What is this Life
philosophic inquiry into life and meaning
...if truth were not for man the desire for truth would not be as a burning unrest in his heart...
Inspirations
Movies, music, books and other media that is inspiring, uplifting, sobering, and catalytic will be found here.
Excerpt from The One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka
"If life and death are realities, isn't human suffering inescapable?"
"There is no life or death."
"How can you say that?"
The world itself is a unity of matter within the flow of experience, but people's minds divide phenomena into dualities such as life and death, yin and yang, being and emptiness. The mind comes to believe in the absolute validity of what the senses perceive and then, for the first time, matter as it is turns into objects as human beings normally perceive them.
The forms of the material world, concepts of life and death, health and disease, joy and sorrow, all originate in the human mind. In the sutra, when Buddha said that all is void, he was not only denying intrinsic reality to anything which is constructed by human intellect, but he was also declaring that human emotions are illusions.
"You mean all is illusion? There's nothing left?"
"Nothing left? The concept of 'void' still remains in your mind apparently," I said to the youth. "If you don't know where you came from or where you're going, then how can you be sure you're here, standing in front of me? Is existence meaningless?"
The other morning I heard a four-year-old girl ask her mother, "Why was I born into this world? To go to nursery school?"
Naturally her mother could not honestly say, "Yes, that's right, so off you go." And yet, you could say that people these days are born to go to nursery school. Right up through college people study diligently to learn why they were born. Scholars and philosophers, even if they ruin their lives in the attempt, say they will be satisfied to understand this one thing.
Originally human beings had no purpose. Now, dreaming up some purpose or other, they struggle away trying to find the meaning of life. It is a one-man wrestling match. There is no purpose one has to think about, or go out in search of. You would do well to ask the children whether or not a life without purpose is meaningless.
From the time they enter nursery school, people's sorrows begin. The human being was a happy creature, but he created a hard world and now struggles trying to break out of it.
In nature there is life and death, and nature is joyful.
In human society there is life and death, and people live in sorrow.
More info:
http://www.onestrawrevolution.net/
One Straw Revolution on Amazon
by Patrick O'Leary
There's a place that I travel
When I want to roam
And nobody knows it
but me.
The roads don't go there
And the signs stay home
And nobody knows it
but me.
It's far far away
And way way afar
It's over the moon
and the sea.
And wherever you're going
That's wherever you are
And nobody knows it
but me.
A reading by Bart Marshall from his translation the Faith Mind Sutra, part of an excerpt of his book The Perennial Way: New English Version of Yoga Sutras, Dhammapada, Heart Sutra, Ashtavakra Gita, Faith Mind Sutra, and Tao Te Ching.
You can find out more about the book here: http://tatfoundation.org/perennial_way.htm
The Web of Destiny by Max Heindel seems to be a small treasure, but it is a treasure that is wrapped in its own codewords and sealed within its own system which I have been unable to unlock. Still, there are some gems inside which do not require one to know everything about Rosicrucianism to decipher their meanings.
I picked out this book from the TAT library (upstairs in the community building) as it felt different from all the other books to me. It was "charged" if you can understand that...The edition I borrowed was a first edition and perhaps was one of Richard Rose's books in his search. Picking this book was an experiment in intuitional book choosing as there are millions of books (among other things) to read and only so much time so we must limit what we read and choose wisely.
Movie Review: "Terminator: Salvation" by Jake Jaqua
[from "Theosnet"]
"Salvation" could probably be a "stand-alone" movie, but one would have a hard time with the plot without watching either Terminator 1, 2, and 3(?), or maybe the 2-year Fox TV series.
The plot in "Salvation" is the loosest and poorest of any of them, but I would enjoy watching it regardless. The "machines" and Skynet have all but wiped out the human race with isolated resistence groups here and there and a larger human central command. The key and most interesting character is an android with a human brain (with a chip) and a human heart, that was early on designed by Skynet as an infiltration machine to kill key humans - unbeknownst to the android, who thinks he is totally human (until he is wounded and his inner mechanics are visible. The android's human heart battles with his unconscious programming and wins out in the end, proving himself to be fully human instead of just a programmed machine. That the center of the human nature is in the heart and not brain would agree with Blavatsky (Esoteric Instructions, BCW 12, I believe.)
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