Chris Corrigan

From my new read, gassho, Jack writes an elegant summary of the roots of six major religions:

Lunch today with Koshin Ogui who heads Chicago’s Midwest Buddhist temple. He suggests that religion is at the root of our political and cultural worldviews and that there are two genres of religions — mountain-field religions (Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism) and desert religions (Islam, Judaism, Christianity). The ethos of desert religions is survival by resisting and opposing nature — the dualistic perspective; the ethos of mountain-field religions is survival by being in harmony with nature — the oneness perspective.

Maybe, maybe not, but it is a nice starting point for thinking about things.

The Human Phenomenon, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Mega-synthesis in the tangential, and therefore and thereby a leap forward of the radial energies along the principal axis of evolution: ever more complexity and thus ever more consciousness. If that is what really happens, what more do we need to convince oursleves of the vital error hidden in the depths of any doctrine of isolation? The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of ‘everyone for himself’ is false and against nature. No element could move and grow except with and by all the others with itself.

Also false and against nature is the racial ideal of one branch draining off for itself alone all the sap of the tree and rising over the death of other branches. To reach the sun nothing less is required than the combined growth of the entire foliage.

The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human–these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others. They will open only to an advance of all together, in a direction in which all together can join and find completion in a spiritual renovation of the earth….

The father of the notion of noosphere, Pere Teilhard de Chardin wrote some amazing stuff on evolution. More to come…

The Hiri Sutta

Who in the world
is a man constrained by conscience,
who awakens to censure
like a fine stallion to the whip?

Those restrained by conscience
are rare —
those who go through life
always mindful.
Having reached the end
of suffering & stress,
they go through what is uneven
evenly;
go through what is out-of-tune
in tune.

A picture of earth from the edge of the solar system, by Voyager 1

Carl Sagan: Relfections on a Mote of Dust

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there ï¿½ on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

The picture at the top of this entry is a close up of the Voyager image of which Sagan is speaking. It was one of the last photos taken by Voyager 1 as it left the solar system in February 1990 to embark on its journey into interstellar space. The earth, a pale blue dot, appears suspended in a sunbeam which is basically solar glare on the camera lens. For a larger picture, with a lot more black nothingness surrounding our tiny, tiny home, click here. It sometimes brings tears to my eyes.

whiskey river stares into the abyss:

I pace back and forth on the edge of the abyss, looking down into the dark. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

[Friedrich Nietzsche said that. But you knew that.]

And now, feel it begin to sink.

Here’s hoping everything’s okay down by the whiskey river.

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