Art of War once Moore, Sander R.B.E. Beals [leveled readers TXT] 📗

my situation, I can consider this deity a Her, even though that has nothing to do with any part of the female anatomy, but way more with the female psyche, since the first part is matter, but the second part is mainly free energy....

Does that mean that I consider those worshiping male and non-gender-based deities my enemies, and thus worthy of my more devastating aspects? Nah, couldn't be bothered, because in my heart I know that the bigger fish don't think that way either, but they will keep us properly fed and enjoying life, no matter which path we choose to take.

And yes, this is a solution so obvious to our dilemma of Life, that over time many have found it, and shaped their lives after it. They may or may not have chosen to publicize their findings, and they may or may not have told us about their intent to teach us, but they sure will have enjoyed their lives after they realized their allegiance with the All....

7. the Operations Room

The idea for this chapter came from Mark, a friend I picked up amongst those who downloaded my third book, called Infinity plus One. He had written this story about God and the various other significant figures in the higher dimensions, which gave me the distinct feeling of an operations room in some grand war. OK, it was a very relaxed war by the looks of it, but nevertheless.....

We've all seen them in the movies, large perspex screens in there, with distinct lines and circles on them that seem to say precious little about the arena where the battle is at. Technically, these are a far cry from the command tent that used to fulfill a similar function in medieval times. Back then, there was a reasonable one-on-one relationship between the stretch of leveled sand with had scratch marks from swords or wooden sticks or the table with the little tin symbols on it, and the war theater which would invariably be only a few miles away. Nowadays, since the perspex screens have been replaced by wall-to-wall LED screens of proportions many a movie-addict would love to see in his or her living room, we can observe at least two things about war over the ages:

First of all, the human – technology ratio is definitely shifting! Where we used to be Neanderthals with a club each if we were lucky, it went to bigger stuff like the guns of the Navarone, which needed a three or four man crew each. OK, in the war zone one or two pilots are enough to fly an F-18 Hornet, but back on base there will be ground crew, maintenance crews, and of course the many air traffic control personnel across the world that the jet has contact with during its flight.

And still, with the lines of control lengthening, the Artists of War seem to keep ever tighter reigns on their toys: despite the very intense flight training, the pilots are nothing more than human safety nets for the multi-million dollar contraptions: defensively speaking they may have a reasonably free reign, but where the offensive capabilities are concerned, they are simply the droids throwing the switches. At least that is what Hollywood tends to show us, of course I have little (or even no) experience with actual war tools...

But still, whether it is the state of mind of the warlords, or their anxiety about their investments, they tend to even distrust this ever-decreasing human aspect in the choice of their weapons, which of course makes the idea of fully technological solutions without the possibility of human error quite enticing. Hollywood's most impressive expression of such a concept is Terminator III: Rise of the Machines in my humble opinion. Too bad for them though, that humans are still in use to design and build the stuff, and thus error remains ever present...

Actually, maintaining machinery of war seems so much more difficult than keeping peacetime stuff working. If you've ever seen the DoD standards for hardware and software, you'll know what I mean. And the designs reflect a similar stressed attitude: where we are content to press refresh in order to get the latest info even now, back in 1989 the Dutch navy required from the software of their frigates that if as much as a nut or bolt was added to inventory during loading, any screen displaying the information about that particular nut or bolt was required to immediately reflect that change! No wonder they charge you ten thousand dollar for a toilet seat!

8. Identity

I'd seen it in the past, a movie by this great guy also known as Nicolas Cage. I'd wondered at times though, why would a movie actor call himself 'Nicolas Cage'? Because believe it or not, I simply couldn't believe it wasn't an alias, just like you probably already heard that my author's name is nowhere near Sander R.B.E. Beals. Still though, Cage was the conundrum, and Lord of War which features tonight in my personal computer theater gave me the idea for this chapter, because basically it's all about that, ain't it? Even the romantic angle in this movie is all about the identity of our Lord of War's lifetime love, which on the first viewing I never noticed, probably because back then, I hadn't met mine yet. But I've seen something impossible happen, which not only helped me realize that will is in fact a very potent piece of creational tool, if you get the hang of it. I'm not saying I have it down already, because apparently getting it right every time requires plenty more exercise.

But still, identity is a key concept in War, or even in Life itself: “Friend or Foe?” is only a preliminary identification, but just think about that question before you answer it: it requires you to know the man, woman or being asking it of you, and know yourself, or at least know what you want to be in relationship to the guy or gal doing the asking. And is it all just a game? Well, it is during peacetime: even peaceful people like most of us, have several identities nowadays. And only for the simple fact that even in peacetime, we simply can't answer that question of “Friend or Foe?” And what turns a friend into a foe? Is it the Lord of War downing his cargo plane on a dirt road in the middle of Central Africa, in order to offload the cargo on a more than willing local population, thus leaving him with a plane carrying no contraband. Of course that backfired on him because in the 24 hours he was locally detained, the same population completely dismantled his Antonov, thus leaving him with no transport home....

But back to more peaceful surroundings: over time I've had many Web-identities, but despite my colleague in 2000 calling me 'the Big Friendly Giant', I switched identities fairly easily. Not so much because I needed to hide, but more because my psyche was changing faster than the name that my parents gave me could keep up with it. We call ourselves something different than our parents called us, because we either want to express what we think of ourselves, or what we want others to think of us. That last one is usually the beginning of the end: just like the Buddhists stick to the simplicity of the Now, completely foregoing the happenings of the past, and the uncertainty of the future. The identity part is in fact the same: Not to worry about those you left behind, or about those you would love to meet. Because time being the man-made illusion it is, you just never know on which leg of your ever-circular journey you will find your next interesting event. Heck, I've been intimately busy with trying to figure it out, but still I cannot determine what will or will not go wrong or right. And in the end, that isn't even important. Just seeing more fun things than bad things is all that counts. Isn't that what we call progress?

But that is just for us as ones, of course things get radically different if more people are involved, that are doing other things than we are. Just like the Lord of War lost his Ava because she simply couldn't identify with the father of her child as the dreadful weapons dealer he was. Well, shit happens. As does divorce, many times over. Where Cage lost his family, his brother, his wife and child, I only was left by my wife, who couldn't deal with my bipolar disorder. Heck, back then even I couldn't deal with it. But being thrown back upon myself, that started to change. By now, I'm well aware of being a writer, if only for the joy it is giving me. And while I am by now fully unconcerned about how it will eventually work out, I know what Yazz and the Plastic Population had to say about it: “The Only Way is UP!”

By now my movie drip feed on the right screen has brought me to Venice, for what is probably my tenth or so encounter with the sinking city over the past few weeks. Is it just my choice of movies, or is synchronicity trying to tell me something? This time it's Indiana Jones and the last crusade, because yes, I am a Spielberg fan. To me, Spielberg is the Einstein of the movie world. He sees in the scripts he films the very relativity that Einstein saw out in the Cosmos. And so we come full circle, where relativity connects identities: just as Indy right this moments tells his female companion that as long as he's not certain about her, he'll continue to do things his way. Well, smart boy!

But that's a tried and tested theory, right? In absence of those who can be implicitly trusted, we all tend to trust just ourselves. And then our circle of trustees is very small. Hmm, not really Einsteinian is it? At least not in the way the quote at the start of my third book went:

"A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty... We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive."

This essentially says the opposite: by widening our circle, trusting others before they give us reason to, we actually have more opportunities for success.