Why rave mailing lists in the first place? They are popping up all over. One only needs to check Hyperreal to see the growing number of rave-related mailing lists around the world. What is the importance of these lists?
Well, the rave scene means different things to different people. I, for one, think it is force that is drawing young people into a new way of thinking about themselves and the people and the reality around them. They are also a lot of fun. I think this is why the rave scene is growing, because raving is "fun". I think we live in a world that lacks fun. Sure, we can be entertained. We can have are senses stimulated... with a constant barrage of sex and violence and earth-shaking DTS Digital THX Dolby Ultra-Surround Sound. But is this really "fun"?
It is about having fun. It is about having so much fun that "fun" does not really describe what one feels very well. Raving is about satisfaction, about feeling good about everything. Raving is about spirituality. This is a loaded term because so many institutions have taken true spirituality and hid it, and replaced it with dogma. These institutions will tell you all about it, they will sing hymns and prayers devoted to it, and they will promise it to you IF you follow their rules. But, they never give it to you. They keep it hidden behind symbols and language.
The rave scene, however, has no language. Because once you experience that feeling, once you feel true spirituality get into your soul, no words can describe it. It just is. The feeling is nothing less than heaven. Where as the other institutions promise you heaven after you die (if you have obeyed their dogma), the rave scene simply gives it you. Look around you at a party. Rave promoters are in the business of providing heaven, and they can do a pretty good job of it.
I think the first step to creating heaven on this earth is that people need to experience what it is like. Reality starts inside of our heads. The sum total of what is inside of our heads is projected into the world around us, and that becomes reality. So, all the garbage we see in our culture is simply a reflection of sum total of the garbage in our minds. It is pretty easy to see that if we start replacing that garbage in our minds with good stuff, specifically Peace, Love, Respect and Unity, the reality around us will begin to reflect that. If we start putting heaven into our heads, we will start to see heaven around us.
But, it is kind of hard to do this when we are being fed a constant diet of mental garbage. As media companies get larger and more centralized, and as our government puts less and less restriction on how they operate, our mental stimuli is increasingly controlled by a single, higher power. This higher power is pretty ambiguous, it is difficult to see. To help us, new symbols have appeared, the most successful is Schwa. What is Schwa? Schwa is a group of aliens who are slowly taking over this planet. Aliens? Sure, why not. They might not really be aliens, but by the way they are taking over they might as well be. How can you identify Schwa? It is easy. Schwa has the money. With this money Schwa controls your government, and more importantly, your media.
Yes, the Media. By controlling television, movies, newspapers, magazines, radio, and billboards, Schwa controls all the information that flows into your mind. And since Schwa controls all the information that flows into your friend's minds, talking to other people can be like talking to carefully programmed computers. Opinions, likes, dislikes, political affiliation... all carefully programmed from birth, and reinforced everyday. Reality for these people is what Schwa has programmed Reality to be. Nothing more, nothing less.
If this does not make sense to you, if it sounds crazy, then you may want to consider if you are a carefully programmed person. Do you eat fast food because it tastes good? Do you drink Coke because it is refreshing? Do you wear makeup because you think it makes you more attractive? Programming. From the day you were born. Images repeated over and over again. Mental association. Forty years and billions of dollars spent on figuring out how to make you crave a product. Using electrical technology to beam this information into your habitat. Electro-Magnetic Mind Control.
So what if there was something out there that they did not want you to know about? What if there was something out there that threatened their power and control? How would they deal with it? Well, in the 60's they used scare tactics. And that only backfired because once the people who strayed off the programmed course learned how silly their claims were, it only reinforced the notion that they were lying bastards.
Today, Schwa is smarter. To keep people away from dangerous ideas, concepts or practices, they simply erase it from reality. They just don't allow it to move through information channels. They hide it. They filter it. Because for 95% of the population, if it does not exist on television, it does not exist at all.
But now we have computers and the Internet. For the newcomer, the Internet is a scary place. It is reality out of control. It is a place where anyone with an idea can learn how to express it through appropriate channels, pumping out information to a more or less receptive audience... many times an audience that is so fed up with the infinite boredom of mainstream culture, they crave new, radical thoughts and concepts. New ideas. Ideas free from Schwa's filters. Thanks to the magic of word processing, anyone can get their ideas out... even engineers.
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More of my ideas are available on my Web page.