or burned because they threaten belief systems.

Not long after books get burned people get burned. History’s worst punishments are for those who threaten sacred beliefs, for those who dare to put heretical ideas down on the page.  A single diversion from the dominate belief systems of a time can get you sliced into a thousand pieces.  The Catholic Church had burning at the stake and the fiendish torture dens of the Crusades.  The Chinese had Lingchi or the “death of a thousand cuts” which was reserved for the serious crime of Treason.  And what is Treason but betrayal of an idea?

But what if there were books that threatened all of your belief systems?

Would you not consider them the most dangerous book ever written?

That’s where Jed McKenna’s Spiritual Enlightenment the Damnedest Thing, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment and Spiritual Warfare come in.  These books skewer sacred beliefs of all kinds, from new age mysticism to religious morals and even basic tenants of right and wrong.  They threaten every single belief system that you or anyone else has ever had and they do so very, very convincingly.

Because these books are so dangerous, I waited several years to write this post.  I am still not sure about putting it out there.  To this day, I get chills thinking or talking about these books.  I hesitate to recommend them to people and yet that is exactly what I am doing now.

But be careful.

These are not books to be picked up lightly.  This is not a game.  Don’t take this post as a challenge because you like a good scare.  Instead find these books if you are in trouble.  If you can’t stand your life anymore and you don’t know what you’re living for then pick these books up.  If a great friend or a parent died suddenly, then get these books.  If you get cancer, go find them.  If you’re ready to make a major life change like leaving your significant other or starting a brand new career at forty, go looking for these books.

Still, be warned.  It’s safe to say that these are not like any other books you’ve ever read.  To say they are terrifying at times is putting it lightly.  I can’t think of a single horror movie or book that even comes close.  Perhaps the only book that is even in the same ball park is Thomas Ligotti’s “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race.”  Yet while Ligotti’s book focuses only on the blackest part of our existential crisis, McKenna’s books keeps going, breaking through to the other side and offering some hope that you can survive your darkest days.

These books are really about what happens when you hit a powerful spiritual crisis, when you don’t know what to do with your life or what to believe.  Everyone experiences them differently but nobody who reads them is ever the same.

I’ve recommended these books only to a few folks and here is what they had to say:

Text message from a friend: “Is it normal to feel physically ill while reading these?”

Me: “Yes and it gets worse but keep going.  Don’t give up.”

Another friend said, “When you first told me these were the most dangerous books ever written I thought you were kidding.  I read the first one and it didn’t hit me that hard.  It was a like an itch I couldn’t scratch but it wasn’t that bad.  Then I read the second book and the third and it’s like a burning throb that I can’t get rid of now.  What do I do?”

Me: “Keep going.  You’ll get past it.”

My own experience was similar.  At times I felt like I was falling out of a plane or like I was badly hung over, my head spinning.  I am not using a metaphor here.  I really felt like that.   No matter what, just keep going.  As a famous saying attributed to the Buddha goes, “the only mistake is not starting and the other is not finishing.”

The good news is, the negative effects pass.  You get over it.  You work through the challenges of the books and if you are lucky you come out on the other side as a more authentic and powerful you.  Still, don’t get me wrong.  These are not self-help books like any other.  As they say in Fight Club this is not a “weekend retreat.”  You won’t find a few mantras to chant here or some safe Saturday group meditation while you all hug and experience oneness and the imminent transmigration of the Gaia soul or whatever.  These books are a punch to the face.  They are are profound spiritual explosion.  McKenna’s “teaching” style is a lot like the old Zen masters.  When the student came to them full of their wrong ideas, they got a smack on the head with a hard stick.  If that sounds unpleasant, it’s because it is, but it may just be what you are looking for, if you’re suffering.

If you’re happy with your life, leave it alone.

They’re a shattering experience.  They leave you no room to debate and no safe ground to stand on.  They ask hard questions and give you hard answers.  This is a book for adults, not children.  And as you’ll soon discover, there a lot more children in the world than adults.

As a small example McKenna points out that with all of the spiritual belief systems in the world purporting to bring you enlightenment, how come not one has ever produced a single enlightened follower?  Nobody has ever come out and said I was a student of so and so guru and I am now enlightened.  The uncomfortable answer is obvious when you really think about it.  It’s because they don’t really work. They aren’t teaching enlightenment.  They’re teaching you how to stay asleep.  I won’t go into any other examples.  You’ll discover them for yourself and you don’t need me or anyone else to point them out for you.

I will say one other thing though: if you’re considering reading these works, don’t bother reading any websites or forums about them.  You will just start off on the wrong foot because the only thing ever written about these books is by people who are really, really confused.  Don’t get caught in their webs.  For example, there are people out there posing as Jed Mckenna.  It only takes a few days of reading his books to realize they are fakers.  Jed has no Facebook account, no Twitter handle, no Snapchat or Instagram.   He won’t be selling you a new seminar or a weekend retreat.  Of that I have no doubt and if you really understand what he is saying, you will see why and it won’t be hard to spot the liars and fakers. Stick to original sources. Judge for yourself and you can’t go wrong.

If you do waste time reading forums, such as Goodreads, you’ll see a lot of people completely missing the point of what he is trying to say to you.  Folks get wrapped up in debating things like whether Jed McKenna is “enlightened” or any other number of nitpicking points.  Again and again, McKenna tells you not to worry about him or who he is and what he is really like.  “I am just a man pointing at the moon.  Look at the moon, not my finger.”  He’s right.  It’s probable that many of the things that happen to him in the book never happened at all.  McKenna is not his real name.  He made sure to hide his identity and for good reason.  As noted earlier, history is not kind to heretics, so it’s best if people don’t go looking for him because he upset their cherished ideals.  Forget him.  Concentrate on what he is saying and think about it for yourself.

Of course, if a book could only destroy you why would you bother to read it?  You wouldn’t. In the end, the purpose of these books is not to simply destroy everything but to destroy everything that is not you, that is not real. They are a powerful cleansing fire. They’re designed to slash and burn your suffocating belief systems to make room for something new to take root.  McKenna uses his definition of “enlightenment” which he defines as “truth realization” to clear the way. Whether that is the correct definition is basically irrelevant. This book is about looking hard at the truth and your life and getting rid of everything that is not you.  It asks the question, what can you really know for sure?  Until you know that, how can you ever figure out what really matters to you?

More than anything these books are a call to adventure.  After the destruction comes your chance to rebuild yourself into something better than you were before, something new and authentic. Ultimately, they’re asking: what do you believe?  What do you want?  What is your purpose?  What are you really here for?  What are you meant to do?

If you’ve ever read Joseph’ Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces you probably thought it was a book about someone else’s life.  It’s about heroes, not you.  Wrong.  The call to adventure is your story.  You are the hero.  You are the protagonist in your own life.  Once you realize that there is only one question:

What the heck are you going to do about it?

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Star Wars the Force Awakened Plot Predictions

First off, this post is likely full of spoilers.  While I have absolutely no advanced knowledge of the plot details, I do have a history of accurate story predictions, such as predicting the ending of Breaking Bad with 100% accuracy.  ( Well apparently not since they are are now doing a season 6 *cough cash grab* and bringing Mr White back to life but I was right about season 5. )  This is not due to necromancy or any magical tricks or precognition ( mostly ) I just spend a lot of time analyzing stories.  If you want to see the movie as a total surprise then turn back right now.  You’ve been warned.

Again to be as clear as I can, I have not seen a script, nor do I know anyone with a script, nor do I know anyone even vaguely associated with the movie.

I am going to lean on several rumors and potential leaks that have hit the internet as a basis for some of my predictions but honestly most of the so-called leaks have been thin or weak at best and make little to no sense or are obviously intentional misdirection by the creative team.

To start, I’ve seen a lot a posts looking to the expanded universe mythology when the creators have already made it clear that they plan to ignore the expanded universe completely.

“In an official statement…Lucasfilm said the new “Star Wars” films — Episodes VII to IX — “will not tell the same story told in post-‘Return of the Jedi’ Expanded Universe.”

So what can we look to, to understand the new films?  Look no further than the Hero with a Thousand Faces (HWTF), a masterpiece of comparative myth by the man who invented the genre, Joseph Campbell.  It defines an ancient pattern of stories that we tell again and again throughout all time in all cultures.  It’s this pattern that the original stories used and Lucas famously called it out as a primary inspiration.  It’s formula at it’s most basic is simple:

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

We’ll take HWTF as the guide for the story moving forward but let’s start with looking at the characters.  Where do they fit in the story and why?

The producers have gone to great lengths to conceal the last names of the characters referring to the main characters as Finn or Rey.  This is for good reason.  The last names will tell an astute observer a great deal about potential plot details.  But the lack of last names is also revealing.  Anyone who is listed with a last name should be considered a minor character.  Conversely anyone with only a single name or a moniker such as Captain Phasma are major characters.

Let’s start with Finn.  For me he is the hardest character to predict.  We can assume that the story will follow the general direction of the first three films, with a rag-tag group of unlikely heroes utilizing the power of friendship to overcome the forces of evil.  Hero teams usually have a very specific personality make-up to give them balance.  For instance while Luke is a idealistic dreamer Han is the roguish selfish guy who learns that friends mean something.  I’ve had a very hard time reading any personality off of Finn from the trailers.  Hero groups in film fall onto a personality spectrum because we don’t want to see a bunch of the same folks on screen at once.

What I can say with confidence is that Finn is not the main character.  Instead, that is Rey, the female hero, played by Daisy Ridley.  Since she seems to fall into the hardened outsider or jaded recluse from society role, we have to assume that Finn’s personality is a sharp contrast to that to balance her out.  You can’t have two of the same character personalities rolling around in the same story.  What we do know about him is that he comes to the hero team in a “unique way.”

Since there are very, very few black characters in Star Wars and since we can assume Finn’s last name is concealed for a reason, we can hazard a guess that the are correct and that he is the son of Lando Calrissian but I don’t think so.  I think that Amazon shot is badly faked and everyone fell for it.  However, there is really no other black character from the original trilogy and considering this follows on the heals of the first trilogy, 30 years later, we can expect those three films to form the bulwark of the background story.  Oh wait, there is one other character who is at least dark skinned, Boba Fett.  I can see him as a partial clone or son of Boba.  This would make the most sense because it seems like he comes to us with a heal-face-turn right out of the gate.  This is basically a crisis of consciousness that turns a man from bad to good in a flash.

That said, Finn doesn’t really doesn’t need royal parentage to make his character a useful part of the story.  He can fill the role of Han, an outsider with rough edges who becomes a true selfless hero.

On the other hand we have Rey who will undoubtedly have royal parentage.  So who is Rey?  There is a trend in today’s fiction and film to make a strong woman the protagonist for action films such as with the Hunger Games.  Considering that Disney is trying to broaden the appeal of the franchise by setting a black man and a female center stage it’s easy to predict that Rey is the new Luke Skywalker, aka the story lead.  She will act as the main protagonist and it’s her that will have to save the universe from the rebirth of evil over the next three films.  In fact, no matter what her last name is, you can think of her as the centerpiece of the story.  I see her as a kind of darker and grittier version of Ang in the Last Airbender TV show, a monk like character who is thrust into greatness.  This might make Finn a kind of Zuko character, a redeemed bad guy who struggles with doing things the noble way.

Rey is possibly Rey Solo, aka the estranged/hidden daughter of Han Solo and Leia, which would give her a “royal” pedigree with the force as well as a rogue nature, hence making her a loner.  There are several other options for her parentage, such as her being Rey Skywalker, the daughter of Luke and some unknown woman.  When Lucas talked about the trilogy in the past, according to Timothy Zahn, one of the most popular expanded universe writers, he said “You’d have the original trilogy, then go back to Luke’s father and find out what happened to him [in the prequels], and if there was another 7th, 8th, or 9th film, it would be Luke’s children.”

The ‘Luke’s kids” plot is the strongest possibility for the arc of the next three films.

If you click on the link and try to get to the old interviews with Mark Hamill you’ll find them inaccessible.  Surprise, the Disney law machine has systematically purged the web of anything that would reveal the new plot which is telling in itself.

Luke has remained hidden from all promotional material.  This leads us to only three possibilities for his character.

The simplest one is in keeping with the Hero with a Thousand Faces story template: he has become the new Obi One.  The only photo we have of Luke in the new film shows him dressed like Obi One so this is a likely scenario.  It also makes sense.  In HWTF, the hero always meets a mentor character who guides him forward teaching him the way of the spirit world.  In Star Wars we had Obi One and Yoda.  The mentor character is always a retired hero.  He faced the eternal battle in his own time, won the day and retired to teach the next generation.  Expect to see him in disguise at first and living far away from society if this is the case. You can also expect him to die in either this movie or the second one, as he will need to sacrifice himself to allow the new heroes to succeed for themselves.  Also, expect him to be tracking the rise of the new evil in the galaxy which is hidden and gaining steam.  He’ll secretly work against it in the background, perhaps hunting down Sith or he will go Yoda and realize the fight is done for now and hide away from the world until the rebirth of evil in the eternal cycle.

The second possibility here makes Luke the new “Yoda.”  In other words, he is the primary trainer of Jedi since there is nobody else left.  In fact the more I think of it, the more and more this makes sense as the strongest possibility.  Just as Yoda and Obi One failed in training Anakin, who became Vadar, I suspect that Luke failed to train Kylo Ren, the first major bad guy of the trilogy and the Dragon of the story, and this leads Kylo, his son, to the dark side.  This also makes it virtually guaranteed that Rey is Rey Skywalker and Kylo is her brother delivering us a Kain and Abel story of epic scale.  More on this later.  I also see Luke’s death ( in the movie that will follow Force Awakens ) come very smoothly from this plot trajectory: Kylo seeks out his sister, Rey, to try to turn her, but is intercepted by Luke who sacrifices himself so she can get away.

The third possibility is one that I do not give much credence to and that is that Luke has embraced the dark side.  There is a lengthily breakdown of the Luke is evil idea here.  I am not buying it.  If this is true, then we have only one true reveal for the first movie and that is Luke is Kylo Ren, 

Here is the reason this is not happening: it’s a franchise killer.

It essentially destroys the cherished message of the original trilogy which is redemption.  Vadar is redeemed at the very end and it is Luke that redeems him.  No writer in their right mind would do this twist unless they want to go into hiding for the rest of their lives or if they are GRR Martin who just likes fucking with people.  Actually it goes even deeper than that.  Artists have a fundamental world view that underpins their story-building and that colors everything they do.  Martin’s story is a dark saga that is cynical about human nature, believing that the lines between good and evil are not so clear cut and that many great men do wicked things and vice versa.  This is known as black on gray morality.  Star Wars is a black and white morality play.  It draws clear lines between good and evil, much like the Lord of the Rings trilogy where the good guys are beautiful and wear white, while the bad guys are hideous monsters.  The original trilogy is two stories, the rise of a hero and the redemption of Vadar.  It’s optimistic to Game of Thrones’ cynicism.  It speaks to a different world view, one that says people are inherently good and that they are often drawn astray by life circumstances, but given the chance they will turn back to what’s right when faced with the ultimate choice, such as Vadar’s choice to kill his son or the emperor.  There is literally no way they make Luke evil and if they do it is a misdirection.

However, there is one way that the Luke is evil idea could play out. If Rey is in fact his daughter as Lucas originally intended and Kylo is not his son.  This would make it possible for Luke to play the role of Vadar to his child because he would act as the contrast to Rey’s goodness.  This is a very, very risky possibility and probably too daring and original for a Disney franchise to take on.  If the story is about Luke’s children then he may have to inhabit the dark father figure character, a central tenet of the HWTF mythology.  Remember that ever character must contrast the others for a story drama to work.  Think of Cronus eating his children and Zeus surviving and killing him as a prime example of the HWTF framework.  Frankly, I just don’t see them having the balls to do this, though it would make for the most interesting possibilities story wise.

The more I look at this the more I think the most likely strategy is to make Luke good, but not good enough to train Jedi at the caliber or Yoda, since he does not have Yoda’s longevity or life experience, hence his offspring become evil due to the weakness in his teaching ability and he must hide the second (and possibly a third) child to protect her, hence Rey (probably not her real name for the whole story since it is a cover name) is hidden away on a desert planet as he was in his childhood, while Kylo becomes a dark force of destiny.

So let’s get into the plot of the first film: the Force Awakens.

As I noted, Disney is not a company that takes big chances.  They are in the business of making money with established franchises, hence buying Marvel and engineering the purchase of Lucas Films for four billion dollars.  They buy stories that work and they make big money from them.  They don’t take their stories in crazy new directions.  They repeat formulas that work.  As such I expect them to stick close to the original story line, not taking too many chances, while updating it with some new twists.  They picked an established big budget director in J.J. Abrams and they went back to the screenwriter of the most beloved movie in the franchise (The Empire Strikes Back) .  In short, they’re not willing to gamble.  Expect them to hew close to the original ideas.

So what are the key ideas that make the first three movies?

They are war movies
As well as black and white morality tales
They follow the major plot points of the HWTF almost exactly
It’s a generational family saga
It’s a redemption arc

The Force Awakened will begin in the midst of a civil war.  The last generation destroyed the empire but empires don’t die gracefully.  In their wake comes violent strong men battling for control.  In Rome we saw powerful generals seize territory after the death of Caesar.  We saw the same warlord periods in ancient Japan before the daimyo Hideyoshi united the warring provinces and the same went for China before the nationalists united the country prior to communist rule.  In the vacuum of power, strong men and fanatical groups rise looking to take advantage of the chaos and a return to a strong central power.  Expect to the see the empire and the republic as fragmentary, warlord like fiefdoms, vying for the future of life in the galaxy with neither powerful enough to defeat the other.  Unlike in the last movie do not expect the empire to have a Nazi like hold over the whole galaxy, but instead expect to find former commanders of the empire with strongholds of power scattered across the galaxy with the Republic looking to root them out.

Into this volatile mix comes a young dark warrior and his new master looking to return to the glory of the age of the Sith, Kylo Ren, as the movie’s Vadar and Supreme Commander Snokes as the Palpantine, a master of the rule of two and Kylo’s second teacher after Luke.  They are the ones that can see a way to manipulate the situation and destroy their rivals to become the most powerful men in the galaxy.  While some folks have noted the Sith may abandon the rule of two, I expect that only as a recruitment effort in the beginning.  Expect Kylo and Snokes to turn on any Sith in later films to consolidate their rule.  To rule the universe again, they must unlock the secrets of the past and rebuild the power of their destroyed order.  But first, they must disguise their motives and objectives.  This is the art of war: deception.  Nourish your light in darkness and bide your time.

The key to understanding the movie comes from the scene with a masked figure descending into a destroyed spaceship.  This is Rey kicking off the adventure and setting everything in motion.  We know she is a scavenger.  She is looking for something she can turn into quick cash.  She has no desire to join the fight between the remnants the empire and the new republic. In the trailer that is her climbing into the downed destroyer, disguised as a sand person.  Expect her to find an ancient relic that sets the forces of the world against her.  This is an object that everyone is looking for even if she doesn’t know it yet.

Rumors have it that she finds Luke and Vadar’s old light saber.  There’s a lot of debate on the interwebs as to what this means.  It’s a waste of time.  The short answer is it actually doesn’t matter in the least what the object is, whether it is Luke’s light saber or something completely different.  Whatever it is, it’s something Kylo Ren, the dragon/early bad guy of the story wants and will do anything to get.  My guess is that it is some kind of key to opening an ancient vault of Sith secrets.  It could be the light saber, but it doesn’t matter.  What matters is that it will act like a key and that the bad guys need to unlock a pyramid archive of dark knowledge and power, hidden away by the Sith that came before him, a Pandora’s box of evil that starts the cycle of violence and war anew.

In essence, she is unlocking the macguffin a key plot device that will bring powerful forces to bear on her.  This leads the Dragon of the story Kylo Ren to her home in search of the relic/key and brings about the destruction of some of the only things she cares about.  Remember that dragons burn and we’ve already seen the clone troopers with flame throwers.  It’s likely that Finn is one of the troopers involved in the original destruction of what little home Rey has and in doing so he sees the evil of his ways, which causes an early heal face turn aka a bad guy turned good.  Together they barely escape with their lives and the ancient relic and now they’re involved in the games of empires whether they like it or not, pursued by darkness.  The forces of fate come knocking and whether you refuse the call and try to stick to your normal life or embrace it with open arms, eventually the powers that govern the universe force your hand.

Remember that originally Luke refused to get involved in the battles, because he had obligations at home.  It’s only when his home gets destroyed and his step-parents killed that the battle becomes personal for him and he joins the fight.  Expect a similar death in the early moments for Rey which likely triggers the crying sequence we see in the trailer and which many folks think is the death of Chewie.  I say it’s not Chewie’s death later but from this early sequence.  She may be a loner but she feels emotion deeply and she only hides from the world to protect the people she loves, perhaps a younger sister like Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games.  When she realizes she can no longer do that, the battle becomes intensely personal for her and launches her on her life’s adventure.  Expect everything she cares about destroyed early.

In the first film, in keeping with the original trilogy, we will not see most of the family dynamics revealed.  Make no mistake, this is a family saga and a dysfunctional family at that, but expect no reveals about bloodlines in this film, other than for the heroes.   Expect those reveals in episode 8 and 9.  Also, expect the first movie to hint at greater things but instead follow the spirit of the original Star Wars, which makes it a classic space adventure.   The forces of evil are looking to build a major weapon to give them the ultimate advantage in the civil war and establish them as the ultimate power in the galaxy. The hero team will destroy the weapon and win the day but unwittingly unlock the key to the Sith’s quick and brutal return to power.

What I can guarantee is that Kylo Ren will not be anyone’s father, such as Rey or Finn.  They won’t hew that closely to the original story line because that would be ridiculous and lame.  But do expect Kylo Ren related to the heroes in some way such as a brother of Rey.  My best guess is that Kylo is Luke’s son or an estranged third sibling to Luke and Leia and that training for him went south, leading him to the dark side.  In other words we do a reversal of the original plot of bad father/good son and do good father/bad son.

But back to our heroes in trouble and just managing to escape with their lives.  Their escape leads them to some old familiar faces, namely Han Solo, who rescues them at the last moment.  Two things push them into the rest of the rollicking adventure: a message embedded in the droid BB-8, Rey’s friendly droid, an r2-D2 stand-in, and the ancient relic.  When Rey tells/shows Solo what she’s found, he realizes there’s only one person who can help them, namely the wizened Princess Leia, now called General Leia, his estranged wife.  More battles ensue, as the forces of Kylo pursue them and they narrowly escape.  Ultimately, they make it to Leia, who recognizes the power in the girl and/or recognizes her long lost daughter, though she is unable to reveal herself as her mother and realizes she must send the girl off on a mission of great danger even though she would like to protect her.

Above all, Leia knows there is really only one person who can help the girl: Luke.

This sets Rey on a path to find him in whatever place he’s hiding, survivalist style, most likely a forest like his old master Yoda, because there is no place like the forest for an old survivalist to hide in.  It’s Luke who will begin her training in the ways of the force.

It’s here that we discover that all of the Jedi are not lost and that a rival group of young Jedi, trained in secret for years, has spawned to face the dark forces of Kylo Ren’s assassin squad The First Order who are seeking to “finish what you [Vadar] started” and wipe out the last of the remaining Jedi, to make way for a return to power for the Sith Empire.  As is often the case with strong men, they look to eliminate any dissent and anyone that can oppose them with political violence.  In fact, I suspect that Kylo Ren was a part of that new group of secretly trained Jedi.  Dissatisfied with his progress he began to study the dark side in secret as Luke trained him, as well as study the history that led to the great war of the first three movies.  Beware of studying monsters lest you become one yourself.  He breaks off from the group and founds the First Order, originally called the Knights of Ren, bent on finishing the work of Vadar and slaughtering the remaining Jedi and all of their secret knowledge.

Eventually, the republic forces with the help of Finn and Leia destroy the massive weapon that the old empire is building but in doing so they make a critical mistake, unwittingly unlocking the ancient archive of evil knowledge that Kylo Ren was seeking the first place and giving the bad guys the tools to tip the balance in their favor in the next film.

Expect the fortress of knowledge to be hidden in an unexpected base, perhaps the Starkiller base that forms the basis of the Republic’s army in the early parts of the movie.  In other words, expect it hidden in plain sight all along, right under the noses of the good guys and the audience, and though the good guys win the day, the also mistakenly open the doors to the ancient knowledge for the bad guys who will rise resurgent in the second film and wreak havoc on the universe.

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Killer Robots, Gene Editing, Personal Factories and the End of Work as We Know It

There’s an old curse: “may you live in interesting times.”  Right now, we live on the cusp of one of the most interesting times in the history of mankind.  A number of incredible and incredibly terrifying technologies loom just over the horizon.  Few people seem to understand just how fast they’re coming.

As a society we won’t be ready.

At least not in the short term.  The long term is still up for grabs.  Let’s look at why.  But before we get there, we need to back up and understand the difference between disruptive technologies and revolutionary tech.

Disruptive technologies are the kind they teach you about in business school.  You build a better mousetrap.  A perfect example is the Dyson bagless vacuum.  Until Dyson’s invention the major vacuum companies all sold endless disposable bags to their customers.  And they liked it.  They had no incentive to change.  Why not?  It’s a subscription model.  Instead of selling people something once, you keep on selling it to them.  They created bagless tech themselves and buried it to keep their bag cartel going.

Then Dyson came along and brought his tech to market.  The results were predictable.

First the big companies ignored him, then they laughed at him, wondering how he would make any money with such an expensive product and then the product took off like wildfire, the only way a product ever does, on the winds of peer to peer recommendations.

Then the big companies got scared.  They fought back, nearly suing him out of existence.  At one point Dyson went from something like 70 engineers and 3 lawyers to 5 engineers and 50 lawyers as he battled against the terrified companies.

Eventually he won.  The industry was forced to changed.  Whole revenue streams evaporated overnight.  But of course, society didn’t change all that much.  Some companies had to change business models, others went out of business, some people got fired.  Of course, none of this is fun for the various people involved in the change, but the overall effect on the rest of the world is minimal.

That’s the essence of disruptive tech.  It changes industries.  It effects businesses and the people who work there but day to day life doesn’t change all that much.

Revolutionary tech remakes society.  It changes the very way we live.

Some examples of revolutionary technologies:

Printing press
Farming
Guns
Computers
The internet
Double entry accounting

I won’t go into each of these and it’s by no means an exhaustive list but each and every one of these technologies remade how the world worked.

The printing press accelerated the spread of knowledge.  Before the press the only books were generally religious books, copied over and over laboriously by hand.  Few people owned them and few people could read.  The printing press democratized knowledge and let people rapidly print anything they wanted.  All kinds of subjects went down on paper as never before.  Now for the first time, people could learn from the past and because of that they could build on the discoveries of their forefathers, producing rapid iterations, dramatically increasing our understanding of the world around us and letting us build bigger and better technology.

Farming changed how societies formed and coalesced.  Before farming we roamed the world, following the migration of animals, hunting and gathering.  After farming we settled into permanent homes and communities.  From the rise of farming came centralization: organized government, bigger and bigger villages and cities, corporations.

Now a number of new revolutionary technologies are just around the corner.  The difference is this time we’ve got a bunch of them coming together.  Usually these technologies come one at a time or in very small clusters.  They take decades or centuries to absorb.  But these new technologies are coming like an avalanche and they’re coming all at once.

They are the following:

Self driving vehicles
Service robots
Automation technology
Autonomous killer robots
Personal factories
Gene editing

Tech writers recently spilled a lot of ink on self-driving cars and how they have the potential to destroy 10 million jobs rapidly.  If I can take 1000 automatic-taxis, spread them evenly around NYC and replace a 100,000 taxis that’s more violently disruptive then Uber by miles.  Not only could I replace those 100,000 taxis, which cost millions of dollars just to get a single medallion and are regulated to the point of absurdity, I can get them to anyone in 30 seconds to a minute and I can do it cheaper.  No human could compete.  Instead of paying salaries I pay maintenance fees to fix the vehicles.  But that’s just taxis.  How about getting an ambulance or firetruck to someone that fast?  How many lives will that save?

The driverless revolution will start with commercial vehicles.  In the next five years more and more truck drivers will be looking for work.  The trucks themselves will get redesigns to be able to carry more load and they can drive all night without rest, something a human can’t compete with, and never will.

It won’t take long before personal vehicles become driverless.  Elon Musk even suggests that in 20 or 30 years it will probably be illegal to drive yourself, because the error rates of humans driving will cause so many more accidents.  It’s also likely that if I live in a city area I won’t even want a car.  If I can have one to my door faster than I could have a butler fetch the one in the old world, why bother?  Most cars get used about 3% of the time anyway, so best to save that money for more interesting things. That eliminates a whole host of service jobs like maintenance detail, lube changers, mechanics and the like.

Now I disagree with the overall 10 million number, mostly because I disagree with the Factor article that nobody will want to own cars.  Human psychology is a strange and interesting beast.  Sometimes we want things just because we want them and not because they have a practical purpose.  Lots of people will choose not to have a car but many people will still want them for status or because they are now rolling personal offices with sleeper beds and desks and other things that make working or reading or watching media fun, not to mention we’re away from the kids while doing it and we don’t have to pay attention to the road.  Once you take out forward facing seats and all the other stuff necessary to drive today, you have a cool personal space that is mobile.  You can do a lot with that.  Nevertheless some of these jobs are definitely going away.  How many and how fast is anyone’s guess until it happens.  Right now Uber is on the right side of the new-fangled “sharing” economy, allowing people out of work to work when they want to, or pick up extra money to pay that mortgage.  Tomorrow they could be on the wrong side, putting those people already out of work out of work again.

Jobs on the lower end of the skill spectrum are hard to replace and the folks who do them often struggle to adapt to new jobs.  If we wipe out millions of hauling jobs and put all the Uber and taxi drivers out of work, where do they go next?  I’m not sure.  Nobody seems to know.  Historically something else has always developed but this time its not clear what that will look like.

It’s not just drivers that are about to get automated out of existence.  Computers are getting better and better at doing more and more things.  In my story, In the Cracks of the Machine, I write that the automation of service jobs will start in the fast food industry.  It’s already happening and fast.  You want $15 an hour?  Companies will respond with how about $0 an hour?  Everything has a cause and effect.  They spend $50K on a machine that lasts a decade, pay it no wages and service it every so often.  The robots don’t get bored, have discipline problems, take extra long breaks or piss in the drink of an angry customer.  Every day more and more jobs are getting automated and those jobs are not coming back any time soon.  The amount of jobs that are invulnerable to automation are shrinking.

As we automate more and more jobs lots of futurists get very excited.  They envision a society with little to no work where people can pursue leisure and time with their families.  They expect a basic “universal living wage” to take care of all the necessities of life, when most jobs are done by machines.  As a SF author I think it’s inevitable that we evolve to a point where a lot of the repetitive, boring jobs are done by machines, where we do in fact have the ability to pursue work if we want to or not at all.  However, I don’t think we get there overnight and the path to get there from here is a very rocky one.  What I worry about most is that we will delete all these jobs before we really know what to do with people.   The likely outcomes from there are not pleasant: mass unemployment, no safety net, no way/will to create one and no alternatives leading to starvation and war.

In today’s political climate, where half the population thinks that anyone who doesn’t work is barely human, where illegal immigrants are stealing jobs they don’t want anyway and political groups that take opposing positions to everything just because, I can’t see us passing anything like a universal living wage, or even where the money would come from other than taxing the hell out of the few people who own all the tech that runs everything.  That won’t fly and it’s not really ideal anyway.  Who the hell wants to be dependent on the government for day to day living?  Some alternative proposal is needed and I keep waiting to hear it.  I haven’t heard it yet.

I read a book recently called the Joy of Not Working and the author spends a lot of pages to try to help people make the transition to not working in retirement or unemployment.  He takes a surprisingly positive attitude to unemployment, arguing that we should love not working and enjoy it as some of the best times in our lives and yet as a society we are conditioned to need work and that when people get unemployed they suffer from depression and loss of purpose, even when most people hate their job.  We have a love/hate relationship with ours jobs. We don’t like them when we’re there but when they’re gone we miss them.  He’s right.  We should enjoy not working more but right now, in today’s world, that is a lot harder than it sounds.

I also don’t buy the idea that everyone will suddenly become an artist or craftsman overnight.  That sounds a lot like a Utopia dreamed up by artists that will likely never exist. The love and pursuit of art is not universally shared.  Lots of people consume art but not that many people would choose it as a full time career even now.

To make things worse we have other technologies coming down the pipeline that could exacerbate these conditions of war and strife, namely killer robots, where all you need to fight a war is some software and open source hardware. With the sorry state of our information security, that tech will get out.  Don’t think so?  Then how come all the Chinese military drones look exactly like ours?  Because they stole the tech and/or reverse engineered it.  In today’s world one person does the R&D and everyone else steals it.

Recently, such scientific luminaries as Hawkings and Elon Musk put together an open petition to keep the world from developing autonomous killing machines.  It’s a noble ideal.  Unfortunately, it simply won’t work.

What’s more likely to happen is that western governments will sign up and then do it anyway in secret and totalitarian and authoritarian regimes will charge ahead with it gleefully.  A petition assumes everyone has the same moral values.  This is never the case.  There is a famous bumper sticker which says “Coexist” written in letters that represent different religions around the world.  I saw an alternative sticker the other day that said “you can’t coexist with people who want to kill you.”  In other words, high ideals are nice until someone doesn’t play by the same rules.  In war and the arms race, everyone plays by the same rules: win.

You also have gene editing, namely via Crispr technology.   Cripsr technology has the potential to eliminate all kinds of disease, as it makes gene editing super simple and really, really cheap.  Scientists are talking about editing out malaria from mosquitoes and targeting cancer cells with therapeutic smart bombs.  Just program the code you are looking for, zero in on it and delete it.  Of course, Crispr tech also has the potential to be used as a terrifying weapon unlike any we have ever scene, including nukes.  The Wired article I linked to above interviews one of the early innovators of Crispr and asks him what his worst fear about the tech is and he mumbles something about weapons and doesn’t elaborate, saying he hopes to “take the idea to his grave.”  Here’s the problem: it’s not that hard to figure out what he wasn’t saying if you think about it for even a little while.  It’s not a stretch to think of micro robots or pills or sprays that can target populations of people based on genetic markers or traits which would be a boon to psychopathic, genocidal maniacs everywhere. In other words a genetic smart bomb.  It’s easy to think of others, which I won’t elaborate on here either for fear of putting them out in the collective unconscious.  It won’t matter.  Someone else with psychopathic tendencies is likely thinking about it right now.  Hell they may even be looking at it in a lab already.

Once someone does it, we will do it too and eventually we will do it openly.  The problem is the human mind: once we see an idea we can’t let it go.  Someone will make it happen and that leads to another inevitable outcome.  Life is an algorithm.  It follows the same basic patterns over and over.  You can try to ban human editing of embros, but all it takes is for one person or place to do it and suddenly the cat is out of the bag.   Scientists in China already attempted to edit an embryo.  Others will follow.

Any time we have tried to suppress technology in human history, we’ve failed.  The Luddites tried to hold back the textile machines.  The Japanese tried to keep guns off the island.  All of this works for a little while, right up until it inevitably doesn’t. We can outlaw genetic engineering of children, ban Terminators and insist on quotas for human drivers versus machine.  It just won’t matter long term.  In the short term, it will work, kind of, for a little bit and then it won’t.

A lot of people have pointed out the horse and buggy versus automobile as an example of new tech fears that never materialize.  The car did not destroy whole industries, it made them.  Very true.  But today just might be different.  When the automobile replaced the horse, horse populations rapidly declined and they exist at around 10% of their commercial peak today.

In this case, we are the horses.

And now we are out of a job.

Is our only possibility to decline?  Are we living at the peak of human population growth?  I don’t know but I don’t see any answers yet and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I do have a few possibilities though for a more rosy future, even if we have to go through some bumps to get there.

One of the technologies I mentioned that has the potential to disrupt work as we know it: personal factories, aka 3D printers and their inevitable successors, nanoscale factories and eventually atomic factories can change all this for the better.  If I no longer have to centralize manufacturing and I can print up anything I need, do I really need to work anyway?  It’s likely that all I would need to purchase are the raw materials to make whatever I want.  Even better I can build anything that I need that is custom to me. In the days of 3D printing I can’t print up food (actually I can, just not food I really want – yet), so I would still need to grow food or barter for it, but as we move to nanoscale or atomic printing I can print that too.

Ironically, we may be able to look to our past for a solution to the coming problems.  Before the industrial revolution the idea of full time employment was an incredibly rarity.  Most people had a full time job called farming and raising children.  They worked their asses off, but not for some centralized entity.  They built their own house or inherited one that got passed down, farmed for all their food, traded for other things they needed and did odd or scattered jobs in the community.  People had big families because they needed additional labor.  The 3D printing revolution has the opportunity to take that to a new level.  Now I am not just trading for things build by a limited number of local craftsman.  I don’t need a big old family to build things for me because I can print them.  I can download an infinite amount of amazing things.

There’s also the foundations of the sharing economy already in place: peer to peer trading/automatic routing/sharing/mutual ratings and money exchange that takes us well beyond just the local community.  There’s an Uber for everything.  AirBnB to rent a house.  Want a bike?  A power tool?  Someone to pick you up?  Dinner?  How about a personal valet to park your car?  There’s an app for that.  Someone will show up with a scooter and park your car and fetch it when you need it.  Need a dress of one event?  How about a doctor to come check you out at home?  Doctors haven’t made house calls since the 50s.  They do now.  That will help a society that needs to barter and trade things faster and wider.  Maybe cities start to spread out again.

When it comes to eating, I can grow food in a compact location and farming tech has gotten more and more precise.  Already the Japanese are using special lights built by GE to grow food indoors rapidly and without pesticides.  In a short period of time I could have one of these in my house and have fresh, bug and pesticide free vegetables year round, regardless of weather conditions or season.  If it’s not feasible to have them in my home I could have small collectives in the city or local towns that feed people the way energy companies supply electricity now via subscription.  Perhaps the universal living wage is free 3D printing bar and food from indoor farms?  Need some more housing?  Print it up.

That’s just one way this could all go down.  The future is hard to see, even for people who spend a lot of time looking at it.  As Yoda said, always in motion is the future.

In the end, not working would be fantastic.  I would love to spend all my time on my art, with my friends, eating, drinking, playing with family and my animals.  I also happen to be a writer and enjoy making art.  Not everyone does.  I think as a society, a place where we all have micro-farms, print up most of things we need and trade for others is fantastic.  Unfortunately, we can’t just leap to that place of a universal basic wage and post-scarcity.  We likely have to go through a painful period where we have a lot of people who were born with the idea that work is the only purpose in life suddenly out of a job with no way to support themselves and no alternatives in sight.  I hope that the old saying “necessity is the mother of invention” is true.  When these problems hit, they are likely to shift the old political ideals of what is right and wrong and perhaps we can solve these issues before they get out of hand.  Then again, if you’ve ever watched CSPAN, it’s hard to hold out much hope.

I only know one things for sure:

You can’t fight the future.

The post Killer Robots, Gene Editing, Personal Factories and the End of Work as We Know It appeared first on Me Uploads.

The Common Sense Diet

There’s a mind-boggling amount of advice out there on how to eat healthy that leaves people feeling confused and frustrated. I think it’s a lot simpler than folks make it out to be. The basics of healthy eating are:

Eat: Meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts and natural fats like butter
Limit/Avoid/Control: Too much red meat, sugary and starchy foods (pasta, breads, rice, potatoes)

When you do eat starchy food avoid the white versions of them and choose yams, purple potatoes, brown or black rice
Berries are you best choice when eating fruits
Eat red meat once in awhile but not all the time
Dried fruits are fine in moderation but know that drying them concentrates their sugar so eat less
If you’re going to eat bread choose 100% whole wheat or ancient grain varieties (like kamut or quinoa, farro) but under no circumstances use the old food pyramid suggestion of 4 million servings. One or two is fine.

Eat when you’re hungry and go until you are “eight parts full” as the Okinawans say. In other words don’t eat until you are completely full, eat until you are just about full.

Concentrate on nutrient rich foods; don’t worry about calories. Worry about empty calories, like a 400-calorie coffee from Starbucks. When you eat, make the food count.

In Moderation

Like wine? Good. Drink it. But have one glass. My favorite line when I go out to eat is “bring me one glass at dinner.” That way I only drink one. If they bring it early, then I send it back or they do not get a tip.
Rich dark chocolate has some beneficial properties, so eat that once in awhile too.
Cheese from reputable overseas brands that don’t pump their cows/sheep/goat’s full of antibiotics and feed them garbage.

Avoid All Together

Boxed healthy meals
Boxed/frozen stuff
Fast food
Soda
Man made crap. As Jack Lalanne says, “if it’s man made don’t eat it.”
Processed pseudo-food like Twinkies, Kit Kats, energy bars, Mac and Cheese
Fake cheese
Low fat meals
Fast food
Deep fried stuff (except very, very rarely)
Any oils but sesame, coconut and olive oil (real, unfiltered, green cloudy olive oil)

That’s pretty much it. Of course, there is a bit more to it than that, but not much. Let’s look a little deeper.

Longevity Versus Weight Loss

Make longevity your goal, not weight loss. Weight loss is just a happy side effect of longevity. When you eat correctly you will lose weight and you will not gain it back. It’s easy actually. The problem with focusing on weight loss is that it has an end state. It has a finish line. Once you get there, you start back sliding because you’ve reached your goal. Longevity has no end state until you reach the big sleep. So concentrate on living to 100. Your weight and clouds of other problems like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, stubborn belly fat and the like will gradually disappear.

I utilize the above principles and brought my weight down from 215 to 176, my high school weight. I dropped from a 38 to a 34 waist. My blood pressure went from borderline hypertension to normal. Yours can too. How long did that take? About four-months. Not long at all. I still have some things to work on. This is an ongoing process but at least now I am trending in the right direction.

 

Start Where You’re At

If you’re overweight with high blood pressure and a wheezing cough, understand that you aren’t going to undo these things overnight. Some of them will change quickly, some not so much. You can drop 40 or 50 pounds in three or four months. The other bits might take a little longer. Just remember that Rome was not built in a day. You took a long time to screw your body up. Take the time to fix it. Each choice adds up. Make good choices every day and your body will get stronger and stronger. Every choice is connected to the last like beads on a string.

 

Listen to Your Body

There is no perfect diet for everyone. The foundation above serves as just that, a foundation. Tailor it to your own needs. You do this by listening to your body. The although lots and lots and lots of folks disagree with it. So what does that mean for you? How do you figure it out for yourself? Listen to your body!

For me personally wheat doesn’t work very well. When I eat wheat, I get a significant increase in acne, fatigue, headaches and the like. That is my body telling me that it does not work for me. I do not have Celiac disease however even 100% whole wheat seems to effect me in a number of negative ways. It may or may not do the same for you.

To understand how foods affect you I have a simple test:

How do you feel as you are eating it?
How do you feel ten minutes after you ate it?
How do you feel a half hour after you ate it?

Notice the differences. Did you love the taste as you ate it, but within a few minutes you started to feel sluggish and cloudy? These are the most basic signs that what you consumed is not right for you.

Put simply, if you feel tired after you ate, you ate wrong!

Let’s take this a step further and understand the early warning signs that you are sick or getting sick.

 

Early Warning Signs of Disease

Your body has a built in early warning system. It lets you know when things are wrong, first subtly and then with more urgency and then with disease. Of course, I want to be careful here. Not all diseases come from lifestyle. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. You can’t tell a four year old that got Leukemia that he ate wrong. And yet a large number of our diseases are preventable. More than half the people in the U.S. don’t meet even the most basic criteria of eating reasonably and exercising. I’d say those stats are probably low balling it. Eating well and exercising puts you on the right statistical curve. If you have any of the following symptoms, or worse multiple symptoms, they are warning signs that you are eating wrong and headed for an early grave. Heed them!

Acne
Puffy skin
Eczema
Dry, itchy skin
Acid reflux
Tingling in arms or legs or other extremities
Chest pain
Back pain
Tooth aches
Runny nose
Fatigue
Depression
Fuzzy thinking
Bleeding gums
Frequent headaches
Trouble sleeping
Bloodshot eyes
Frequent peeing
High blood pressure

These warning factors let you know something “ain’t” working right. So use trial and error. Cut things out, even if they are on the “healthy” list of some new fangled diet. Remember just because something is objectively healthy does not mean it is healthy for you.

We are accustomed in the U.S. to seeing disease as an isolated process that can be treated on an individual basis. Got reflux? Take some antacid. High blood pressure? Here are some prescriptions. At no point do we stop to see the symptoms as part of what they are, the body’s early warning system to you, the body’s owner. Treat the cause, not the symptoms. Taking blood pressure lowering drugs does nothing to make you healthier. Instead, it simply suppresses the problem so you stop paying attention to it and make no real change. There are times when a person is so far gone that blood pressure lowering drugs may be the only recourse. Don’t get there. If you are there, look to get off them as quickly as possible.

You may be surprised by some of the things on this list. And the list isn’t even exhaustive! Many of these are considered common everyday occurrences, with no treatment that you just have to accept. In fact, many of them are not considered disease processes at all by the average person. After all what teenage kid doesn’t have acne? To be clear, I’m not talking about one or two pimples here. I’m talking about constant breakouts. I’m not talking about one headache or one day of reflux. I am talking about reoccurring instances of the above. Frequent. Constant. Persistent. The problem is these are so common that we miss them. They look like part of the scenery.

If you are born in an insane asylum and everyone is shouting, you probably think it’s normal. It “ain’t “ normal.

 

Counting Calories, Food logging, Fitbit, Apple Watches and Other Unnecessarily Complicated Recipes of Long Term Failure

A lot of folks really like the food logging apps and Fitbits, etc. Do you need a food logging app on your phone? I say no. Why? If it’s too hard to do you won’t keep it up over the long term. Eventually you will get bored with it and give up. This is because it is boring. Honestly, who the hell likes to write down everything they ate every time they ate? Horrible. Boring. In my opinion, it’s a recipe for long -term failure. Go ahead and do it if it helps you, but talk to me in five years if you are still doing it. I doubt it.

Here is technology I will buy when it eventually hits the market: a device that can unobtrusively sample my blood or saliva and run a battery of tests, keeping track of my blood sugar and cholesterol and every other useful marker in my body, graphing it over the long haul and making it easy to spot trends. It doesn’t exist yet but it’s coming. My guess is in the next five to ten years, maybe faster. Until then, anything that requires you to type out everything you ate and then you check your logbook and, gosh I’m already bored writing this. It’s a long-term loser. It won’t work. You’ll fail eventually.

Instead, focus on good habits that are easy to replicate. Throw out all the crap in your house so you can’t eat it in a moment of weakness. Have plenty of healthy snacks on hand so you have something to keep you satisfied.

 

Proportions

More often than not I see people eating things in the wrong proportions. Strict vegetarians will tell you that not eating meat is the only healthy diet. Paleo folks will tell you that you can’t eat beans and potatoes but you can eat as much meat as you like. The wheat industry will tell you that you have to make wheat the foundation of your diet. What’s wrong with all of these?

Balance.

As my father always said, balance is best in all things.

How can we even know which one of these is correct? What’s right?

My litmus test is simple:

Who in the world is actually living the longest? What do they eat?

I am not interest in theory, only fact. My favorite book on this subject is 50 Secrets of the World’s Longest Living People which highlights five hot pockets of longevity: Okinawa, Japan; Bama, China; Campodimele, Italy; Symi, Greece; and Hunza, Pakistan. You can read the book to get all the great tips. I recommend it. Basically, they eat a variety of foods, but vegetables are the foundation, as is regular aerobic exercise. Okinawan’s love their pork, but they don’t eat it every day. The Grecian’s love their olive oil and wine. Here’s what I noticed about how all of these folks eat:

They understand proportions.

As such, I’ve drawn up some crude little diagrams with what your own proportions should look like. Got a plate full of rice and no vegetables with a ton of meat? Not going to work for you over the long term. So let’s take a look at my white-boarding here. They are thumbnails, so you will want to click on them to expand them. They show you the basic correct proportions for eating meals and soup.

The key to the charts is at the top. Here it is in case you can’t read my chicken scratches.

Veg = vegetables
S = Starch
F = fish
M = Meat
G = grain
N = noodle
M/F = Meat and/or Fish

Each dish has a check mark or an x at the top of each dish.

Check mark = good, X = bad.

It doesn’t mean you can never eat an X, just do it very, very rarely.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stick to those diagrams and you won’t ever have to count a single calorie. You will lose weight, get your blood sugar under control and maintain weight with ease.

 

Critical Thinking

How best to understand all this? There is a lot of information out there on how to eat healthy. Recent dust ups on the blogosphere like the Science Babe versus the Food Babe only serve to create more confusion with both of them making arguments laced with countless logical fallacies such as composition/division, appeals to authority and appeal to nature. The diet wars only hurt people. If two sides are shouting how do you see through the noise? For that we turn to our good friend critical thinking.

Put simply, critical thinking is asking questions. You don’t simply accept what you are told; you examine the evidence yourself. Never turn your health over to an outside authority without studying it. If you can’t ask why, then you won’t learn anything in life. Cross-examine all the food advice you get, even from diets that make sense to you. Always ask why.

One of the biggest things that critical thinking will do for you is help you avoid arbitrary distinctions that come with many diets. What’s an arbitrary distinction? One that does not stand up to repeated questioning.

For example, many Paleo diets draw a line in the sand and say that only vegetables grown above ground are good for you and anything from below ground should be avoided.

Let’s examine this. What is the reasoning behind it? The idea is to control blood sugar. Now we know that the . When studies first appeared around this many of the foods that really spiked our blood sugar surprised people. Some foods considered very sugary turned out not to be.

So if the idea is to control blood sugar, how is eating corn on the cob (which grows above ground) with a glycemic index of 78 better than eating a Yam (which grows below) with a glycemic index of 54?

Doesn’t make sense right? So how can it be correct? Answer, it probably is not. So take it with a grain of salt.

As you examine other claims by various diets, such as the China Study’s “all meat is toxic”, ask yourself if that really passes the sniff test? If the five longest-lived peoples eat meat or fish how does that work? Conversely saying that eating meat is good for you does not add up to eat it all the time and in huge proportions, Paleo style. Since you are not out in the woods, hunting and tracking an animal for days and then carrying it back to your tents are you really getting enough exercise to eat Paleo?

I will add one more note to the evidence against the China Study that I have not seen anywhere else. To be clear I am not against vegetarianism. If that’s the way you want to go, that’s perfectly reasonable. What I am against is making claims that vegetarianism is the only choice.

The biggest flaw that I see in the China Study is historical context. I happen to know a heck of a lot about Chinese history, as China is the subject of one of my new novels. The China Study was conducted after about 50 years of war, famine and societal upheaval. Studying what they ate and whether they smoked during that time doesn’t begin to cover the half of it. Not many people live through civil war, the death of 50 million people in the famine years of the Great Leap Forward or the indiscriminate violence and turmoil of the Cultural Revolution without deep scars that effect health. What they ate is only one factor.

Again am I saying vegetarianism is bad? Nope. Please eat lots and lots of vegetables. Have a bunch of vegetarian meals a week. Eat lots of salad. What I am saying is that from a critical thinking standpoint it doesn’t add up that no meat or fish is good for you.

That brings up another important point. I want you to guard against the distortion effect of taking a side in a debate. Sometimes one camp in a debate has to make an argument so forcefully that they end up distorting their own arguments dramatically. For example, one of my favorite food bloggers, Denise Minger, makes numerous arguments against the China Study. They are very well reasoned and I don’t find Dr Campbell’s responses all that compelling from a critical thinking/reasoning standpoint. The problem is this is yet another public diet-wars dust up that confuses people. Because she had to make her arguments so stridently and defend herself from multiple counter-attacks, Denise might have you thinking that she eats meat every day. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. On her own blog she describes a typical menu for herself. It’s mostly RAW, lots of fruits and veggies and a lots of fish, Pescetarian, which falls into line with the diet of another long term superstar of health, Jack Lalanne who said, “In [my early years] everybody was saying that you had to eat meat to build muscle, so I went on a meat thing for awhile. Now I only eat fish–no chicken, no turkey, just fish. I get all of my protein from fish and egg whites.”

One last type of thinking to guard against: Philosophical arguments against food. It is fine if you want to not eat certain types of foods for philosophical or religious reasons. However, don’t assume that because of your philosophy, that science backs you up.

Many vegetarians are vegetarians for humanitarian or philosophical reasons. They don’t like the way modern animals are treated on factory farms. And they’re right. In the past farmers treated the animals they raised with respect and killed them with dignity. Now they treat the animals like garbage, packing chickens into tiny cages, feeding them a horrible unnatural diet and pumping them full of antibiotics to keep them from getting sick in their overcrowded, squalid conditions. Whether you think animals are bio-robots for our personal use or you care about animals it’s hard to look at the pictures from the last link and think anything good can come of it. Ask yourself this question: how could animals living in horrible conditions, eating unnatural food and subjected to endless stress and suffering produce anything that is not sick? Do you think they won’t pass that sickness on to you? You bet they will.

So look for meat from local farms or places that mandate that the animals be treated humanely. It makes a difference not just from an ethics standpoint, but in the vitality of the meat you’re eating.

That brings us to another point in our journey. What is in the food you are eating?

 

Chemicals in Food

Going back to our nasty fight between the Sci-Babe and Food Babe, the Science Babe called out some of the Food Babe’s more extreme statements as well as her more colloquial use of the word toxin. And yet, to make her point she had to take such an extreme position herself that she essentially missed the entire point.

Let’s take something as simple as color level IV in carcinogen class 2b in Starbuck’s Pumpkin Spice Latte. She points out that it’s basically safe, a position probably validated by years of science.

And yet, so what?

The real problem is why is it there in the first place?

Simple. It’s there to trick you.

How? We are wired by evolution to see richly colored foods as healthy. In the wild, during our hunter-gatherer days brightly colored foods meant they were alive and healthy. Desiccated food that lost its color meant it passed its prime or had gotten infected or eaten by pests. In the wild this worked pretty well, as Mother Nature rarely produces food that is not nutrient dense. We evolved with the plants around us and the plants come with all of the requisite stuff we need to survive and thrive. Using food coloring in foods is a way to trick your brain into thinking what you are eating or drinking is attractive.

Ask yourself this: Is there any diet on the planet, by any dietician anywhere that includes sugary, whip cream covered, colored additive coffee on its menu? No. Why? Because a Pumpkin Spice Latte contains between 300 and 470 calories with zero essential vitamins and nutrients. That is 23% of your calories for the day if you are consuming 2000 calories on average. In other words, 23% of your intake for the day does absolutely nothing to nourish your body in the least. So who the hell cares if it is safe? The answer is moot. Its intent is to fool you into drinking garbage. That’s all you need to know.

Even worse people are not just drinking this once in awhile. They are drinking it every day! Walk into Starbucks and read the calorie count on the board some day. See if you can find anything but regular coffee or loose leaf tea that is not 300 calories of nutritionless crap. Go ahead. Give it a go.

The Science Babe also says nonsense things like “sugar is sugar.” This tells you absolutely nothing. Yes it’s true, that sucrose is sucrose at the chemical composition level. The sugar in a tangerine is the same chemically as the sugar in your coffee, provided the processed sugar doesn’t have additives or filler to make it cheaper to produce. But again, so what? How your body metabolizes that sugar is much more important.

As the Cancer Treatment Centers of America notes, “The body breaks down refined sugar rapidly, causing insulin and blood sugar levels to skyrocket. Because refined sugar is digested quickly, you don’t feel full after you’re done eating, no matter how many calories you consumed. The fiber in fruit slows down metabolism, as fruit in the gut expands to make you feel full. ”

In other words, if I dump a packet of sugar into my coffee (or two or six) my body sucks that sucrose up like it’s going out of style. It mainlines 100% of it. Yet when I eat that tangerine, my body has to do some work. It has to break that tangerine down to get at that sugar. That requires effort. Some of it never gets metabolized, as it gets flushed out with the left over fiber that helps clean out our systems. Thinking that eating processed sugar and eating a banana is exactly the same thing is completely missing the point and only serves to confuse people.

Of course that doesn’t mean you should pound apples all day long and think it will have no effect on you. As Jack Lalanne says “just because one apple a day is good for you does not mean ten are.” Again, this comes back to common sense. The proverb says “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” not “ten apples a day keeps the doctor away.” And it’s safe to say people two hundred years from now will not be saying “a Pumpkin Spice Latte a day keeps the doctor away.”

 

Pesticides

As Consumer Reports notes 85% of Americans are concerned about pesticides. So let’s address those for the sake of completeness.

Organic produce does use pesticides. It’s a myth that they don’t one that I’ve been guilty of misunderstanding at times in my earlier posts. But the Consumer’s Union, the folks behind the excellent Consumer Reports, found that the residue of pesticides on organic produce is significantly less. However, organic farmers also try not to use pesticides in mega-doses, using farming practices that have been in place for the several thousands of years before we created synthetic pesticides. Yes, we managed to keep the pests away long before giant agribusiness came along to save us from ourselves.
Synthetic pesticides have a bad track record. In fact, humans have a bad track record when we muck with nature. DDT came out of the World War II period. In fact, many of the first synthetic pesticides started life as chemical weapons. Not a great pedigree, if you ask me. After the war was over, the corporations behind them said hey what could we do with all this poison? I know we’ll put it on food! As a friend said to me, “It’s like some comic book villain stuff.” If you wrote it in a story, people wouldn’t believe it.
The list of . The list is not getting any shorter. With over 600 compounds in use in the world today, including at least 5 in the US banned in Europe, it will continue to grow as we find the unintended consequences of these substances, which are usually not apparent until years down the line. DDT was found to kill off Bald Eagle young.
We can’t predict this kind of far reaching consequence until it happens in the real world. When companies “prove” that these chemicals are safe, they’re doing so in isolation. When we put things into the real world things get messy. A perfect example is neonicotinoid insecticides that may cause colony collapse. A controversial paper a few years ago proposed that neonicotinoids may lay at the root of the mysterious colony collapse disorder sweeping through bee colonies world wide. Critics pointed out that the traces of the chemical found in beehives might not be in high enough concentrations to kill them off. However, a paper published this year in Nature says the reason is simple: Bees simply like the taste of neonicotinoide laced food better. Ouch. Now that is something we could never foresee. That’s how nature works. We live in a complex world with unexpected consequences.
Some people are quick to point out that organic foods are more expensive. This is not true across the board, but that doesn’t mean it’s not generally true. It is. But saying they’re too expensive does not say a single thing about their health properties. This is an economic statement. Yes, they can be more expensive. If you can afford to buy them then do it and feel good about it. If you can’t, you should still eat fruits and vegetables, as they are the foundation of any good diet. And in case you can’t afford them Consumer Reports has an excellent article on which countries to get your produce from to consume the least amount of chemical warfare residue.
Another critique I’ve seen that is utterly nonsensical is saying that all foods are chemicals. Plants and water are chemicals. Well, yes. What does that have to do with anything? Saying everything is a chemical is saying nothing at all. The difference we are talking about is the difference between DDT and water. Yes both are chemicals but one generally sustains life unless forced down your throat as a form of torture and one takes life. This is just basic fallacy of composition and says nothing useful whatsoever. Ignore it.
Proponents of synthetic pesticides like to point out that it’s the concentration of the chemical that makes it dangerous. True. Of course, folks making ten cents a day in a 3rd world country spraying chemicals may or may not deliver a uniform dose to the plants with consistent quality control. Concentrations vary widely, as the Consumer Reports article points out. You can get fewer residues on certain plants just by buying from certain countries. This also doesn’t take into effect the run-off of certain chemicals and the way this stuff invades our environments and spreads out, multiplying the concentration and it doesn’t take into effect the long term effects of eating small doses day after day after day.

 

Economic Arguments

I’ll keep this as simple as possible. If you can’t afford organic foods, then you should still eat vegetables. If you live in an area that has regular farmer’s markets or live in a rural area with lots of locally grown produce you can eat good, cheap, healthy food. Find a way. Vegetables are the foundation of a healthy diet.

 

Just Because You Walked into Whole Foods Does Not Make You Healthy

You have to read labels in Whole Foods like you do anywhere else. Buying something as simple as dried bananas is not so simple. More often than not you find even the brands they sell at WF are dusted with extra sugar for no reason I can fathom. Bananas have plenty of sugar. They don’t need more. So you have to read labels carefully. Whole Foods or Sprouts are not free passes to randomly pick up whatever shiny packaging catches your eye.

 

Conclusion

Hopefully that gives you a better idea of how to go about eating to get your health in order. I’m hoping to put all of this research, and ideology into a book when I complete my current fiction projects. It’s tentatively titled, The Common Sense Diet, but I may give it a flashier name later so I can compete with the likes of the Blue Zone and Primal and all the other catchy names out there. Then again, maybe I won’t. I like “common sense” thinking about how to eat. Even if common sense is not all that common. You just received the Cliff’s Notes version right here. As one of my friends noted, it’s not that complicated. You don’t have to read thirty books on the subject. A little bit of reading, some critical thinking and listening to your body goes a long way. So what are you waiting for?

 

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Buddha Lessons: The Gateless Gate

Enlightenment is understanding that there is nothing to understand.

Every line of questions leads nowhere. Think you have a great philosophy about life the universe and everything? Keep asking it questions. Keep going with it.

It will fall apart.

All philosophies are houses of cards. They fall apart when you shine a light on them.

That’s why nobody in the entire history of the world has come up with a philosophy that everyone hears and says yes, that’s it! Lots of great philosophies out there with lots of followers. And many of those followers believe it is only a matter of time before everyone gets on board. They are wrong. Not going to happen. Ever.

Nobody can make a philosophy that’s true for everyone. And if a philosophy is not true for everyone it is not true at all. It has holes. Everything has holes. Life is a leaky boat.

The reason is that everything that exists in the dreamworld we call life doesn’t really exist. So the further you go, the more contradictions you find. Everything is contradictions. It will trip you up. Think you figured it out and turn around to find out that you haven’t yet again. Hell even this text is hopelessly riddled with contradictions. How can it not be? It’s born of this world, a world of contradictions.

At least that’s the best explanation I or anyone else ever came up with. Nobody really knows. You can’t really know. It’s just yet another attempt to explain the unexplainable.

There are no external things that can teach you any of this. You can only explore it directly.

Ask yourself questions and keep asking questions. It takes about two years before you realize there is nothing you can figure out. Nobody can help you in this.

This site and others mark my two year journey of discovery even though I didn’t know it. I thought I was teaching people. In fact, I was just teaching myself.

If it takes longer you probably aren’t trying very hard or you got lost in one of the distractions along the way. You’re like Ulysses who got sidetracked in the land of the lotus eaters and became a mystic or guru or energy healer or whatever. But those aren’t enlightenment. They’re professions.

Real enlightenment will not bring you anything. You will not become a famous guru heralded through the ages. Nobody will sing your name. In fact, nobody will really listen to you at all. At best they will just think you’re a weird person or a smart person or nobody. Or worst they will think you are crazy or try to kill you for wrecking their cherished belief systems.

You’ll be alone in it.

You won’t be able to tell anyone about it because nobody will be able to hear you. And it will all be pretty damn funny.

Words will be coming out of your mouth or you will write them on a page and nobody will be able to understand them at all.

It can’t be put into words. It can’t be taught.

What about the Buddha or Jesus? They taught right? What all great spiritual teachers teach is compassion and contentment. That’s what people really want. Buddhism could be called compassionism. It’s not really about enlightenment. What about the Buddha? He was enlightened right? Well let’s explore what I’m saying about asking questions.

First, did the Buddha really say anything? Well no. He didn’t write anything down. Nothing. Zero. Zip. Neither did Jesus. In fact, not even the people who were hanging around in his time wrote down anything he said. It took hundreds and in some case a thousand years before anything they “said” got written down. Now look at this from the common sense perspective. You played telephone as a kid right? You saw how bad people’s words got mucked up in about ten minutes. What about a thousand years when the original people who supposedly said it have died and all of their sons and daughters have died and their sons and daughters and so on? Ask yourself, is there really any chance whatsoever that they got those words right? No.

So we have no idea what any of the great teachers taught. But we do know what the religions that sprang up around them taught. Jesus has the golden rule. Buddhists have compassion. Compassion for ourselves and others. Treating others like you want to be treated. Sounds pretty good to me. It’s not enlightenment. Not really. But it may be a by-product of enlightenment and a good one. And its reasonable. Sounds like a good way to live so go ahead an be that way if you want. Be compassionate.

What about modern teachers like Tolle and Osho? Great men. Wise. But they are not teaching how to become enlightened. You can’t get enlightened listening to them. You have to do the work yourself. They are teaching contentment. No mind. Stop thinking so much about stuff. Don’t worry about the past and the future. Why? Because there is a lot to worry about there. We may not live another moment. We may not make it much further. The past it filled with trauma. The future is unknown. So let it go. And be more like the animal you are, happily living your life, ignoring the train wreck that is coming. A good philosophy, but not enlightenment.

The realizations you discover along the way will be yours to cherish and yours alone. Along the journey you will discover all kinds of “magic” tricks and see the divine bones of the universe as you link with cosmic consciousness and yet none of those are enlightenment. They are just more distractions to discard as quickly as possible.

For some reason you were driven from a young age to figure it all out. You saw a problem. You sensed something wasn’t right, like being in a dream and realizing it’s a dream. And so you pursue it in all kinds of wrong places. And mostly people never figure it all out. Why? Because they don’t really want it. They can’t go all the way with it.

At the end of the rainbow is nothing. Literally. You get nothing. It won’t make you famous or happy or content. Only giving up on this insane pursuit will get you what you want. Contentment.

Secretly, you already know everything there is to know. There is nothing to know.

You already know the truth when you break down in tears at your worst moments: that it is all meaningless. We give it meaning by what we do.

Enlightenment is truth realization and the enlightenment sold to you by various spiritual modalities is not real enlightenment. It’s an unenlightened person’s vision of enlightenment. It’s an advertisement.

Nobody lives in a state of constant bliss. It’s not real. It’s a marketing ploy.

Everyone around you suffers. No exceptions. Didn’t the Buddha “say” life is suffering? It is.

No way around it. Best you can do is try to be compassionate. Love your kids and friends and lovers and pets. Try not to create more suffering in the world.

Generally you will fail because that’s just the nature of the world. Try to “fix” things and they just get worse. Spirituality is trying to let go of as much unnecessary suffering as possible.

Spirituality is not suffering.

You already know this. Somewhere inside. There is no mystery to life. It’s self evident and self obvious. But your brain is talking too much. It comes up with all kinds of imaginings and nonsense. None of it is real.

I am going to wreck enlightenment for you. I am going to show you the last page in the book, spoil the ending for you. Don’t worry, it doesn’t matter. You won’t understand it anyway, until you do. Or you will think I don’t have it or that there is more to it that that. There isn’t.

It’s all a gateless gate.

That phrase comes from some Zen koans written in the 1200’s. It’s a mistranslation, but it sounds good. The actual translation from the Chinese is something like the gateless door or the gateless barrier.

But I like gateless gate. It’s more refined. Sounds better. More poetic. Easier to remember.

The book is a bunch of nonsense sayings. Why? Because it’s all nonsense in the end. Life is nonsense. It shouldn’t exist but it does. It should make sense but it doesn’t. And yet it all makes perfect sense. That’s the thing about duality. Both sides of the dice are true and not true at the same time. Huh? Exactly.

Anyway it’s meaning is simple. Like all truth it is that which can’t be any simpler.

There is no barrier to enlightenment.

There is nothing holding you back.

There is nothing keeping you where you are.

None of it is real.

After you get through the door, you’ll realize there was no door at all.

It was all in your head or it was the circumstances or the people babbling around you.

Nobody is keeping anything from you.

It’s all right there, written in bold print on the cover.

Just open your eyes, stop thinking, stop talking, stop trying.

There is nothing to figure out because it can’t be figured out.

The gate is there but it’s not.

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Writer’s Toolbox: Tropes – Black and White Insanity

The deeper I get into writing, the more I learn. There’s always something new around the next corner. Learning never ends. As such I wanted to start sharing some of the bits I’ve picked up along the way, in the hopes that other writers might find it useful.

One of the sites I’ve spent a ton of time on is TV Tropes. At it’s worst, it’s a bit of a maze and one that can lead you down some serious rat holes. Many articles barely qualify as tropes and aren’t very useful but such is the nature of a community built website.

Yet at its best, the site lists all of the essential patterns of fiction. You simply can’t write a story without them no matter how much you want to rebel against “formula.” There is no escaping the universal patterns so you might as well learn them. Don’t worry. They’re in every story you have ever loved. So, don’t fight them. Go with them. In the coming weeks and months, I’ll spend a little time highlighting the best ones as time allows.

Now some folks see tropes as bad and others see them as good. Nothing is all good or all bad. We all exist on a continuum of good to evil. Some shade closer to one side or the other. A gun can hunt game and feed a family just as easily as it can murder someone. A lamp can bath a room in light, but I can pick it up and hit you over the head with it.

In fact, thinking about things as binary, good or bad, is the essence of the trope Black and White Insanity is one of my current favorites and one I use as an ongoing theme in my stories. The best tropes reflect deeper truths about life. This one is about how people view the world. In childhood, we tend to see things as all evil or all good, but as we get older we start to see the complexity of people’s behavior. It’s the essence of the Biblical quote “when I was a child I saw and acted as a child but when I became a man I put away childish things.”

Seeing the complexity in things allows you to develop more realistic and rounded characters. You can’t build a great villain if you don’t love him in some ways or see some truth in why he does the things he does. In real life, you don’t need to look hard for examples. Gandhi changed India, but also beat his wife. Martin Luther King had affairs but changed thinking about race in America. Genghis Khan slaughtered numerous people, but also fostered cross cultural connections between Europe and China, spreading ideas and building bridges. Mao’s own black and white insanity made it impossible for him to see that the people around him were telling him what he wanted to hear, causing the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward and yet the man also smashed a brutal and vicious feudal system where a tiny fraction of people controlled everyone’s life from beginning to end, a system that had persisted for two thousand years.

Of course, not everyone sees the complexity of life. Many folks never get out of this binary thinking and it’s these people who often end up causing the most problems for the world and for your heroes in fiction. When people view their own views as entirely right and justified and everyone with a differing opinion as evil and entirely wrong, it leads to some ugly violence and a complete inability to communicate. I’ve often been guilty of it in my own life. Guess what, everyone has. Some people never see that though. They never take the blinders off and that’s what this trope is all about.

We see this type of thinking now about the Baltimore turmoil. Watch people’s Facebook streams and you’ll see people who favor one side or the other completely, as if there are no good police officers or no good people of color. This is “you are with me or against me” thinking. Either all cops are good or all blacks are bad or vice versa. This type of thinking strips individuals of their own personalities and makes them nothing but a cog in a larger machine. Rather, a more nuanced approach is to understand that blacks have something to be pissed off about, but that smashing local business where people get food and medicine will not help much. Likewise, we don’t have to condemn all police for the actions of a few and those few should pay the same penalty as other criminals for killing a man over a minor infraction. In other words, some cops are good, some bad, blacks have some legitimate things to get mad about and yet burning down your local pharmacy won’t do any good for anyone. This is what it means to understand the complexity of the situation. It allows you to see it for what it is, a senseless tragedy that hurts many, many people and will continue to hurt them for years.

Black and White insanity directly leads to overly harsh convictions, justifies extreme violence and the destruction of lives and property. It’s a central cause of wars. Throughout history this type of thinking has been used to solidify discrimination and violence against all types of groups and people. In other words, if all of XYZ group is evil, then wiping them out is all right. It’s not hard to look around the world and see this trope play out every single day across a huge swath of life and society.

This is an excellent trait to give to villains and it’s the one that writers most often employ when they want to show rigid, vicious authority figures, such as in books like the Hunger Games. Give it a whirl in your own fiction and you’ll find it’s a trope with a massive amount of depth and complexity.

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Why Do We Do Terrorists Jobs For Them

Every time I see another terror attack I mourn for the victims.  I lived in NYC during 9/11 and felt the acrid cloud of black and white smoke that burned my lungs.  I saw the people leap from hundreds of floors up rather than burn to death.  And yet, as soon as I mourn for the victims, I find myself cringing as I wait for politicians and governments to use it as another excuse to subvert the very principals that make democracies special:

freedom of expression
freedom of assembly
freedom to say and think whatever I damn well please.

These are unique traits not shared by most societies.  And they’re under attack everywhere in the world, in places like Russia and China and the strong man dictatorships of the Arab world and unfortunately, right here at home and now places like France.

The calls for restricting freedoms are inevitable. They come like clockwork. As soon as the Hebdo attacks hit I knew another round of restricting freedoms was on its way.  It didn’t take long.  As the New York Times pointed noted in article a few days later:

“In Paris, a dozen interior ministers from European Union countries including France, Britain and Germany issued a statement earlier this week calling on Internet service providers to identify and take down online content “that aims to incite hatred and terror.” The ministers also want the European Union to start monitoring and storing information about the itineraries of air travelers. And in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron suggested the country should ban Internet services that did not give the government the ability to monitor all encrypted chats and calls.”

These are stupid, arrogant and incorrect approaches.  In short they do the terrorists work for them.

And here’s the worst part: they don’t work.

I study China extensively, as I’m working on a SF book that takes place there.  They have some of the most restrictive internet freedoms on the planet.  They just .  They’ve clamped down on foreign sites with widespread blocking.  Their internet is a slow, buggy, piece of shit that’s is painful to use.  I know, I was there for a month and watched countless sites spin and spin as they tried to call out to some google service that randomly got blocked that week.  They attack VPNs that scholars and everyone else with a brain in their head use to get around those blocks and get news from the outside world.  And yet China still had a string of violent assaults from Uighur nationalists that have only accelerated into a full blown armed rebellion in parts of the country, as the Chinese authorities react with typical iron fisted tactics.  No matter how many professors and student groups they lock up with two hour show trials they attacks don’t stop.  No matter how many sites they block, it keeps going.  It always will.  We can NEVER achieve perfect stability in this world.  We always exist on the razor’s edge.

Security and freedom are diametrically opposing forces.  They’re like sunshine and rain.  They don’t exist together.  If you have openness, you have many avenues open to exploit and attack.  We see this in computer software all the time.  A browser that lets anyone install anything at ends up allowing some malicious bits to get through.

Representative democracy and theocracies are opposite ways of seeing the world.  One favors freedom and the ability for individuals to choose their own destines and the other believes that God told them that a few violent morons should be in charge of what everyone else thinks, says and does.  These two ideologies can’t get along.

I say let democracies do what they do best: speak freely.  That means offending some people.  Why?  Because not everyone agrees on everything.  If someone thinks all vegans are psychotic tree huggers, you can be well assured that die hard vegans think meat eaters are barbaric animals killers.  The two won’t ever see eye to eye, no matter what they say.  Our job is not to make it so they can’t offend the other.  In a democracy you have no right to NOT be offended.  You’re free to take offense and to call the other side a bunch of idiots and buffoons.  What you are not allowed to do is suppress their right to call you the same and point out your ideas and weak and dangerous.

Let newspapers and blogs and zines and every other written form make fun of other’s belief systems.  If your beliefs can’t stand up to scrutiny and ridicule, they aren’t very good beliefs after all.  Let cartoonists lambast them, let people call each other ignorant, stupid, arrogant, obnoxious, and then print a zillion copies and replicate it all over the internet or sell them to whoever will buy them.

Instead politicians propose the opposite.  They swiftly propose the same tired garbage: let’s restrict what people say.  Let’s tip toe around, lest we offend people.  Let’s cut back in just this one case.  Oh and this one and this one too and these five others we couldn’t think of, because once it starts it never stops, as our forefathers discovered when they started this amazing, wonderful, imperfect, maddening country of ours.

Terrorists attack us to do damage to these principals.  So why do we do their job for them every time?

For a small supply of bullets and few fanatical soldiers, tiny, radical groups of terrorists have successfully encouraged us to restrict freedom of speech, ratchet up warrantless surveillance, reduce transparency in government and the judicial process and in general trample and spit on our own values in the name of keeping everyone safe.

Here’s the truth: you can’t keep everyone safe.

People die.  They die every second of every day by the millions.  You’re going to die.  I’m going to die.  But your changes of dieing from heart attack, cancer or on the freeway tomorrow outweigh your chance of getting killed by a terrorist bullet by a trillion to one.

And so why do we give these bastards so much power over us?  Why do we power up a massive surveillance state and restrict what people can say because a few moronic fanatics blow themselves up or shoot some people?  They should be a footnote in history and yet they’ve costs us hundreds of billions of dollars, done untold damage to our values and in general made us look foolish.  And they still won’t go away.  You know why?  Because they never will.  You can’t kill all the bad guys in the world.  They keep coming back.  They are produced in endless supply just like everything else.

If you adopt the methods of darkness, the darkness inevitably corrupts your from within.

The terrorists attack don’t destroy us with fire and ice, they cause us to turn inward and destroy ourselves.

There is only one answer: stop doing it.

Remain open.

Fight efforts to get more secretive.  Oppose everything that restricts transparency.

Oppose limits on our right to say whatever they hell we feel like saying, whenever we want to say it.

Je suis Charlie.

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