Tag: life

In the Beginning There Was No Adam and Eve Traipsing Around Naked In a Tropical Paradise

In fact there was no life at all.

Scientists now believe life began in a far more hellish environment than some kind of Frankenstein laboratory with lightning somehow creating life in primeval soup.

Most likely life was created by thermal vents deep in the lightless, airless recesses of the ocean. Cracks in the ocean floor opened to a hellish heat created by nuclear fusion that will continue until a dying sun engulfs the earth.  

Today such vents are still alive with alien life that cannot survive the sun and oxygen-rich environment of the surface.

Anaerobic archaebacteria created that oxygen-rich environment from the poisonous methane that filled the atmosphere and then died from their handiwork.

Nitwits who call themselves environmentalists and pay no attention to science would return much of the stored methane to the surface and the atmosphere and call it clean energy.  

They revere the distant sun, which will eventually destroy the earth, with its relative dribble of sometime energy and mostly ignore, or even denounce, the massive energy available from Mother Earth herself and her prodigious production of vegetation.

These fine folk even prefer to fill the land and waters and air with their own waste rather than recycling it for energy.

What kind of environmentalism would that be?

Best,  Terry

Popular Culture 20121012: Rituals for the Deceased

I originally was going to write about the new Dark Shadows motion picture, but circumstances have intervened.  It turns out that my dear friend’s mum’s twin brother died either late Wednesday night or early Thursday morning, alone except for his little dog.  My friend called me around 9:30 Thursday morning to go next door and try to comfort her mum, and I was honored to do so.

Her mum was a basket case.  She and her brother were Christmas Day babies, 65 years ago Christmas past.  I have a brother, but not a twin, and my brother and I are separated by 14 years.  She and her brother were separated by fewer than 14 minutes, so they grew up together.

I did comfort her, and she cried in my arms.  I could not do much except to try to let her know that I really care, and she appreciated that.  Now for the culture part.

To Become as Gods or to Die in the Faustian Bargain

I beg you to watch this video.  Embed has been disabled as “inappropriate” material on You Tube.  It is theoretical physicist Michio Kaku discussing the nuclear disaster for Japan and the world.  I think the embed was prohibited by the nuclear power industry out of fear for what he says.

What he says is inspiring.  Interviewed by Eliot Spitzer, Kaku ends with an incredible statement of where humanity will be by 2100 when/if we get by the Faustian bargain within which we all currently live.  

I couldn’t agree with Michio more, he clearly elucidates where we can and must go to accomplish the evolutionary imperative of the nuclear age.

With the splitting of the atom, everything has changed save man’s way of thinking.  And thus we drift toward unimaginable peril.

Since the embed has been disallowed, I can only cite the link.  Please go.  Do yourselves a favor:

Michio Kaku and Eliot Spitzer

Be inspired!

Thanks!

Where Do We Go When Our ‘Time’ Comes?



I have always liked the myth and metaphor that Alan Watts in the mid sixties used in his “The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are“:

   “There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again. But just as the hour-hand of the watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night, waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can’t have any one of these without the other, because you wouldn’t be able to know what black is unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or white unless side-by-side with black.

   “In the same way, there are times when the world is, and times when it isn’t, for if the world went on and on without rest for ever and ever, it would get horribly tired of itself. It comes and it goes. Now you see it; now you don’t. So because it doesn’t get tired of itself, it always comes back again after it disappears. It’s like your breath: it goes in and out, in and out, and if you try to hold it in all the time you feel terrible. It’s also like the game of hide-and-seek, because it’s always fun to find new ways of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn’t always hide in the same place.

   “God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear.

   “Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that’s the whole fun of it-just what he wanted to do. He doesn’t want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self-the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever.

   …

   “God is the Self of the world, but you can’t see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can’t see your own eyes, and you certainly can’t bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding.

   “You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn’t really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It’s the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world.”

   “The Ultimate Ground of Being” is Paul Tillich’s decontaminated term for God” and would also do for “the Self of the world” as I put it in my story for children. But the secret which my story slips over to the child is that the Ultimate Ground of Being is you. Not, of course, the everyday you which the Ground is assuming, or “pretending” to be, but that inmost Self which escapes inspection because it’s always the inspector. This, then, is the taboo of taboos. You’re It!

I highly recommend Watts’ book.

Everything’s Falling Apart: Moksha Revisited


Everything’s going to get worse in time, because as you know, it does!

We all fall apart in the end.

Everything falls apart, institutions, buildings, nations, it all crumbles.

I would rather say that the people who have hope in the future are the miserable people, because they’re like donkeys chasing carrots dangled before their noses from sticks attached to their collars.

And they pursue and they pursue in vain, always hoping that tomorrow will be the great thing. And therefore incapable of enjoying themselves today.

People who live for the future never get there, because when their plans mature, they are not there to enjoy them.

The whole idea you see is, everything’s falling apart! So don’t try and stop it!

When you’re falling off a precipice it doesn’t do you any good to hang on to a rock that’s falling with you!

This is another case of our completely wasting our energy, in trying to prevent the world from falling apart!

Don’t do it! And then you’ll be able to do something!

Watts

Off The Wall: Wave Dancing

meh. I have much to say but my meatworld self and my family have other ideas and demands on my time today.  I pretty much said it, most of it, yesterday with my ironically titled essay No Strings Attached. So I’ll just take a little time to embellish this one little thing from there. A postscript, if you will.

This is all such soul sapping stuff. It can drown you but there are ways… in the ocean, you dive under the wave…. under, then wait, swim out some, then surface. Breathe.

Photobucket

PSALMS BEYOND THE SPEED OF LIGHT

VARIATIONS ON THE MYTH OF ZEUS AND SEMELE: POETRY FOR THE ATOMIC AGE END OF TIME

                             Part One

                            EMERALD SEA

Once, as in a dream, Zeus came to her

Quietly slumbering on her emerald isle

Thought form wholly

Holy without form

Asleep upon her emerald isle she played in dream

Invoking out of emptiness

Some image, sub-atomic, non-particulate

Evoking echo without sound

     …and to her watery bed she took

        mankind as her groom…

Just as in a dream, Zeus came to her

He too a shadow of his glimpse of her

Appearing conscious

Yet not wholly formed

Echoing the formlessness of his perfection

Awake above the teal blue sea

He sought the body for his litany

Shakti dreaming by the emerald sea

The dream in his emerald eye

     …and to his sky bound heart he took

        the maiden as his bride…

He, taking her hand in hand

Gave her hyacinths from the sun god’s land

To weave in her sea wound hair

Just as in a dream they moved

Dancing in tidepools

Gems for their eyes

They gathered anemonies from the tidal pools

     …pink, purple, lemon and orange…

With anemonies for her bridal bouquet

Eels grass for her gown

She led her sky god lover down

To the church at the bottom of the sea

          ~~~pls follow below~~~

 

Moksha: It Was Hid So Carefully

Chattering finch and water-fly

Are not merrier than I

Here among the flowers I lie

Laughing everlastingly

No: I may not tell the best

Surely, friends, I could have guessed

Death was but the good king’s jest

It was hid so carefully

— G.K. Chesterton

Off The Wall :: Meta, Mega Meta, and Nina

“Off The Wall” (OTW) is my ongoing Thursday Series about life, cultures, and random stuff that preoccupies my mind. (NOTE: today is Thursday on Wednesday… I’ll be out of pocket for much of tomorrow morning, so publishing early, as per the muse.)

“There is nothing noble in being superior to some other person.

The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.”

meta, mega meta, and nina, emo’s emu’s and empaths…

I know, I know. Enough with the meta. Enough with blathering on about That Other Place and all that.  I’m not actually going to get deep into the GOS meta.mud here. At least, not right outta the gate. lol. Let’s have a little Nina:

What I have churning in my head, in response to all the meta, is more…. a stepping back. A looking inward. And an effort to try to look at The Big Picture.  Keep perspective. Gain perspectives.

There are struggles and then there are struggles.

On Being A Human Cannonball

PhotobucketI’d rather be a rocket than a launching pad.  I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.  I’d rather be a human cannonball.  That would be best.  That would be unbelievably exciting.  That would be the way to live.  No safety nets.  No crash helmets.  Blasted through the air.  But first before the launch, there’s some important research.  Research, as Mr. Toad once said, is my life.

Hugo Zacchini may have been the first human cannoball.  Born in Peru on October 20, 1898, he died on the same day in 1975 in San Bernardino.  His wiki is only a stub but it tells the following about him:

*”He was known for being a daredevil and a painter, and for being litigious.”  This is quite a sentence for a two paragraph biography.

*He was an interpreter of as many as 11 languages.

*He received two engineering degrees from the University of Florida, was educated at the Rome Arts Academy, and got a master’s degree at Jamstown (NY) Academy.

*He was the victorious named plaintiff in Zacchini v. Scripps Howard, 433 U.S. 562 (1977), decided by the US Supreme Court:

“Zacchini sued Scripps-Howard, the owner of an Ohio television station, when it filmed, and then broadcast on the evening news, Zacchini’s entire act of being shot out of a cannon at a county fair. The United States Supreme Court sided with Zacchini, ruling 5 to 4 that the publicity rights overrode the First Amendment rights in this case where the entire act was shown on television.”

You Got Gold

Some Herbal Wonders

A Gentle Way of Healing…

I read with great interest randgrithr’s Essay on Swine Flu and encourage her to write more about the “New Dark Ages”!!! Our conversation there reminded me that yeah, I am an herbalist, and maybe I should offer some of what I know to those among us are wondering about how to stay healthy while the Murder-by-Spreadsheet crowd is busy robbing us blind for nothing.

First (I guess) I should say that the “active ingredients” in most drugs – including synthetics – are called alkaloids. Opium, for instance, is an alkaloid. Alkaloids are chemical compounds that contain nitrogen, which gives them an alkaline base. Life from bacteria to fungi to plants and animals all produce alkaloid compounds, usually extracted via an acidic extraction method. Quinine, cocaine and nicotine are further examples, as are a great many of the compounds identified as “active” in other natural sources that end up getting synthesized by Big Pharma and sold for way too much money to sick people who can’t afford it.

The difference between synthetic drugs and natural herbal remedies is significant. When you use an herbal extract or tea, you’re also getting a host of associated natural compounds that can boost the effects and/or dampen harmful effects. Plus, natural compounds come in the proper chirality for life, thus are readily absorbed by the body and put to good use. Synthetics often have backwards compounds that life can’t use, and these are either useless or harmful depending on what it is you’re using and how it is put to use in your body.

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