Just Thoughts

Pale Blue Dot from Richard G on Vimeo. – 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–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness - not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

To be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind; to talk health, happiness and prosperity to every person you meet; to make all your friends feel there is something in them; to look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true; to think only the best, to work only for the best and expect only the best; to be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own;

Recently I was visited by a very good friend who had just returned from a long walk in the woods, and I asked her what she had observed. “Nothing in particular,” she replied. I might have been incredulous had I not been accustomed to such responses, for long ago I became convinced that the seeing see little. How was it possible, I asked myself, to walk for an hour through the woods and see nothing worthy of note?

What will you do? Links. The five best poetry slams with a message.

Slam poetry piece: similar versus different. Stereotypes on why they are different.

What is privilege? Did I really have an advantage as a white male in America? It isn’t as bad as other places right? So I shouldn’t worry about it I guess. Link to the comic itself. The Pencilsword: On a plate.

I knew this years ago when noticing how Facebook was adjusting feeds. People that I didn’t view started getting filtered out and the more I looked at a particular topic I started seeing a lot more suggestions around those topics. Very specific suggested posts and articles too; extremely well targeted. I became acutely aware that I was inadvertently being steered down a path by a feed of information. I was personally looking at motivational material and adventure related sports, but it was easy to see that this was being done across the board.

Ego-centric: If you say I all of the time. Be honestly interested in other people. And much more. Link: Stephen Fry on Everything