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In a hostel room with an ex CIA consultant

Soon after I entered my hostel room in Munich, an old man opened the door and looked around for his assigned bed. He started talking to me with a clear American accent. He showed me his anti-snoring device and then asked me where I was from. I told him that I am from Romania and he replied that he has been there, listing a few of the major cities he’s visited and then conveyed to me that he had been to more than 100 countries. I asked him how he could afford to travel that much and he said that he was retired, but that he used to work for NASA as an engineer. “NASA?” I asked. “Yes, and I was also involved with all the other major intelligence agencies”. I was very surprised and excited with all sorts of questions arising in my mind, but I reserved a certain dose of skepticism at first.  He kept on going about how he was involved with the military, how the FBI does all sorts of internal crimes (not being clear at all if they are the ones who try to prevent them or the ones who are c...
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The need for purity and the balancing of opposites

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The opposition to a certain old religious status quo which had a refined moral guideline and the curiosity that emerges after the fall of its major institutions has led us ever more to embrace vices that have imprisoned us. A vice is an unhealthy coping mechanism turned into a habit that alleviates suffering and fills a void with different amounts of pleasure that you obtain via exchanging your attention, vitality and purity for it.  The immediate urge to avoid pain at all costs is what is leading this and we use vices as a sort of sedative not to deepen our own suffering. But by the repetitive and mechanical habits that are in place to distract us from the truth of pain, we remain stuck in the same circle of hell with no advancement towards a development of acquired and integrated wisdom that could emerge from going through certain phases of suffering that would open the doors for a more authentic experience of life.  The philosopher Slavoj Zizek downplays both the role of su...
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Thoughts on Sweden

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The cultural impact of coming to Sweden is great. You hear in the news and on YouTube about the issues that this country has had to deal with recently and you expect the worst from big cities like Stockholm and Malmö. In the rape statistics, Sweden is at the top, and crime and violence have been rising over the past decade due to the naïve openness that the Swedes have had toward the world. Their ideal of equality led to this result, but the question is whether that same ideal also had something to do with how the country has become so successful and utopian in the last century. And it truly is a utopia; it truly has that feeling of near perfection and efficiency on every level. Stockholm, the only city I have visited in Sweden, is dominated by a deep spiritual calmness, a tranquility I have never seen in any other big city. People are calm and polite. They are not pedantic, unlike the Germans. You can still see someone crossing on a red light when cars aren’t passing by, and that is t...
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