I struggle with polarity a lot. I generally feel like I have to be 100% this or 100% that. Lately this had been a problem for me in figuring out a career. For some reason I have always felt like I should either run an orphanage in Afghanistan or become an investment banker, no option in between the extremes. This kind of thinking has caused me a lot of stress, especially because no one else has ever seemed to understand it.

As usual, one of our favorite bloggers, Steve Pavlina, came to the rescue. I happened upon his poston polarity in lightworkers and darkworkers. He says:

If you polarize as a lightworker, you are dedicating your life to serving the greater good.

If you polarize as a darkworker, you are dedicating your life to serving yourself.

Neither lightworkers nor darkworkers are inherently good or bad. They just are. Society has a tendency to idolize both: think Gandhi (light) vs. Walt Disney (my personal favorite darkworker). Both the lightworking path and the darkworking path lead to enlightenment in the end by seeing that all truly is one.

The way I see it, lightworkers feel compelled to pour their internal energy out into the world, turning outward to make the world better and more in harmony. Darkworkers, conversely turn inwards, drawing energy into them to put themselves and their goals in harmony. For example, if darkworkers wanted to break free from an oppressive foreign power (say, England) their revolution would like the American Revolution, they’d be willing to kill for their goal. However, take a similar scenario headed by a lightworker, Gandhi, and you find someone willing to die for the goal, but not to kill. This is not to say that lightworkers are necessarily pacifists, it’s more to illustrate that for a darkworker the ends would justify the means, while for a lightworker they would not.

On further investigation of lightworkers I found mostly New Agey sites like this and this. I also found an interviewthat says that lightworkers are the precursors and often the parents of the Indigochildren. You’ll also notice from that Indigo link that Laura and I frequently refer to a 1% of humanity which is what Steve Pavlina calls lightworkers and darkworkers.

As for darkworkers, the best site I’ve found is darkworkers.org. Perhaps not surprisingly, this site is much more well written and informative than anything I could find on lightworkers. The site’s owner seems like Nietzsche channeling Howard Roark, a calm visionary. I like him.

Why polarize? I’m very glad to have Steve Pavlina backing me up on this one. When you are waffling around, not committing to yourself or to the universe, you get very little done. Clarity of vision helps you achieve great things, whether it’s nursing refugees or building your real estate empire. Most people let guilt stop them from darkworking or let societal pressures stop them from lightworking. If you’re drawn to a path, commit!

Good vs. Evil?

Some darkworkers and lightworkers seem to be in a battle against eachother. Ayn Rand and Nietzsche thought Christianity had an overall negative influence on the world. Although Gandhi and Mother Teresa seem to have been very accepting people, I doubt they would have praised the self-serving work of various titans of industry. I don’t think it needs to be this way. If polarity eventually leads to unification and acceptance of both paths, we should have respect for those that have chosen a different route. One thing lightworkers and darkworkers can agree upon, hypocrisy is bad. Whatever their ideals, they stick to them.

A Middle Path?

Some people are very uncomfortable with this idea of polarity. Some traditions emphasize balance detachment from either path. Asmoday says, “Buddhism teaches one to really do both Lightwork and Darkwork. While through compassion they might be operating with Lightworker ethics, the path to Liberation is entirely inwardly directed energy.” That’s really what Buddhism is all about, a Middle Way, between the extremes. If that works for you, great. If light or darkwork, works for you, great.

Lightwork and darkwork are important because they give us more paths towards enlightenment. No one path works for everyone, not even the middle path. Choosing the right route on your journey towards enlightenment can make the difference between a miserable, bumpy ride and a smoother, fulfilling one. The best path is the path that you feel comfortable and energized following. Whether making money, caring for the sick, or meditating on a hilltop, you should feel good in your work. That is how you know you are on the right path. Good luck!

(Since discovering all this polarity stuff, I’ve discovered that I’m a lightworker who has been trying desperately to be a darkworker for years, thus making myself miserable and accomplishing very little.)

We’ve written and read a lot about goals: check out The Four Hour Work-Week or our previous goal post. I have a tendency to be skeptical of goals. I’ve had some great successes with personal goals and other times a great inability to get myself motivated for something that I was convinced was important. I didn’t really understand why this was until two events came together. I had a burning desire to accomplish a goal that I’d set for myself years ago but hadn’t had the motivation to do and I read Steve Pavlina’s article “Motivation for Smart People.”

Steve Pavlina’s article cleared up my previous confusion with goals. He writes:

When you set goals that are too small and too timid, you suffer a perpetual lack of motivation. Try all the emotional conditioning techniques you want, but you’re wasting your time. Deep down you already know the truth. You just need to summon the courage to acknowledge your true desires. Then you’ll have to deal with the self-doubt and fear that’s been making you think too small. There’s no getting around that if you want to experience lasting motivation. Ironically, the real key to motivation is to set goals that scare you.

It seems counter-intuitive that motivation may be highest when setting goals that lie outside your comfort zone, but I’ve seen this pattern too many times to discount it. Perhaps we have to set big, hairy, audacious goals in order to feel truly motivated. Maybe little goals just aren’t enough to trigger the release of motivational energy. If we think a goal is too easy, we won’t commit all our internal resources. It’s only when we set unreasonable goals that all our internal resources come online, including motivation and drive.

This immediately explained my previous goals, going to a tough college far from home, writing a 150 page thesis and learning Georgian. These things had all been personally audacious and ways out of my comfort zone. In fact, I was surrounded by people who told me I couldn’t accomplish them. This kind of prodding was just what I needed.

Steve’s discussion on emotional motivation and why it doesn’t work, explained my innate distrust of many goal setting strategies. I dislike inducing pumped up states of “go-get ‘em!” attitude in order to create motivation. That strategy has never been effective for me and caused much of my annoyance and railing against goal setting. He says:

Have you ever seen one of those rah-rah motivational speakers? If the speaker is good, s/he will have an emotional effect on you and get you to feel motivated. But within a day or two, that emotional boost fades away, and you’re back to normal. You can listen to hundreds of motivational speakers and experience an emotional yo-yo effect, but it doesn’t last.

I studied and practiced these kinds of emotional motivation techniques extensively during my 20s. In the long run, I didn’t find them particularly effective. My intellect saw right through all the chest pounding. The logical part of my mind was ultimately dissatisfied with attempts to induce motivation through emotional manipulation.

So I learned why I’d accomplished some of my goals in the past and learned why I disliked and distrusted most goal setting strategies that many people posit.

But how to explain my current situation? I now have a burning desire to study and take the GRE (the test to get into grad school). This may seem like quite a trifle, just study a bit, take the test and move on. However I’ve had the hardest time finding any motivation to study, despite many starts and plenty of free time. In fact I’ve been trying to study for this test for more than three years. Did all this hemming and hawing simply occur because the goal was too easy? I don’t think so. Because if so then I’d still have the same problem. The GRE hasn’t suddenly gotten any harder, so where did my motivation come from? Why now? And what does this mean?

The key is timing. I knew I’d eventually have to take the GRE and I figured it would be annoying, so I thought I’d just “get it over with.” It didn’t work. No matter how much I tried to pump myself up with rah-rah speeches or appealed to my rational self, pointing out I had lots of free time to study, I couldn’t keep it up. I didn’t have a burning desire to study for the GRE, even though I had the time.

We talked before about Yin and Yang, the idea that life is full of ebbs and flows comes out of this concept. The seasons flow from summer to autumn to winter to spring. The tides ebb and flow. The cycles of the moon wax and wane. The cells in our body are constantly changing and re-creating themselves. This give and take is an essential part of life. We have to keep this in mind, especially when we contemplate goals. This concept isn’t something we have a lot of practice with. Our society doesn’t exactly highly value time for reflection and relaxation. How many vacation days do you have a year? Now ask a friend in Europe how many they have.

We often try to create goals for ourselves when we’re in an ebb period. This will only cause us to meet resistance. This is exactly what happened with my GRE goal. I knew I was going to have to take it. My rational mind knew I had time for it, my emotions told me to study and get it over with, but I just couldn’t do it. The timing wasn’t right. I was ebbing and instead of just learning from that, I was constantly fighting against it and trying to make myself flow.

Next time you’re trying to make something happen, stop and reflect on what you’re doing. Is there something else at work? We can learn to trust that the time will come when we’re supposed to start working and we’ll know when that is. The key is to not only notice the ebb and flow but to embrace it.

I’m sick. My head is all stuffed up and I have a sore throat. Poor me!

Laura and I are constantly observing how mind, body and the universe are connected. We’ve noticed that during difficult times in out lives (Peace Corps depression) we were much more likely to get sick. So why am I sick today?

Lately I have been struggling with my place in the world, feeling like I’m not progressing and have no direction. I have been dwelling on this negative thought rather than enjoying where I am or even making positive changes to go forward. Often when we are doing to much, not getting enough sleep, our bodies will get sick to make us slow down and get some rest. I have been getting plenty of rest lately, but my mind has been going in a million directions at once. I have been getting down on myself and life in general. I think my body said, “You want to cry? I’ll give you something to cry about.”

Please keep in mind, I am talking about small illnesses like a sinus infection or the flu, not cancer. These little illnesses are just enough to disrupt our daily lives and make us feel pretty miserable for a few days. But maybe they are blessings in disguise. Here are the steps I have taken to deal with being sick:

1. Figure out exactly what feels bad in my body: sinuses.
2. Notice if this is a repetitive problem and when it generally arises: repetitive for me, always stress related.
3. Locate the source of stress, is it physical or mental? What is causing the stress? (See above.)
4. Notice the stressor and take steps to alleviate it: Calm my mind and work on the tasks I have in front of me instead of worrying about where I’ll be in five years.
5. Drink lots of water, take a vitamin, and go to bed early, in short, relax and recharge.

I know stress makes me sick, so the most important thing I can do to get well is remove the stressor. I can avoid getting sick by keeping stress at a minimum. If you have chronic small illnesses, the stressor may be larger than you realize. When I was working an office job where I sat still in front of a computer for eight hours a day, I was sick all the time. I had never had such frequent illnesses before in my life. When I quit the job, I stopped getting sick. Think of a time in your life when you seemed to get sick often. Was there a particular stressor that may have caused it?

Being sick or feeling sick is another clue pointing us to investigate our situation. When I’m unhappy or ignoring the clues my mind and self are giving me, I get sick. So, the secret to good health? Investigating ourselves and our situation.

When Emily and I were at the Singularity Summit, we were surprised by the amount of people who were intrigued, interested and even obsessed with utilizing technology created from the Singularity to live forever. In honor of yesterday’s post on time and Aubrey De Grey’s new book Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime we thought a post on immortality and aging was in order.

After the tenth question about uploading human minds into super-computers to achieve immortality a woman stood up and boldly asked the Singularity Summit Conference Attendees, “Is there anyone here who doesn’t want to live forever? Because I certainly don’t.” Her question was met with cheers and boos. I was cheering.

Reversing human aging sounds great. Who likes getting wrinkles, saggy arms and an achy back? We use technology to help cure innumerable illnesses; why not use it to reverse aging?

First, I want to acknowledge that we don’t currently have any reverse-aging procedures so this entire post could be simply a thought experiment. But I still think, it is useful to examine our beliefs and prejudices about aging.

So why do we think that aging is a bad thing that we want to get rid of? It brings physical discomforts, aggravation at not being able to do things we once were able to do, our mind isn’t as sharp and we are seemingly closer to death. Health, youth, vitality and vigor are important characteristics we value. Large numbers of people take huge doses of vitamins, get cosmetics and surgical work done or maintain low body weight in order to slow the aging process. Many people feel that if you work hard you can stay looking young and avoid the troubles of old age. Thomas the Tank Engine, a popular children’s TV character says “being really useful” is the most important and best quality anyone can have. Americans’ deeply ingrained Protestant work ethic isn’t compatible with aging. We’re acculturated to fear, dislike and fight against the aging process. If successful aging means maintaining our youth and living as long as possible, we all fail eventually.

However, lets take a different approach. Think about the stages of life, we go from children to teenagers. During this phase we lose our child-like aspects and move into a different arena, that of young adulthood. From there we move into middle age. This process is the process of life, during each of these stages we have a different physical form and we have different perspectives on life. Ask a well adjusted middle-aged person if they’d want to go back to being a teenager? Maybe some of them would, but probably most wouldn’t. These stages are like mini-deaths.

Researchers from Stanford developed a theory called “socioemotional selectivity,” which argues:

Under time constraints emotional aspects of life are illuminated. Goals shift from those aimed at novelty or information seeking to those related to emotional meaning… older people are not suffering from limited opportunities to pursue social relations with others. Rather, they are investing carefully and strategically.

The complexity of emotion deepens under conditions that limit time. And because age is inextricably correlated with time left in life, age is associated with changes in emotion…Events that at one time were simple and straightforward now evoke mixtures of emotions ­ happiness, sadness, joy, fear and pride ­ all in the same moment. We suspect that emotional experience in later life may be richer than ever before in life.

The Stanford researchers and I both agree, that to talk about aging one has to talk about how we view death. Death has become a great taboo recently. For example, we hide ourselves and our children about our favorite meals: hamburgers, hot dogs and fried chickens. Professor Ashliman from University of Pittsburg writes:

A pet, too old and frail to live much longer, is “put to sleep.” At the human level, we are even more isolated from the one final act that we must all experience. Few people die at home. Funeral “homes” turn the act of mourning a “departed” loved one into a sanitized reunion of family and friends. The deceased are not “dead,” they have merely “passed on.” Euphemisms proliferate.

It has not always been so.

We do not like to be reminded of our own mortality, and in today’s world, institutions such as hospitals, hospices, retirement centers, and funeral homes (euphemisms abound in the language of death!) shield us from the worst of the Grim Reaper’s ravages. We cope, or so it might seem, by pretending that death does not exist.

We are all going to experience some of the declines associated with aging. We are all going to get old and we are all going to die. That’s not a threat. The knowledge that our years are limited may be what makes life precious. The Buddha tells us that the most important meditation we can engage in is of death, “Of all footprints, that of the elephant is supreme. Similarly, of all mindfulness meditations, that on death is supreme.”

Having said all this though, I don’t think we should give up the pursuit of anti-aging and rejuvinating techniques. I mostly wanted to point out some of the impetus and underlying fears and preoccupations that we a society have and how those fears are often shaping our discussion about life extension or immortality.

Perhaps this preoccupation with aging and death is our culture’s manifestation of its fear of death

There’s some memey post (apparently originating at Evolving Times) now circulating through the personal growth blogosphere asking: What would you do with an extra 36 hours of free time each week? Now, I appreciate Edward’s motivation for the post: work less and enjoy life more a la Timothy Ferriss. My problem is the assumption that we are all too busy too enjoy life. We don’t need more time in each day, we need to understand our beliefs and myths about time better.

Does this sound like someone you know:

“I’d love to learn Spanish, I’m just so busy. Hey, did you see Entourage last night?”

The term “busy” is another way of focusing our choices away from ourselves. By saying “I’m too busy” we are not using our personal power to determine what we do and when.  Every moment of every day, I have a choice to continue doing whatever I’m doing or do something else. This is precisely what Scott H Young talked about in his insightful post about time. Time is a relative construct, really we are always in now. When you’re deliberate in your actions, you can find yourself doing exactly what you want to be doing every moment. Time cannot be wasted; time is only this moment. As Scott says:

Time is not a resource. It is completely inside your mind. You can’t experience time, only right now. You simply have memories of the past and projections of the future that leads you to suspect time exists. It is your focus on these concepts of time, which don’t appear through the senses, that make it real.

Even if you look beyond this abstract perspective, time is not a resource. Twenty-four hours will pass in the day no matter what you do. You can’t store or collect time, nor can you grasp it in this moment.

When we say we “wasted time”, what we mean is that we remember certain moments in the past as being unfulfilling. No activity is objectively fulfilling or unfulfilling. I choose how I spend my time; I choose to be fulfilled or not. This feeling of being unfulfilled comes from a lack of presence in the now. Scott explains:

If your time is being invested in pursuits that lack quality, you will feel deprived even if the amount of time is unchanged.

The first way to increase quality of the now, is simply to look for it…When you stop planning, projecting and remembering and focus only on what is happening right now, worry dissolves. The oasis is beneath your feet, the desert was just too distracting.

The second way to increase quality deals with the method of interacting with the world. Become deliberate in what you do. This could be seen as a parallel to the first suggestion. Focusing on the now is mostly blocking out thoughts through effort. Whereas, doing in the now is task oriented.

Every minute is free time. We are free to do anything we choose every moment. There is no reason to wish for more time because the only time you’ll ever have is now. If you wish you were doing something else right now, do it. This doesn’t necessarily mean you’d have to sit in a field of daisies all day. Sometimes I like going to the grocery store or the post office because I like getting things done. When we recognize that every moment is a choice, these things don’t seem like chores. If we increase the quality of our every moment through deliberate intent, life will seem less hectic and more fulfilling.

Seth Godin had a fascinating post about a human rights group that posted signs around his college reading:

On Wednesday
Wear Blue Jeans
If You Are Gay

This of course caused a great deal of discussion and debate. Every person who had read the sign was forced to make a decision about what they were going to wear the next day and what that would mean.

This example relates directly to our post from yesterday. We all like to regulate our interactions with others. In Seth’s example, the human rights group threw a monkey wrench into our illusion. No matter what you would have worn people would have made assumptions about your sexual identity.

We may attempt to control our interactions by telling people about our personality traits, explaining our ideals and describing hobbies (or even if we attempt to control interactions by being as secretive and evasive as possible), but this is ultimately something we need to let go of. When we label ourselves we limit ourselves to behaviors or ideologies that fit the label.

For example, how would you feel if you’d unwittingly worn jeans on Wednesday and found out about the sign when you got to school? Conversely, how would you feel if you had worn khakis? Would you feel differently? Would you spend the whole day explaining that you didn’t know about the sign?

Notice your reactions the next time someone labels you in public. How do your reactions change based on your identification with the label? For example, I used to love being called a “Trekkie” in high school. The first thing I told people when I met them was that I was a Trekkie. However, I would get extremely annoyed when people described me as “nice.” Being “nice” seemed uninteresting and bland. Now, I no longer introduce myself as “Laura the Trekkie.” However I’ve noticed I do still get annoyed when I am described as “nice,” I guess I’m still coming to terms with that. Are you the same as the labels you place on yourself? How much of your identity is wrapped up in labels?

As I asked before, how much of this represents the “real” you and how much is simply a need to create a division between yourself and other people?

Up until now, I’ve tried to keep a low virtual profile. I’ve never had a MySpace or Facebook. I don’t show up on Google. There are no videos of me dancing around my bedroom on YouTube (as far as I know). So before this blog, there was really no trace of Emily on the internet. I liked it that way.

I’ve had friends jokingly threaten to create Facebook profiles for me. So far, they haven’t done it, but maybe they won’t have to. Like this Valleywag writer found out, there are plenty of services that encourage users to make profiles for other people. Check out Gleamd, which lets you “add someone” anytime. Someone? Anyone. After that you might want to head over to Spock so you can “Get alerts on your web activity.” Once someone else has created a profile for you, Spock is gracious enough to allow you to “claim it” and add your own content about yourself.

I know I’ve been spouting a lot of conspiracy theories lately, but I can’t help linking to this video about Facebook having potential links to the CIA. Again, my point is not so much that it is true (I have no idea really) but if it were, what difference would it make? These sites are public. From my experience in HR, I know that a damning MySpace profile can land your resume in the trash. I would be more concerned about my boss finding debaucherous photos of me than the CIA knowing my favorite movie.

We’ve always known that our personal lives could be made public on the internet, but now sites are encouraging us to write about others. If this catches on, you could conceivably find anyone’s general bio via Google in a year or two. How would this change our behavior?

Maybe nothing would change. After all, we don’t have control (even though we like to believe we do) over what people think about us or how they judge us.

Initially, I wanted to liken this whole thing to corporate or governmental transparency. Generally, transparency in institutions is considered to be a good thing, but what about for people? If anyone, anywhere could add to your online profile with the click of their mouse, might you act differently? Like Wikipedia, it’s likely that some vandalism would occur on the profile database, but that overall, entries would be balanced. How would your life look in summary? How might this trend change society?

I recognize that we often attempt to regulate our interactions with others by telling them what we’re like, by giving them the information we want them to have. When meeting someone new, we may provide a list of our likes and dislikes, personality traits, and common habits. Sites like MySpace and Facebook are places for self expression as well as places for us to define ourselves via friends, hobbies and social events. How much of this represents the “real” me and how much is simply a need to create a division between myself and other people?

I like my personal information to remain private just as much as the next person, but interacting with the world requires some loss of control. We are observed, described and judged already. There is no balanced, unbiased account of the life of a person. I guess the question becomes not what do these sites mean for our society, but instead how are you personally interacting with the world? Are you constantly creating a story of yourself to tell others, trying to control their perception of you? Or are you just being, content to experience every moment as it comes? If you do this, your life’s story will take care of itself.

Today I learned all about Ron Paul. Initially I was very closed, I didn’t want to learn about him or have to rethink any of my political viewpoints. I heard he was conservative and pro-life, reason enough for me to discount him totally. I like liberal politicians. Certainly I could never support someone who wasn’t pro civil liberties, especially all the liberties I care about. I had already decided, I wanted to support my Alma Mater and go with Hillary. We need more women in power and obviously anyone who went to the best college in the world must be amazing. Why should I even bother listening to a word old Ron has to say?

Pretty soon though, I found myself immersed in the Republican debates on YouTube. I was thinking, what about our current foreign policy? What do I think about radical policy makers, especially a fringe politician with a more-than-just-cult-like internet following?

Well this isn’t a political blog post and I certainly don’t have any answers about who to vote for in 2008. This is instead a post about our comfort zones. My experience with Ron Paul today was the perfect example of expanding a comfort zone. Initial rigidity and negativity with a lot of “I” statements (I don’t like conservatives, He isn’t my type of politician), followed by slow realization of my prejudices and unwillingness to re-examine my ideas. Just about every self-help and popular guru will tell you that breaking out of routines, unconscious habits and our insular comfort zones is one of the best ways to grow (spiritually, intellectually, personally).

As we live we gather up a set of habits, beliefs (or ideologies) and routines. These keep us in our “comfort zone.” However staying in our comfort zone at all times does not provide a fertile medium for growth or reaching our best potentials. These habits and routines become so ingrained in our daily experience that they often fall into our unconscious. Pretty soon they are determining for us what we can or cannot do (or even try!). We’ll be stuck in the “comfort zone” or rut, in a state of mild fear (which is our ego telling us we need to stay in our routine in order to be safe and happy). Stagnation and ruts don’t sound exciting for anyone.

A great way to over come this is to try something new. Even our extremely successful habits and comfort zone routines will lose their use fullness as we change and grow. Continuing to try new things in new circumstances is a great way to expose our routines. If we keep trying new things we’ll eventually adapt. The more things we try the sooner we can let go of old routines and habits that have lost their usefulness.

Life Hack’s article on just this explains further:

Understand the truth about your habits. They always represent past successes. You have formed habitual, automatic behaviors because you once dealt with something successfully, tried the same response next time, and found it worked again. That’s how habits grow and why they feel so useful. To get away from what’s causing your unhappiness and workplace blues, you must give up on many of your most fondly held (and formerly successful) habits. and try new ways of thinking and acting

At first I was totally closed to the idea of learning anything about politicians outside of my “zone”. I didn’t want to hear a thing about them. My mind was made up. Slowly though, a small part of me warned, “What if you’re being willfully ignorant? Can it really hurt you to learn more?” Thankfully, I listened to this little voice. Now I am more informed in general and that doesn’t mean I have to change my mind, just challenge my assumptions. It’s scary to reevaluate, because sometimes we identify so much with our ideas and beliefs that revisiting them seems like we are challenging our very souls. This is merely our scared ego talking. We grow by trying new things, learning about new things and contemplating new concepts.

I’ll leave you with some suggestions from Steve Pavlina about how to expand your comfort zone each and every day:

Routine is important for providing stability and security, but it should only provide the outer shell for tackling novel challenges each day. Push yourself to take in new input, the likes of which you’ve never previously experienced, and you will become smarter. Ideally you’ll want to tackle something new and non-routine at least once a day. Read a new book, listen to a new song, walk around a new location, meet a new person, eat at a new restaurant, play a new game, install new software – do something that provides fresh, new input to your mind.

Over the next several days, begin to consciously recognize how your mind uses invariant representations in everything you do. Notice the labels you assign to people, objects, and activities, such as boss, faucet, and paperwork. Notice what other labels you associatively link to those representations. Pay special attention to those representations that involve your identity. How do you label yourself? Begin to question some of those representations. Are they accurate? Could any of them be holding you back? How can you consciously improve upon those representations?

I received the link to Zeitgeist from Brandon Peele of Generative Transformation (something seems to be up with the site). It’s a long documentary about the pagan roots of Christianity, the federal reserve, and 9/11 (you might consider skipping ahead about 7 minutes to get past the long musical intro). If you have a patent bias against conspiracy theory, don’t bother with the link. However, if you can keep even a slightly open mind, I suggest you watch it.

I’m not prepared to defend or refute any of the film’s claims. What I ask is, what if you believed it? What then? What if even a small percentage of the film’s claims were true? What would you do?

On the film’s website there are some suggestions for activism: attending protests to demand further 9/11 investigations, supporting Ron Paul’s presidential bid, and of course, educating yourself. Questioning these things on your own is the single most important thing you can do on your path towards truth. Do your own research, rather than accepting everything that is handed to you.

The Zeitgeist movie was interesting and inflammatory. It employed many of the media tactics it criticizes and some of the “facts” it cited were a little shaky. Despite its shortcomings, I’m glad that it’s getting a lot of attention on the internet. Movies like this give us an alternative to the highly controlled content of mass media organizations. When you are presented with an alternative view, you can dig deeper to make up your own mind. So again, I ask you, if Zeitgeist got even a few things right, what are you going to do?

One thing we liked a lot about the movie was its conclusion that changing your own perceptions and choosing love over fear can change the world. If each of us worked to find our own truth and act out of love, we would be able to achieve anything.

Here are some other reviews and criticisms of the movie:

Boing Boing

FoulMood 

Gotthammer

Our friends at The Speculist posted about a Soviet doomsday machine yesterday. This got me thinking about other rumored Russian plots. Serving as Peace Corps Volunteers in the Republic of Georgia, Laura and I were able to collect some interesting Soviet conspiracy theories from the front lines. Here are some of our favorites:

• The Russians can control the weather and in Soviet times, they always ensured a sunny day for propaganda events like parades.

• Putin hates Georgia because he has a bad relationship with his mother, who lives in Georgia (supposedly).

• Avian flu is actually a bogus media story thought up by the Russians to cause Georgians to kill their chickens and starve. (In 2006 the Georgian government recommended that all chickens be killed because of the Avian flu deaths in neighboring Turkey. The villagers were not happy.)

• Russia has an earthquake machine. From time to time they still send small quakes to Georgia just to remind them who’s boss.

Funny as these claims might seem to us, many Georgians take them completely seriously and they’re not the only ones. According to this article, Nikola Tesla was working on an earthquake device that could have fallen into Soviet hands. That article may not look particularly trustworthy, but even the popular TV show Mythbusters, took the earthquake machine seriously enough to investigate. Sure enough, their research showed that Tesla was working on such a device. After trying Tesla’s methods, Mythbusters was unable to produce strong results and deemed the earthquake machine myth, “busted”. Just because the Mythbusters staff couldn’t produce results from Tesla’s work, doesn’t mean the top scientists of the Soviet Union wouldn’t have been able to.

If there’s a grain of truth to a story that sounds as crazy as the earthquake machine, what about other conspiracy theories or regional folklore? It was very easy for us Americans, armed with the internet and college degrees, to dismiss the Georgian villagers’ stories as paranoid nonsense. The truth is, we may never know what kinds of shenanigans the American government is up to, let alone Russia. It’s important to always ask questions and do your own research. Serious inquiry into these sorts of things is what separates village legend from a New York Times whistle blower cover story. Pick your favorite conspiracy theory and dig a little deeper. You never know what you’ll discover.