thin film of life

I love the coincident cosmopolitan serendipity of today's two FoL reports, converging as they did on Carl Sagan and Pale Blue Dot on our first day with Bill McKibben's Eaarth. Marie commented on Jeremy Rifkin's "empathic civilisation" and quoted the passage beginning: "There are places... where the natural world has all but disappeared." Our "thin film of life" is all we've got. Why do we fight over it so incessantly?


Then Jason played the Symphony of Science's "unbroken thread"... 





...heralding a more "glorious dawn."


Is there intelligent life on earth? Well, there was. Maybe there will be again, in the future.  


Or, maybe we should just say: there can be a future only if there is... only if we're still evolving.





P.S. I hunted for the Flaming Lips Bonnaroo video you said I'd like, Harrison, is this it? Guess you had to be there. But the Alan Watts "conversations" are unquestionably great.

flowering on campus

"Atheist student groups flower on college campuses," reports USA Today.

Or would you rather be a "None"? Some would. All apparently prefer to stand with Bertrand Russell, Ibn Warraq, and other free-thinkers in rejecting labels and identities that seek external support.

"The goal," said [one student], "should be to obtain inner peace for yourself and do random acts of kindness for strangers." [He] calls himself a "spiritual atheist." He doesn't believe in God or the supernatural but thinks experiences like meditation or brushes with nature can produce biochemical reactions that feel spiritual.

Great, but in "Atheism & Spirituality" we're going to go a step further and ask not just if non-believers can feel but if they can actually be whatever an atheist could mean by "spiritual." "Where there are rocks," says Alan Watts, "watch out. Watch out! They're eventually going to come alive." Stay tuned.

change channels

Thanks for this, Bob: compared to the world of rotary-dial phones (etc.) "everything is amazing," but too many of us still whine about the smallest aggravations. Happiness has very little to do with flight delays or Internet service disruptions, but we've trained ourselves to think small.

And as Megan says, our culture's consumerist preoccupation with stuff and celebrity trivia is a huge distraction from the challenge of long-term, sustainable, real human flourishing. Shopping is not the solution.

But neither is whining. I stand by my dawn post, and the Schulzian insight that happiness can be anyone and anything that engages and sustains your passion. Maybe that's the most sympathetic way of translating "Bashar's" talk of vibrations and excitement.

The medium was not Tara's message, "acting on your joy" is timeless wisdom, and it doesn't take a "multi-dimensional" future-world spirit with a cheesy accent to tell us so. A new attitude really can change the quality of your experience, which after all is inseparable from reality as you know it. Our oppressors (capitalist and otherwise) can't take that away.

Kevin passes along a nice message from Alan Watts (he's from the fairly-recent past, btw): don't forget to sing and dance along your way to "success" and happiness: