For me the whole thing started when I woke at 1am to the sound of sirens and the smell of smoke. Nothing new in Cape Town, fires happen most summers, so I didn't particularly worry as i put on my pants and went to the front door.

Outside, a huge pall of smoke and red light glowing off the building next door. I felt a moment panic as I ran to the street and was met with the growing chaos. Behind the three Disa residential towers the flames leaped as tall as the 15 storey buildings themselves. This is just a few hundred meters away. Further down, smoke and bright yellow glare obscured the road.
"They're evacuating the far end of the road, " someone said. There were already people gathering, chattering. I thought, pack a suitcase.
I hardly turned to walk down the stairs to my flat when the loudhailers started screeching into the night, "Get out of your houses immediately! Leave now! For your own safety, leave your houses immediately!" Over and over, up and down the road, blue lights flashing from everywhere.

Then I was running. Suitcase. Random grabbing at clothes from my cupboard, from Chris'. Chris is away. I must do this alone.

I run to the car. There are now people running everywhere, people shouting, calling. Me and a neighbour bang at some doors. No reply. I see a bleary eyed owner in another flat - I press his buzzer. "Get out now!" I shout, weirdly thinking about how I know how badly he handles waking up - the whole building hears it every day.

I see Katie, the old lady next door, standing alone in the sudden chaos, Katie who at the best of time is a fragile, slightly hysterical, terribly sweet old lady in a one room flat with very little to call her own in the world.
She looks bewildered. "What must I do? Where must I go?" She says to me as I run past.
"Katy, get your things now, you're coming with me!" I yell, still running.

Then Ive got Penny, the cat, who is highly aware of the emergency and the madness, and who is acting compliantly and cooperatively, so un-catlike, in the flames and the smoke and the shouting and the loudhailers, still threatening.
Not much more than two minutes has passed in all of this.
Katie shouts, "My Terry, my Terry!", I'm thinking, "Who?", and again, 'My TEDDY! My TEDDY!" Its her Teddy Bear, Terry.
She rescues the bear. "If my Terry burns my life would be lost," she says, mournfully. Her face is stricken with fear. Only last week her cat Leo had disappeared, an adult given to her by its former owner Belinda, who could no longer keep it. It was hers just three days before it went out and never came back, probably not fully realising this new place was now home.

And then we're in the car, me, Katie, Penny, Terry. I drive through the evacuation traffic, people in the streets.
We spent the night in the car in a quiet street half a mile away, watching the fire, my eyes fixated mostly on the bluegums across the road from my flat, waiting for them to explode, to set the buildings alight like in Australia.
Talking about it.
Thinking about what I didn't take. All the important documents, every one except my driver's license, which was in my wallet.
What I did take: winter clothes. It's summer. I think I had visions of being a shivering refugee somewhere. Clean underwear. Random clothes from Chris' cupboard - luckily he has so much with him on his trip. My laptop. My backup hard drive and Chris' Mac Mini, which has his new kids' novel on it. I had to crawl under a table and unplug all sorts of things. Still, this was my real moment of presence of mind! I saved what I thought he would save.

In the car, I tried out the feeling of losing everything. I chanted to Ganesh. I went on facebook at 3.30 am on my phone and told all of you.
Really, thank God for Facebook! Without Chris there, in this out of control madness, and Katie trembling in the rear seat quietly praying, I had nobody to survive with. To tell. To quell my fears. But there was facebook.

Next thing I had my brother in the US on the phone; I had your messages beginning to pour in, as Im sure you also sent to all your others here, I had so many friends in real time just there when I needed it! This aint no telephone, no email, it can be really something. Thank you, I really wanted to say that, thank you.

By 5 am we saw the fire moving on, higher up, taking what little was left of the mountain. Tentatively, we drove towards home.

The street was nearly deserted. The homes were empty. For an hour or so I patrolled, I sat and watched the receding fire as every now and then a car would pull up; someone would drag a suitcase back into a house. Katie had to catch a taxi - Cape Town taxis, even when its raining ashes and its 6 am - and go to work
Others, also patrolling. Exchanging stories. Hearing that the practically the whole neighbourhood had eventually evacuated.

Finally, back home. Penny, the cat, checking everything, confirming all was okay and intact.
Me, shellshocked, relieved, it was over, even though the whole building was still empty and you could feel it.

Finally, dawn: helicopters at last, at 7am; sleep, just a little, til the phone started ringing.
Later, when I drove to the airport, I saw the fire had even been much closer than I thought. Parts of the Disa property across the road were burnt, one tennis court gone. Further, burn right down to the road; and across the road, to my side of the road, the whole field next to the QuickSpar, right in the middle of lots of houses.

What came out of the fire: Katie's missing cat Leo. Lost for a week, at 3am the fire chased him, scared and starving, into the first stranger's flat he could find, and who still had Belinda's cell number on a collar around his neck.
And all of us, me, Penny, Katie and Terry, intact.

Tags: personal

I have a terrible fear of nature documentaries. Ever since I can remember, when one of them comes onto the television I get a queasy feeling in my stomach. I get that irrational feeling of panic, a sense that I must leave the room at once.

Of course I don`t leave the room, not actually, but over the years I have developed a variety of the unseeing stare that can ignore even the most brutal of what nature, and the dedicated documentarians have to offer.

They don`t even have parental advisories, any indication that what you`re about to see is more violent than anything Quentin Tarrentino could have dreamed up, and not only that, but this is real. No fake blood, no playing possum, this is death in all its glory.

The most mundane of TV shows have great big triangles in the corner warning of all sorts of dire horrors. Even if they think you`re going to be hearing a word you don`t fancy they`ll stick a big road sign there to warn you. Some of them are such accomplished sensationalist horrors that they warn sensitive viewers to leave the room immediately. Not that I`ve ever wanted to flee, in fact, quite to the contrary (which might also be part of the intention.) But undoubtedly there are those whose bladders groan at the prospect of yet another cup of tea while the flicker-eyed monster pours the dark guts of the world into the living room.

Now naturally I understand that this stuff on the nature documentaries is nature pure and simple, the ultimate life is tough lesson. But does that mean that you have to sit there and take it, even if you are a sensitive viewer? Surely somebody must realise that even those who like a juicy steak now and again (and that does not include me) doesn`t mean that you`re willing to watch a poor, helpless doe-eyed creature meet its end in the gnashing jaws of a mincemeat machine such as the jaws of a lion or crocodile.

Yes, I am a vegetarian, but you don`t need to be a vegetarian to have compassion for a real-life creature who has been especially bred for the slaughterhouse. Even a farmer must have a little switch-off button that allows him to admire and nurture the homely, appealing cow, wax lyrical about its majesty, and then send them genocide-like to the chopping block. Or in this enlightened era those who advocate hunting, people like Prince Charles of Wales, whose own mournful eyed looks have adorned the publicity papers of many a conservation agency. Oh, never fear, the foxes and stag are essentially allowed to breed expressly for the sake of the hunting.

So how should an animal react to that, when chased by the hounds and horns of a maniac institution? If it could speak, would it say to its twenty-first century predators, Oh, don`t worry about me, I was bred to be shot!

What is this weakness in me that I cannot watch the death of an animal without losing contact with reality, feeling a deep terror that the world is ending? Here I sit, a middle-aged somewhat adult man still not dealing with a small fact of life like the gruesome real-life death of warm and cuddly creatures. Wanting to leave the room like a wimpish child, fearing the ridicule of his friends almost as much as the inevitable fate of all those animals they`re getting us to love, sympathise with and donate to.

Perhaps this is the stuff that therapy is made of. It could have something to do with that aged teddy I mutilated in a quest to be a surgeon and then felt guilt about for the remainder of my childhood. Or else, something deeper. There was also that teddy I had that all I remember of is that it had no head. I was three years old when it lost the head, so later I never remembered why. I felt guilty about that, too.

And then we were at Craig`s place, and the TV was on in the background as usual. Being a Saturday afternoon it was really kid`s stuff that was on, but like any other day there were as many previews as actual shows, and the previews never had any parental advisories either, but that`s another matter.

So there is this preview of tomorrow`s great animal show. This time it`s a mass-genocide episode, the migration of cute animals across a treacherous, croc-infested river. There they were, huge killing machines, lining up in their tens and twenties, knowing that their victims had no choice but to come this way.

And there they were, the soon-to-be victims, knowing it too on the other bank of the river. Their huge brown eyes screaming out to you, miles and years and glass-tubes away, saying you, please, you see me, you can help me. Finally they cross, one by one and then in their masses, and the crocs close in.

Slow-motion images of antelope and gazelle, some of them only babies with their thin long legs and their vain hope that their terrified mother can help them. Seeing them going down, struggling, those eyes, those Disney doe eyes. This is cartoon hour, remember. What are they telling us? Hey kids, come watch Bambi and her family getting snapped to death by crocodiles!

And then it struck me, what it is, this strange phobia that I have. There I was, six years old, all over again. There was no TV in those days, there was lots of imagination, and there was Bambi. This huge screen, the overwhelming joy and astonishment of the gorgeous singing animals, and when it comes to its glorious finale your pure little heart is bursting for joy and the next thing Bambi`s mother is shot, and she`s dead. That`s it. Even in Disneyland dead things don`t come to life.

Wham. It`s like a bullet through my head.
Dead.

So maybe they are trying to say that everything dies. But at six years old, singing, actually understanding the animals words like you were Doctor Doolittle. You don`t need to tell me everything dies, even at six I know that. In any case, you don`t need to tell me that way.

Scarred for life. Myself and many other six year olds, they`re out there. Because I know what it is, why it is that I and probably many others of my generation have a secret terror of nature documentaries.

With Bambi`s mother, you just can`t get any closure.

I have been away for a while, on one of my regular visits to the most remote corners of the country in rural Pondoland, Transkei. So many South Africans don't even know of this incredibly beautiful and ancient part of the country, where African ways and traditions thrive almost untouched by European influence and where lush indigenous forests remain unspoilt. Of course, the current government - most of whom were born in the Transkei - have lots of plans to mine and cut down and rape the land every which way they can, but thats another story for another post one day.

I took some folks to experience the ancient spirituality that is alive and thriving in South Africa today. One of the wonderful ironies of the evil apartheid system is that it unwittingly and unintentionally preserved the ancient culture, and so here in this land we have spiritual practises that reach back to the heart and core of our shared humanity.

We spent the weekend in a roomy, dark hut. Mpepho, the sacred herb of the ancestors, burned, its spicy smell permeating the air. The drums began, and their insistent rhythm slowly called more and more people from the hills far and wide, people who walked as much as ten kilometres to get there, in response to the call.

As they joined, they began to sing the ancient songs, clapping with the drums louder and louder, the children's high voices soaring and waving over the rumble of the men and the sing-song of the women. The energy was raised higher and higher. One by one the sangomas took the floor in the centre of the hut, stamping and whirling faster and faster, the rattles on their feet urging the rhythm on, the spirit rising, filling the room, the presence of the ancient ancestors as tangible as the dust and the smoke in the air.

As always, the white South Africans with me were utterly transformed, moved beyond words. Some were eventually encouraged to join the dance, shown the steps, taught the songs. At no point was their colour relevant. Our ancestors are the same - spirit is the colour of light, the white inside, not the 'white' of the skin. As they say here, if you scratch the skin, we all bleed red. And so we danced, we who were born on this land thrugh the winds of destiny, history, and karma, we who have been joined on this continent, like it or not, through the ways good and bad of our ancestors, we danced together in the celebration of spirit, in the affirmation of our shared humanity.

Some days later, we returned to Port St Johns, the old town at the coast which is the magnet to dope smokers, hippies and nature loving backpackers around the world. It's an amazing place itself, shockingly beautiful, giving a hint of the ancient African culture that surrounds it.

And there we found backpackers from Cape Town, camping in their native American tipi. Having a spiritual experience, waving their crystals and their eagle feathers around, talking of lodges and sleeping under dreamcatchers. Feeling connected. Yes, 'connected' to a lost and very distant spiritual culture not even remotely connected to themselves and their ancestors.

In the hills around the campsite, you could see the fires being lit and you could hear drums starting up. Only a kilometre or two away, the drums called their invitation to all who would listen, all sons and daughters of this African soil, and made welcome to them all. 'Come dance, transcend time and space, my culture and yours, enter the ancient space of spirit!'

And the new age hippies, seeking spirit, so blinded by their own starry eyed vision of what spirituality is, a made up version of another continent's lost ways, so deafened by the banging on their own drums that they remained utterly oblivious to the unique and precious invitation they have inherited as young South Africans, the invitation to accept the invitation of the ancestors and be a part of a new, authentic, African spiritual path into the future.

Just yesterday I received an email from a friend who had decided to sign up for a Shamanism 101 course, wondering if I knew the facilitator and why I myself didn't offer such courses. It didn't take much ESP, intuition or magical powers for me to immediately detect the odour of a plague of rats, even over all the copper wire of the internet.

Naturally, I had never heard of this facilitator, and unsurprisingly, even the most exhaustive of Google searches didn't turn up his name. You may think that a recommendation for a Shaman - surely some sticks-and-herbs man wandering the dark paths of the forests, fighting demons and making medicines is not to be found updating his Facebook profile and so is unreachable by the viral reach of search bots?

Well that's just the point. Shamans, the real ones, are not wont to advertise their services online, and most importantly, they do not teach their skills in expensive seminars. Shamanism or anything like it is a calling, not a choice, and its usually a difficult and troublesome calling, just like all callings are.

Even though the real ones are pretty rare these days, here in Africa the process resembles that of any trainee medicine man in any traditional culture: it is a one-on-one apprenticeship lasting many years, initiated by a series of invariably unpleasant circumstances that signify the calling. If someone actually wants to do that they are considered as mad as someone who wants to throw themselves from a cliff to see if they can fly.

Whatever your opinion about Shamans per se, you can't help but recognise that familiar combination of Spiritual paucity and rampant commercialism that drives our Western need to make the fast buck, to imagine we're doing something relevant and useful for the world, and to increase our importance in the eyes of all around. Magical powers! Second only to the hallowed wizardry of Hacking (interestingly, also taught in dark places rather than 101s!)

It's been called 'the cult of the amateur', but I think it's even worse. Not only are we dangerously misinformed, dumbing ourselves down and creating a world of intellectual poverty for our kids to inherit, but our spiritual, intellectual and experiential heritage is being usurped by a bunch of self-appointed idiots like Mr Shamanism Facilitator. The ironic side effect of the incredible power of the democratization of information that the internet has unleashed for us.

Shamanism 101: How to destroy thousands of years of human knowledge and experience in a single weekend, and get rich doing it. And we wonder why the great achievements of religion, philosophy, astrology and others like them have vanished?

Let's celebrate the Net and its unimaginably exciting future, but let's not forget and bury the heritage from the past.

The first rule of Shamanism: honour the ancestors. Oh, the irony!

Hardly a day goes by that I don't hear some reference or other to the Mayan Prophecy - the one that says that the world ends on 22 December 2012. Well at any rate, when I first started hearing about it decades ago that's what it was supposed to mean, but these days I hear all sorts of wild New Age theories. The latest was just the other day, when someone told me that the Mayan calendar 'ending date' is in fact the day that the earth enters the Galactic Centre - a place billions of light years away that we orbit over unimaginable lengths of time and that we can't get any closer to since we are circling it - duh!

This New Age business is gobsmacking. They have managed to transform a prophecy of the end of the world - a key principle of any religious organisation worth its salt - into the characteristic new age fluffy unicorn stuff of "transformation", delight, bliss, elevation of our miserable lives into a spiritual rescue mission that sends us into another dimension, by means of the usual hodge podge of misunderstood science, bastardised and misunderstood Astrology and Religion of the Self.

It's nothing more than the Catholic Rapture twisted into an almost unrecognisable mockery of itself, which is ironically true of much of the rubbish that the 'New Age movement' recycles: so much of it is a shallow relic of long-crumbled Judaeo-Christian spirituality with a tad of Hinduism and a healthy dash of anything Native American.

Anyway, this date is derived from the fact that the fascinating Mayan Calendar comes to the end of its great cycle on that date. It's a remarkable blend of partly understood but complex concepts of time, much like the same kind of things that most ancient cultures have, but of course claiming an altogether different measure of time as all the others do, as is generally the case. (Let alone the fact that the Mayans knew nothing of the Galactic Centre.)

What makes little sense is why the New Age pundits have seized onto this particularly obscure theory of time as the gospel? Especially since there is not much that these ancient American cultures have to offer that is particularly desirable, profound or applicable to the rest of humankind. Part of the reason is of course that little of their culture is known, having been so utterly destroyed by their contemporary enemies and even more so by the marauding Spaniards.

Ah, there's the rub: there is nothing so attractive as a vague and unsolveable mystery. When something is coded and lost in the mists of time it could be made to serve anyone's theories - Nostradamus' obscure scribblings are a great example of that. No better way to prove vague New Age ideas than with vague historical ones - there's a reason to punt some obscure culture's obscure prophecies.

And here's a more important rub: everyone seems to neglect the fact that the very same Mayan calendar predicted the 'previous' end of the world as 11 August 3114 B.C. Oops. Not only did that prediction patently fail, but so has every other end-of-the-world prediction failed, and there have been no shortage of those across various times and cultures.

Yet the Calendar-thumpers persist in their prophecy of doom transformed into another good old fashioned deus-ex-machina, their Rapture, the hoary old "listen to us and you will be saved!" And there's the other reason why end-of-world prophecies are so necessary to any burgeoning religion that wants to be worth the parchment its scriptures are printed on.

There's an aspect of human psychology here too: it seems that throughout time people need to believe that they are the last generation, the pinnacle of all that has gone before, the ones cast with the divine responsibility of saving the world from certain destruction. It is the psychology that underlies much of that religious thinking, as well as the need for individual and own-group purpose and meaning. And it also reveals the materialism that lies behind New Age 'spirituality' - there is no room for redemption in spirit or in time, it has to be in our own lifetime. Ah well, New Age spirituality is the spirituality of the Ego, as I have said elsewhere in this blog (see The Secret Behind the Secret.)

But let's face it: it really does seem that the world is in a sorrier state than ever before. There is little doubt now that we truly have brought our planet to a brink of some kind, with our destruction of natural resources and the environment adding up to actual evidence, for once, that an end is indeed nigh. Maybe this time, the prophecies are right ... ?

Well, what time and failed prophecies prove is that the earth - nature - is self-correcting, as all systems are. It is sadly likely that death and destruction do follow, that global warming, HIV and other diseases, you name it, are indeed symptoms of a world at a brink, but in reality what follows is a turn of a cycle, a natural cycle, one that does not change magically on some special date predicted by a people not noted for any intellectual, spiritual or cosmic insight. Nope, the consequences of the result of our destruction themselves eventually bring about the correction - many humans will die from these horrors over the next decades and centuries: not a disaster, though - a sadly necessary natural correction.

As an astrologer, I believe that we should learn more about cycles than worry about predictions. Perhaps you're surprised that an astrologer would say that, but there is a lot more sense to astrology and how it works than most lay people know, more topics for future posts. Astrology is also an ancient study of time, a study that concludes that everything goes through cycles, be it the weather, events, beliefs and even individual human experience.

Mayan astrology has not survived (although it has been reinvented, not at all the same thing.) There is a culture whose notion of time cycles have endured for millenia, undestroyed, and that offers a view of cycles that provide a more useful and meaningful set of symbols to understand these cycles, and why the earth is such a sorry mess. The ancient astrology of the Vedas, the early (East) Indian culture, describes cycles as vast - from hundreds of thousands to billions of years in size, much closer to what nature and experience actually show. In their cultural worldview, we are now in a long age of 'iron' or darkness, an age predicted at about the time the Mayan calendar was predicting the previous end of the world 5000 years ago.

The characteristics of that age are all we see in our time: materialism, loss of our respect for humanity and nature, loss of our natural spirituality, destruction of species, the list goes on. But this is what is important: since it's a cycle, eventually it will shift and gradually start going in the other direction. No intervention necessary, no chosen people, no chosen culture.
No spiritual rescue is required, no subscription to a religion or even a belief in astrology. It is not relevant whether the number of years given for each cycle is right or wrong. It is the underlying universal wisdom we should see in these ancient teachings rather than the assertion that an individual culture is correct - the wisdom of huge cycles expects no individual culture to last billions of years; only humanity itself could.

So we are not required to subscribe to some lost culture's beliefs. In this worldview, all that is required is a personal commitment for the individual to live his or her life as respectfully as possible, and to strive toward one's own innrer enlightenment rather than to look to outer events or to proselytise. In this way, we can keep the tiny fire of mankind's natural spirituality burning, passing it on down the generations, through the inevitable destruction of much more of this planet and our species, until the day returns many years hence, not in our lifetimes, when we can again live in harmony with everything else.

And even then, the Galactic Centre will be as many billions of miles away in space and relevance as it has ever been.

Tags: 2012, Mayan Prophecy, prediction, New Age

For the record, and in response to some of the concerns that people who know me raised about my "I See Dead People" post. From my own experience, I do think that 'ghosts' exist. I think that they are sometimes a strange phenomenon whereby an 'energy memory' of some kind seems to stick to certain places, but also that they may be actual dead people. In that case, they either don't understand that they are dead, and so are trying to interact with the living world, or they are powerfully attached to this world due to trauma or unfinished business.

So yes, sometimes psychic mediums may help those dead folk with unfinished business. So some of the dead can sometimes be contacted - but not the telephonic chatty stuff that John Edwards and his ilk do and that the previous post was all about.

And yes, I do think that people can be genuinely psychic, and that often explains why the psychic who give messages from the dead can give accurate, already-known information: they are unconsciously picking up the thoughts from the living 'client' (rather than from the dead person.)

Tags: psychics, ghosts, spirits, death, John Edwards

It has been amazing to see the growth of TV psychics over the last few years. Although talking to the dead has been popular for over 100 years already, ever since "rock star psychic" John Edwards' TV show has become an international hit our fear and suspicion surrounding this rather unusual occupation has given way to ratings and rave reviews.

Never mind TV, in almost any city a glance through the local New Age listings - say, the 'Link Up' newsletter - will offer a veritable yellow pages of psychic telephone operators ready to put you in touch with the dearly departed. Many people now think that contacting the dead is a pretty normal thing to do - if you need a last goodbye or to ask where the will is, no problem.

Rewind a few hundred years, and talking to the dead is a very serious, difficult and dangerous activity. Only the greatest of Magicians can do it (that's Magicians as in Wizards, not stage conjurers like Mr Copperfield) and usually with enormous consequences - from having their houses torn apart by strange inexplicable energies, to death. That's when it worked, of course, and there's very little evidence that it did. There is lots of strange stuff in the world, there certainly are inexplicable and spiritual phenomena, but that doesn't mean it was chatty dead folk.

Actually, 'spiritualism' - the politically correct name for what is properly called necromancy or 'raising the dead' - is a modern invention, invented in the late 19th century by a pair of sisters who worked out how to create taps and movements in the furniture. Despite their eventual admission that they faked it, an instant fad developed and tables were tapping and tipping on both sides of the Atlantic before you could say Harry Houdini. Yes, conjurers picked up on the clever trick and made a new branch of illusion out of it, and Sherlock Holmes' creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dragged his own name and reputation through the mud trying and failing to prove that communication with the dead was possible.

Duh! I mean, whatever your religion or belief system, is there one idea of 'heaven' that suggests that dead people are hanging around waiting for the phone to ring? Most people who believe in spiritualism also believe in an afterlife of some higher dimension and even in reincarnation. It takes only a moment's thought to realise that both of these make taking calls impossible - one way or another, these spirits are either moving on to a higher cloud or back down to dreary old earth.

But as usual, that never stopped an industry being born. An industry that is really all about exploiting people's fear of death, lack of knowledge about it, and their very sad inability to let go and move on themselves. All of these are brought about by a materialistic culture totally devoid of any meaningful spiritual worldview or authority, and so the vultures move in.

What do these telephone operators tell us? That your relative is happy, that they they are fine now, they're in a great place, and that they forgive you. That's it, that's always it. They don't even bother to get a new script or a different one from the next psychic. It is truly amazing and also sad that people are so easily taken in by such shallow platitudes. It also shows how desperate they are (and how religion has failed them.)

More significantly, they never give useful information - who is the murderer? Where is the will? Not a single case of such help. Never is a person given any information they don't already know or that can be verified later.
And that reveals how they're doing it - because some of you must be thinking, 'I've seen it done, they come up with names and diseases and all sorts of stuff - it's pretty convincing.'

Actually, any student of magic - the conjuring type - knows how to do it (and also knows how to bend spoons, another famous piece of deception.) In fact, stage magicians usually do a more convincing job than John Edwards. It's a technique cold "cold reading", and it boils down to an incredibly simple, clever and deceptive method of first homing in on the right person ('I'm getting an 'M' ... and 5 people raise their hands; 'someone who died of cancer' (gee that's unusual!), 3 of those now lower their hands ... and so it goes; and then extracting information from them without them even noticing! It;s even more convincing in a one-on-one, where it's more subtle and devious but still very similar. It's bog standard illusion though, and very frustrating and infuriating for an amateur or pro magician to watch a cold reader pretending to have paranormal talents!

Okay, most of them don't do the cold reading and are really well-meaning, and no doubt even think they are doing what they claim to be doing - after all, they're generally as gullible as the people they're persuading and "she is no longer in pain and she loves you very much" doesn't take much skill to produce. But well-meaning or not, if self-delusion leads you to take desperate bereaved people's money and deny them the very necessary psychological acceptance of the death it's actually a lot worse than anything a 'conventional' religious idea does.

After all, even if they're not really sitting on clouds and all, they're certainly gone. Not forgotten, still loved; but the only word that needs to be spoken, and which needs no magic telephone, is 'Goodbye.'

You must have caught the hype by now - the book/DVD called 'The Secret' that is supposedly changing everyone's life. It's all about 'The Law of Attraction', the universal Spiritual Law that says that what you 'put out' is what you attract back to you.

There is nothing new about this 'secret', of course. New Age evangelists have been singing this one since the before the New Age was new (is it? See a forthcoming post on the secret behind the New Age). It boils down to the claim that you attract to yourself the manifestation of what you think and believe about yourself and your own life.

At first glance, this is an attractive philosophy, nobly holding ourselves entirely responsible for our own lives and all thats in them. Responsibility is a good thing, we think, this makes sense, and we start buying into the idea. But quickly it develops into the idea that if anything bad ever happens to you, you caused it by your beliefs and thoughts about yourself. This is an attractive idea because it implies that nothing bad need ever happen to you if you think positively. It gets even more attractive when it quickly becomes the even more attractive idea that you can have anything you want, just by thinking and believing it so.

Wow! Having already bought the idea, this then seems to be a deep and profound truth. And so you spread the word and the authors behind the secret make another few hundred bucks (and no doubt end up having everything they want.)

The sickening thing about this idea is that its chief proselytist is Oprah Winfrey,a woman with a bank balance big enough to not only have whatever she wants, but whatever all of the rest of us want too! She can smugly sit there and proclaim You Can Have It All from atop a heap of gold while millions around her, in her own country, ours and everyone else's, die in poverty, disease, lack of sanitation and housing, education and all the rest of the basic human necessities.

Ah, but of course, that's their fault. They just think wrongly. Those starving masses don't really want food, they probably believe they don't deserve it. And would Ms Winfrey have us believe that the millions of desperate, hopeful children she never accepted into her elite academy in South Africa actually didn't really believe they deserved it? Yeah, right, just like the victims of Hurricane Katrina that Oprah shed all those tears about. Why worry, why cry, why help them? Didn't they attract that hurricane themselves?

There's an even darker side to this - I'm gonna say it, wicked idea the Secretists are purveying. A woman I know who (even before the 'publishing phenomenon') made her living teaching that you cause your own illnesses by your beliefs ("yes you do!" chant the Secretists) suddenly was diagnosed with an aggressive breast cancer. Because of her beliefs, she blamed herself, sunk into a deep depression (much more dangerous than 'beliefs') and tragically failed to fight the illness because she believed she must have caused it. She agonised because she couldn't imagine how and why - she had been so positive about everything, she was the passionate evangelist of thinking positive! The wickedness is that (apart from the clear fact that The Secret Can Kill You) the Secretists would have her believe that she unconsciously had negative beliefs that caused it.

Yes, the Secret always works because if it doesn't, it was merely that your unconscious belief was the opposite. How clever and manipulative is that? The Secret can never be disproved because the 99% of the time it plain doesn't work is because you had wrong beliefs you are not aware of and actually can't control. (Er, never mind the apparent contradiction that no-one seems to have noticed there...) So if it doesn't work, that's also your fault, not the fault of this supposed 'Law'.

Despite the authors' claims that this is an ancient knowledge they are revealing to us, it isn't - they are manipulating some traditional or ancient ideas and fitting them into the modern materialist mentality that measures success and happiness by having what you want. Ideas like 'as you sow, so shall you reap' (which has altogether different implications than 'you can have it all') and even the law of karma, which in many ways is the opposite of the Secret but to the naive looks just the same ... also a topic of a future post.

There are no spiritual or scientific worldviews that rest entirely on one law - the notion is absurd. These Secretists would have us believe that millenia of spiritual and scientific thinkers somehow managed to miss this point. That lifetimes dedicated to trying to penetrate the mystery of Life, the Universe and Everything, which absorbed the greatest minds that have ever lived on this planet, were wasted because they didn't realise there's only one Law of the universe. How arrogant could they be? They've essentially negated all of human thinking in all cultures ... the mind boggles!

So why do people buy into it? For the same reason that they believe the advertising that says FREE! and YOU HAVE ALREADY WON $40,000! We want to believe there's a magic bullet that will remove the difficulties of life. We want to believe we have control. We want to believe that we can have whatever we want without working for it. We don't want to believe we're subject to the laws of nature or of God (take your pick, but neither are compatible with the Secret, another fact the materialistic Secretists seem to have missed.)

But most of all, our world has become driven by materialism. You don't need me to tell you that, it's all about buy buy buy and want want want! And some clever people got together and created a religion based on You Can Have What You Want - the perfect religion for the New Age, the age of materialism and the belief that humans are the most powerful thing in the universe. Of course people would buy into that!

And right now, with millions of books and DVDs flooding the world, and millions in the bank, the authors of The Secret have exactly what they want: your hard-earned cash.

Tags: The Secret, New Age

By now you have heard enough jokes about Pluto losing its planetary status, but I am still having people stopping me in the streets and asking what this means for Astrology.

Some are horrified that such a powerful force could be toppled from its throne (it often represents trauma in astrology.) Some are delighted that astrology is definitely wrong after all, since we were wrong about Pluto, and on top of it there are three all new planets. Somehow these people think that if new planets are ‘discovered` then the old planets become invalid.

Now let`s get something straight, people. ‘Planets` are essentially things invented by people. This is a bunch of people sitting in a room, voting on what the definition of planet should be. Size and shape are big contenders to define them, but shape of orbit put in a special appearance this time. Most fascinatingly of all, the new category of ‘dwarf` planets is based on the number of Earth years they take to orbit the sun, with an arbitrary cut off point of 200 to get called a dwarf (is that how old Snow White`s buddies were?)

Even the scientists must have thought it was a bit silly. And there are still some people out there who worry that this will affect the cosmos, or that the 6000 year old art and science of Astrology, one that has persistently occupied the minds of the greatest thinkers throughout the ages, will be toppled by some obscure committee in an unrelated field.

Astrology has no such problems of definition. To most astrologers, the planets are relevant to us because we can see them. This is considerably less arbitrary! Astrology has been called the Science of Light, concerned with the sun, moon and five visible planets. Even bad-rap Pluto, and its invisible cousins Uranus and Neptune, the ‘classical` planets, have never quite acquired the influence and status of ‘real` planets in the astrologer`s chart. So all those invisible blobs of rock out there are not much more than small details, just like they are in space useful, but not essential to the story.

Just never let a bunch of guys in white coats define reality for you. They may never let you out of that place!

One of the things that everyone seems to bemoan these days is how out of tune with nature we humans have become. We yearn romantically for the (imagined) days of our ancestors, when sun rises, lunar phases and all the rest timed our daily existence. Ah, what a blissful life - no stress, alarm clocks or TV schedules.

While there isn`t anything we can do about the march of progress and time, we certainly can stop making it worse for ourselves by setting ourselves up for all the out of synch problems, let alone the disappointment of the freeze and frost that will kill all those cute baby plants the nursery foisted on us this last weekend because we were all so drunk with joy at the arrival of spring.

So here`s the facts, folks: Spring DOES NOT begin on September 1st. Sorry, but just because the grass is riz and the jasmine is blooming - and even the sun is shining (for a second here in Cape Town) - that doesn`t make it Spring. No, September 1st is just the day that the public swimming baths open, which I`m sure is where the ridiculous made up date of Spring comes from. Hey, no surprise that repressive old government we had tried to control Time along with everything else. They did, after all, spend a lot of energy trying to tell us what was natural (by legislating their definition of UNnatural, of course!)

Of course, Spring begins at the Spring Equinox, when else?! For those who don`t know, that`s around September 23rd. That`s the day the day starts getting longer than the night because - and this is the real point - the sun returns to the Southern Hemisphere. It`s also an important date for astrologers, more of which at some other time …

So if you`re really concerned about getting back in touch with nature, save Spring Day for Spring, celebrate on the Equinox Day and don`t let some grey NP bureaucrat dictate your natural cycles from the grave and kill your premature seedlings!

Tags: Life

I`m here to reveal the greatest secret of our age. Not the opening of new burial chambers within the eternally enigmatic Great Pyramid, nor the lost manual which explains how to get more bandwidth out of that choked Telkom line. It`s the great mother of all conspiracy theories, the UFO cover-up.

Now I know it`s a sensitive point after all, the amount of work and number of person-hours it`s taken to keep all of that stuff concealed for over fifty years probably comes close to the calories that were sweated away when building that pyramid in the first place. That`s not to mention the fact that nowadays, since all that stuff is pretty much out in the open, all those guys in the CIA who`ve been chastely sealing their lips in honour of a long-dead president (well, whose secret is it?) would be out of a job. But Greys have become an industry, and so has the conspiracy itself.

Let`s face it, those Greys are everywhere, and nowhere more than cyberspace. To deal with smaller mysteries first, it`s those millions of Alien Abduction and Pleiadian Message pages which are probably hogging all that bandwidth that`s preventing you having decent cam-sex with your friend in Moscow. As it turns out, they couldn`t have chosen a better home, the strange virtual world which is somehow an interaction of a little technology and a lot of imagination and opinion.

To get back to the Great Conspiracy, we need to look at where it started: post-war America. Now I know that you`ve been told that the aliens noticed us because of the nuclear technology (mass destruction, of course) that we had developed and thought to save the day, but that`s probably another conspiracy to distract you from the real truth. As with all wars, killer technologies caused an economic boom, and we`ve all heard about the post-war one. It was in precisely that climate that the ultimate manifestation of the American Dream happened. The sugary pastel Pleasantville fifties that we all see as so quaint (and dangerous) clustered around the ultimate icon of the modern era: the home appliance. Think about it, all those cheesy retro fifties ads and fashions you see show quite plainly that the era was a homage to human inventiveness and vanity. People tried to invent machines to do just about everything and it hasn`t changed much today, except that they`re now trying to give them little Windows-powered group minds, just like those Greys.

We seek the ultimate machine, really. Since at least the time of the Greeks human beings have looked skywards for a deus-ex-machina, the hand of the gods, to reach down and fix the terrible trash we have made of things. (Only goes to show, those Greeks 2 500 years ago feared their own stupid civilisation just as we do in the shadow of Y2K.) Of course the idea that UFOs are just another need for that divine intervention is not new and quite besides the point.

Here`s the point: just look at the average 50s appliance: sleek, curvaceous (rounded, actually, like a saucer) and bright chrome. If possible, silent and with lights. The inspiration of those flying toasters that flew across everyone`s screen savers some years back. Has it occurred to anyone that UFOs look just like all the other machines of their generation? They are the original flying toasters! Personally, I don`t think that all this secrecy is doing us any good. We`re still worshipping these icons of an alien generation!

Since aliens don`t seem so intelligent after all, stuck in the same pointless pretence and weird ritualistic behaviour (not to mention their fifties style vehicles), I somehow doubt they are intelligent overlords. I think it is time for us to accept that they are something else, some inner reality or quantum warp, a parallel world or another dimension, but not a great big machine that will appear and sweep us into appliance heaven, the future, where everything is done perfectly without any mess just as all those corny ads promised us. I`m sure that if UFOs had first been spotted today, they`d have interchangeable skinz and morphable, sharp-edged features.

The secret is out: appliances won`t save us, our own proud inventiveness is not the answer and nor is any other machine from the gods. No. We must look to inner space to find the truth that is so seemingly out there. For years we have been told to look outside for answers, but I say that the truth is in there, and those shiny chrome appliances you see flying silently in the night are just mirrors, mirrors to help you see the greyer side of yourself, and through that fog, the bright beam of light that is always so compelling.