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Monthly Archives: March 2017

The Mother of All Fears

25 Saturday Mar 2017

Posted by Jay Magidson in books, death, fear, Threshold of the Mind

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audiobooks, death, fear, religion

Drowned, burned, buried alive, starved, death by thirst, falling off a building, airplane crash, suffocation, are just a few of the truly great fears.  But there is one greater, one that is the source of all others.  It is so insidious we have to bury it deep in our subconscious, push it far away; so heinous we must deny it utterly.  It is in fact so awful, so unimaginable and indescribable that we can’t even conceive of it.

bosch

More Frightening Than Death

And the greatest of all horrors is that we must all face it – that we are all headed straight for this ultimate terror.  It is not death, we know that one.  Death is certain, natural and inevitable.  Many have conquered the fear of death.  It is wise to live well, with intention, because we know it will someday end, will simply go out like the final flicker of a candle.

Humanity staves off the fear of death with religion, science and rationalization.  But we fail to look deeper at the sustained myths of living eternally on a cloud in the sky or being reincarnated.  Even burning in Hell for all eternity is easier to deal with than facing the truth.

alone

One Day We Will Lose Our Self

The consciousness that allows us to comprehend our individuality – our separateness from the billions of other men and women – will absolutely end.  What we call self, that unique person that we spend a lifetime developing and understanding will simple cease to be.  All the money, power, and accomplishments cannot change that.  Worst of all, is that it is inconceivable.  Even the deepest meditation involves mind.  When the mind ends, we end.

What if we could experience that before we die; know what it is like to be a no-mind, a no-self?  Would you try it, travel the unimaginable journey; face this fear and perhaps come back to tell others?

zombie

Zombies as a Metaphor

Zombie stories and movies fascinate our imagination.  We hate these mindless creatures and revel in the men and women who try to survive the cartoonish world of a zombie apocalypse, those brave souls who would bash in the heads of the undead.  But these stories are fairy-tales, unreal, denying nature and physics.  Zombies are just a metaphor for the greater fear.  We use these stories to crack the impossible nature of what we must all face.    It is the no-mind we recoil from.

The development of advanced technology may allow us to experience nothingness, may even force it upon us.  Then the ultimate fear will be realized and the choice will have to be made: eternal life without self or death and the unknown.

cropped-threshold-frontcover
Threshold of the Mind faces the ultimate fear.  Can you?

Available now in print and audiobook – Buy it Today!

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My Favorite Poem at 160 Years Old

20 Monday Mar 2017

Posted by Jay Magidson in books

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arachne

Les Fleur du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), a collection of 101 poems by Charles Baudelaire was first published in 1857.  Six of the poems were deemed so perverse and subversive, the French police rounded up and seized all available copies of the book.  Baudelaire and his publisher were arrested and tried on offenses to public decency.  That conviction wasn’t overturned until 1949.

Aren’t you just a little curious?

To the Reader

Folly and error, stinginess and sin
Possess our spirits and fatigue our flesh.
And like a pet we feed our tame remorse
As beggars take to nourishing their lice.

Our sins are stubborn, our contrition lax;
We offer lavishly our vows of faith
And turn back gladly to the path of filth,
Thinking mean tears will wash away our stains.

On evil’s pillow lies the alchemist
Satan Thrice-Great, who lulls our captive soul,
And all the richest metal of our will
Is vaporized by his hermetic arts.

Truly the Devil pulls on all our strings!
In most repugnant objects we find charms;
Each day we’re one step further into Hell,
Content to move across the stinking pit.

As a poor libertine will suck and kiss
The sad, tormented tit of some old whore,
We steal a furtive pleasure as we pass,
A shriveled orange that we squeeze and press.

Close, swarming, like a million writhing worms,
A demon nation riots in our brains,
And when we breathe, death flows into our lungs,
A secret stream of dull, lamenting cries.

If slaughter, or if arson, poison, rape
Have not as yet adorned our fine designs,
The banal canvas of our woeful fates,
It’s only that our spirit lacks the nerve.

But there with all the jackals, panthers, hounds,
The monkeys, scorpions, the vultures, snakes,
Those howling, yelping, grunting, crawling brutes,
The infamous menagerie of vice,

One creature only is most foul and false!
Though making no grand gestures, nor great cries,
He willingly would devastate the earth
And in one yawning swallow all the world;

He is Ennui! -with tear-filled eye he dreams
Of scaffolds, as he puffs his water-pipe.
Reader, you know this dainty monster too;
-Hypocrite reader,-fellowman,-my twin!

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Books are Dead – Long Live Stories

15 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by Jay Magidson in books, fiction, Science Fiction, Threshold of the Mind, Virtual Reality

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Tags

audiobooks, creativity, future, libraries, Sci Fi, Virtual Reality

Long_Room_Interior,_Trinity_College_Dublin,_Ireland_-_Diliff

I love books.  I have hundreds in my library, have read hundreds more.  I get a warm comfortable feeling when I go to a bookstore or public library.  But I also know that the end is near for books.  I’m not sad or nostalgic about any of it.  Things change.

Tens of thousands of years ago, long before speech, man told each other stories through pantomime and play acting.  They acted out their hunting adventures or mishaps, probably laughed when Grog hit his head on a rock.  You can feel the truth in this, have this genetic memory as I do.

tapestry_design_apollo_in_his_chariot_led_by_aurora

Thousands of years after that, our brains developed speech and the stories got more sophisticated, more detailed.  They were passed around, embellished, exaggerated until they became myths and legends.  Really exaggerated, like Atlas holding the world on his shoulders and Apollo pulling the sun across the sky.

Mankind lived on the earth for hundreds of thousands of years telling stories without books.  Then some clever fellow in Mesopotamia scratched symbols in the dirt and invented writing.  Someone else smeared these symbols onto parchment (no fun for the lamb by the way) and presto we have scrolls, and if they are long enough, are really just rolled up books.

parchment

Thousands of years after that, Gutenberg figured out a way to make multiple copies of the bible and by the 20th Century, we’re neck deep in books.  Millions and millions of them.  Even Hitler couldn’t burn enough to make a dent in the growing pile.

But if you look at the bigger picture, the history of humankind at approximately 500,000 years, books are still pretty new.  Writing is barely 5,000 years old, printed books only about 600 and the novel as we know it, less than 300.  And sad, though it may appear, books are going to disappear, are already disappearing, or more accurately, evolving.

Do you have children?  If not, have you ever seen one?  They love video.  In my day it was TV, “Gilligan’s island, Lost in Space.”  Horrible stuff.  Now it’s six second vines.  Amazing really, that you can tell a story in only six seconds.  YouTube, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Vimeo, Facebook, video is king.  We love them, devour them like chocolate on Easter.  They’re stories.

shutterstock_146935070

Oh I know the argument, video and movies do the imagining for us.  Books make us create the pictures in our own head.  “The movie was pretty good, but the book was great.”  But someone had to create those stories, imagine them and how to present them.  Grog didn’t worry about that when he acted out a good hunt in front of the fire half a million years ago.  Plays are high art and movies are not?  Nonsense.  It’s all just human beings telling stories to each other.  And that’s what matters.

shutterstock_30799201

Not long from now, we’ll agonize over the displacement of video and movies too.  We’ll watch and interact with Virtual Reality or maybe someday images will be beamed directly into our minds.  We can’t live without stories.  Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, “The medium is the message.”  I think it misses the point.  We are not that different from Grog in front of the fire, maybe no different at all.  I think we’re all just kids begging dad to tell us a goodnight story and don’t really care how it gets into our heads.

Threshold of the Mind by Jay Magidson

Threshold of the Mind by Jay Magidson a novel about  mankind addicted to Virtual Reality in the near future.

Available on Amazon.com in print, kindle and audiobook.  Buy it today!

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