Sometimes on my way home after work I stop at the pub to have a beer and a chat with some of my old friends. It is seldom very uplifting. They have as always been drinking and smoking pot all day so the communication is mostly of the one way kind, which means that I don’t say much. Well, I listen to their disconnected ramblings for a while, and then I go home.

Is this what it fees like, I think to myself, for an awakened man to talk with ordinary sleepwalkers?

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Some are alcoholics or drug addicts. Some are completely hypnotized by some weird religion or ideology, like neo liberalism, neo Nazism, Raëlism or Islamism. Some are racists, some are neurotics, or stressed out, or just out of it. Some suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, some are schizophrenics and some are health and fitness fanatics. The list could be made very long I guess. But how many of the earths population aren’t caught up in anything? How many people simply live their life without any particular ideas about it, without any activism for any particular cause, with no special goal, no agenda, no nothing? I think a lot of people do so. And I think that the only hope for the human species is that more people would get off whatever train they are on at the next station.

Some people collect butterflies, some people collect stamps, and some people collect thoughts. Thought collectors always carry a small notebook to be able to quickly jot down interesting thoughts as they flutter by. Thought collecting is a weird hobby. What is the point with it? To eventually write a book filled with interesting thoughts and make some money? The whole thing is very sad. Isn’t it like trying to sell sand in the Sahara dessert?

Anyway, at some point in life most people realize that thoughts are not that important. The brain is constantly producing thoughts, like the kidneys are producing urine. But absolutely no one is collecting urine to show off.

Well, also many butterfly collectors eventually loose interest in collecting butterflies. What is the point with it really if one doesn’t have scientific reasons for it? It is possible to find butterfly collections in any museum of natural history. One can look at dead butterflies there. Or one can enjoy the living ones as they flutter by.

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I don’t think that daydreaming is a bad thing. I think it is healthy. It is not possible and it is not necessary to always be in the “real” world. It is OK to be lost in dreamland every once in a while. The point is what kind of dreamland one is lost in. Is it a terrible place? Is it a dungeon where one is brooding on revenge, or is it a sexual fantasy where one is having a wonderful time? It is not possible and it is not necessary to, for example, be fully present when one is driving a car where the traffic is not to heavy. One can let the autopilot do the driving while one is listening to the radio and singing along with the music.

But, today many people live all their life in a virtual reality with almost no connection to the “real” world. This is a problem. Many kids today have absolutely no interest in the everyday reality. They shut everything out. Television, computer games, portable computer games, cell phones with computer games, iPod’s and all kind’s of technical appliances makes it possible be completely lost somewhere else. And the big problem is that it is not their own dream worlds they are lost in. It is someone else’s. Their own reality is a foreign land to them. Many people today can’t stand their own thinking, how they are, what they look like, what they are and how the world is functioning. It will be a long and hard way for them to reconnect even sporadically to their own reality.

Animals can’t create philosophies and religions, and they can’t smile. We, on the other hand, can certainly produce a lot of different philosophies and religions and we can produce a lot of different smiles.

Politicians have their special way of smiling when they want to look good on TV. Social workers have their kind of understanding and well meaning smiles, with the head bent a little. Many born again Christians produce an interesting holy looking kind of smile. Idiots have their idiotic smiles, car salesmen have their big Hollywood smiles and crooks have their nasty ones. Very cultivated and high born old ladies can smile wonderful smiles as they spread their sarcasms around.

Alcoholics have their special way of smiling. They produce a very stupid kind of smile. You can immediately see that someone is an alcoholic only by the way he smiles. Some people are not alcoholics but are filled with mendacities for other reasons. Their smiles are difficult to make out, but I have noticed that when they get older their weird smiles get more pronounced.

All this applies of course also to laughs. There are also many different ways of laughing. But not all smiles and laughs are false. There are also true smiles and true laughs, straight from the heart. These smiles and laughs are of a completely different quality. They originate from a completely different part of the brain.

There is also true religiosity, true spirituality and true philosophy. Not everything what people say (including one self) is false. And of course, there is a also a true self.
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Some people are right-wingers and some are left-wingers. Some are devout Catholics, some are devout Muslims and some are Boston Red Sox fanatics. But some people are nothing special. They don't belong to any particular group. With such people I can feel at ease and be myself. In that group I can find friends wherever I go.

Many Germans explained after the second world war that they had never been aware of the concentration camps and what was going on there.

To buy stolen property in good faith is not as bad as if you know that it is stolen property.

It is better not to know. It is easier to be happy if you don't know what is going on.