Our Radiant Future

The Radiant Future is the title of a book written by Alexander Zinoview, the author of The Yawning Heights, both highly recommended.

There are at least three New Age monthly magazines one can pick up gratis at cafes and bookstores around here. There is something called the Psychic Institute, dozens of yoga studios, tarot card readers on the Avenue, a bookstore devoted to just fantasy fiction, all this and no Gypsy caravans in this town!

The monthly free computer magazine stopped publishing at the beginning of the year, but we now have two monthly newspapers devoted to dogs. Astrology, tarot, yoga, dogs, you think I'll be talking about the glorious past now? No, we're talking about our pagan future, boy!

Last weekend, I picked up one of those New Age magazines, which, like the other two, is getting thicker and slicker, advertising revenues from all those gurus, quacks and aura readers must be up. I stepped inside the pub, ordered a pint of ale, and tried to read some of it without laughing.

And then I opened the page to an article about and an interview with one Dr. Masaru Emoto. Dr. Emoto is a Japanese scientist who has a certification from Open International University as a Doctor of Alternative Medicine. His published works include The Miracle of Water, The True Power of Water and The Hidden Messages in Water. The article tells us that Dr Emoto "stepped outside of the boundaries of traditional science to study water samples from around the planet as a human being and an original thinker." Hmmm.

Dr. Emoto claims that exposing water to music changes the structure of water crystals (i.e. ice) in a bottle. More, exposing water to written words, does the same. The words are written in Japanese on a sheet of paper which is placed near those water crystals (i.e. ice) which are examined through a microscope before and after.

Here are three quotes from Dr. Emoto:

I believe this world was created and designed by God's intention. He created water as a means to convey the information rapidly. So in this sense, the water is a messenger of God. Creator etched two basic Yin and Yang energies into water–Love and Gratitude/ Thanks. He made the ratio 1 to 2 (1 part Love and 2 parts Gratitude/Thanks) so that free energy could be provided when people really understood the meaning of H2O. I know a scientist who is doing research on the power of love and gratitude. I believe there will be more scientists to follow him.

If you are happy, the water in front of you is happy and if you are unhappy, the water in front of you would also be unhappy. Therefore, water and human are connected to each other. The consciousness of every one of us can be transmitted to water. This consciousness creates a morphogenetic field and, as a result, influences the climate and energy of the earth.

I believe in the saying: "In the beginning was the word" from the Bible. That is why the water crystals are changed by words. I am now doing research about this and I am getting the answers. The results should be published in my new book that will be coming out in three months.

Is this like, far out, man? Wouldn't you like to smoke what this man is smoking?

In the meantime, previous Saturday's Wall Street Journal printed an article about and an interview with Václav Havel. Here are some quotes:

Mr. Havel saw "living in truth" as the act of refusing to participate in the everyday lies that were the cornerstones of totalitarian rule: sham elections, hypocritical expressions of solidarity for the oppressed, patently fraudulent statistics on the economic progress of the socialist bloc, and so on.

In the essay's most memorable passage, Mr. Havel ruminated on the phenomenon of the greengrocer who places Marx's slogan calling on the workers of the world to unite "among the onions and the carrots." Why does he do it? Not out of any serious conviction, Mr. Havel argued, but simply to "get along in life" and "to conceal from himself" -- by means of a high-sounding slogan -- "the low foundations of his obedience."

To some of his critics, the idea of living in truth smacked of moral posturing by a man who, being the childless and bohemian playwright he was, mistook drama for life and failed to appreciate that in the face of dictatorship "getting along in life" was hardly an ignoble or degrading objective. Mr. Havel shrugs the criticism off. "I was never a priest preaching how people should behave, or a moralist bullying others to be this way or that," he says. "I simply thought about the behavior of the majority as well as that of the minority, and tried to analyze it."

"hope is not the same thing as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good. . . . The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is."

I ask whether the quality of art in the West hasn't in fact suffered in conditions of almost unfettered liberty. "I wouldn't declare it as a rule," he ventures. "But let's say that semi-democratic conditions are inspirational. And that art plays a more important role because it assumes the place of politics."

"a big danger of our world today is obsession . . . an even bigger danger is indifference."