Friday Showing

- The magic of teaching - the magic of science -

a Radio program from NPR, With Good Reason

- The Art of Science -

The Weekly Magazine - Friday Showing

For Friday 6/14/13

This Friday Showing...

Humans

The Devine

Death

Love

and some pretty tawdry fashion

Humans and the Divinity we Seek.
Holy Shit! This is just too much, I can’t stand it anymore. Perhaps this profound phrase is the origin of human pursuit of divinity. Something somehow must be able to change this. It seems easily that wherever humans are found there is a lot of thought and effort spent in pursuit of this something.
Nothing seems to work so maybe I can induce some unexplainable force to change things, some others have done this. Nothing can explain their good fortune. I just have to seek what that is.
Depending on how hard they seek, Buddhists at the ‘this is too much’ time feel they always can find an answer which helps and if they still don’t quit looking they can find something that will truly change their fortune.
With strong seeking spirit we can get to a point where we can say, Bring it On world! I know I, we my family can overcome.
Humanism generally relates to the idea that the best changes occur when the individual human is considered first and foremost and I feel this idea is at the root of religions. The problem here is that when we haven’t really changed ourselves the humanism seeps out of our religion.
I think this is where the great debate over the religions and over whether to have any religion, stems from. I greatly appreciate the humanist aspects of a religion or philosophy but am strongly against any system which has lost track of its humanism. To me a humanist is someone who has overcome his/her desire to kill. A humanist may step on a bug or kill another human when under a direct threat but in no case should this occasion a desire to kill. The reality is the human in us does not desire to kill.
Accordingly, the human in us even as we desire to uphold it and build religions around it, often slips away. My job is not to judge anyone, the workings of the universe will put people in the position they deserve, again depending on how hard they are willing to seek it, even if it means seeking it outside of any box they may live in. In my book humanism is universal therefore never dependent on a particular culture or home location and certainly not color, education or status.
Buddhist share the idea that it is inside the human, where divinity exists and if we look for it elsewhere we simply lose the human, who always seeks divinity.
Both the East and the West share great potential for finding holiness in humans.
In the Eastern world, the lesson of history has led to societies who value the benefits of unity and organization which many times allowed mass starvation to be avoided when a strong leader and a strong central government could allocate food and other needed resources as needed. Other than understanding strong central government as essential to human survival Easterners tend to view the unity of the family as similarly essential.
The West on the other hand especially in the US individualism and thinking and even moving outside the box is celebrated. Settling new land, which needed a gun and some cowboy type spirit is what we who broke away from the short lived but at one time greatest empire on Earth, so we could drink coffee instead of tea, is what we’re all about. Not trusting the government led us to design a theoretically people-centered government and then not trust it much forever more.
On Earth here we continued to struggle and survive but with some very divergent world-views. This is the natural order of human life to struggle and survive with warts and divinity. It seems we just need something to protect our humanity, keeping us out of the jungle and open to a reality of diversity, taking all comers. Something ever mindful of the human and thus our divinity, something both organized, helping each person, helping each other, in the most sustainable way based on a universal law and free enough to embrace a culture of cowboys turned into suits, eccentrics and loners, a culture with power enough to be innovators and inventors for the world, not just in the world of music, Something that liberates the human in us all. The yin and the yang of a middle way. The divinity we seek must be very powerful indeed.

The Death of Love.
It’s OK we can read or write this, no one has to know you read about the death of love, certainly not me. Heaven forgive if we have a ‘death-wish’. I scan the headlines on the supermarket tabloids and once in a High School down in North Carolina I read books telling about Communism, it was a pretty big topic back then and I wanted to know what it was, in spite of warnings that it seduces people. I guess it was fortunate the single storefront library in Jacksonville didn’t let it leak, the kind of stuff I was reading. Unfortunately or fortunately they had no pornography which is something I’ve always had interest in. That, if it got out may have been even worse.

Nothing bad happened to me after that research and since I’ve tended to think I should seek to know about things, I am curious about. At any rate, in the words of E.B. White, I may be the “person who is congenitally self-centered (and) has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.” for I want to share some thoughts about love and death. I certainly am no authority on love or death or Buddhism but I am aware the Buddha said, In order to understand life you should first study death.

In order to write better I’ve been following the advice of a friend to read from the essays of Mr. White, and I rather impulsively want to share this from the author of Charlotte’s Web, before moving on.

“This is what youth must figure out:
Girls, love, and living.
The having, the not having,
The spending and giving,
And the melancholy time of not knowing.

This is what age must learn about:
The ABC of dying.
The going, yet not going,
The loving and leaving,
And the unbearable knowing and knowing”

E.B. White needs no explanations from me but I did think that the Girls he refers to are the ones that girls want to figure out as well as boys and the author has the boys covered because he is one as he goes on sharing what youth and age need to figure out.

Back to my death defying topic of love. Love is a humankind thing which we have no doubt shared with some of the animals, especially dogs and well who’s to say that some of it isn’t involved with reptiles and germs keeping their species alive, I mean don’t we all usually love our own species? I would say we do unless we’re deluded, which is a kind of illness after all, because when we get better we always want to be back with them warts and crassness and all.

Love Stinks! remember that old rock n roll number, well I do and I love rock n roll. How could any human have written that profound song who hadn’t been involved with some love, somehow?

We all know that girls and love are quite dangerous but we still want to love them both. Speaking as someone more on the age side of things at this point, although it doesn’t feel like it except in my body, I think we all should be aware it takes about half a life to learn what love is and even then some don’t, bless their souls.

I lucked out because before I had any clear understanding of what love was I got married to just one woman. That event viewed internally was a commitment to face up to love no matter what happens, I guess I really did like the concept and had some high hopes for it. I think it was just about the time I entered the age side of this particular life that I entered into a sweet realization that I did know what it was and I did have it, for that very same woman and the love that had shown the great prospects.

I never promised to give any answers here but rather to put out an essay, so if my little realization doesn’t help much, it’s still the way it is.

So where is the death of love? I have seen love die many times and I want to call them all back, really I want them back even if they’re doing much better now for each in it’s way was epic, noble and unforgettable even the ones that just seemed like mere reptilian encounters otherwise known as a fuck. Fortunately I feel no compulsion to try to figure out how much each encounter of the sexual kind had love in it and it may have been one or two of them that were spectacular - failures. I mean really profound remembrances in my life which is as big as a grain of sand in the universe.

Like anything else they had to die in order to have ever been born and in this sense I have no regrets now, this grain of sand has it’s own profundity and is happy to have been around and helpful in any way I could. I was around for a moment, a moment as described in Buddhism* is far shorter than the length of time a particular arrangement of colorful dots exist as an image on a screen which changes 64 times a second in order to give the illusion of a picture with movement, that time being far longer than the time it takes to attain enlightened realization.

*as described by a friend of mine.