The People Of The Labyrinth

The other day I realised that a very large number of people I have come across over the years who rank in the relatively quite well-off, tend to act in a noisily ungrateful way regarding their spouse's wealth and more or less everything else about them...! Why do they get involved, afterall, one may well ask, if they so detest their situations. You get the typical answers – chemistry at the start, wild optimism, all the apparent material benefits, and so on.

But I say! This churlish behaviour once the reality sets in.

The fact is some people are thoroughly nasty when you get right down to knowing them. Louis Theroux could do himself a great big favour by turning his cynical lens on the daily life of Rupert Murdoch, for instance – but of course, neither would he be allowed to nor does he have the guts to try.

Yet I still feel for some who enter the world of moneyed society and rather innocently become skewered on the naked rapier tips poking up all around the place there.

It is not a morally bad place. This is not what I am implying at all. But I am saying one needs to be advised about certain things: poverty closes doors that ought in any case not to be opened to too many human beings under any circumstances! Money, opens doors but it opens too many doors!

Which brings me to the continuation of my myth story from the last time – the labyrinth. The modern Western myth recounts the tale of the seven young boys and the seven young girls sent to King Minos to be sacrificied to the monster the Minotaur inside the labyrinth from out of which it was virtually impossible to escape. The victims would wander around the twists and turns ever more lost until they would suddenly make one terrible turn into the waiting Minotaur who would kill them and literally eat them. The ships that subsequently returned to Athens would hoist a black sail of mourning.

However this is not the story certain Greek families tell. For a start I have to tell you that the word 'labyrinth' has a particular meaning that is not transmitted commonly today. Yet, in some parts of modern Sicily, they still preserve the doorways to certain shrines said to have been built by Daedelus, the architect of the original labyrinth, and upon which there are carved mazes and symbols that have some reference to that famous legend – or myth, if you like. Daedelus retired to old age in Sicily, as you know. Like Plato also did later on. Labyrinth, is a word which means 'two leaved,' and is mostly rendered to be a metaphor of the two-leaved axe that was supposed to be favoured by warriors and used in sacred rituals around the time of the mythical King Minos. But this story is actually about the two leaves on the sides of the outer vagina. People commonly have supposed the 'two leaves' to be about the dual halves of the puzzle 'labyrinth,' but it is about the types of doors and doorways at the beginning and inside the segments of the unicurved maze, and it is especially about the symbolism and psychology of sex – about which the rite of the labyrinth is in fact actually concerned.

And so, I shall extenuate my explanation and now advance to quote a little of the Roman Pliny, about the ancient mythical city of Minos, namely that it had sacred, rich, and wonderful palaces of 'many doors and galleries which mislead the visitor.'

So do not think that all who lead lives of extreme wealth spend all of their time generously tolerating the simple, or the unlearned, or the noisy nouveau riche, and welcome them into their inner sanctums where they can easily trample unrestrained all over olde wealth culture and cause mischief and mayhem. The world today, by one reason and another, even has such uncouth people trampling around in very high places, in dictatorships, at the head of large corporations, very especially in the media, and in churches and open democratic politics as well.

At a certain time, the gods will destroy such antics. First, societies use rituals properly, and retain an understanding of their proper meaning and purpose, and then, when there is degeneracy, and people lose the meaning of their culture, there is eventual destruction. One cannot grab and hang onto power and money because of brute force and selfish ignorance and stubbornness. Well, that is to say, one can – until something happens to you. The point of the Noah story is that one can and prudently ought to build a safe haven against the deluge caused by divine displeasure, and that one can and ought to hand-pick who and what is allowed in. For me I suppose, it is just a matter of whimsy really, that I quite like the fashion stance of the Dutch fashion House 'People Of The Labyrinths.' All the same, there is a great meaning behind such myths and stories, and advisedly such things are well-recommended to those who would step into the real world of old wealth and aristocracy. I shall not be talking about the Dutch men's clothing group 'Suit Supply' just for the moment... But you might look them up to get an idea about it!

Regards,

Calvin J. Bear

The Daedalus Barrier

Something known as the Drake Equation describes the probability of human-like intelligent life in other parts of the Galaxy as being very highly likely, if not indeed, virtually certain.

The Fermi Paradox questions why, if the Drake Equation is correct, we haven't encountered it yet.

I need not go too deeply into these two concepts here – with the internet these days, any reader can, if they aren't already fully familiar with either concept, read up on them quite exhaustively.

However to me there is a great deal these days that passes for science and intelligent thought, that is in fact really nothing more than present-era folklore. Yes, these sorts of ideas contain some mathematical contructions that are meant to reflect or even represent the situation that is being looked at. And these constructions can be quite complex and impressive and look the part. But this is a kind of a trick, a way to infer legitimacy by associating a weak conclusion with something external that is solid and strong itself.

A Monstrous Bull

My own concept borrows a great deal from an ancient Greek, and by our own family folklore, an ancestor of mine – a certain Daedalus, of Ithaca. This Daedalus once made an incredible maze for King Minos, in which was kept the deadly and horrible monster the Minotaur. Once a victim entered the maze, they would never be able to discover the way out, and were forced to go further inwards, into the centre of the maze, where the Minotaur was, and where they would meet certain death – according to the most common versions of the tale.

Humans appear to have this remarkable inclination to create mazes of the mind for themselves to wander around in, where none actually exists in the outside physical reality. Reality consists of a large number of shapes and sizes of a very large number of things: some things are smaller than we can easily see, some too large individually for us to perceive what they are as a whole complete thing. Some things we know of as the result of many of them appearing together and thereby becoming more perceptible to our senses at our own human level, some we know of only one face or aspect of them at a time since they are quite gargantuan in their complete form to our human level of sense and perceptions.

The immensely complicated maze of Daedalus was overcome through the device of a simple ball of a single string that the holder unwound as they went into the maze, and then could wind back up in order to retrace their steps and find their way back out again.

Without such a device to assist us to 'cheat,' as it were, the complexity of 'the maze' - whatever that maze is - our perceptions and intellect are at the mercy of potentially overwhelming odds that run against us: fear of the monster in the dark, fear of our own demise, doubts about the clarity of our senses, the problems of perspective that confront us when matters are not on the human scale, and the fundamentally gravitic forces of crowd mentality... The problem of encountering other intelligent human-like life in the Cosmos is not resolved by the Drake Equation, or any better understood by the Fermi Paradox, because in the way of our perceptions is the Daedalian Wall.

Of course the original myth of the Minoan Maze contains a lot of complex psychology – and certainly, the sacrifice of virgins to propitiate the monster is a recurring theme throughout human history. In another post soon, I shall, I am sure, voice some of my own views about things like the Golden Apples of Hera, and the black sailed ships returning from Minos. And the virgins.

Best, Calvin J. Bear.

Good-Looking Russian Models

Maybe because I have now been sucked into playing the “From Russia With Love” Sony PSP game, I think I am going through a Russian-stuff phase.

I mean yes, it's true I still have a few friends left in the post-KGB world... Who tell me by the way, that every Russian outside of Russia attributes all the good things there to Putin, and every Russian inside Russia blames him for all the bad things.

Well, in all events, I remind myself that I have always had some regard for the work of the Russian designer Slava Zaitsev and recently I had the chance to see some of his work again in a private showing in South Africa. Zaitsev distinguishes himself from the rest of the European design/fashion world by engaging models who are both not dead, and not ugly. Granted a lot of what he does is not suited to the places I find myself in most of the time – hot, dry, or hot, humid, and monsoon-y. But the workmanship he accesses and the fabrics and materials are first-class. And his vibe is more positive and uplifted than perhaps the economics of Russia is entitled to necessarily reflect. On the other hand it's funny how some things of quality and standard seem to survive the worst of times and get swamped more often when the broader environment is awash with a lot of simply dumb money.

Zaitsev's vibe is also more complex and intellectual than many other designers'.

So... 'Complex, intellectual, high standard, quality ingredients...' That's obviously the stuff that turns off the denizens of the noisy media these days. They prefer stridently common, zombie-eyed, near-to-death scrawny, and dystopic, persons and visions – with a lot of noise, cursing, and chaos thrown in, literally. I saw the BBC movie critic's Mark Kermode's rant about Disney's 'John Carter Of Mars,' and immediately figured that this might be reasonable entertainment. Every single movie I've seen panned by popular media critics has proved to be the exact opposite of what was said about it and JCOM is no different.

The thing that is most unfair about this particular production is the sheer lack of respect for the hard work given by the cast – Lynn Collins in particular sells her role in the film through commitment to the producers and a commitment to credible adult belief about her character, and it works. The whole thing works and I believe there is not a single expletive throughout the entire movie either.

I could say something really nasty about people like Kermode, but I won't because for one thing I know for sure that – and I have said this before, the Rothschilds are not Zionist Illuminati World Domination-seeking bastards – but that there are certain ideological alliances and slants by the poster children of the gutter media and the popular yellow press is quite clearly evident to me. People ought to aim their conspiracies at this crew! And it's all about the material power that has gone to their collective heads, and not to any allegiance to a political or a national or a religious or an ethnic or a racial cause. Do I think that movie critics are seeking to be the financial powers behind the movie producers' thrones? Oh yes I sure do. But, as many of you already know, I have always been a strong supporter of the words and sentiments of Julia Phillips when it comes to the film business. Her words are complex, intellectual, displaying personal flaws and weaknesses, yes – but true enough for those who can fathom them. She seems to say that ego and the arrogance of unchallenged power drives the animus of the rulers of the channels of mass communication – of which I would say movie critics rank as a set of such 'rulers.' And unlike Robert Parker, the seriously flawed wine critic, movie critics have produced nothing at all of relevance and value to the role into which they have inserted themselves in everyone's lives.

Best,

Calvin J. Bear

Great God Pan Is Dead

What led me to this is my five year-old profoundly autistic son, who recently has made us watch that scene in Kubrick's '2011: a space odyssey' – you know, the one with The Blue Danube Waltz behind it – over and over, and over again.

And then, he (the kid) took over my main computer and has been watching Vladimir Malakhov dancing with the Austrian State Ballet – The Blue Danube Waltz...

Obsession must be in the genes; everyone knows I talk a lot about Kubrick!

Anyway. I can't dance but my mother was a good ballet dancer and teacher as well. So I'm going through this 'Russian' phase right now, and watching Nureyev and Zakharova and so on.

Meanwhile, over a few days that movie 'Zeitgeist' has been on one of the local channels. I'd have to agree with this flick that there are a few problems with the 9/11 official story – to say nothing of the fact that back at the time I had been plagued for months by market traders in the US and Euro pushing scuttlebutt about another 'go' at the World Trade Center, seeing as how a year earlier there had been a car bomb incident carried out in one of the basements.

However, I have to disagree about some of the other conspiracy stuff voiced in Zeitgeist. Hey, I mean it would good if these conspiracies were really there and run by brilliant geniuses who can pull the wool over everybody's eyes all the time. As it is though, the catastrophic Euro Central Bank and euro currency just underlines what a bunch of idiots they all are, who supposedly 'run things' and conspire to control everything and have power over everything and everyone. Here's why I say this: you can't have a fiat currency without a discount risk-free bond market – otherwise what you have is not money but only unfinancialisable tokens. And we are seeing and will continue to see until its demise, the dysfunctionality of the euro because of this. This fatal flaw - and failure – has already shifted power away from the dimwits previously at the top. Germany, unlike the popular notions about its supposedly bullet-proof position, is an accident waiting to happen. Germany, is nowhere near as financially strong as the media has been portraying and as the Euro-centric technocrats have convinced themselves that they are.

Zeitgeist uses this following phrase to outline the grand conspiracy that has been rolled out over the last, more than two thousand years: 'mainstream religions are based on fantasies and mythical stories and invite the masses to believe in a superstition or even many superstitions in order to enslave them.'

And that all sounds quite possibly true and great and all except for this thing about human mentality and intellect and I would say even consciousness:

See, I believe that Rudolph Nureyev could fly... ...and that isn't a superstition, even though it is a myth though one that I regard as having been turned into a myth for ordinary people because it was actually a material fact that is too difficult for ordinary people to accept or comprehend. Every serious appreciator of classical dance knows that Nureyev could certainly fly and it's a waste of time saying otherwise to them. This is the meaning and essence of art. And it is the transcendent aspect of the human. There is nothing romantic or mythical about the hard work of the living human in being able to acquire the art of flying...

Muslims believe some magical horse flew Mohammed up to heaven... And maybe they have a good reason to believe this; I have a good reason to believe Nureyev could fly - I've seen him do it. So why should I deny the Muslims their little nonsense? And like Jesus, Nureyev was both a god and a man!

Nonsense is of course quite wonderful. It is entirely human and what makes us interesting and worthy of sentiment. And Jesus, of course, according to the clever Greeks who wrote about him, is Love itself. And Love, is certainly not, a superstition; that is to say, to believe in Love is not to believe in a superstition.

Modern, fashionable, atheists spend a lot of time worrying about the sexual evils of religious organisations, and the moral and ethical corruptions of these organisations – and they insist that no god, properly defined, could permit such organisations to proceed in the name of that god, and therefore, that there is no god at all. And they pretend to speak about the scientific facts to justify their view.

But that would be like saying that Nureyev could not fly, which is a way of trying to belittle a very great miracle, of which they who do so are entirely possessed only of a mere jealousy about, because it is not something they, nor anyone who cannot believe without qualification or equivocation about the fantastic-turned-into-reality, can ever achieve themselves.

To be a real atheist one must be genuinely objective, and not so propelled by this emotional and biting animus against the Superior.

But you see, therein lies the whole point - some human beings understand art and transcendence including artistic transcendence, whilst others simply do not have the soul to do this no matter how much of a show they put on for superficiality's sake in order to claim they have any depth at all. And certainly, for those, who do not have this type of soul, they neither need a god nor is the existence of a god necessary for them to exist. Because that is all they do too, exist. Until they die and then, nothing. And why not. Nureyev, however, said this of himself and of his approaching death, 'the lights will go out and it will be darkness, but I will live again and I will dance again.' According to everything experts accept and say of him, he was a notoriously promiscuous, gay male, who also had sexual relations with women sometimes too and, if you go by religious fundamentalists and probably Dr. Phil as well, he's certainly nobody you should take as a prophet of any decent god!

But for me - for someone who can fly, to say that he will overcome Death is something coming from a person with a sound scientific understanding of the superhuman, the miraculous, the infinite – and worthy of taking very serious note of.

It's become very fashionable to be an atheist, because of the supposed advances of science and as a contrary position to a sexually compromised swathe of churches. These modern fashionable atheists are just as prurient about sex as any dogma-bound religious fanatic is. Luckily for me, I'm an Ithacan whose god (the one who often resides in Ithaki and favours the sons and daughters of that place) is often at odds with the other gods, and is not generally as nice, nor always as peaceful or polite, as the modern, fashionable 'experts' on god, seem to think that a god must always be, in order to be 'a real' god at all. To answer the deepest questions on this subject, one requires to be like the Nureyev of the Mind – able to leap and to fly with grace and land again without hurting oneself. Very difficult. Very mysterious. Though not completely impossible. And something within the scope of the human to be able to do. Though not just any and every human all the time.

Oysters a la Russe

Calvin J. Bear

Composition In Design

Okay I have to admit my business has been doing rather well over the last several weeks and that is probably the main reason for the recent slow-up in postings here. It has also been interesting to see what levels of site visits are maintained when the posting rate changes.

The exact nature of business currently undertaken by my consultancy is still not able to be detailed, as it involves publicly listed corporations with direct implications for the related share prices. And such things are quite rare in these difficult economic times; well, when it comes to positive implications things are rare at the moment!

On less secretive matters though there is one area about which I could regale people long and hard on at the drop of a hat: design. Industrial design, creative design, production design – all kinds of design.

Like Karl Lagerfeld, I am not ashamed of superficiality when it comes to beauty. The superficial is important when the word is not being employed to merely convey 'shallow' or 'a facade.'

I think the great secret to the look of a design – and its intrinsic philosophical or intellectual implications – is in composition. Design composition comes from hard work, well-structured thinking, intelligent decisions. The word taste is used by people discussing art and design but the reality is a whole series of actions and choices and decisions that link functions and elements together.

Image composition is the secret to good photographs, and it is also true of any mechanical item where the function of that item is meant to be part of the lifestyle of the user of the item. The Germans like to have ze multi-funktional instrument, but then the market outside of other Germanic-minded people becomes limited if the product is stupidly ugly – but then a lot of producers make that mistake, not just the Germans!

Perfect composition creates greatness in design. Personally, I find the interior design elements of the new Mercedes SLS terribly flawed, and this detracts from the car's potential for greatness. It is true in any case, that many big corporate designers are stuck in the past – the SLS is a streamlined Dodge Viper look melded with the old original Mercedes Gullwing. Still it is visually appealing and that's what counts. It is not avant garde but why does it need to be if it looks modern and new, stylish and streamlined, and – beautiful.

Again, to quote Lagerfeld: 'a respectable appearance is sufficient to make people more interested in your soul.' I agree with him. A profoundly good and wise and wonderful person may certainly exist behind a rough or roughened exterior within a surrounding context of misfortune, accident, or privation. But I think the choice of the adjective 'respectable' is intelligent, and meaningful. And I have found that in business, in life, and especially in human personal relationships, a 'respectable' appearance will show you a person who will never let you down, but tiny little flaws in what they composed of their own appearance, will announce to you the virtual certainty of failures to come.

A person might show damage, material limitations, or even relative material poverty – but these are not flaws. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, is a person without visible damage, material limitations, or material poverty, and yet shows countless surface flaws to any student of human nature. You can judge a book by its cover. This book will have a substance seeking to make late middle age chic, an arrogance about who deserves to be wealthy, and a nature that fits easily into blue jeans. Some gun-slingers make their name though, by shooting people in the back. They're the ones who find it easy to smile all the time. They've never faced a real challenge or a fair fight in their lives. Watch a tyrant or a political brutalist: they're always smiling or at least being cocky. Am I right? That's not a respectable way to deal with other people. Give me a serious-looking guy. And always beware the Ides of March.

Best,
Calvin J. Bear

Overcoming The Modern Mental Staleness

In my own personal view of myself, I regard myself as the student of about three or four quite significant and at one time world-famous individuals, although they are mostly not that much remembered anymore. Professor Munro Leaf from Harvard was a tutor of mine for a short while – he created the story behind the first Disney fullscreen colour cartoon: Ferdinand the bull. I got engineering lessons from some people I won't name although one was trained in Nazi-occupied Holland and I'd have to say, gave the impression to me that he was of two minds about what Nazism meant to him.

As far as psychology is concerned I am very proud to say I was something of a disciple of the late architect, psychologist, and polymath Paul Ritter, the man who laid the foundation stones of the original World Trade Center towers.

The one thing that I can distil from having known all of these people is a clear impression – as a result - that today's world possesses a kind of a 'spirit of deliberate mental staleness' and the consequences of this are bound to reflect in its buildings, architecture, social patterns and ultimately in the inevitability of widespread political, economic and social failure.

To build things worthy of the appellation of 'greatness,' is a lot lot harder than the government of Beijing knows, for instance, and it's not about 'doing more big buildings,' and takes a considerable amount of substance more than just the facile supplying of money which can of course be easily accomplished by drug cartels operating in Miami, as much as it can by the central planning committees typical of most contemporary governments.

To be great you have to know how to transgress the protective and self-defensive psychological umbra of other people, be able to get under their skin in a nice way, and make them much more human, rather than simply more 'televisual...' And really, beyond 'more human,' you also have to progress things and propel people into the future. You have to be avant garde.

One of the problems about blandness and intellectual staleness prevalent everywhere today is in the expression of the style and substance of today's woman. I agree, for example, with a few other bloggers about the recent interpretation of 'Irene Adler,' played by Lara Pulver, in the popular new television series 'Sherlock.' At first it seems she's clever – maybe cleverer than Sherlock himself - independent, sexual, and very bad, only for the whole thing to disappear under the idea that she is a puppet of Sherlock's nemesis, Moriarty.

A lot of what is passed off today as interesting, exotic, erotic, and attractive – is simply trite.

And following on from the last post I wrote about the Heineken beer commercial, why the superficiality when they could have extracted so much more from a legitimate mondo-ethnic source like: Bowyer-Yin's “Meet The Tiger.” Playing on the presumed superficiality of contemporary people is a mistake; yes the ad works, but it could have worked so much more. What are they all afraid of, these drips who have been hogging the commercial world for so long? And that includes Rupert Murdoch, who is an old fool. And all the politicians who kow-towed to him for so long are going to have to deal with people like me and the blogs that will go down into history standing in stark contrast to the self-important nonsense that has been written up till now about reactionaries like Reagan and Thatcher and Harry Lee – the nonsense that was mostly put up by themselves and their appointees funded by them to create the propaganda. Lee, for instance, purports in the Wikepedia entry about himself, that he was an interpreter for the Japanese, and no one says a word about it. Well, of course, you won't hear any complaints from the 50,000 ethnic Chinese (at least) who were genocidally massacred by bayonet and knife by the Japanese when they first entered Singapore. So much for the bullshit from Mr. Lee about how he was a great torch-bearer for ethnic Chinese interests.

Calvin J. Bear

Heineken's Froth And Bubble

Decadence. The importance of this idea – especially today – should not be lost to you under the noise of the news media screaming at you about Greek debt and 'part default' and 'austerity.'

After the zenith of an age, there remains the overgrown and the overbuilt – unfunctional and existing only because of the wastefulness of the supreme owners of the money and the power that was construed at the height.

Are you familiar with that current filmic commercial advertisement for Heineken beer? You know, the one with the magician and the appearing rabbit, the guy, the girl, and the Chinese waiter and the curly-haired singer in the tuxedo... It's called 'The Date.' The Art Director was Alvaro Sotomayor.

This ad was not dreamed up in fifteen minutes, if you know what I mean. I know people, or at least once upon a time I did - at board level at Heineken. They are very much the kind who believe in a cosmopolitan ideal and a modern cosmopolitan world and lifestyle. And in that vision, Asia has long been a significant market for Heineken even though they are also totally a global brand.

It's a great ad. But it is also the very essence of the meaning of decadence: referring to everything yet tied to nothing, lacking in intellectual depth, pointless, meaningless, and possessing no moral values. Believe me I am the very last person to preach to anyone about moral values(!) however it is decadent; it expresses a decayed intellect and a nondescript salad-mix world. Okay today's kids will love it and care less about what it is being lost in the process. And okay it will sell beer. And that's the problem with decadence, it happens when the money no longer cares or needs to care about anything other than serving itself and devising rationales for its own careless behaviour.

The art deco world and the modernistic industrial gothic world were thought of as examples of decadence. They are not. Human beings used the overhangs of that overbuilt past wealth and there and we got a slightly positive image of 'decadence' as a result. No one is going to use anything from the imagery or the ideas or the economics reflected in this ad 'The Date.' They are all perfectly useless and meaningless. The argument will of course be raised that multi-ethnic, multi-cultural egalitarianism is the point. It's not the point; selling product is the point. And that's because a totally mindless lack of regard for any of the cultural motifs used in the ad is shown by the producers. It is all facile and fatuous. Cultures are cultures because they have depth and meaning. 'Fun' is not an excuse for terminal shallowness. When you have money, and you have the sense of humour to sponsor and project 'having fun' on a global media platform, you also have the cultural responsibility to demonstrate that you care about something too. Ultimately, this ad shows absolutely no respect for the past, and for the real people of the past, and for culture and no matter how many times these monied upstarts assert they are respecting the egalitarianism of modern 'mondo-cultural' youth, you really have to wonder whether it is all because they have no clue and are fatuous, rather than that they are just being 'carefree.'

Because they are forever just being superficial. And there is never any depth coming from them at all. And the froth and bubbles are starting to look a bit thin, more like scum, in fact, than froth. And that is what I think of the leaders of the Euro-zone, too. Everybody looks upon the guy with the date in the ad as if he is a superstar worthy of greater respect and admiration ahead of everyone else... Certainly this is the vision the Euro-zone leaders have of themselves, and certainly the way ratings agencies, most banks, and the Murdoch media, look at themselves.

It's a fatuous fantasy. Sort of forgiveable in a commercial about beer.

Calvin J. Bear

Lantern Festival

I have always been doubtful of the criticism about synchretism. Well, not only did I grow up in a highly multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society – there were two people within the household who, originally orphaned after World War II, grew to their teens not knowing that they were in fact full siblings, yet having originally been raised one by a Chinese family, and the other by an Indian family... One spoke only haka, the other mostly only tamil and a little english.

And it was virtually a complete accident that they were employed within the same household too, with my father and mother going through birth and immunisation records with a schooling register that was being formed post-war, from memory I think just to work out what real ages students were, and discovering the facts of the situation when they realised who the actual individuals were these particular details referred to. I won't go into how the matter was eventually revealed to all the people involved, suffice to say it all went extremely well indeed.

The internet is doing one thing very well and that is to underscore that the world of human beings is actually only one world. People today can and do rapidly access information and cultural ideas and aspects from across the entire globe and there will be an inevitable social, cultural, conclusion to that in the future.

Fifteen days after the beginning of the Chinese Lunar New Year, is the lantern festival. I understand this as a Taoist tradition – because that was the predominant Chinese ethnic cultural group dwelling in that part of the world where was raised. I do think in fact, that it is indeed a Taoist tradition fullstop, but of course it has been changed around in varying parts until today, say for example in Singapore, it is quite a bizarre, commercialised, spurious portrayal of something, I'm not sure what, but certainly something the Singapore government feels will appeal to the tourist dollar. Singapore is the very 'least Taoist' place in the world that I can think of!

Synchretism is one thing, but then there is such a thing as simply a bad human, and there is such a thing as a bad type of government or system, or a malicious tyrannical dictatorship- these things are not about differences of philosophy; they are about evil motivations and corrupt and evil motives. Whether they are disguised or rationalised spuriously, or whether they are open and obvious, it is possible to detect the difference between what are merely distant philosophies, and otherwise simply narrow-minded, single-minded, self-aggrandizing and self-important attitudes.

However, just for the moment, I shall focus only on the Lantern Festival, its beauty and its subtletly, and its myserious aspect, which is typical of all things Taoist. On the lanterns, there are meant to be puzzles of various kinds, that you can contemplate and try to solve, as the light breezes touch the swinging brightly-coloured candle-holders... as they slowly sway on long strings in the warm evenings...

Best,
Calvin J. Bear

Fantasy, Gambling, And Fast Money

Listen, the only kind of money you want to concentrate on going after is fast money.

I can't be sure of what type of person reads this but I've made myself a rule not to compromise on my own style and expressing what my innermost thinking is based on what experience has taught me. The fact is I known that many people carry preconceived positions on many things and worse still, there is individual brain psychology going on that manhandles whatever anyone says, not just what I might say.

Jesus Christ said this: the love of money is the root of evil; do not rely on material riches because when they fail you, what will you then do?

Money, you see, in the form of something captured, or kept, or held to you, is static. Meanwhile everything around you moves. Money, and even the value of it, while you're still holding it, can seem to evaporate into thin air because of the scale and rate of external change. If you have a real lot of it (money), do you know that if you stack it, the notes on the bottom can actually wear away over time? There are banks that I have seen in Switzerland and Germany, with special stacking machines made typically in those countries – machines that all they do is stack and re-stack notes to slow down this wearing away process.

Today, you see the mainstream media carrying on about how the IMF(!) is the reason that countries (for instance such as those countries under pressure in the Euro zone right now) can have a viable and valid currency. And that is absolute rubbish.

The only reason you can have a viable and valid currency is that people have a belief in it.

Nobody believes in the IMF except those inside its closed circle of power and who want to preserve its power and position of political influence and I would add, interference.

Consequence: money is evaporating under everybody's nose because the IMF is not imaginative enough to engage people's genuine belief which is starting to move away very fast.

So we have this set of socially common misconceptions about valuable things which includes an aversion to gambling, fast money, and fantasy.

Nonetheless, if Mrs. Georg Philipp Telemann never gambled, and her husband not have felt an obligation to pay her debts, her husband would have written far fewer baroque pieces of music for us to enjoy today. If fantasy were not so powerful, we would not be able to anticipate the sci-fi movie spectacular coming out this year John Carter of Mars, originally written by Edgar Rice Borroughs of Tarzan fame. Fantasy makes Hollywood movies! And lots of money!

Lynn Collins in the new John Carter Of Mars movie

In the search for the real and the substantial, the usual default human position is risk-aversion and what appears to be prudence and restraint. This default position arises from a mental laziness, and a fear, and a group delusion about safety and security. Now my meaning here is that in order to attempt anything with a chance to succeed that involves risk, imagination, unique action, and daring – you have to accept that to possess the skills required and to train for them to function successfully is more elevated a thing than even is in the hands of the people in the IMF right now... So I don't really look down on what I have been calling mental laziness and the fear of failure – that fear is real and a sensible feeling. Jesus Christ, in my own view, did not come to speak to everyone and what he really was saying was directed at the human in its peak potential state. In that state, magical thinking, is both realistic and capable of affecting the external material world. But all that stuff, is not for ordinary people, but extraordinary people.

Best,
Calvin J. Bear

Lace Masks And Ethics

People can get lost in their own sophistication. Have you ever noticed that there are people who will launch themselves into a dissertation on mathematics, or god in relation to mathematics(!), or advanced physics, or some other thing full of special obscure terms and terminologies that no one else in particular really has much firm grasp of – if indeed anyone does at all...

And they do so with verve, mainly because they feel the thrill of having discovered that they have what passes for them as intelligence. And of course intelligence has had such a great reputation in the past in society generally so it's no wonder they feel a thrill.

I suppose intelligence for these people must seem like some kind of a new toy.

I intend to bring the word 'ethical' - believe it or not - into my argument here. The governing spirit of things that are done – the ethos – in our modern times, could easily be simply erraticism. And so, those entangled in their own webs of complicated ideas and who really are simpletons on every other level – can't tie their own shoelaces and so on – may be acting quite ethically, in laying claim to the present-day high ground of the human intellect. : ) They are presenting a true depiction of their ethos!

From where I stand, today there's just too much – too many foolish and thoughtless iterations of someone else's original ideas or innovations – and none of it shows the formal consistency that a genuine form of ethics would donate to a validly intelligent human endeavour.

But one has to be careful to distinguish between outward style as deliberate studied design of a human facade or mask, as opposed to the purely opto-graphical capturing of human form as an aesthetical appreciation. This is the difference between the work of Helmut Newton and say – Ellen von Unwerth (who created the photograph to the right). I don't personally believe Newton wanted to show an appreciation of the human form, as much as he desired to explore an intellectual juxtapositioning of human things but involving the human form and this of course comes across almost always as erotic and sexual style. Von Unwerth, on the other hand, I would say explores a simple direct aesthetic appreciation of the human form as her main photographical subject matter without too much extra symbolic meaning. Her work often appears decadent but why this should be so in the sense of style escapes me. Maybe the human form is decadent!

People who know me know I have a great interest in design – industrial design, commercial design, also design in personal style as typified by the well-known stylists: Panté, Lagerfeld, Armani, and so on.

The intellectual ethics of style – once you disregard the current ADHD-afflicted, erratic mindset – goes like this:

A theme must be consistently carried through across the whole of the subject matter. The lace face-mask is mirrored by the lace-covered high-heeled shoes. This implied intellectual vision of style shows the fabric (lace) as translucent, confidential, ornate yet honest. It reminds us also of the Tao – black and obscure or impenetrable in part and clear and penetrable in another part. The surface and the internal. The front and the rear. Et cetera. It recalls to us the Hermetic Code: 'As above so below.' What we cannot see will be as one with what we can see.

Beneath the skirt we will expect the underwear to be black Chantilly lace, oui? And so too must the wearer themselves also be translucent, confidential, ornate yet honest. This is the meaning of personal ethics in relationships. Of course this is just one example of something where style is consistently expressed. I am not sure that people today quite so deliberately intend to express themselves as definitely as the image example I have just suggested, but the effect is that a personal inner haphazardness still comes across. We cannot escape the meaning of what we look like. Whether we like it or not. Some people think they are being very clever by employing complex facades and calling it style – but old hands see through them very easily.

And Kippers For Breakfast

This week I've been staying at a golf course resort. The course itself was designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr., whom many regard as the world's all-time best golf course architect.

I haven't played golf in recent years myself although at one time I was a good player. I was taught as a teenager by a knowledgeable old Scot and frankly I loved the game and eventually just couldn't abide the great swelling tide of new players who turned up around the late Eighties along with the Japanese money of that era and its interest in brightly-coloured criss-crossed plus-fours and all things Anglo-American.

But every cloud has a silver lining.

The money that swirls around the golfing world nowadays has meant that the hotels attached to most of the top-grade courses lack for nothing.

The standard of service, quality of food, solidity of everything you touched – were all reasons to be extremely cheerful, if not indeed quite joyous, given the miserable day and age in which we live right now. (It's just a stock photo of fruit on the right there - the fruit at the hotel was light years better. I'll take my own pics next time!)

And I take it kippers for breakfast is rather normal for golf resort hotels... It wouldn't be too normal in most Australian households in high summer though let me tell you!

When was the last time I observed as fine an array and selection of fruit, for example, at the breakfast bar? Nope. Can't think of an 'ever before.' And as a good friend of mine noted yesterday, if John says so then it must pretty damned good because he's seen it all before and been there when it was something special. I had to smile when I saw him raise his eyes at my explanation of the extraordinarily high quality of the food.

I guess there may also be some effect coming from the China market commodity boom going on in Australia – particularly in Western Australia - right now...

Frankly I like the prospects for investing in Australia again right now and I haven't felt that way for, what, um, maybe thirty years...?

Let me tell you this much about money: it's pretty dumb stuff. When it's really around in huge chunks it just goes everywhere and anything can make you a profit. It's around in Australia right now. And I don't think its going away any time soon either. People who know me know that in fact most of my money is in South Africa and London, but I still have a few things here in Australia that I never thought would do too much. Wrong!!!!! Just shows ya, don't it; eggs in different baskets and all that.

All the best,

Calvin J. Bear

The Spirit Of Education

I am not an educator. I am an entrepreneur and businessman. My father, on the other hand, who came from a very wealthy family in shipping, tea and banana and pineapple plantations, and eventually oil – was an educator. He gave up the family business to teach english, which he ended up doing for forty years after World War II until he retired.

He claimed the two best writers in the english language were Arthur Quiller-Couch and Joseph Conrad. And he said Conrad demonstrated that people who did not have english as the mother tongue often wrote the language better than native english speakers because they actually tried to follow the rules of grammar. Conrad of course, was not English.

My own view of why my father gave up what was and would have been an incredibly lucrative life, in order to teach people who were pretty impoverished after the war, was very probably due to the life-changing experience the war itself had on him.

Personally I cannot teach and generally I will not try either. People who want to learn and know they need to learn – as may have been true of those who had missed the normal years of senior schooling, but had survived the war – are vastly different from people of the modern era who know everything, have eveything, and are usually seeking only greater access to ever greater material wealth.

The power of real education can certainly gain you material wealth. But the point of it is not that.

Virginia Woolf is a classic case in question. She was born rich, and both vastly more naturally intelligent, as well as stunningly well-educated – but she had no degree and never attended any university. An avant garde personality living in the wrong time, and dying tragically.

(Pic is Tilda Swinton as Woolf's 'Orlando.')

Being educated DOES NOT necessarily mean having a degree. I know it is widely held that being held up to the scrutiny of academic peers, and testing oneself against a benchmark of peer-rated excellence is the philosophy behind the honour and desirability of the modern university education.

And there is also an idea that the best educations develop leaders in various fields. Including, certainly, in professional fields.

At the same time though, happiness itself, for the wise individual, cannot be counterfeited under great swathes of money only... Happiness for a human can only come from the deepest understanding of a very large number and variety of things, including, of oneself as well as of others – and sometimes, nay, I would say often, in order to arrive at such understanding, it is necessary to abandon the mercantile altogether, and what even appears to the less wise, the immediately practical as well, and devote all attention to the important. And what is important? The human spirit is important. The character of a person is important – meaning, as my father would say, it isn't what you look like but the content of your character that counts. It is not whether you won or lost, but how you played the game, as the saying goes. It seems platitudinous but I maintain it to be true.

In order to follow the path of real education, one must hold still against a strong tide. One must discover what is worth fighting for, really worth fighting for; it's about values and having them. So many great and wise people have gone before you, and they have left their writings, and their words and their works. When your heart strings are moved by the legacies of those certain particular human beings who have gone before you, then you have found educators to follow.

And when all others have fallen away, and that paragon leads loftily ever upward even to the very highest reaches, the most difficult of places, the most unhuman and absurd and humanly despised of intellectual concepts, may you still be there, following that star in its own brightest divine firmament against the black and ignorant void of the rest of empty space, the place to which all the merely finite must be consigned eventually. And then you will be happy indeed with your position in the Universe. Knowing more than the merely mortal. And as the Platonists say, befriending the gods themselves.

Meditative Trance Consciousness

I like to throw a few things around on this blog that might go to worthy people who are here because they like and follow ideas and do not suffer the ADD that 'the mass mind' apparently suffers from. I'll take the risk, frankly, that the ideas won't be going too far from this fairly limited circle, which is in the hundreds, not the thousands I should add. And I'll further gamble that those who are well-connected or business-oriented who stop by here are capable of filtering what I write so that whatever large scale use they might make of something 'exposed too early' will be unlikely to harm anyone.

And so with those words of preparation let me mention the name of Tomas Prevenslik.

In connection to breakthroughs that Prevenslik came up with, I want to underscore that brain neurophysics – and not just neurophysiology – involves tremendously complex science that is way beyond the scope of this blogspot to indulge too deeply in here. At the same time, one can say this much readily enough: the popular terminology used by New Age ideas often obscures valuable scientific technical understandings that we do have about various experiences that people talk about involving trance states, and conscious awareness, and seemingly unusual capacities.

Accepted theories of mind and memory raise questions about where or even how certain trance state experiences are recorded in the brain, and for reasons of facility I am forced to simply assert here that one will find that many in-trance experiences cannot be 'remembered' when back in a conscious state. And that is because popular 'techniques' are not as advanced as science actually allows the potential for them to be.

You can chant a money mantra, for example, all you like and very probably you will make yourself go into a type of sleep during which you will perceive things only to not be able to retain those perceptions when you 'awaken' again.

Prevenslik – and a few others who are also in the avant garde of brain science research – will tell you that wine 'experts' are quite wrong in what they say about what they experience and also quite wrong in claiming to detect certain perfumes and odours and flavours the way they have developed this whole virtually completely commercial tradition now about it. More likely, they are creating a trance state from discrete micro-electronic arrangements of molecules and perceiving connections inside neuron networks in their own brains, and not perceiving things directly from odour molecules at all. Gasp.

Yes of course I have amazing high scientific research and literature that you can access with lots of money, but I know most of you are not going to do that. You might though, want to contact me if you are an executive in charge of marketing wine for a very large corporation. Short of that I am certainly not going to reveal all, that's for sure. But I don't make my email address a secret: it's interdeq@iinet.net.au

I will say this: if you take any old money mantra and chant away at it, it might stand a better chance of 'working' if you can recall what you experienced while you were in the part of the routine in which you were semi-conscious, or even 'unconscious.' What the brain perceives in these states when 'prepared' to think on a certain subject is very important. Money is fast, unobtainable, fascinating (I quote Arturo Perez Reverta). To perceive where it is flowing one must be able to perceive also, and without critical prejudice, that which is fast, unobtainable, fascinating. That is the meaning of one type of real 'money mantra' that puts your brain into a directed type of trance condition where you can 'see' these things.

Year Of The Dragon - Ice, Water, Power, Money

Money, is like water. Without enough water, things die; without enough money things also die.

If you watch modern business, financial institutions, people, politicians -, they all have this habit of trying to cling onto money by stopping its movement and turning it into a fixed form. And if you extend the first metaphor, what they are attempting to do is 'freeze the water into ice.' Which takes some considerable energy.

And that is why the world is in the place it is in right now.

Leaving aside for the moment all the academic economic questions about whether or not it is possible to perpetually increase the Money Supply, at a more fundamental level we are simply dealing with a kind of desperation and a grasping for something that is not that clearly understood, in the vain hope and belief that by 'clinging onto it' you will somehow 'have' what is quite ephemeral when in a given stationary position. Money is fluid and mobile. The flow – and not just the flow, but the system of flow – is what's important.

The people who are genuinely rich are those who have the power to move money around – not people who possess 'iced' money. If the world has gotten itself into a position where so much of the previous flows have been turned into ice, as it were, the only money mantra worth talking about is one that can melt that ice that is under the hand of whoever is keeping it under their hand.

Of course, the beauty of money itself, is that outside of a refrigerated atmosphere, it does have the tendency to melt virtually all by itself.

I can confidently tell you, that heading into this Chinese New Year of the Dragon (beginning 23 January, 2012) there is a genie fire being lit under all that ice that governments, politicians, 'technocrats,' and nominally 'financial' institutions, are trying to clutch to themselves for dear life – and it will all melt away and slip right through their fingers. Into the system of pipes that clever people have devised and positioned to channel it.

Last pic is an Omani Frankincense burner...

The Sultan of Oman buys 40% of his entire country's annual production of Frankincense - which is regarded by experts as the best in the world - and he burns it 24 hours a day throughout the year in a huge burner open to the sky. Quite extravagant and exotic. 

Calvin J. Bear

The Sage and Oracle of OMSF

Sex Mantra

I want to tell you about something called a 'sarangi.' It's a musical instrument from India.

The sarangi has a much more ancient origin and mysterious past, than is commonly understood. Modern popular beliefs even in India today are stilted on account of the effects of the intrusion of several waves of invaders in history who went on to occupy and militarily and politically dominate the peoples within those states of the Subcontinent where the sarangi was played.

Although numbers of players can get a tune out of the instrument, the definitive way in which it is designed to actually be played, is known to only a very rare few.

Perhaps a tiny handful of old Sikh knowledgeable individuals might remain who could relate the truth about the sarangi, and then again it is doubtful that much of the modern generation care to grasp these stories in the face of the current era's iPad invader.

Commonly, even among literate middle classes who ought to know better, the sarangi is somewhat of a taboo instrument on the basis that it has a history presumed to be traced in the brothels or at least the sex priestess sub-culture temples on the edges of the Great Indian Thar Desert in Rajasthan.

In all cases it is an 'underground' musical instrument – a feature of an 'underground' and hidden, secret culture.

As you all know, the Garden of Eden is encircled by a wall of heat and flame and fierce angels with fiery swords barring the way to mortals... So not many people get into there anymore.

However... Let me get on with my story.

Sarangi means 'one hundred colours.' A mantra is some configuration of sounds, not necessarily verbally intelligible, which have 'atomic' sound elements in them and which are the keys to various transformational powers in the material universe. And they can get you into the Garden of Eden...

The great Maharaja Jai Sing II (1688 - 1743) commissioned buildings which gathered together and housed 'celestial' technical developments along with their formulae – or principles – which went along with the instruments to allow the actual functioning of those instruments for some purpose. But the point of it all is lost today even somewhat on the many recognized scholars writing about this endeavour which is known as the 'Janta Mantar.' They tend to concentrate on what appear to be astrological purposes for the structures and formulae written on them.

Jai Sing and his architect knew that the only thing the human being can do on this earth down through succeeding generations of Mankind, is improve on the physical instrumentation; for all the fundamental principles are already known (according to the Vedas) – which is why the formulae are written down on the outsides of the structures. There is simply nothing at all being 'discovered' at CERN that is not already written down and explained by the ancient Vedantas. Vibration of the precursor quantum particle of standard matter is the foundation of the entire physical universe and this is detailed in the Naad Vedas. Even the much-vaunted aspect of chirality which people think is 'new' is dealt with there.

There is a special type of 'guru' who is of a rather occult nature in Rajasthani culture – this is the Naad Brahma master of one hundred colours. This person understands such a vast range of nuanced vibrations (of sound), that they are really able to implement a fundamental atomic sound arrangement that will legendarily 'open doorways into heaven.'

At this point I shall recommend that you look up a video clip on Youtube under the title of 'Sindhi Music Sarangi' which is a short 2.16 minute piece played by a young Langa master called Sikander Khan. (His name means Alexander the Great King btw...) This example will appropriately show how the sarangi is played in the hands of a genuine cult caste mantrik. The techniques of playing are highly confusing to a non-adept and include striking the strings with the same fingers that also at times press down, vibrato and glissande to get the bowed notes, in note patterns that contrast to the vibration of hidden sympathetic strings inside the three sound boxes.

One must realise that to properly meditate on the sarangi music in question, it is vital to remove outside interruptions of all kinds, or at least as much as is possible.

The playing of sarangi (one hundred colours), especially in this particular piece, is not, as is captioned in the video clip, merely 'a set of patterns,' but is in fact a mantra arrangement carried out by a sacred and perfected instrument that guarantees the activated results of the mantra for the person hearing it, where a problematic, untrained human voice alone cannot give that guarantee. This however is not a money mantra (which is often what people want to hear) being rendered in the video clip, it is a sex mantra.

And yet, the comparison of a money mantra, to a sex mantra, can unveil aspects of how mantrams are expected to work generally: like the sympathetic strings resonating within the sound boxes of the musical instrument, harmonic vibrations set off effects at spatial distance, and consequently at time differentials, from the precise moment energies were formed into their specific deliberate 'template' pattern in their musical mantra formulation.

Unlike money mantrams, sex mantrams transform subtle feelings, thoughts, sounds, impressions, memories and visions and are able to do so almost immediately – whereas money mantrams act on grosser material elements and take longer to 'manifest.' A sex mantra can make an almost immediate connection on what in the West is called a spiritual plane, and even a person's actual 'consciousness presence' may be evoked in a sex mantra. A deva - though not an ordinary human being – can materialize their subtle physical presence through evocation by the mantra meditation of an adept.

Most of what you will read on the web listed as being or claiming to be 'mantrams,' even on Wikipedia, consists of devotional prayers only and not actual mantrams. A mantra is an unintelligible sound as far as human speech or words are concerned and therefore not able to be translated as 'hail this god' or 'peace/love/whatever,' as is the case with almost everything you will read which claims to be about a mantra, or claims to actually be a mantra.

Real mantras or mantrams are possessed only by great individuals and passed on only to those chosen by them. However certain great scribes throughout history have also been able to more widely disseminate true indications of these things.

In future articles I must outline some techniques to bring the meditative trance condition nearer to the fully-conscious normal sensatory state, otherwise a lot of the experience of mantra practice can be lost to the current memory and held only in the subconscious.

'Guru' Calvin J. Bear I

The Instrument And The Formula

“...The young scholar stumbles his way along and unsuspecting, falls into the deva maze. Unseen hands support him as, in a daze, he wanders further and deeper within. Wild and unknown flora reclaim their territory and overhead, the Monsoon thunders and heavy tropical rain crashes down in a deluge everywhere in the outside world.”

Having from a very early age encountered great masters in different fields and quickly having realised that they were nothing at all like the simplistic public facades and images presented that were mostly the ways they were known to the majority of the public – it is now not something I find all that unusual for me personally, that is, to accept an uncommon juxtaposition of certain things otherwise taken for granted, as I am about to expound on for you here now.

(Pic: Iggy Pop performing Johhny O'Keefe's 'Wild One.')

It is a fact, that on the two separate occasions I attended lectures given by Johnny O'Keefe (a globally-influential rock and roll star of the Fifties and Sixties) it was he, in fact, who introduced names such as Truman Capote and Frederick Matthias Alexander to me. He spoke of those people in connection with a movement centered in California - which included followers such as Aldous Huxley - that taught various techniques and ideas enabling artists and performers to project themselves to a large audience. He never stressed personal self-expression that much, rather, his claim was that it was all a question of using physical energy and connecting that energy up through the crowd via rhythm and music. I clearly recall him saying that his American agent, Lee Gordon, challenged him to build his (eventual) famous audience high energy level, initially from a few hundred working class people, tired and worn out from a long week, and unlikely naturally to have anything left to give to 'audience participation' of any positive nature. It is worth some passing note that a Prime Minister of Australia – Paul Keating – was also a music performers' agent in the same Balmain streets at one time slightly later on...

A relative of Johnny O'Keefe's, Andrew O'Keefe, is today a very successful and well-known Australian television and media personality who sometimes is called upon to relate what his impression of the great 'JOK' is or was. And he is retiring in the way he speaks of him and understandably for modern audiences underscores the 'fast life' aspect that is also one of the downsides of the particular kind of fame that JOK had.

If you look at a Youtube video clip of JOK performing something like 'Shout' and observe the girls and women screaming and the incredibly intense performance from O'Keefe, whichever way you look at it, it is hardly something highly intellectual. Mistake. O'Keefe was an erudite, highly-intelligent, and very self-analytical person whose performances were all strictly 'by design.' He knew what he was doing. There would be very few people alive in the world today who actually knew back then or know even now that about Johnny O'Keefe. To inspire cycnical, sceptical, tired, working people to give up so much energy is a scientific feat of no small proportion.

There is so much available on every subject today via the internet, but to me it seems not merely 'only' commentary, but mostly superficial coverage passed off on many occasions as 'the actual essence of the thing itself.'

In the next upload, I intend to render an example of something I learned from other musical masters, this time from India and the Far East, and something quite esoteric and also rather ancient. It will not be just commentary, but a practical functioning exercise and understanding of a 'mantra' or 'magical' formula. Well let's not say magical, but rather, mysterious. And, it will produce an effect. I don't think I can explain adequately via a website everything Johnny O'Keefe explained in person about the real and actual mechanisms behind engaging a large rock and roll audience, but I think I will be able to communicate more tangibly the nature of the next subject, which exposes and juxtaposes the genuine underlying hidden aspects of what is generally only superficially known, even to the mass audiences of the actual culture and location from which it comes – that is, specifically in terms of location at least, from Rajasthan, in North India.