seeker for truth

Interesting site: http://sustainability.publicradio.org/consumer_dilemma/ I heard this on NPR this morning and I decided to visit the site. I added a few of my own ideas to their list, we'll see if they publish them and how low they rank the feasibility... Anyway, here are the three ideas I submitted: Education Democracy/Capitalism relies explicitly upon the idea of an informed polity/consumer. Culturally/Institutionally, we fail to meet this requirement. Marketing controls the bulk of political/dollar votes. Through propaganda the political/corporate machines generate buy-in from the masses. Making the education of our future generations a political/economic priority could create a critical/informed polity/consumer capable of using democracy/capitalism to manage this Earth. Global Governance Our global capitalist economic system has outstretched our political system. In a balanced scenario government can be used to check the excesses of powerful corporate interests, to protect...

"As a minister I am quite unnecessary to anyone else's salvation. Surely it is one of the universe's little jokes that I must be a minister in order to make them see this." - Alice Walker's The Temple of My Familiar Although my personal version of this sentiment probably wouldn't use the word salvation, preferring perhaps a word more similar to enlightenment in the Buddhist sense of the term or self-actualization in Maslow's language, but it would be a mere quibble. Salvation, in the Christian sense, already means the same thing as these other terms. Mythologists might disagree, might try to make an argument about literal salvation as it relates to an afterlife or the development of some specially privileged relationship with God. But I think that Jesus would be quite happy to equate the salvation that he spoke of with these other terms, being quite content that each term (and the many others that remain unmentioned) is a bona fide attempt to att...

I was listening to StoryCorps this morning on NPR, a woman was talking about her experiences with her brother who died of AIDS and the familial controversy over the publicity vs. privacy aspects of telling this story on national radio. The woman, although a self-proclaimed private person, spoke about the profound effect that the broadcast had on her and felt enriched by her participation in the process. Our stories are meant to be shared. It enriches the teller and the listener. It creates bridges of understanding and empathy. When I first conceptualized this blog endeavor, I had planned to make it anonymous. Using the shield/illusion of anonymity to free myself of feeling watched or constrained. However, I think that such anonymity would also serve to reduce the genuineness of the work, the lack of constraint translating into both a weakened level of ownership and a diminished sense of responsibility. So there is no veil here, no mask of persona, only a person with a keyboard ...

"the beginning is a very delicate time..." - David Lynch's Dune there is a sense of threshold in any beginning, a feeling of motion, of change, which brings with it both exhilaration and trepidation... yet perhaps it is overstated... perhaps the biggest danger we face when beginning something new is that we fall back into solipsism, taking ourselves far to seriously... imagining our own centrality "All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, not in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin." - John F. Kennedy this blog is intended as a journal that is primarily concerned with my ongoing struggle/purpose/mission to find/understand/articulate the truths of my/our internal/external nature/reality/spirit/god/the_universe/everything. as the JFK quote above indicates, this journal is not an ends within itself, it is not a work of staggering genius or monu...

Invocation I’d like to open this morning with a passage from the Martin Luther King Jr. sermon Rediscovering Lost Values: “The first principle of value that we need to rediscover is this: that all reality hinges on moral foundations.” In other words, that this is a moral universe, and that there are moral laws of the universe just as abiding as the physical laws. I’m not so sure we all believe that. We never doubt that there are physical laws of the universe that we must obey. We never doubt that. And so we just don’t jump out of airplanes or jump off of high buildings for the fun of it – we don’t do that. Because we unconsciously know that there is a final law of gravitation, and if you disobey it you’ll suffer the consequences – we know that. Even if we don’t know it in its Newtonian formulation, we know it intuitively, and so we just don’t jump off the highest building in (Austin) for the fun of it – we don’t do that. Because we know that there is a law of gravitation which is final...