Tag Archives: awareness

The alien guesthouse

By Eh’den Biber

#AUSITM
#AWARENESS

Part one – Drop the Grenade, or Inner Spirit of Time

When I was young and innocence I loved playing games; I loved pretending. I can still remember how I loved to pretend I’m an astronaut, a scientist, a hero. I remember how I saved the world again and again in a movie constructed by my own imagination. It felt good, felt wonderful.

That was then.

Let’s fast forward to my last weekend: I’m in a restaurant in what will be called by Americans as “the middle of nowhere”, or as Europeans like to call it – Brussels. I’m the hero of a WTF story: one which I, as a dad, is trying to prevent his youngest son from stabbing himself with a knife. Seriously, where is my freaking spaceship!?!

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EU: The Post Mortem Edition

ANALYSIS: How lack of awareness led us to BREXIT, and what can we do next?

(Warning – colourful language is ahead ).

 

Part 1 – The Deadly and the Trump, or how the heck did we get here?

For months EU citizens were looking at the race of the US republican and democrat candidates, feeling they are watching a weird reality show. The democratic party stood behind a politician who is so tied to corporate America that it’s impossible to think of any interest group that she or her husband didn’t receive donations from. The Republicans vote went to a big mouth, fear mongering, racist, who was best described by Seth MacFarlane: “This guy has an ego. When Trump bangs a supermodel he closes his eyes and imagine he’s jerking off”

The fact US citizens are most likely faced with the option of choosing between a scam master sociopath and a the most lethal woman in US politics is not easy. Some European felt compassion to the Americans who have to choose between the two, but the majority of the people simply felt shocked by the Trumpism movement and the fact he was left the only nominee of the Republican party.

Meanwhile, in my fairyland, also known as the UK, our prime minister lured voters to re-elect him in the last general election based on a promise for a referendum to whether or not the UK should stay in the EU. Since he won, and since there are so many people in the UK who wanted that referendum Cameron was forced into honouring his promise. And then blah blah blah… and now we’re out. Hip Hip Hooray to 52% of the population.

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Zuckerberging Reality

Why the Chan-Zuckerberg philanthropic venture and the Islamic-State terrorist actions are so alike, and why you cannot see it.

By Eh’den Biber

 

Mark Zuckerberg is the poster boy of what success seems like in the 21st century. A highly talented and intelligent young man, who managed to create a technological platform that has transformed one of the most important human activity – communicating and interacting with each other.

It was no wonder why everyone seems to have hailed and/or criticised the decision Mark and his wife Priscilla Chan made as they announced their intention to donate almost all of their fortune to a philanthropic venture called “The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative”. Like a drug addict who knows his addiction patterns are sponsoring his drug dealer expensive car and jewellery, people recognised that their inability to stop using Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram is the root source of Mark’s fortune. What we experienced was a collective “hey dude, it’s my money!” moment.

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Shoham – Collapsing Technologies

Healing our technological self-destruction

By Eh’den Biber

Dedicated to Shoham

Prologue – Shoham (1997)

Shoham was the beautiful gift my ex-wife and I received after the death of our second son. I remember our happiness when she came into the world and the shock that hit us less than 24 hours later when her doctors realised something is *really* wrong with her body. The doctors did everything they could – they made her pass endless tests, they created a committee with the best experts in the hospital and consulted with colleagues around the country and the world. She was given every treatment they can think of – but nothing helped. I remember a conversation I had with the head of the emergency unit for newborn babies, a kind and gentle man, who told me during that week: “You know, we doctors are good plumbers. We can change valves, and pipes, but when the system is collapsing we don’t have any ability to fix it”.

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The Corporate Book of the Dead

What will you do when your organisation be annihilated by a cyber-attack?

By Eh’den Biber, Sense of Awareness

 

A Sense of Death

A few years ago my best friend was sitting next to her dad’s bed. It was a cold winter night, and he was dying of a stomach cancer. For more than six hours she set there, alone, tortured by her dad excruciating pain, and the fact she was unable to help him nor knew what to do. Late at night her dad took his last breath, and left this world. After he did, she called me, crying, telling me it was the most horrible experience she ever had.

Death, the final frontier, has been a profound element in what we call “self-awareness”. All human cultures that we know of – both in current days and in the past – have and had death-related rituals. Death is as integrated in the fabric of our existence as life is, and our ability to acknowledge is an indication of our evolutionary state.

The realisation of the notion of death is an evolutionary process. You first develop a sense of self (ego), and then you discover (or become “aware”) that this self is limited, that it must die at some point. The ego then depend on the information it will receive and how it will interpret it to devise plan on how to handle that fact, and that plan will be engraved in him and define many of his actions, consciously and subconsciously, becoming the young ego biggest challenge.

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