philosophy

"A spiritual religion of humanity is the hope of the future. This does not mean what is ordinarily called a universal religion, a system, a thing of creed and intellectual belief and dogma and outward rite. Mankind has tried unity by that means; it has failed and deserved to fail. The inner spirit is indeed one, but the spiritual life insists on freedom and variation in its self-expression and means of development. A religion of humanity means the growing realisation that there is a secret Spirit, a divine Reality, in which we are all one, that humanity is its highest present vehicle on earth, that the human race and the human being are the means by which it will progressively reveal itself here. It implies a growing attempt to live out this knowledge and bring about a kingdom of this divine Spirit upon earth. By its growth within us oneness with our fellow-men will become the leading principle of all our life, not merely a principle of cooperation but a deeper brotherhood, a real and an inner sense of unity and equality and a common life." -- Sri Aurobindo

By bits, I mean digital bits and the words you are about to read are an exploration and a free flow of ideas about sharing things online. Here is a list of some things people share online: photos, recipes, videos, articles, opinions, commentary, personal experiences, events, advice, business, achievements, charity. Initially, I was going to try to categorize all this with a type of sliding scale between surface level sharing and deep (i.e. more meaningful) level sharing. I realized, though, that what seems like a surface level of sharing to one person might be deep and meaningful to another person. Furthermore, a large number of surface level posts might very well add up to something far more meaningful than a few deep level posts. Categorizing everything shared online is not a simple task. However, in trying to understand online sharing I think it is important to examine it from two interrelated perspectives: the perspectives of the individual and the many.

Individuals sharing online can influence the things others see, hear, eat and think about. Being able to influence people on a large scale is an extraordinary power that until recently was held mostly by governments and large media conglomerates. Now, every individual with access to the internet has this power available to them. The level of influence can very depending on an individual's intention but even the most benign sharing, a music video on you-tube for example, has an effect of influence. Essentially, when individuals share online, it connects them to other individuals. As those connections spread, the influence becomes amplified.

The aggregate of many people sharing takes things a step further so that the (somewhat intangible) things being shared become realities reflected back to us in the "real" world. When many people begin to share an idea, that idea becomes a part of the collective consciousness; the idea becomes rooted in our everyday actions, it influences public policy and becomes the basis for our social (and political, and economic) systems. I think it is important to note that some of the ideas shared online will be more evolved, more whole, and more inclusive than others. I believe that these ideas have a greater weight of influence even if they are not initially shared by the majority of people. The more evolved ideas eventually seep into the consciousness of many. For example, the rights of a woman to vote, something we now take for granted, were at one time supported by only a minority of people. Today, the internet has the power to spread more evolved ideas into the collective consciousness at a much higher rate than ever before. It might even be argued that we are now witnessing our own collective evolution occur before our very eyes.

Many wisdom traditions through out the ages have explored the paradoxical concept that the one and the many are the same thing. The word "individual" is itself somewhat a paradox in that the meaning refers to one person as separate from many but the root of the word means undivided. Certain people (Jaron Lanier for example) have argued that the "hive mind" mentality of the internet will be the end of individual creativity. I disagree; when the "yin and yang" (i.e. paradoxical) relationship between the individual and the many is recognized, both the human collective and the individuals within it can be honoured together.

Sharing online is a very powerful tool for expressing ourselves. When that expression has the right intention behind it, it can, as it is embraced and amplified by the many, change the world for the better. This exploration on sharing has left me with a few new questions: What are the barriers (both internally and externally) to my own public self expression online? What, exactly, is it I wish to express and through what mediums should I express it? And, ultimately, in what ways do I want the world to change?

As the Vancouver Canucks prepare for game seven with the Chicago Blackhawks, I can't help but think that the negative energy and pessimistic attitude of Vancouver fans and media has played a role in this teams recent losses.

I have been around sports long enough to know that the energy from not just the crowds at the games but also the fans in the city, plays a huge role in helping or hindering a team. Energy fields are real things and self-fulfilling prophecies are real phenomenons.

An example of how this works to the detriment of the team can be seen with the British world cup football (soccer) team. A plethora of horrible, paparazzi style media in the UK is constantly searching for the slightest issue to turn into a massive negative story. This constant negativity combined with the high expectations of UK football fans creates a highly charged negative atmosphere that constantly hangs over the team. Englands results at World Cups over the last 40 years speak for themselves.

An example of how positive energy from fans and a city can support a team can be found most recently with team Canada's performance at the Olympics. If you were in Vancouver durring the Olympics, then you know that the positive energy that I am talking about is a real thing. Team Canada's win in the hockey gold medal game is now legendary, but without the positive energy that permeated this city, I am convinced that the pressures on the team would have been too great to overcome. The "I believe" campaign worked; we did believe.

I once was part of an Ultimate frisbee team that won the Canadian university championship. We had a skilled team but it was on the mental side that we really excelled. The team openly preached something we called PMA: positive mental attitude. PMA means never getting down, it means staying light and having fun, it means never yelling at a teammate when they make a mistake, it means believing in yourself and your teammates.

Canucks fans that want to see the team win need to embrace a PMA. We need to consider ourselves as part of the team. If you were on the team, would you yell "Luongo, you fucking idiot" if he let in a bad goal? Would you boo and cat call from the bench if things weren't going the teams way? Would you say out loud "Oh no, here we go again, were're going to lose". If you did those things, you would be kicked off the team pretty damn quick.

Of course, as a fan, you have every right to yell and scream whatever you want and to think however you want. But if you want this team to win, then you will be best served thinking the way you'd want the players to think: positively. If you want the players to believe in themselves, then you have to believe in the players... you can't have it both ways.

This video is a bit uncomfortable to watch, but I think that's the point.

Robert Thurman is a professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia University. He was one of the first American Buddhist monks of the Tibetan tradition and he has studied with and become a close friend of the Dali Lama. Being the father of ultra-hot Umma Thurman also adds to his impressive biography.

I have seen Thurman speak a couple of times and he is an extremely entertaining and informative speaker. The slideshow below is a comic-form adaptation of one of Thurman's lectures on buddhist mythology. It's pretty wild stuff that, while mythological, could quite possibly exist in realms of possibility

(You can also download the pdf of the comic by clicking the attachment link below... it might be a little easier to view it that way.)

Last Minutes with ODEN from phos pictures on Vimeo.

I put my comments below this video so I wouldn't influence your experience of it.....

I've watched it three times now and have teared up every time; it is incredibly sad. But, there is a message and a beauty in the sadness that makes this video something special (it won best video at the 2010 Vimeo Awards).

Of course, the message of unconditional love as taught by the life of Oden is an important aspect of the video. But, for me, the power of this video is in how it forces the viewer to confront emotion, particularly sadness. Our society tends to be hyper-masculinized; promoting the hero as a stoic warrior archetype and, genrally, teaching us to hide our emotion and feelings. Sometimes, though, the difficult emotions need to be brought to the surface. By observing them we can begin to find the truth, goodness, and beauty hidden within them.

In the case of Oden, the truth was that he was in pain and needed to be put down. There was a goodness to Oden's owners doing the right thing despite the grief it caused. And, there was beauty in Oden's life and message being recognized, appreciated, and passed on to anyone watching this video. If the owner, as he put it, "John Wayned" it and put the dog down without feeling the sadness, then the lessons of truth, goodness, and beauty would have been missed.

A few day's ago I posted an update about being in chinatown. It wasn't what I would consider an engaging post. It was created entirely on my cell phone, posted to the internet from my cell phone and, more than anything, it was a slice of my real time experience in that moment. That aspect of the post is, to me, extraordinarily interesting. Revolutionary is a word that's used much to often when talking about technology so I'm not going to use it here. I do believe, though, that the ability to access other people's real time experiences, as mundane as they might be individually, is evolutionary.

We are living in an era where, for the first time ever, human beings have access to the knowledge from all the cultures of the world. Interestingly, one of the common pieces of traditional wisdom that has been / is shared by many cultures, is the concept that separation is a type of illusion and that we are all, ultimately, one. In the 1920's, this dude named Pierre Teilhard de' Charidin theorized that humanity was evolving towards something he called the "noosphere", which is essentially a global brain or global consciousness. Somewhat related is the idea of formative causation. This theory proposed by the biologist Rupert Sheldrake states that the human entity is more than that which is contained within the "boundary" of our skin. Our very beings are connected to and are influenced by "morphic fields", patterns of energy which organize systems at all levels of complexity, and are the basis for the wholeness that we observe in nature, which is more than the sum of the parts.

My point is that homo sapien's continued development of connective technologies has created, in a very short time, the structures for a new evolutionary stage. One where many individual human beings exist with the awareness of themselves within, and as expresions of, a greater intelligence. What that greater intelligence might look like and what that greater intelligence might mean is a discussion for another day. For now, I am simply left pondering if, given advancements of the last 20 years, we might already have evolved beyond the genus "homo sapien". Perhaps "homo transitionalis" is a better classification.

Sometimes, I wonder about Utopia. If the world could be any way you want it right now, what would that look like? That question is intimately tied to what truth is. Not long ago, truth for some people was that black people were meant to be slaves and people literally fought for a world with slaves in it.

So the question about what is true is a very important one. Followed all the way it, it leads us to the great wisdom traditions that have been pondering the question since the beginning of thought. Yes, many dogmatic religions have warped, twisted, and abused the traditional wisdom but we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

The wisdom traditions generally suggest an Ultimate Truth, an Ultimate Beauty, an Ultimate Goodness; a God, a Spirit, a Source, an Omega Point that has always existed, right now, forever. And we, you and me, are THAT. We are not separate from God. Everything is perfect NOW. In certain states of being I have felt this to be true.

The tricky part is that held within this perfection is all things dark and, so called, evil. Cancer, slums, slavery, disease, poverty, injustice; these things exist within perfection; pushing us to question; pushing us to evolve. It is with the aforementioned wisdom, however, that darkness can be met and even embraced. This is especially important when it comes to ourselves but applies to the larger social issues as well.

Things are getting worse and things are getting better at the same time. It's a paradox; no matter how much light we bring into the world, darkness will continue because we need it...we are it. With darkness embraced (not aloofly accepted!) we can have Utopia, right now, in this moment that we are always striving to improve and is perfect just the way it is.

From Wikipedia:

In metamorphosis, within the body of the caterpillar little things that biologists call imaginal discs or imaginal cells begin to crop up in the body of the caterpillar. They aren't recognized by the immune system so the caterpillar's immune system wipes them out as they pop up. It isn't until they begin to link forces and join up with each other that they get stronger and are able to resist the onslaught of the immune system, until the immune system itself breaks down and the imaginal cells form the body of the butterfly.

In a previous blog post, I referenced a quote by Stuart Hameroff about the nature of consciousness. In the following video, Hameroff and Deepak Chopra discuss this topic in greater detail.

An important point is that consciousness does not arise at a certain level of complexity but is embedded into the very fabric of the universe itself. This point of view can help us realize the oneness we share with the world around us. (As differentiated entities in nature, some are more complex than others, some are more aware than others, but none are "better" than others; that would be like saying an organism is better than a cell).

Another important point is that humaness (i.e. consciousness) cannot be reduced to simple bio-chemical processes in the brain. Consciousness is not just a product of neurons in our brain acting as on-off switches, which, at a certain point of complexity create consciousness. (As a side note: the de-humanizing effect of this view point in the world of technology is the topic of a good book by Jaron Lanier called You Are Not a Gadget.)

Here's the video: