Fear not death

Here are five reasons why one must not fear death:

I: Death is our birth.
We begin dying from the moment of our conception, and we never stop doing so. Death is linked to our life and thus is inescapable; there are no immortals - not even the Universe itself is one, but, in accord with its own laws, marches surely towards chaos. Our own life is nourished by the Death of other beings, our breath sustained by the inner blaze combusting our own matter. Death is so bound to life that its knowledge of existence surpasses no-one, not even ourselves; hence...

II: Death is an adviser.
Death is the best counselor that we have, as don Juan Matus said. Nothing knows life as well as Death, its twin sister, does. Just turn to it, as you turn to a good friend, when you need advice on how to act, how to live: "You have but a moment left to live, use it well" it will say - no better advice will you ever find. Death, this wise entity, makes such a good adviser because it is without ourselves, it is objective, outside our control; hence...

III: Death is uncontrollable.
We never choose the moment we die. All control we think we have is mere illusion, for life is a like a battlefield: as we sidestep one blade, we squarely fall onto another, there always is a most bare flank, a chink within our armor. Those who try to bend Death to their will but waste their strength and breath, as him who tries to grab a stream with his bare hands or her who tries to command fire with her voice. Indeed, all things we try to bridle lose their beauty, be they part of life or death, and lose their mystery - what we don't control, we cannot know; hence...

IV: Death is unfathomable.
Many fear death because it is unknown. But if death is the opposite of life, our self cannot know it nor experience it, only that part of us that belongs to neither life nor death can touch both. Therefore death indeed consumes life and strips us of all the earthly things we know: not only happiness and bliss, but also pain, loneliness and fear. In death old things will be forgotten and something new will be 'known', if something as knowledge indeed exists in death. So alien is death that to fear it is pointless; hence...

V: Fear is Death.
Most importantly, to fear death is to stop living. Death, instead, must be the other side of the mirror, the darkness that makes us see through the mist of life. While knowing Death opens our eyes, to fear it blinds us ever surely and turns to shadow all life's beauty. Those who covet freedom from Death's grasp become as pebbles, ever closed upon themselves, untouched by all except that which they fear. In sum, when we lost immortality in Eden's garden we gained life, since Death only helps us live; hence... Death is our birth.

The Hawk-moth emerges

Almost exactly one year after my sighting of the caterpillar, I have been rewarded with a sighting of its renewed nature. I take it is a sign that, too, it is in us to change, to metamorphose ourselves into our latent self, and that this new self has not been crushed by past hardships but fed on them and made them beautiful to be endured. May you feel the same...

El Castillo de Belorado

Travelling the Way of St. James, I happened upon the quiet town of Belorado, in the province of Burgos. Many would say "large village" is more accurate a term, at least those pilgrims who would not venture outside its modern self, but would stay either in the comfort of their pilgrim "albergue", or limit themselves to visiting the modest central plaza nearby. They would not notice the past, espying them from the hills...

It had been a lucky chance that Elys and I decided, at the end of our long walk, to stay in the first place we found - a parish hostel in the church of Santa María, facing a small channel and almost succeeding in hiding the cliffs and caves set within the hill behind the edifice. Planted upon this hill, almost hidden from sight, sat a small rocky formation that I later found out to have been a castle. This "castle" seemed, from the distance, to be as uncivilized as the nearby caves, and made me wonder if the cliffs themselves had not belonged, at another time, to a refuge or even part of a citadel, perhaps now buried, composing its own grave mound.

Not long after hearing the word "castillo" - mentioned by the albergue's "hospitalera" - I already was striding up the grassy hill leading to the castle ruins. Although Elys had meant to accompany me until the end, when the drizzle turned to torrent she had to stop, since her garb was not well suited for a climb under the weather. "Turn back if you feel in danger" she said, "I will, my Love" I said, turning to her.

Yet slowly, as I climbed the slippery slope, as my clothes and shoes slowly soaked, and as I grew more determined to reach the castle - mockingly invisible from the slope - I started feeling that I could not turn back. Strangely, the wind and rain, which slowly gained vigour as they flew into my face, somehow pulled me forward. Even that brute gust of wind, which menaced to throw me off the path as it caught me unawares spying the ruins for the first time since I set off towards them, even that almost blazing downpour, they pulled my spirit in while thrusting my body away, perhaps in a vain attempt to separate them. These short episodes of inclement rage repeated many times, always when I found myself struggling to secure a foothold on the muddy path, always when the slope was steep, always when the castle grazed my mind.

I finally reached the small plateau where the small ruin stood. How to describe it without disappointing the reader? It is impossible to capture in words or photograph the actual spirit of the thing, which is not kin with its outer aspect. The ruin, which did not surpass a small house in size and rather seemed a natural rock untouched by chisel, bloated out of the hill, the cave at its foundation swollen like a bubble. It is to this cave that the zephyr called me, to its low, wide entrance, giving passage to a rough interior that would not have admitted me but on my hands and knees. It looked not as abandoned as I expected - the rests of wood and sharp rock within, and the rests of what could have been burnt or aged fabric suggested it had been visited, although I suspected no human being would find lasting comfort within the cavern. I stood at the threshold, with the wind pushing me within, but did not enter. How could I know whether that unnatural gust, which seemed to gain strength as I approached the castle, would let me out once I had entered its domain? As I stepped back, another gust of wind hit me, as in a last desperate attempt to bend my will, but another step back curbed it.

But I had not reached my destination, not yet. This thought appeared to have conjured a tempting path going up and round the ruin, to the rough facade towering above. I fell into its sin. As I stepped onto it, the squall renewed itself, alluring me on and forcing me to keep vigil on my steps.

When I looked up, I saw the facade from the other side, and for the first time I witnessed something distinctly human in it. It was not the fact that its arches and windows, unseen from the other side, seemed carved by iron rather than the elements. It was something entirely unexpected: I saw two 'faces' in the wall of the facade. The eyes of the rightmost, masculine face had large arches as its eyes topped by two short, grassy brows, and hiding the remaining features below under a dense beard twisted from various plants, grasses and mosses. The leftmost one, more feminine, had two small windows for eyes, each set within the curved brows of an arch, under which little grass could be seen, and where protrusions and cavities suggested the remaining features. Between the two, a bush of white flowers stood, perhaps as a last marker of the death and life of these once lords, once lovers, perhaps once slaves to one another. Why did their lives, which seemed turbulent enough to leave a mark in stone, result in small, clean, white blooms? While the windowless blind eyes of the stone lord could show me nothing, I thought that the eyes of his mistress could perhaps tell me something - if I could climb the wall and reach those high windows, perhaps I could see another world through them.

I checked myself. Those windows were not meant for human eyes.

I twisted myself round at last, finally heeding Elys' voice within me - "Turn back..." I ran down the path to the front of the castle, for the first time feeling how soaked my shoes had become, but as I stepped down onto the plateau I realised I could not find the path by which I had climbed onto it. Instead, the only path in sight veered off elsewhere, in the direction of the caved cliffs. Maybe the storm, with its rising vigour, had shifted the paths on the hill; if I had satisfied my wish to glance within the windows of that stone mistress, I would perhaps have found all paths gone, and myself alone on a dancing green island, eventually to be transmuted into one of its flower bushes...

I hurried down the path, and ignored the rain on my body, which had already passed through my raincoat as though through paper. It did not matter, not as long I could find a path - down, down, down... But the path mocked me, moved this way and than, first down, then up, yet higher than I had been before. Thankfully, I was not derided for long, and soon glimpsed the ruins of some houses down the hill, which I quickly passed only to realise that I was on the other side of the town. As I walked - or rather swam within my shoes - down the street to the parish hostel, all that existed was the cold wetness of that strange storm, reminding me that I had returned to reality.

Independent/Bosch Technology Horizons essay

Recently, I have written an essay on the topic of Ecology and Technology, which is one of two to have been published in The Independent newspaper. If you are interested in how technology can help us curb our energy consumption the essay offers a review of some very promising developments soon to come. See it by clicking the link above, or read it here below, I would more than welcome any comments/arguments on it!



"The energy diet

We are living in a 'fat' world. In recent years, the figure of size in environmental discourse has come in the form of the 'Carbon Footprint'; as logic tells us, the size of the footprint corresponds to the size of the foot and the foot to the size of the being resting its weight on the world.

We live in a world where we, as a collective 'being', are expanding: we consume far beyond our necessity and give little back. With the help of emergent technologies, we must embark on an 'energy diet' consisting of three things: 'losing weight', 'eating less' and 'exercising'.

First, we must lose 'weight'. The weight of our means of transport - cars, buses, trains and planes - means that we spend much more energy in moving the vehicle than in moving ourselves. Here the obvious solution is, in fact, a viable one: make things lighter. The most important advance in transportation within the next few years will not be the development of electricity or hydrogen-based engines, but the production of lighter cars. Instead of shifting the carbon footprint from the consumer to the energy-producing industry (remember, hydrogen/electricity must come from somewhere!) we must make the actual energy use efficient.

This way of thinking results in the Hypercar: a modular car with a carbon-fiber body, a tiny engine and a fuel cell. Its modularity means it is easy to maintain; its engine makes it highly efficient (up to 200 miles per gallon) and consequently ecological; and its carbon-fiber body makes it safer for those in and outside the car, since it absorbs impact much better than steel. Taking the load off the road will go a considerable way to reducing the size of our collective 'mass' and the footprint it leaves in its wake.

But not all energy is used up in transport. In everyday life, we need to 'eat' less energy than we currently do. While it is crucial to limit energy waste by changing our lifestyle - turning off appliances and heating whenever possible - it is perhaps more important to change the objects of our consumption: making appliances themselves more energy efficient. As our use of electronic equipment continues to increase in line with technological advancement, we need more than energy efficient bulbs to make the cut - we need efficient electronics.

A benchmark for this has been set by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, whose laptop, designed for children in developing countries, consumes a mere 2 watts, including processor, memory and screen. Since these components are part of an increasing number of electronic appliances, this technology could be applied to televisions, phones, media players and computers, giving consumers both peace of mind and better performance.

But where does 'exercise' fit in all of this? We cannot expect to reach environmental sustainability if we don't find ways of making energy without burning carbon fuels. Solar energy, wind power and ground source heat pumps are becoming increasingly efficient in obtaining energy, but unless we reduce our energy requirements, there will not be enough provision to satisfy our energy hunger.

There is, however, one more resource that technology can help us regain. Redirecting the normal flow of energy in physical exercise, we can actually regain energy by burning calories. This shift would involve the manual production of electricity - using our bodies to make energy. The process has been realized by Potenco for the OLPC project, which has created a pull-string dynamo to power the computer; given its low energy consumption, this is very easy indeed.

By extension, rather than going to the gym and using electricity to power an exercise machine, we could instead use portable generators to transform the energy of our bodies, as we walk or run, into electricity to power an iPod.

Secondly, through advances made in the efficiency of converting biomass into liquid fuels capable of powering cars (think Back to the Future), we could even transform our homes into safe mini-powerplants by decoupling the engine of our Hypercar from its wheels. Biodegradable rubbish could be used to create electricity to be sold back to the grid or stored in a battery for later use.

In these self-sustaining models, it would be possible to generate power from unburnt calories. With an incentive to escape our sedentary lifestyles, we could not only reduce the contours of our physical and consumptory bodies (and, of course, their footprints), but radically improve their respective states of health."

It's about time

It's about time I wrote something. I found this text half finished after being neglected for over a year... I hope you have a good time:


"How could time travel be possible?" - This question has occupied my mind now and again, but a simple way of answering this question has not found its way into my mind until recently.

It is known by physicists that subatomic particles can, and do, travel in time, but few talk how such an event is possible at all. Also, many writers have thought of the eventuality of travelling to the past and how it would affect the future, but the issue of travel into the future and back is equally interesting and less charted. Putting aside cliches of flying 'time-cars', amulets and special portals, let us consider the situation where a 'consciousness' can travel back and forth into time (I will leave it to the reader to extrapolate this example to the simple physical world...).

Imagine that your mind - let us exclude the body for the sake of simplicity - could travel into the future and back again. Whether you could have changed anything in this supposed travel is so far (relatively) irrelevant. However, acquiring information about the future would likely affect your future actions, which would again change the future. This results in a paradox, since the future that you have visited exists no longer, hence, you cannot have travelled into that same Universe in the first place.

Aside from saying that a parallel universe is created, with the old one remaining, you can still 'get away' with a single Universe. Let us think of time as of a strange kind of quasi-mathematical funcion that stabilises itself after infinite reiterations.

Imagine, for example, the archetypal situation, where you witness your 'future-self' painting a still life. Having seen yourself doing this, your 'present-self' will likely change the way it paints in the future, thus changing the painting of the future-self. Such change in the painting will, no doubt, be reflected in the perception of the present-self of the painting, which will in turn change his actions again, thus again changing the painting. This could be equated to a function that loops into itself, changing the outcome each time. Such a loop could, in theory, last infinitely, but as the number of iterations tends to infinity, the situation would stabilise itself, so that a point will be reached when the beholding of the painting by the present-self will not have any effect in the way this painting is made by the future-self. However, there are two arguments that could work against this:

First, imagine now another archetypal situation where you have witnessed yourself in the future, say, dropping a cup of coffee onto the floor. Knowing this, you may check yourself and not drop it. However, this means you would not have seen yourself dropping the cup of coffee and thus should drop it, given you had no reason to check yourself. This argument is weak, however, since no action is binary; thus there should always be a way for the most stable action to be reached. Imagine it as the point of lowest Entropy, or a curved rocky terrain where a small marble is dropped and rolls downhill until it finds a trough or well where it can 'sit'.

The second, more serious problem with such an explanation is that perhaps the loop would not ever completely stabilise itself, due to the effect of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, meaning that no two events could ever be exactly the same. Thus, rather than living in a time-line, we live in a sort of multi-dimensional 'time-band', which has different probabilities of existing at different cross sections of it, that varies according to the exact probabilistic make-up of the entire 'situation' - the entire universe at a moment in time (but note that time itself is likely probabilistic too!). Thus, our marble above would be constantly moving about the well, depending on the 'geography' and on the energy posessesed by the marble, which would exist in many places in the well at once, just as an electron cloud 'orbits' about its nucleus...