For a crash course in how to tie together three seemingly unrelated subjects...
Kismet. God Wills It. Most Westerners view this attitude fatalistically. To them, it's the kind of karma think that perceives life as a predetermined straight jacket of inevitability. Because you messed up in your last life, this one's doomed to mediocrity and failure. Clock in, suffer through it, pay all your karmic bills. Then check out in the hope that next time will go better. Sounds like a civil servant career working for big brother, don't it? Or believe in merely one life to truly feel screwed. Your choice.


Let Thy Will Be Done. That perspective adds an element of voluntary participation. For the will to be done, we must help execute it. What is this Divine Will so we may know what to do? That's the dilemma. Some view it as a tightly preset pattern. It's a course beset with countless temptations to fail and veer off the narrow path. This induces constant anxiety and humiliation. Walking the path becomes an exercise in fear of failure. For good measure, add a sense of barely fulfilled duty belittled by human frailty. From the Old Testament's jealous boss in the sky who commanded human slaves to fill his orders, we've advanced to an elusive cosmic puzzle. We're struggling hard to solve it and call it progress but it's still no picnic.


A new dawn in understanding then chances upon the cocreative principle. Align with the communal, global and cosmic gestalt of the moment. By using the fullness of our human faculties to perceive and respond, these energies rely on our cocreative participation to manifest. Without our hands and feet in this physical dimension, the Higher Purpose is rendered handless and footless. Without our life experience, inspiration and resourcefulness, the Divine is but a formless potential. It's helplessly waiting to burst into action through empowered agents. Forget puppets on strings. This calls for voluntary and fully activated cooperation. It relies upon the participants' resources and smarts.


To use Christian speak, the cocreative principle recognizes how there are indeed many rooms in the father's house. Down the endlessly changing mazes of hallways, there are millions upon millions of doors. Each leads to different actions and outcomes. Deliberately passing one door to open another instead is the providence of the cocreator. It's the gift and contribution of free will. Alignment and commitment to the Greater Design guarantee that one remains inside the house of the great cosmic muffin no matter what. Stay aligned and you can't miss, violate the design or misdirect your destiny.


This realization birthes a new freedom. From that springs joy. Executing the role we choose to play becomes the fullest expression of our individual gifts and talents. We move beyond the fear and anxiety that marked our earlier sussing out of the predetermined path. We were always so worried then to hit its every turn and switchback to perfection like an actor hitting his marks. Cut. Do that again. Take 47. Cue up. Dude, this set sucks. I'm getting another director. I'm so outta this show.


Joyful creativity becomes the deployment of a free will that has committed itself to forsake personal gratification for the bigger picture. Personal will and the greater design then begin to overlap. So does personal gratification. What arises as a result of this overlay is what we want and embrace. Responsibility to the design is no longer a burden. It's merely the ability to intelligently respond to the call of the moment. Destiny no longer is a close-loop program that's been written by some cold-hearted software bastard up in the sky. Destiny becomes a free play in which raw potential, heartfelt human intelligence and the cocreative principles work with the forces that present themselves. This interactivity writes our destiny and that of the greater whole as we move through our earthly sojourns and beyond.


Predetermination and predictability are at their greatest when we behave as robots programmed by fears and mental and emotional habits. When we allow others to think for us and make choices on our behalf. Predetermination lessens as we erase genetic, mental and emotional programming and exercise our free will. Freedom grows further as we align ourselves with the greater flow and commit our facilities to serving it. In this freedom, the differences between Thy Will and my will diminish. Eventually, we want what occurs without judgment. Eventually, we see how our human responses mysteriously birth benign outcomes within this alignment. That bi-directional engagement becomes the play we call our life. Passive fatalism has morphed into intelligent cocreation. Wouldn't it be something if upon complete erasure of our personality coding, the end result -- as in "no difference" -- were to become God Wills It again?


Now what's all this philosophical rubble got to do with audio? Didn't I promise to try tying the two together? There are many different ways to Rome. The choice of any one component is akin to walking through one particular door. This sets a course. With it, certain outcomes arise. Those will be different than had we picked the first door. Therein lies a certain amount of determinism. As we practice more curiosity and step through different doors to explore, we begin to erase certain personality habits and beliefs. We begin to have fun. We remain more open-minded about different approaches and their differences of results. We hone our discrimination. With it grows our ability to tweak and voice most any given system to magnify whatever particular traits and qualities we enjoy the most. We take the liberty to change our minds and reassemble a system around a different core group of assets. We practice enjoyment and in turn, discover that there's many of us around the planet. While we speak different languages and listen to different music, we're all engaged in the same pursuit: to be emotionally stimulated and spiritually restored from listening to music. We're no longer alone but part of a global community.

We outgrow the fatalism of God Wills It wherein a magazine, review or writer substitutes for the big pompous omniscient G. Now magazines, reviews and audio commentary become harmless means to participate in the global community. We outgrow the determinism of Thy Will be Done as though fulfillment and satisfaction in audio were possible only in one specific but hidden way we had to anxiously divine and fulfill to the letter. We learn about the far more joyful process of cocreation. We realize a new degree of freedom in this entire endeavor called audio. We outgrow fears and concerns over missing out, screwing up and making the wrong decision. Our battle cry becomes "less obsession and fear, more light-hearted experimentation". Or perhaps it becomes "I already love what I got, let's start using it".


So much for a seemingly nonsensical attempt at connecting the big matter of life with the trivial matter of audio. Did I overstretch the exercise? Perhaps so. But doesn't it seem that no matter what we do or talk about, it's always permeated by our headspace on how we view the cosmos and our part in it? If you don't like the direction our government is taking or where certain sections of the Asylum are headed, accept that it's all connected. Change can be triggered no matter where you decide to push a button or switch a track. Even our little audio hobby with its obsession over luxury toys can become the playground wherein bigger things are reflected than the three Ds of dogma, disagreement and disrespect. If the alchemists were right with their As Above, So Below, then As In Audio So In Life could be more sensible and far-reaching than it may appear at first.


That belief is what the six moons of our site circulate around - what we refer to as elsewhere. It's what allows us to talk about more than just audio. After all, that would get terribly boring in a heartbeat. This kind of discussion needs to be about a bigger context to keep making sense. That's especially true for today. Climatic and geophysical changes remind us that old forms of government, politics, environmental concerns, business and organized religion which were based on fear, deception and control models are passé. We either let them go to embrace a more enlightened and evolved mode of expression or they'll drag us down with them. If we let them, mankind will have been an experiment that's sadly gone awry. We'll be a cancer or virus in need of extermination.


In that context, you'll see 6moons undergo its own changes. In 2006, I will relocate our headquarters to Europe to expand beyond our well-developed American base and its solid team of US-based writers. I'll live and work in Europe, run 117V and 240V product and develop new relationships with European manufacturers. I'll cover Euro audio shows and attempt to put into action the mandate that it must be about global thinking and action today, not small-minded territorial nationalism. Expect more details on my pending relocation by the end of February. Have Internet biz, will travel. That was the very intent that launched our site in the first place. For you as the reader, nothing will change except our coverage will grow more international and thereby, hopefully even more interesting. And that would be a good thing in my book. Let's make it so.