The Problem with Live Music

-->

  

Like most human beings, I am a music fan. I like listening to it, and I like to see it performed. But recently something has been going on at live shows that has bothered me.

In the past few years, I have had the chance to see several bands perform that I really loved and anticipated. They had good sounds that I assumed would translate well to the live space; yet when I saw them, I found the experience deflating.

Conversely, I have seen several bands that I had never heard of previously, but found their live shows incredibly satisfying.

Now, why would I enjoy seeing a band I had never heard of—some in genres I don’t even listen to—and yet find the performance of bands I am fully in love with dissatisfying?

I’ve pondered this long and hard and came up with this answer: it’s all about experience and expectation. The bands I know and love already occupy a huge part of my brain. I’ve built enormous, ornate shrines to them. When I hear their music, elaborate videos play in my head. Sometimes it’s a soundtrack to my dreams, sometimes I’m in the band. I’ve already co created an awesome mental experience that goes along with the music. It’s like a movie, except I’m creating it and controlling it. And starring in it, for that matter.

In light of this, I have to say, I feel a little sorry seeing these bands. How can they possibly compete with what’s going on in my head? My brain is the most perfect, powerful and eternal stage that ever existed—for me. Your brain is the same for you. How can these bands possibly live up to that? They can’t. Sure, once in a while an awesome act will impress me, but what’s going on in my brain is a very hard act to follow.

On the other hand, these new bands that I hadn’t heard of before or had very limited exposure to—they are the ones that usually impress me. They don’t yet live in my brain. They are a totally new experience for me, and seeing and hearing them live builds brand new neuropathways, and therefore, affords a more pleasurable experience.

Strange, but it makes sense to me now. Tempering expectations is always a wise move when approaching your idols--now I have even more reason to do so.

Maharishi Explains Transcendental Meditation

Beautiful video, conceptually and visually, of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi explaining the nature of Transcendental Meditation. This was shot at Lake Louise, Canada in 1968.

Evolving Beyond Money

What value does money have in our society? Is it a tool, or an evolutionary cul-de-sac?

Yes, money allows us to trade commodities, and it forms a baseline for exchange of goods and services. What are the value of these things in our society? It's convenient, yes, but think of all the meaningless actions we are all forced into in order to acquire money. No human can deny that deep in one’s soul, there somewhere resonates the truth of the statement: All work is meaningless.  In fact, I’d go as far as to say that our station in life and in society is determined by how much time and effort we wish to devote to fooling ourselves that this is not so.

 Is it possible we could trade based on something else? Is it possible to exchange the necessary goods and services we need to live without currency? Is it possible we as a species are being held back simply by being forced into this fear-based scarcity mindset where we MUST spend—not a portion—but the majority of our day engaged in useless activity, for which we are barely compensated and meagerly thanked, in order to fill our plates and keep our homes? We are giving our lives up for… what exactly? We are living inside the bones of a dinosaur that has been dead before our fathers’ fathers’ fathers were conceived. Can we not conceive of something else?

I am not a communist. I see that that modality failed. I’m just a common man who believes that we as a species are better than this. We are better than money. We no longer need to be wage slaves, for it is our own doing. Perhaps simply acknowledging this fact is the first step in creating a dialogue around how we as a species can evolve. 

The Obama Experience

Last week, I was selected from a pool of 1.2 million LinkedIn users to attend a Town Hall meeting with President Obama. It was a strange and awesome experience, the full reasoning for which I can only estimate. What follows is my attempt at explaining.

On Monday, September 19 I received an email from a LinkedIn employee announcing that they were hosting a panel discussion on “economic opportunity” and asking if I would like to join. They were interested in me particularly because they saw that in recent years I had switched careers from a field that was shrinking (journalism) to one that was expanding (market research). If I was interested in attending, I was asked to briefly summarize my career history as well as my perspective on the current employment crisis. I did so.

The following day, LinkedIn reached out to me saying that they liked my responses and that they had some exciting news. The panel discussion to which they were inviting me was in fact a town hall meeting with President Obama. They asked if I was available the following Monday, September 26, and if so, what question I would ask the President.

At this point I was in a state of disbelief, but on the off chance it might be real—and might be the opportunity of a lifetime—I composed a question based on my experience shifting careers. I am of the mindset that education is the key to discovering new job opportunities—not only in the academic sense of learning new skills—but also in educating oneself on the opportunities available and how one can reconfigure their skill set to match. The original question went something like this:

What can federal government do in conjunction with US citizens to provide or promote education amongst adults interested in shifting careers? Is there something that can be done to raise awareness of the opportunities available to adults who are facing career changes?

Later that day, a lady from LinkedIn wrote to me and asked if we could talk on the phone. I was in the short list of people selected to ask the President a question. We chatted a little bit about this and that—mostly I think to verify that I wasn’t a nut case—and then she asked for some more personal information. Since I was in the running to be in the same room as the President, she needed to do a background check, see if I had a criminal history, verify my legal standing, etc. Wow, I thought, this is getting pretty serious. But she seemed nice and very sincere. I checked the whole thing out online and various sources confirmed that the President was supposed to be holding a town hall meeting in Palo Alto the following Monday in conjunction with LinkedIn. So I complied.

Two days later, I opened my email and quiver of fear/anxiety/excitement ran through my spine. I had been selected to attend the event! My question was in the top 6 of 8 to be asked.

I arrived at the Four Seasons Palo Alto Sunday evening half expecting someone to pop out from around the corner with a video camera saying that the whole thing had been a practical joke--but that never happened. Instead I met with a group of equally shocked/jazzed participants flown in from all over the country. Some were out of work, some were underemployed, some were veterans looking for career training, and some had successfully made a transition to a new career, like myself. We chatted together in a state of shocked disbelief. The LinkedIn team then helped us rehearse our questions for the President. After some revisions and a suggestion to add a little personal history to give my question context, I ended up with this:

Good Morning, Mr. President. Three years ago, I found myself out of work. Being unable to find gainful employment in my chosen field, which was journalism, I sought and landed a job in a field about which I knew little previously, but for which my skills and training were well suited—market research.

I have great faith in the American people’s ability to adapt—as long as we are empowered with the knowledge of burgeoning opportunities and career fields.

Is there a way the federal government can provide or promote education for adults looking to change careers—especially those who find the fields they’ve been trained for are either saturated or evaporating?

The morning of September 26, we were shuttled to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. After going through airport-level security, we were admitted to an auditorium filled with LinkedIn employees, LinkedIn members such as myself, and a few random Silicon Valley luminaries (including this guy, who apparently was one of the original employees at Google). The head of the Secret Service for the event gave us a briefing.

“You can stand and sit as much as you want,” he said, “but do not leave your seat. I repeat—do not leave your seat. If you forget, someone will be there to remind you.”

Once we were all seated and locked in, the nerves really kicked in. The anticipation was palpable. Background music was playing over the PA system and between each song there were long, pregnant pauses when the entire crowd involuntarily silenced. The collective bated breath of 100 people generated a crazy energy in the crowd. It was almost as though someone had set a spell on everyone, and all we could do was look at each other incredulously and shake our heads. The spell would finally be broken when someone dropped a camera or the next song started or whathaveyou, and we giggled at our own nervousness.

After a good hour of waiting in our seats, the CEO of LinkedIn came in, gave his speech, and introduced the President. The erupted in cheers—partially because we were glad to see the guest of honor and partially because the tension of his arrival had finally been released.

Seeing Obama in person is extraordinary. He is a fantastic performer. Poised, well spoken, unflappable—in addition to handsome and very well dressed—Obama made a fantastic impression. It was one of the best performances I’ve ever seen, in or out of a theater. He is a commanding orator, and when he speaks, its difficult not to stop everything and listen. It’s no wonder he’s the President—he’s a very, very likable person. When you think about it—that’s what politics is, really. People have problems of all sizes. They have questions, worries, concerns, fears. What’s going to happen to my family? What’s going to happen to my town, my job, my health, my country? The President is someone who is trained to answer all those questions—and Obama does it with style. You walk away feeling like, “everything’s going to be fine. He’s in charge.” Needless to say, I was impressed.

In the end, I didn’t get to ask my question. They told us from the start that depending on the length of the President’s answers, he might not get to all of us. Nevertheless, while answering someone else’s question, he did address my topic. He stated that Americans need to adapt to the present job climate, and that there were education opportunities the government would be endorsing. He promoted the American Jobs Act, which he recently put to Congress, which (if passed) includes mandates for “innovative job training” and incentives for companies to hire long-term unemployed workers, amongst a host of other statutes.

I might not have had the chance to “speak” with the President directly, but I was at least in the same room with him. That was enough for me. It was an amazing experience and one I’ll never forget.

Modern Mythology

Humans are meaning seeking creatures. It is an undeniable human characteristic. Against all the chaotic and depressing evidence to the contrary, we seek out meaning and are on personal quests to fill our lives with some degree of purpose. It may seem foolish sometimes, but it is an unquestionably human drive. One of the key ways that this impulse is manifested is through mythology.

Mythology isn’t something that happened in the past; some ancient, misaligned quasi-religious belief. Mythology may be based in the past, and many times is based on a historical event or figure, but what defines a functional, relevant myth is that it is something that we are experiencing over and over again in our daily lives. It’s an occurrence that has been liberated from a particular time period and has been brought into our contemporary lives.

Take for example Jesus. Jesus was a historical figure that lived and was killed around 30 c.e. He had devotees and influence over a set number of people who believe that he died and rose from the dead. This is historical fact. But it wasn’t until years after his death that people like St. Paul began to mythologize the figure of Jesus. St. Paul had very little concern for the particulars of Jesus’ teachings or the events of his life—at least, he mentions them very little in his writings. Rather, he was concerned with the mystery of Jesus—especially regarding his death and resurrection. Paul wanted to bring this character out of the past and into the present. He succeeded, and Jesus has become an enduring mythological figure, someone that Christians experience on a daily basis now, in the 21^st century. They experience him through both ritual (studying scripture, going to church, taking the Eurcharist) and through action (leading a life according to Jesus’ teachings). Thus, Jesus has become a spiritual reality. His death and resurrection happened once, and now, it happens over and over again.

In the past, things were no different. Myths allowed our ancestors to relate to their surroundings, and to the forces that they believed sacred. It allowed them to experience divinity. The gods were all around them and they saw their handiwork daily. To them, the gods were inseparable from love, passion, anger, storms, the sea, and the quiet beauty of nature. Myths lifted them out of this mundane existence and gave them the ability to see the world with new eyes. Myths addressed timeless truths, fears, desires, and pointed them in the direction of a life more richly endowed.

Freud and Jung had an interesting take on Roman and Greek mythology. They looked at these gods and likened them to facets of our personalities. They proposed that these characters were archetypes from the collective unconscious, and the tales they existed within embodied universal truths that were universally relatable. Freud and Jung then went one step further and posed the question—could not these gods be the emotions and feelings that we experience on a daily basis? Perhaps Mars, the god of war was simply another way of understanding aggression, and so when the Romans spoke of him, they simply referred to a person being consumed with rage. Perhaps by personifying this emotion, it helped the ancient Greeks understand themselves and how they related to the universe around them, just as the mythology of Jesus helps modern Christians participate in the divine.

Can it not be said that a human is a microcosm of the entire universe, composed of the same basic stuff in different quantities? As above, so below.

James Allen and Willy Wonka

Happy New Year! After a recent reading of James Allen’s short but powerful treatise, “As a Man Thinketh” I watched the 1971 version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and discovered a striking resemblance. Simply put, the fictional character Willy Wonka (both in Roald Dahl’s original book and as Wonka was personified by Gene Wilder in ‘71) lives by a life philosophy that very much mirrors that of James Allen’s. Take for example the lyrics to Willy Wonka’s first song in the film:

If you want to view paradise
Simply look around and do it
Anything you want, just do it
Want to change the world…
There’s nothing to it.
There is no life I know
That compares with pure imagination
Living there, you’ll be free
If you truly wish to be.

What a marvelous way to view the world. What a magnificent and open minded sentiment—to believe that nothing truly holds us down, nothing holds us back from what we wish to achieve aside from our own minds. This is precisely what James Allen writes about in “As a Man Thinketh.” And so it is.

A woman is nothing more and nothing less than the whole summation of her thoughts. While she cannot always control the events that occupy her mind, she can control the way she reacts to them. A person’s circumstances reveal the true nature of their thoughts and is an immediate manifestation of his or her thoughts.

“Men think that thought can be kept secret,” James Allen writes, “but it can not. Thought quickly crystallizes into habit, which materializes as circumstance... Bestial thoughts crystallize into wanton drunkenness and sensuality…[while] thoughts of courage, self-reliance and decision crystallize into circumstances of success, plenty, and freedom.”

Does this not make perfect sense? We are attracted to that which we dream, and will always move toward that dream until we manifests our destiny. We MUST become our dreams. We must. It is our destiny—just as long as we remember that it is not easy, and that failure is a necessary station on the road to success. We must not be discouraged by disappointment, by cynical thoughts, or by the doubts and fears that invade us at every turn. These types of thoughts must be rigorously excluded for they serve no need whatsoever.

So why then does the world seem so full of doubts and fears? Indeed, at every stop along the tour of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, nay sayers jump at him with cynical thoughts and aspersions, claiming that their own eyes deceived them somehow. It was only through an immense feat of will power that Wonka was able to achieve all that he dreamed. Perhaps the finest manifestion of this idea is the final utterance of the movie.

You know what happened to the boy who got everything he ever wished for, don’t you, Charlie? He lived happily ever after.

So few movies are imbued with such a palpable sense of magic, of possibility, of wonder. So few actually foster that sense that anything could happen if you wish for it badly enough; if you truly believe it can happen and that you are capable of it.

And what a wonderful thing to inspire! I wish there were more messages like that in the world. God knows there are more than enough messages to the contrary, telling us we’re not good enough, we’re not smart enough, we’re not thin enough, or pretty enough, or lucky enough to achieve the things we hold so dearly in our hearts.

"Cherish your visions, cherish your ideals. Cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts. For out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all heavenly environment; of these if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built."

Could not these very lines be spoken by James Allen or Willy Wonka?

“Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world behind this one, and everything we see here is like a shadow of that world… It was this vision that gave him his great power, for when he went into a fight, he had only to think of that world to be in it again, so that he could go through anything and not be hurt.” –Black Elk Speaks, transcribed by John G. Neihardt

“A really excellent narcissist would be a really powerful tool for saving the planet. If everyone was a perfect narcissist, there would be nothing to worry about because we’d automatically fix everything and our purchases would be so begnign. It’s not self-absorbed, it’s just knowing what’s good for self… as we perfect our narcissism, it comes around where you’re actually doing things that feel like sharing, that feel like connected behavior.” --Alex Bogusky in this Fast Company article


Each of us is the whole and total definition of our capacities. We are the authorities of how our lives will play out. We are the dreamers of dreams, the masters of our own destinies. It is our responsibility to ourselves and to the universe at large to live out our fantasies... to the Nth degree… in grossest detail.

Juice Fasting

I recently read a book on juice fasting (Juice Fasting and Detoxification by Steve Meyerowitz). It’s a well-written book, very well researched and has a fun, casual tone that makes it a breeze to read. It was fascinating, not only for the facts and figures about fasting, but also about the benefits of drinking juices and all the wonderful things they do for your body. It’s amazing when you realize how Mother Nature is so well suited for humans, and how she sustains us so perfectly with all her health giving fruits and vegetables. These truly are the gems of the Earth, and they make us feel magnificent if only we let them do their thing and consume them regularly.

Though this fast was a short one, it was certainly educational. I made a few mistakes along the way, and what better way to learn something than by making a mistake? The key thing I learned (and learned the hard way) was about the state of our digestive systems. Under normal circumstances, our bodies are coated in a thin layer of food residue and bacteria. This bacteria is both good and bad. It’s good because it helps the digestive process occur. It also protects our bodies from harmful fried foods and tequila shots and other bad things we put in our bodies sometimes. However, when that layer gets to be too thick, we don’t get all the nutrients from our food that we should. Food just sort of slips in and out of our systems, and we only extract a small percentage of the vitamins and minerals. This also leads to overeating and feeling bloated, as well as unhealthy weight gain. This is where fasting comes into play.

After about 24 hours without food, depending on the speed of your metabolism, much of that food matter and good bacteria gets eaten digested and eliminated. This is good. You are eliminating food matter that may have been chilling in your digestive tract for months—years even. Flushing that stuff out is a necessary thing to do, for sure. Once that layer is gone though, your body still needs energy, and so it starts tapping other parts of the body. You start digesting some of the fat you may have built up, and even some of the diseased or sick areas of the body. This is why they say fasting is an especially good idea for sick people.

When you are finished fasting, whether it be 24 hours or 24 days later, your digestive tract is in a VERY sensitive state. That whole protective layer of food and good bacteria is long gone. It may take as long as the time you fasted or even longer to build up that protective layer again. Once you start eating again, man are you hungry! That hunger comes on fast, and you feel like you could eat anything and everything, just as if the fast never happened. Well, let me tell you something brother—no matter what your stomach may tell you, you are NOT ready for full on food. Steer clear of any sort of meat or fried food for at least a week. It is a bad idea. If you eat any of that unnatural stuff before you are fully ready, you are going to experience a whopper of a stomach ache. Ohhh! It’s not good. Believe me.

In closing, fast for your health, it will make you feel and look great—but when returning to food, be PATIENT. That’s the most dangerous part of the fast and where everyone messes up. Good luck.

Gurus

Education is a creative act, not an act of imitation. When on the path of self-realization, sometimes it’s easy to look up to our teachers as people to ape. We admire their station in life, so that is a natural impulse. What we don’t realize is that teachers are our peers, not gods. We should think of them as handing us maps. Look at the map and see where you are on it. Are you where you thought you were? Do you want to be somewhere else? Do you want to be where your teacher is? What’s the best way to get there for you and your life?

Each of us makes his/her own pathway to the Truth. You are not the only one to envision the world in a certain way, but the world that you perceive is unique to you alone. There is only one Truth, but there are infinite ways to experience it.

The one and only true teacher resides within each of us. It is our decision whether or not to pay attention to what that teacher says.

No one has ever taught us anything. They have only revealed truths which we already knew.

Accessing Your Section of the Cosmic Library



Locked within the inner chambers of our beings are our fears, desires, and anxieties, but also our inherent potentials for courage, self-growth, and knowledge. These potentials are so great, they are just about unimaginable to our conscious mind. Most potentials remain unrealized because we can't find ways to apply them creatively. Others we don't use because we are controlled by a group consciousness, and can't operate individually. At times it seems our sense of identity seems to rely entirely on our memberships...

We must re-evolve. We must learn to hear and follow a most clear seeing and powerful leader: the knowingness within each one of us...

It is only through meditation that we can tap into the universal source of all knowledge... a pool of wisdom so deep and so wide that all the information on this microscopically small planet, the Earth, would only be that which laps upon its shores. We must tap into this wisdom if we are to move mountains and live up to our full potentials.

All experiences go into this pool of wisdom, the universal archives from which we can draw whatever we wish. But you are your own library card; your mind the only entrance key you possess. However, you can not see all the books. Your mind vibrates on a certain frequency, and therefore you are only able to access the section of the library that has books that pertain to your particular experience, the level on which you are now existing. You can always read the books on the lower levels of development, but you will never be able to access the books from the higher levels of consciousness... not until your mind begins to vibrate there.

If you wish to read more books in the cosmic library, start evolving so that you can gain access to the more highly developed books... meditation is a crucial part of this evolution.


inspired / stolen from "the path of action" by jack schwartz

Balanced Dying

From Human Energy Systems by Jack Schwartz

“An important part of balanced living is balanced dying. As we take time out to eat and rest, we must also take out time to die—to encourage the progressive transition of ourselves through the stages of life. This is how I think of meditation. Meditation is the basic initiator of all action.”

“People long to be eternal, but they die with every day that passes. When you meet them, they’re not what you last met. In any hour, they’ll kill some part of themselves. They change, they deny, they contradict—and they call it growth. At the end, there’s nothing left, nothing unreversed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out of an unformed mass.” -Ayn Rand

Auguries of Innocence

Every Night and every Morn
Some to Misery are Born
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to Endless Night

Towards the End...

Over the past few days I've been thinking a lot about evolution and the place humans occupy in it. Repeatedly, I have come back to the fact that my last post may have ignored the one distinguishing feature that sets us apart from other species—our minds.

Historically, the very first homo sapiens came on the scene during the Ice Age. As they moved away from their ancestral home on the African savanna, they faced glacial sheets, much like the one that covers Greenland today, advancing and retreating with the seasons. Each time the sheets advanced, the humans were forced south; when the sheets receded, the humans moved north to find abundant hunting grounds in their wake.

During this period, the selective process for better brains must have been intense. Only those humans with bigger, more developed brains would be able to reproduce among the perils of new lands and harsher climates.

As evolution progressed, this trend continued. Those humans with the greatest mental capacity survived the longest. Those who used their brains in the most effective ways succeeded. Today, things have changed a bit and arguments could be made about modern medicine allowing the human genetic pool to become polluted with disease, infirmity and handicaps that would have been wiped out in earlier ages—their carriers simply would not have survived long enough to reproduce. However, it could also be argued that the sympathy—the humanity—we express through our mastery of technology and medicine are hallmarks of our evolution away from the beasts and toward something greater.

Either way, the MIND is the key. Consciousness. It is clear to me now that this truly is the central drama and purpose behind all these billions of years of evolution. Consciousness is what life has been heading for all this time. And it has manifested in us!

Can you grasp the power of that?

Think about it like this:

• 3.5 billion years ago… life on this planet began.
• 2 million years ago… apes evolved into the homo genus.
• In a single century… we've discovered and traced the evolutionary forces at work.
• In a few short decades… we've revealed the very basis of life: DNA.

It seems we are fast approaching an Omega Point, where the consciousness of all mankind works together for some grander purpose. Call me an idealist, but no one—human or alien—can doubt that our species will lead this planet and all its inhabitants into a whole new and final unification…or to its ultimate destruction.

I don't know about you but the point of all this can't just be fast cars and rock stars and bank accounts and MTV. Though our current cultural conditioning certainly seems to be pointed that way, if you have any sort of feeling beyond the basest impulses for food and self preservation, you must realize that there is more—and I'm not talking about religion per se.

I think Daniel Pinchbeck says it best:

"The possibility of establishing a radically new understanding of the psyche… threatens the underpinnings of a culture obsessed with acquiring goods, wealth, and status. If we were to discover that other aspects of reality deserved serious consideration, we would have to reconsider the thrust of our current civilization: entire lives and enormous expulsions of energy would seem misdirected or even wasted…"

Consciousness is the key. We have to avail ourselves to the possibilities life offers, whether they seem profitable or not. We must listen to our inner impulses and follow them faithfully, even if we don’t fully understand where they bringing us. What else do we have to go on?

In the beginning…

In the beginning, the Earth was cold and the seas as barren as deep space. The primordial tides rose and fell against small, lonely patches of wasteland. The oceans stretched on and on and on, and there was no sound save for the thresh of the wind and the omnipresent roll of thunder rattling in the distance…two billion years before an ear existed to hear them.

And then one day—a day like any before it, a day that seemed almost stupid with its regularity—a very peculiar thing happened. It wasn't an unheard of event exactly, it had happened in other places on other worlds, but this was the first day it happened on this planet. On that day, not far from the surface of the ocean, a microscopic single-celled organism gained the miraculous (?) ability to divide and reproduce itself. Not long after that, another single-celled organism gained the same ability. Then another, and another, and another… The conditions were perfect to permit it. Time passed, and the single-celled organisms became soft, multiple-celled organisms. These, in turn, joined with others to become larger, more complex organisms, eventually leading to the formation of primitive water-dwelling invertebrates.

These creatures were well adapted to the ancient seas, and they flourished. Over a short period of time—perhaps 1 million years or so—they multiplied so many times that hosts of mutations inevitably occurred. The most successful mutations adapted to their environment and blossomed in that place. The creatures mutated further, and again, the most successful lived on, eventually becoming a class of creatures we might today call fish. This was about 365 million years ago.

Mutation and selection worked its magic, and the fish eventually developed better fins for swimming and better jaws for catching prey. The ones we call crossopterygians developed a primitive lung in addition to their gills. By pure chance, some of these crossopterygians were born with mutated legs, which allowed them to waddle onto the land formed by the receding seas, opening up for them a whole new habitat. These creatures existed on the tiny insects flying at the edge of the water. Time passed, and they mutated further into antediluvian amphibians.

So it went that the fish begat the amphibian, the amphibian begat the reptile, the reptile begat the mammal, and from small, ambiguous mammals came the primates, from the primitive primates came the apes and monkeys, from the apes came australopithecus, homo erectus, homo habilis, the Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon man, and finally homo sapiens: The modern man was born.

Half a billion years of evolution… and at every step of the way, mutation and selection flowed through life like water through rock, carving away the useless, the inadaptable, the weak. Creatures that were not strong or ruthless enough to thrive did not get a chance to reproduce.

And now, to the surprise of many, modern man has escaped evolution. Survival of the fittest no longer applies to our species, at least not in the manner that it has in the past. Physical mutations no longer affect the carrying on of our genes to the next generation. We now have the choice of whether to reproduce or not. Sex is a leisure activity; children a financial decision. Neither hold the instinctual/survival obligation they once did.

When seen on a scale like this, the worries of our everyday life seem utterly insignificant. Who really cares if this or that project gets done today, next week, or next century? Does it even matter? In the space of 70 years—a human lifetime; a micro-blink of the evolutionary eye—what real meaning could anyone’s life really hold? Who really cares if I do or don’t have children, go to work today or stay home, pay my bills or set fire to my credit cards, live, die, kill, be killed… do anything at all? Does it really matter?

Religion, too, takes on a strange, artificial pallor when seen through the evolutionary lens. Where is there a place for God if life is purely mutation and selection, a set of coincidental circumstances occurring with scientific regularity when the conditions permit?

I’m not the first to ponder these issues, and I’m sure I won’t be the last either. Anyone? Is anyone else out there?

Not many men will say what I'm about to reveal to the world right now. It's a confession of sorts, but I can't hold it in any more.

I LOVE AIMEE MANN!

There, I said it, OK? I feel so much better.

The soundtrack to Magnolia rules, as does her 2002 album, Lost in Space. But lately, my fave song of hers is right here. Bad video quality, but the content is classic 80s.

(BTW The guy in the vid is super familiar looking. I think he might have been a regular in 80s videos...)

Enjoy.

“As soon as strong initiative is taken to change our nature toward refinement, a new inner process begins to take place. The forces of positive accomplishment from each of our past lives begin to manifest in this one. These good deeds are vibrations in the ether substance of our memory patterns, because each of us, right now, is a sum total of all previous experience.”

-Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami

I know we have all had it up to here with the Iraq war, but when I saw this article (“War Costs and Costs and Costs” by Prof. Joseph E. Stiglitz) on GlobalResearch.ca today, it made me stop and think about it again in a new way.

“The Bush administration said the war would cost $50bn. The US now spends that amount in Iraq every three months. To put that number in context: for one-sixth of the cost of the war, the US could put its social security system on a sound footing for more than a half-century, without cutting benefits or raising contributions…

The war has had only two winners: oil companies and defense contractors. The stock price of Halliburton, vice-president Dick Cheney's old company, has soared. But even as the government turned increasingly to contractors, it reduced its oversight…

The largest cost of this mismanaged war has been borne by Iraq. Half of Iraq's doctors have been killed or have left the country, unemployment stands at 25%, and, five years after the war's start, Baghdad still has less than eight hours of electricity a day. Out of Iraq's total population of around 28 million, 4 million are displaced and 2 million have fled the country.

The thousands of violent deaths have inured most westerners to what is going on: a bomb blast that kills 25 hardly seems newsworthy anymore. But statistical studies of death rates before and after the invasion tell some of the grim reality. They suggest additional deaths from a low of around 450,000 in the first 40 months of the war (150,000 of them violent deaths) to 600,000.

With so many people in Iraq suffering so much in so many ways, it may seem callous to discuss the economic costs. And it may seem particularly self-absorbed to focus on the economic costs to America, which embarked on this war in violation of international law. But the economic costs are enormous, and they go well beyond budgetary outlays.

Americans like to say that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Nor is there such a thing as a free war. The US - and the world - will be paying the price for decades to come.”

I'm not sure where I found this mandala, but I'm feeling it big time. Something about it just reaches out and grabs me. Hope you dig it, too.

All you revolutionaries out there--make sure you don't miss ZEITGEIST! You can watch it for FREE on this website or check it on Google Video here.

Zeitgeist is one of the most expansive conspiracy theory films I've ever seen. As low budget as it is, it’s both powerful and frightening, and I would recommend it to any free thinking human out there. It's way too large to describe here, so I won't even try. Suffice to say that it covers the gamut, questioning the Bible, the existence of Jesus Christ, Vietnam, 9/11, the Federal Reserve, brain implanted microchips ,and the ever advancing plans for One World Government.

Watch it with the lights on. Yikes!