Archive for the ‘Spirituality’ Category

Why I am (still) on the notoriously bad Facebook (but not “bad” in the relatively respectable Michael Jackson sense of the word “bad”)

Saturday, July 31st, 2010

I said I was leaving Facebook. I didn’t leave but I have been inactive, which is worse because my presence on Facebook adds a silent air of credibility and consent to Facebook’s unethical intelligence gathering and data-mining operation.

I did take a break though and ignored the continuous stream of begging e-mails from Facebook to look at this thing, that thing and some unknown stranger’s ting-a-ling.

Have you counted how many types of spam Facebook sends you?

You don’t even have to be registered to get Facebook spam. They manage to find your very private e-mail address. How? By gate-crashing your friend’s address book and keeping it. Yes, it’s called stealing. Worse, they pretend to be your friend inviting you to join Facebook and surrender your contact list. That’s called phishing and it’s a crime. Insurance salesmen call it "referrals" and con-artists know it as "working the mark’s trust network".

Do you love your friends? If "yes" then protect them from FaceBook, don’t push them into Facebook’s abyss. Especially your techno-naive granny who will get a Facebook-specific virus like the kooBFace virus and lose all of her bank accounts and pension funds to the inevitable 419 scammer who will prey on her goodwill by pretending to be a god-fearing person in dire need of money.

Without Facebook, what a glorious month of peace, quiet and productivity it has been and no Facebook clouds on the horizon! No news of the latest Facebook privacy leak. No fear, just ease of mind. Priceless!

I spent most of the time by the water lounging in the hot sun. We get the benefits of global warming in Finland too. The polar bears are sliding in on melting polar icecaps up in Lapland. Come and see Finland meltdown next July!

Life without Facebook is fun!

First Belly Laugh! Then Learn Truth. OK?

It’s been a creative time for the Oshana Teaching. I managed to achieve previously unattainable goals:

So why have I returned to using Facebook?

The answer is right there in the title of Douglas Adam’s "Restaurant at the End of the Universe". It’s the second book in the very funny "Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe" trilogy. Which is not a trilogy at all but in fact 4 books. I like funny. Do you like funny? I bet most of you can can have more side-splitting belly laughs per day than contractual orgasms (the married kind).

I am using Facebook to promote my Transmission Teaching, especially my Live Online classes (every Sunday) and having fun watching the unethical T-Rex of a social networking dinosaur, Facebook, fall to the floor never to get up again because while it as has two good legs it has only puny arms.

I know some of you will laugh at my prediction because Facebook has 500 million Facebook users, reportedly, and rising. It seems that, like Caesar, it cannot fail. Go ahead and laugh, a big belly laugh, and then laugh some more. I will have at least achieved my first purpose in writing: to get you to laugh. Laugh loud and laugh long. After laughing long you might start to see more clearly. Once you drop your fear of losing your Facebook friends (if you lose them then you never had them) you will get what is going on here and everywhere.

I am on Facebook to watch the spectacular firework show as the monstrous edifice Facebook comes crashing down at the end of its dark Empire reign. Truly a Dark Ages for human consciousness.

If that sounds like harsh words then blame Facebook! The new legal defense heard in courts across every land is "Facebook made me do it" – and it will be very true. First, "They" corrupted the world with drugs, then baby milk power/formula, then Coca Cola and now Facebook!

As well as promote Enlightenment, I will spread an awareness of Facebook’s poor privacy practices and search for healthier social networking alternatives which allow you manage your own networks on your own computer. Ref: the fledgling “Diaspora” project.

My main Facebook teaching account will start again to provide spiritual teaching event dates under the Events section:

http://facebook.com/dave.oshana.spiritual.enlightenment.transmission?v=app_2344061033

But, what did I just say? It’s not really MY Facebook account – because Facebook totally owns it. They can cancel it at any time. Did you realise in your wildest dreams that they can lock you out, pretend to be you and play with my friends’ minds forever? Or worse archive your drunken lavatory photos and make them display them in their futuristic advert sing for time immemorial?

I will update you savvy Facebook dwellers about my Free Teaching audio and video recordings (hosted on DaveOshana.com).

BUT IF REALLY YOU WANT TO WISE UP, GO OFF-SITE. GET OFF FACEBOOK!

I would prefer that you don’t visit me on Facebook. Instead visit my real, self-owned websites – where you can get up-to-date information, articles and resources on Enlightenment, Awakening and come to know who you really are. Let’s avoid the unnecessary hassles of messing with Facebook’s poor and buggy pages. They clearly don’t know or care how to code user friendly pages that would actually work.

GET OFF YOUR FACE — BOOK.
You won’t miss it!

Find me for real at domains that I will actually own for perpetuity:

http://enlightenment-now.com/
http://daveoshana.com
http://blog.oshana.org/

PS It will really bother me in the afterlife if I have inadvertently caused anyone to join or remain on Facebook. Please leave now if I was the inciting cause and then take the time re-think your options. It probably wasn’t caused by me though. You were most likely stressed out by all that Facebook spam, fear of missing out and looking like a friendless loser.

Do you now realise that you you have no control over such things?

But you don’t have to be a victim. You don’t have to take it any longer.

There is life beyond Facebook! Trust me, I am a spiritualist ;)

Long Live the Miraculous Enlightenment Transmission!

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Posted in Enlightenment, FaceBook, FaceBook Virus, Facebook alternatives, Facebook privacy, KooBFace virus, Spirituality | No Comments »

Leave Facebook, Find Privacy Alternatives, Protect Facebook Friends

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

It’s not about me but about you and those that you care about.

I won’t be staying for much longer on Facebook. I do not want friend’s to assume that I support Facebook’s complete lack of ethics for user data privacy.

Facebook data is easy to obtain and could be used to harm individuals and their friends especially in countries under harsh regimes. The value of Facebook has been in seeing friend’s pictorial depictions of their lives. Facebook wall feeds though have been so busy that they are impossible to follow. Facebook gives little and takes away much. Facebook want to own your data including the choices which you have made.

Facebook’s control settings have been frequently buggy, crash or impossible to change (especially privacy options). No one should give Facebook their email password. Once your email account is compromised it could be used for Nigerian fraud scams, banking fraud or spam phishing. Was your password sent using HTTPS? If it was not then a criminal could have it. Even if you sent it by HTTPS then an unethical technician could have sold or abused it. I would not trust Facebook to be ethical nor sufficiently careful given their poor track record.

Facebook has deliberately and suddenly made private user data public.

The Facebook system has been easy to hack. Facebook have, by design, revealed information about user’s geo-location without their awareness. If your bank or email company were this negligent then you would be forced to leave.

I will support safer alternatives though. You can find me in future on my own private network at DaveOshana.com

I resisted joining Facebook for many years. Just before I joined I started to write a blog article about raising concerns about the misuse of privacy and Facebook. In the past year Facebook has blundered deliberately and unconsciously with private user date. I will be posting links before I leave.

Soon after joining Facebook I felt I should leave but others had wanted to do the same had said they would stay because I had joined and was posting. I have enjoyed seeing what is happening with others through their pictures – but you don’t need Facebook to publish on the internet.

I cannot recommend Facebook to anyone.

I don’t need Facebook for my most important life mission: sharing Enlightened Consciousness.

Most people who are interested in my spiritual teaching work have joined DaveOshana.com before finding me on Facebook. Facebook users may have learned about my work via Facebook friends. My opinion is that my presence on Facebook does not bring more attention to my work but gives a false sense of endorsing Facebook. As a person interested in supporting and protecting others I must vote with my feet by leaving Facebook but not without making those reasons clear first.

I encourage you to find social networks that you and your friends can keep private.

It should be possible to set up private networks between friend’s computers using trackerless torrent technology and to have Internet Messaging that does not have to use a 3rd party servers like hotmail, yahoo, skype, etc.

Basically, any company that holds most of your data, could act unethically – and when they are caught red-handed doing it many times over several years then it is time to move on.

My next project will to unhook from Gmail (GoogleMail). I hope there is a similar email product out there.

Blessings,
Dave Oshana
In future find me on
http://daveoshana.com/

Something to Hide?

If someone has something to hide – and people certainly do for a variety of reasons – like client confidentiality then they cannot expect Facebook to respect the need for privacy.

However people tend to naively trust web providers. As I wrote it’s particular dangerous to have your network exposed when a political regime changes – as I know full well happened in Argentina when people burned their address books. The world has not changed. This is one stark example.

It’s also insecure when Facebook users give their email password to Facebook especially if they use internet banking. These are flaws with Facebook’s way of operating that could have been remedied.

Disturbing reading about Facebook privacy violations (just a few examples):

If you understand the risks and consequences and still choose to stay with Facebook then check out this Facebook privacy settings plugin for Firefox:

  • http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/

    • Nothing can protect your Facebook data except leaving Facebook! Find safer alternatives. Protect your friends.

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    Posted in Enlightened Consciousness, Spirituality | 2 Comments »

    The Matrix Meltdown at Christmas: Real Goodwill

    Thursday, December 24th, 2009

    I received an email from a writer who complained of feeling “out of it” and disconnected from her family this Christmas. What’s a girl supposed to do?

    It comes as no surprise. One day the whole world will stand in wonder how they got duped by the Christmas marketing myth. (It’s going to be a long wait; we have to save the economy first by buying more state lottery tickets!)

    My point is nothing so unsubtle the common statements made by the regular debating crews of Christians, pagans, atheists and Jehovah Witnesses like “Jesus was not born at Christmas. It’s a pagan festival and the Bible prohibits trees to dress up.”

    We all know that Santa Claus, while bearing a resemblance to W. C. Fields, is not a living person who flits down from the North Pole every Christmas and merrily breaks into homes to deliver presents to sleeping parents. Every 5 year old knows that. So why keep up the pretence?

    A number of forces keep Christmas in place the most dominant of which is marketing. I am sure that if businesses did not promote Christmas then it would come and go, as unnoticed as, some of the other festivals on our calendar. In England that would be May Day. Except for a few curiously dressed men in shorts and white socks, British people, do not indulge in dancing around the phallic maypole banging sticks together with gay abandon. I would not be surprised to hear that they do that in Holland where they still wear wooden clogs and where the name for Santa Claus comes (or nearby Belgium, borders have changed).

    I gave up Christmas at the age of 17 to avoid meat eating. I headed out to an ashram and even there got a gift of Christmas – a pair of socks of course! It’s easy to feel that Christmas is some alien event when you have never, like some cultures, experienced it.

    Picture a bunch of sad people, wearing flimsy paper crowns made of 1-ply government issue waxy toilet paper, staring at a turkey’s ass on the table, gobbling goose carcass until they are stuffed, and drinking unto totally drunk because they cannot really communicate or socialise. The giving of presents is a momentary pleasure which can be fraught with embarrassment or disappointment. The biggest stress is negotiating the perilous Christmas crowds and being assaulted by hypnogogic Christmas jingles and ho-ho-ing Santa’s with dubious job histories. Christian carol singers have somehow bought into the Christmas myth in an attempt to bring the unfaithful to church and justify church taxes. In Finland, nearly everyone is automatically taxed by the Lutheran Church of the former Swedish occupation. These Finns believe, unchallenged by the priests, that they are Christians if they sing at Christmas in church. Instead of singing carol’s for pennies on the streets, these church chorists should be singing songs of hell, damnation and revolution against the materialistic masses.

    There are very few myths left but Christmas by the collusion of the church and big businesses advertising creating guilt if you should deliver presents on any other day.

    Instead of having an unreal Christmas have a real holiday.

    DO:

    Respect that that it is winter. Go for walks. Snuggle up early. Light candles and making twinkly things. Being loving, compassionate and kind – not just for one day but all year long.

    DON’T:
    Work. Shop. Cook all day.

    Give presents on another day – and be a bit unpopular – or leave a message on your answer-phone saying you are in China and will be back in the New Year. You then can give presents to whom and when you want. Christmas as Sting recently pointed out is about winter

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    Posted in Big Business, Christ, Christmas, Finland, Jesus, Matrix, Religion, Spirituality, The Matrix, society | No Comments »

    Matrix Machine World’s Virtual Prisoners

    Friday, January 11th, 2008

    It seems that the soulless purpose of technology is to make humans feel inferior.

    A joke played by machines to assert their rise from slaves to masters?

    As if there aren’t enough people suffering from inferiority complexes!

    Superiority complexes are no better, just the opposite reaction. However, unlike Newtonian physics the reaction tends to be greater not equal. For this reason people die from inner battle exhaustion.

    Quantum mechanics dictates:

    Sum Total of Superiority Complexes = Sum Total of Inferiority Complexes

    There is a struggle on earth to keep society ego-based. It’s reigning egos out there!

    While this is not good news for humanity, it’s not bad news for me either in my present incarnation as EgoSlayer (my wife is altering the off-the-peg Superman costume as I type).

    As a teacher of spiritual liberation I do ego surgery. My students patients are everywhere. You will recognise them by the powerful “now” look in their eyes which is different from the look of someone merely reading the “The Power of Now”.

    Ego surgery is what I was designed to do before I was born. There are quite a few of us ego surgeons. Some have gone over to the dark side. The stress of playing God on a daily basis. The pseudo-humility of Cypher (The Matrix). You might be one of them. In a world without freedom people feel only free enough to play with each other’s prisons.

    Playing with prisons reminds me of the animated online chat room for pre-teens, Habbo Hotel. Kids get to design their own virtual room and invite others onto their couches. Unrealistically, they never have to clean their rooms. The under-staffed volunteer moderators keep watch for pseudo-teen sexual predators who ask to stroke someone’s pussy-cat. Of course, under-educated criminals may find it easy to masquerade as a 5th grader or even moderators. Like all artificial things in (or outside) life. The real costs are not only lose of money but long-term emotional and psychological damage.

    Spiritual seekers need Ego surgery more than a Hollywood starlet needs plastic surgery. I try to make it as gentle as possible. But the patient has to face the consequences of a life without the crutch of the ego. As face-op veteran Michael Jackson might have sang “I’m staring at the man in the mirror. I’m asking him to change his ways.”

    This blog post originally started out as a counter-warning “Hoax Virus Warning Emails May Do More Damage Than Viruses”.

    That post will have to wait for another day as will my relentless criticism of popular sites and software providers who have been caught spying on unsuspecting users. You will have to live with unlimited paranoia for a few hours – the actual uncensored stories are worse than you can imagine.

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    Posted in Ego, Machines, Spirituality, Technology, The Matrix | 2 Comments »

    After Jokela Tragedy: Picking Up the Pieces

    Thursday, November 8th, 2007

    This morning Finnish flags are at half-mast in remembrance of the victims of the Jokela High School Massacre in Tuusula

    The mourning flags are everywhere, sober reminders across the country of the horrific events of yesterday. The once proud flags which flew on happy State occasions, such as the liberation of Finland, now hang their heads in tears – rain-soaked and unmoving.

    The heart-broken sadness is the watery eyes of every Finn. Like the flags, quiet reminders – 5 million in bereavement. There has not been such a public outpouring of grief over the large loss of life since the Asian tsunamis. Now the loss of the innocence of youth dents confidence that schools can protect youth.

    It seemed like it was going to be a good year for Finland. So many happy international successes in trade, entertainment and sports. They seem trivial now. What good is success if you don’t have friends and family to share it with?

    Now there is just shocked incomprehension at this tragic rupture in a social fabric which everyone believed was once incorruptible.

    What happened in Jokela is not just a Finnish tragedy. It is an international disaster on a human scale.

    We must all pull together. Identify causes, find solution and practically heal the tears in the psyche of human society.

    Today, I go on a scheduled Finnish island retreat with Finns and overseas students. They will become international peace ambassadors. We will find solutions. They will be thinking about their families.

    I would write more but I am already late in preparing for the long journey by land and sea. Interesting how I only started blogging again less than 24 hours before tragedy in Jokela.

    Please send your best intentions and thoughts to Finland because Finland will be thinking not only about their own children but also children of the world. We are one global family now.

    Suggested solutions from the retreat and your own comments will be included on this blog.

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    Posted in Finland, Jokela, Spirituality, Youth, education, school, society | 1 Comment »