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The ancient art of Calligraphy, and in particular the way that it express itself through the Chinese and Japanese Masters, remain in it’s essence a beauty that find harmony through simplicity of its stroke and resonance in the bold meaning that it invokes.

“Rock” is the meaning invoked by the Japanese kanji symbol on the top, and on the left of the symbol you’ll find the meditative wisdom that its scribe would impart on the conscious spark of its creation…

It’s often said the brain is the biggest sexual organ—and every time it happens, I know it’s hard to suppress a groan. It just sounds so trite. So damn cliché! Yet, here’s a prime example of a line being cliché for good reason. The brain is critical to the act of climax, as anyone too distracted by what happened at work earlier that day (or unwanted mental images of your naked mother) can attest. The brain plays a huge role in orgasm—surely as much as any quivering nether regions. And new research in the field of neuroscience suggests that our upstairs may be even more critical to the big O than the downstairs.

Museum of Sex

If you believe in it and the universe has no power to affect your choice,

then belief is the choice we must make.

That is the power of free will.

Yours and mine,

the same.

What do you believe?

According to Michael Merzenich over at at TED it confers on us the ability to do things tomorrow what we can’t do today, things today that we couldn’t do yesterday, and it’s completely stupid of course…

Add to that the fact that recent findings show our mind spends 50% of awareness in the present tense it goes a long way to explain in a sense why the final choice is left up to you, my dear reader. It’s not always about you, but never about you alone, and then thats only 50% of what your likely to get in the best case scenario anyway.

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In 1946 the ideal of venturing into the unknown was popularized by the actor William Shatner in his “Captains Log” narrative during the opening credits of the Star Trek TV series. Originally proposed as a Space Age Western by Gene Roddenburry, the show almost didn’t make it past the pilot episode, and was threatened with cancellation during it’s second series due to bad ratings. Acting on a whim, it was saved from being cut by a unprecedented letter writing campaign that was launched by the series limited but devoted fans who petitioned the network to keep the show on the air.

After failing to improve its ratings during the third season it was eventually cancelled. In 1969 it was decided to rerun the series in the hope of returning some of the investment made in creating them. Unlike during it’s original release, its popularity flamed up immediately and the show quickly grew a massive fan base that would spread across the globe like wild-fire.  Just think, if it wasn’t for those reruns, the Next Generation would never have seen the light of air.

Today the Star Trek Enterprise is a multi-billion dollar industry, and has influenced generations of Trekkies through it’s deliberate mix of morality and adventure.

“To boldly go where no man has gone before” has become more than a mere quote from a series that defines the term of movie cult status, but is synonymous with the way that we value our own accomplishment.

Ask people who they would like to meet most, and chances are they will choose someone that they admire, and more often than not the reason for their admiration is in the way their idol has blazed a trail of infamy that they find impossible to resist.

But for such a lofty ideal to be achieved in a society where everything has been done before is hardly heard of anymore. And prey tell what happens to our sense of achievement when we find out it was old hat, when we discover what we have done has been done before?

Our modern day internet connected world of link-up tech living and 24/7 access to a multi-verse of knowledge behest very little meaning to foster or challenge belief, much less through the multi-platform always access instant feedback information overload of social networking.  In the modern world of today the road less traveled is most likely to be yesterdays news, buried under last seasons headlines.

And yet I have trouble to find something simple, like sense?

In one of my more personal memorable moments from Star Trek V is the opening and closing camping scenes where Captain Kirk, Mr Spock and Bones find themselves camping underneath a star studded sky, and the doc tries to lead the troop in the song “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream”. Imagine my relief when I dis-covered at the age of 43 that it’s down the stream we go, when all my life I thought it was up!

It changed my world for good, and so did it change countless of others like me who found inspiration, revelation and enlightenment in the countless ways the Star Ship Enterprise and her crew showed us how it is possible to find the golden thread that make us human, and follow it all the way to strange alien worlds, terrifying alien allies, and twisted alien foes.

Now that, to me makes sense…

The festival that everybody was expecting, and the spiritual value of the occasion was rather changed. And even though the change is different from what could have been if the Tibetan Monk saw what he needed, rather than missed what he wanted, the reality is as much an opportunity for harmony as it was before the opportunity had been lost.