image: jamesjyu

The fourth estate refers to the media in general and the printed media in particular. It is this esteemed institution that creates, drives and steers public opinion. Public opinion is a creature to be handled with care at all times.

Today a man in the High Court, Robert Murat, is handed damages of some £600,000.00 because the newspapers - or certain editors and certain journalists - decided he was fair game. They proceeded to tear the man’s life to shreds with innuendo, libel and general muckraking in the pursuit of a scandalous headline and increased sales. It became a free for all, a feeding frenzy carried out under the licentious veneer of ‘public interest.’

Know your own mind. Always deal in facts where possible. Always check your sources.

Once I was the foreman of a jury in a high profile court case. The details I cannot go into, but what this taught me was to always reserve judgement until all the facts of any given situation are known. It is only then that you are in a position to assess anything and draw a conclusion, where it is possible. A skilled lawyer will attempt to subliminally influence the minds of jurors, sow seeds of doubt, cast aspersions upon the character of an individual, their actions, challenge and confront assumptions and attempt to persuade them of the validity of their own argument.

You will encounter this regularly, though not in a court of law necessarily. I worked in television and the amount of behind the scenes preparation that goes into giving the impression of spontaneity is quite startling. The majority of viewers are oblivious to the massive campaigns behind every image they see, from make up artists to lighting technicians. All working to give the impression of something casually flung together.

The whole media is a carefully engineered mechanism, designed to influence, persuade and where possible control the free will of its subscribers. The most coveted space in the world is your mind, it is the one place where you can assert your own desires. Do not surrender it to outside influences without first assessing what they want from you.

Note: I enjoy nothing more than to read the papers on a Sunday morning, watch a good documentary or a movie. It’s a question of doing these things on your terms. 

image: pingnews.com

I have always thought that my time was limited. Limited by external factors over which I had no control. I understand now that my time is limited by internal factors over which I do have control. Perception is everything.

Consider the view that time is linear. It is how most of us think of it. A line that travels, and along which we travel, perhaps like being on a train. Another way to think of it is that time is like a stream or a river, the current is the direction it follows, where it has come from is the past and where it is going to is the future. Where it is now is the present.

Let’s expand that idea a little. We have a linear, directional perception of time as a three vectored thing, the past, the present and the future. This perception relies upon the idea of time as having a constant speed and direction, as in it will always be moving forward and it will maintain a regular speed. We go along with it as if we were floating in the current, perhaps as a leaf or a twig might float along in a stream or a river.

Where does a river lead to? All rivers lead to the sea. They merge back into the ocean from which they originated via the process of precipitation. The point at which a river enters the sea is an estuary.

Time is more accurately thought of in this way, that it is like an estuary rather than a stream. An estuary is a combination of currents, directions, eddys, vortices, whirlpools, sudden shifts and rapid changes. So there are temporal variations, there are alternative structures in the fabric or flow of time. Even to the extent that there will be points or zones where it appears to move backwards. There will be places where it seems to alternate its speed and even change direction.

The real leap in cognizance is your understanding that you can be where you want to be within that. Consider your own mind as being an intermediary between the different strata of existence that we are a part of. Your perception is a mediator between the various states that it is possible for it to occupy. It is limited by your beliefs which are essentially a distillation of what you have been told.

Remember the extraordinary young gymnast Olga Korbut who dazzled the world in the Munich Olympics of 1972. She pushed her craft to such an extent that many within the gymnastics world thought that the apex of gymnastics had been reached and there was nowhere left for it to go, perfection had been accomplished. Fourteen year old Nadia Comanici at the following Olympics in Montreal achieved an unprecedented six perfect ten scores. She was the product of a training and coaching system that simply did not tell the gymnasts the things they were being asked to do were unheard of.

These were children and so the luggage of later life did not hamper them. They simply wanted to please their mentors. By which process they became an unstoppable force in the world of gymnastics, achieving things that had been hitherto thought impossible.

Your mind is the same. It is limited by its beliefs of what is possible or not based upon very conservative thinking. The way that you think is not designed to allow you to become emancipated or illumined, it is essentially a means of surviving adequately in the modern world. That is what usually makes the biggest noise. The desire to conform, not in a pejorative sense, to the prevailing conditions is the most acute pressure source we as social entities find ourselves in the wash of.

It’s a little like having the most extraordinary supercar, being sat at the wheel with all the controls at your fingertips ready to respond to your instructions but being stuck in a traffic jam. That’s how it is for your mind, it is restricted and hampered by the situations it finds itself in. 

Like the perception of time as a simple linear construct, we understand most aspects of our lives in a very faltering way. Like Nadia Comaneci it is about believing that you are capable of producing giant leaps instead of tiny shuffling steps.

image: ts1230 

Part of the extraordinary mechanics of the human mind is its ability to transcend its current situation and either endure or persist anyway. You may think this refers to people finding themselves in a war torn region of Africa. You may think it refers to Jews in the Holocaust but it does not. It refers to all of us at all times.

Studies carried out among the brightest and the best have found that young people, bright achievers at university, find themselves overwhelmed by the expectations put upon them. They find themselves almost paralysed by the stress of modern living and its high achievement ethos. In point of fact, they find themselves as far removed from happiness as it is possible to be.

Chemical dependence and suicide levels have skyrocketed in our age and we have a major problem. We have, in esence, given rise to a world that people can’t cope with the complexity and structure of. The pressure to be and do something that may be alien to our intrinsic nature is massive and we see a generation emerging for whom celebrity and the extravagances presented within the mass media are almost assumed to be automatic entitlements.

Fine if you are one of those who actually reaches this mythical nirvana at the apex of material and cultural abundance. The difficulty arises when you are not among this illusory elite and are lacking the cognizance to give your perceived ‘failure’ a context. If you are raised on a diet of soap opera, ‘reality’ TV, celebrity magazines and a media that shoves the accoutrement of this meaningless world in your face and thereby shapes your mind, expectations and cognition you have a big problem.

It’s like the old adage about winners and losers. You set twenty kids up to run the egg and spoon race at school when they’re five years old and you have created the dynamic for nineteen losers and one winner. Statistically that’s not so good because that means that you have created fertile soil for all sorts of things to grow in that will play out in later life. I’m not against competition, it is within the natural order of things, but I am against creating false perceptions of what life is actually about and then releasing people into that model like so many lab rats.

We don’t know what the eventual outcome of this bizarre celebrity based culture will be but the indications are that it is not for the best nor will it, to juxtapose utilitarianism, create the best possible outcome for the greatest number of people.   

What are you left with? There are the simple things that have underpinned the circumstances governing our lives for time immemorial. What the Greeks called Eudaimonia or the Good Life. The idea of right thought and right action bringing about the best outcomes. As an individual you will serve a master, whether it is adherence to celebrity nonsense or indeed Eudaimonia, your thoughts and actions will be subliminally directed by those things you have allowed yourself to fall under the spell of.

Mostly your formative years will have placed you in no option scenarios whereby you will have eaten whatever was served up before you. Now you are a more discerning individual your dietary options have refined and you may be more selective. The Good Life is there to be had, whether you can find your way to it is a matter that is in your hands.

I believe that by the law of attraction you will get what you are looking for, we all do. The art is to know what it is you are looking for. If you are a seeker of wisdom then wisdom will come to you, if you desire celebrity then it will come to you. The real skill in living a life is to have the wit to perceive the eventual outcomes of what it is that you choose to serve and what its ultimate payment to you will be. Equally you must bear in mind the charge it will exact from you before giving its bounty up.