According to Einstein

"There is Only One Important Question; Is the Universe Friendly?"

"There are no answers,... only choices."

"If you center yourself in non-being...
When your mind is transparent to the depths
and your words and actions are one,
the whole world becomes transparent."

(from Stephen Mitchell's "The Second Book of the Tao")

Psychologist Ernest Becker wrote a Pulitzer Prize-Winning book in 1973 called Denial of Death, in which he argues that human civilization is essentially an elaborate mechanism to defend ourselves from the unbearable knowledge that we are going to die.

He theorizes that each of us has an overwhelming urge to create or become part of something that we suppose to be eternal, a motive which he refers to as our “hero project.” People in all walks of life create great monuments and works of art, raise children to succeed in ways they never could, seek to become famous, devote themselves to religions that promise eternal life, or in some other way build something that will outlast their physical selves. The profession of writing has long been associated with attempts to become, at least in part, immortal.

In all cases, these pursuits consume one’s time and energy in greater quantities than anything else they do. Whether the aim is becoming a great writer, raising brilliant children, taking over nations, or amassing great wealth, they inevitably become one’s purpose in life.

from Raptitude Blog article on The Unbearable Truth

 

A more striking excerpt from "In Praise of Boredom", a Dartmouth College commencement address, where Joseph Brodsky argues that boredom is a "natural condition of modern life" and should be embraced in order to realize your proper place in the world.

There is yet another way out of boredom, however. Not a better one, perhaps, 
from your point of view, and not necessarily secure, but straight and 
inexpensive. When hit by boredom , let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit 
bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit 
bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here is to exact a full look at the 
worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, 
undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.

Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to 
the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's 
infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw 
it wide open. For boredom speaks the language of time, and it teaches you the 
most valuable lesson of your life: the lesson of your utter insignificance. It 
is valuable to you, as well as to those you are to rub shoulders with. "You are 
finite," time tells you in the voice of boredom, "and whatever you do is, from 
my point of view, futile." As music to your ears, this, of course, may not 
count; yet the sense of futility, of the limited significance of even your 
best, most ardent actions, is better than the illusion of their consequences 
and the attendant self-aggrandizement.

For boredom is an invasion of time into your set of values. It puts your 
existence into its proper perspective, the net result of which is precision and 
humility. The former, it must be noted, breeds the latter. The more you learn 
about your own size, the more humble and the more compassionate you become to 
your likes, to the dust aswirl in a sunbeam or already immobile atop your 
table.

If it takes will-paralyzing boredom to bring your insignificance home, then 
hail the boredom. You are insignificant because you are finite. Yet infinity is 
not terribly lively, not terribly emotional. Your boredom , at least, tells you 
that much. And the more finite a thing is, the more it is charged with life, 
emotions, joy, fears, compassion.

What's good about boredom, about anguish and the sense of meaninglessness of 
your own, of everything else's existence, is that it is not a deception. Try to 
embrace, or let yourself be embraced by, boredom and anguish, which are larger 
than you anyhow. No doubt you'll find that bosom smothering, yet try to endure 
it as long as you can, and then some more. Above all, don't think you've goofed 
somewhere along the line, don't try to retrace your steps to correct the error. 
No, as W. H. Auden said, "Believe your pain." This awful bear hug is no 
mistake. Nothing that disturbs you ever is.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Steve Jobs  

"Death makes your entire life bullshit. Don’t you see? That’s the problem. The body is going to die, every relation of the body is going to die. You can’t even depend on it continuing for another moment while you’re . . . associating with it. That’s the situation you’re in, but you use fabrications of mind and so forth, individually and collectively, that distract you from the fact of it, so that you won’t feel it profoundly. And so you build up this whole lifetime of endeavors, of attachments, of things you own, things you do, things you’re known for, things you know, things you know about — on and on and on. And it all passes. But in the meantime. . . you bullshit one another, effectively.

The Great Matter doesn’t confront you merely in death. It’s just that in death you are disarmed and you have no choice. While you are alive, you delude yourself! You fabricate a reality that’s not altogether true, in order to give yourself a sense of permanence, continuation, certainty — as if life is about being enthusiastic, about fulfillment of the next desire. In fact, you could easily drop dead in any moment. All kinds of people drop dead every day. And a lot of them haven’t lived a very long life beforehand. All kinds of terrible things are being done by human beings to one another and otherwise by the situation itself.

So you can participate in the round of desires and consolations as much as you are able for a lifetime, however long that lasts, and then be necessarily confronted by profundity at the point of death. Or you can go beyond even right now and exist in that profundity right now. . .

True religious life is a great profundity. But the religious life that people propose for themselves and propose to one another, generally speaking, is the life of consolation, of distraction, of arbitrary beliefs that suggest some kind of continuation (or even permanence) of the present pattern.

It’s not merely the state of the world at the present time — which, of course, is dreadful — but it’s not merely that which confronts you and suggests that perhaps you should become serious. Even if it were not as chaotic as this, the great profundity still confronts you and you could embrace it — or you could continue to ignore it. . . . The same profundity that exists in death is right now. The vortex of fire exists right now. And the fundamental Light exists right now."

Adi Da
Excerpt from "Easy Death"

This is one of my favorite movies!  It is hypnotizingly beautiful and deep in its introspection and contemplation of the human condition.  And I found this amazing review by Roger Ebert on his blog site!  Here are some of the tastier snipets...


"Solaris" tells the story of a planet that reads minds, and obliges its visitors by devising and providing people they have lost, and miss. The Catch-22 is that the planet knows no more than its visitors know about these absent people.  As the film opens, two astronauts have died in a space station circling the planet, and the survivors have sent back alarming messages. A psychiatrist named Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) is sent to the station, and when he awakens after his first night on board, his wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone), is in bed with him. Some time earlier on earth, she had committed suicide.

...The genius of Lem's underlying idea is that the duplicates, or replicants, or whatever we choose to call them, are self-conscious and seem to carry on with free will from the moment they are evoked by the planet. Rheya, for example, says, "I'm not the person I remember. I don't remember experiencing these things." And later, "I'm suicidal because that's how you remember me." In other words, Kelvin gets back not his dead wife, but a being who incorporates all he knows about his dead wife, and nothing else, and starts over from there. She has no secrets because he did not know her secrets. If she is suicidal, it is because he thought she was. The deep irony here is that all of our relationships in the real world are exactly like that, even without the benefit of Solaris. We do not know the actual other person. What we know is the sum of everything we think we know about them. Even empathy is perhaps of no use; we think it helps us understand how other people feel, but maybe it only tells us how we would feel, if we were them.

....It is a workshop for a discussion of human identity. It considers not only how we relate to others, but how we relate to our ideas of others--so that a completely phony, non-human replica of a dead wife can inspire the same feelings that the wife herself once did. That is a peculiarity of humans: We feel the same emotions for our ideas as we do for the real world, which is why we can cry while reading a book, or fall in love with movie stars. Our idea of humanity bewitches us, while humanity itself stays safely sealed away into its billions of separate containers, or "people."

One of my favorite exchanges is when Clooney wakes up on the ship to see his friend sitting there.  His friend tells him..."There are no answers, only choices."  I think that gets real close to the reality of life. From the little we actually really know each other, and most of the rest of it we fill in (make up to seem contiguous)...can there be any deep knowing. Or do we really just need to realize, that there are few answers out there and it is up to us and the choices we make based on our ultimate concerns.

In praise of boredom

In an excerpt from a Dartmouth College commencement address, Joseph Brodsky argues that boredom is a "natural condition of modern life" and should be embraced in order to realize your proper place in the world.

The other trouble with originality and inventiveness is that they literally pay off. Provided that you are capable of either, you will become well-off rather fast. Desirable as that may be, most of you know firthand that nobody is as bored as the rich, for money buys time, and time is repetitive. Assuming that you are not heading for poverty, one can expect your being hit by boredom as soon as the first tools of self-gratification become available to you. Thanks to modern technology, those tools are as numerous as boredom's symptoms. In light of their function -- to render you oblivious to the redundancy of time -- their abundance is revealing.

found on kottke.org

I love this dialogue between Deepak Chopra and Duncan Campbell. I was struck by Deepak's succinct description of the growing attack by Scientists on God, faith and all things religious. And how Deepak says Richard Dawkins, and his ilk, are old fashioned athieists, attacking an old fashioned God, a white bearded old man living in the sky. And that is an easy attack, easy to take cheap shots at that old fashioned idea of God!

(Professor Harvey Cox, Harvard Divinity School, thinks of Richard Dawkins as the Jerry Falwell of the atheists. "He takes the most narrow and most legalistic side of religion, and then he's against it." says Cox)

 Living Dialogues are a series of podcasts where Duncan Campbell interviews leaders in the field of Personal Development and Spirituality.  There are also partial transcripts available on his website.

Living Dialogues with Duncan Campbell 

“You ask, how can we know the Infinite? I answer, not by reason. It is the office of reason to distinguish and define. The Infinite, therefore, cannot be ranked among its objects. You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty superior to reason, by entering into a state in which you are your finite self no longer—in which the divine essence is communicated to you. This is ecstasy. It is the liberation of your mind from its finite anxieties. Like only can apprehend like; when you thus cease to be finite, you become one with the Infinite. In the reduction of your soul to its simplest self (ἅπλωσις), its divine essence, you realize this union—this Identity (ἕνωσις).”
– Plotinus, “Plotinus to Flaccus” (3rd century AD)