D’you know when you walk into someone’s house or apartment and it’s like the door was actually a time machine that brought you back to 40 years ago? What possesses someone not to change a single thing in their entire abode for years upon years? I think it’s because they’re living in a pastime paradise. They cannot let go of the past and they don’t want to deal with the future (well, the future, being right now). It’s a kind of denial of change. Sure, changes have taken place, but you’re stuck. Stuck in a moment, a moment that happened a long long time ago. Holding on to objects and memorabilia, in my opinion, is a way to save the past and avoid change. Death, difficulties, diseases (all the bad D words) happen regardless of anything. But, sometimes some peoples’ systems cannot handle a negative kind of change. They react by denying the dilemmas.

I’d say it’s all a fear of getting sucked into Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. A fear of forgetting the past and living in a very technologically complex future world where everything has become robotic and mechanical - where feelings do not apply. It’s a very scary process.

There was this amazing movie I watched a few years ago called Lucky People Center International. The movie, for me, when I watched it at the time -in 1998- showed the juxtaposition of what we like to call “modernity” and the rest of the world, or, the traditional peoples. The rhythm of the beat - fast paced - was meant to represent the fast way in which old ways are being replaced by new ones. I guess they were also alluding to the fact that fast-paced drumming often accompanies ritualistic dances and trance dances which lead to a state of nirvana or oblivion. And that self-same state of oblivion that one can arrive at in a trance dance is the same as the oblivion in which these changes are taking place, and stripping the world away tribe by tribe, replacing it with this brave new technological world, fast-paced, and money-driven. To me a pastime paradise is also a way of holding on to those traditional ways and resisting all of the oncoming change that is sucking it all in like a whirlpool and leaving not a scrap behind. Here are some scenes that I will advise you - may be disturbing.

In my heart, I feel that change taking place. I feel the knife of the future cutting the soft flesh of the past. I feel the drum beat of the world mixing rhythms of past and future and the force of chaos and destruction conflicting with the forces of integration and development. A lot of what is considered “development” for the “third world” in North America is really aimed at technologicalizing those places. Introducing computers to villages that have never had a phone. Getting the entire traditional world on track with the new world. Regardless of how valuable their traditions may be. And how much can be learned from them. It’s not enough. It’s not going to change the world to say - let’s develop the developing. What is development? My way over your way? Or let’s build together and learn from each other? For me - the “first” world, actually lacks in development in many ways. It is in a desperate state of spiritual poverty, and the “third” world actually has many elements that the “first” worlders can learn from in terms of love, generosity, heartfelt spirituality and age-old traditions that will not disappear along with the beat of the drums of modernity trying to wring the world dry of fresh life.

A bit of that fresh life is all that this dried up world of intellectualism needs.

I wish North America would get that through their head. And maybe learn to think with the heart. And that way the world would be balanced and it would be more harmonized within itself.