Life Out of Balance, Koyaanisqatsi, & What The World Has Become

The author of the commentary below had other intentions. Indeed, there is reason to be hopeful in some of what he describes, but when I read the paragraph other perceptions were stirred in me. I was reminded of the beautiful and profoundly troubling movie Koyaanisqatsi, Hopi for "life out of balance," directed by Godfrey Reggio, music by Philip Glass. I have provided a two minute video clip at the bottom. I have broken the long single-paragraph passage into separate paragraphs:

"The lands of hunter-gatherers have been overrun and are managed by states or individuals, much of it turned into farmland worked by machines. An abundance of food has made huge populations possible. In industrialized societies the percentage of people working in agriculture has dropped to between two and three percent.

Progress and science have encouraged a belief in suspended judgment. There are opposing pulls between a desire for change versus adherence to tradition. The belief in magic has declined and political decisions through mysticism have become disreputable.

Commerce requires social order, and with manufacturing, trade and commerce, tolerance is an economic necessity. Integration has been economically beneficial, and it has been chosen over separation and isolation. Big cities are largely a collection of strangers. With more people, land has become more expensive. The enjoyment of space is more restricted. More than centuries before, people identify with the state and less with their local community.

Democracy and the rule of law is the accepted norm. Improved communications and trade have tied the world more closely together. Conquest and domination are discredited, replaced by a widespread belief that people should be free of the authoritarianism of strangers or ethnicities who consider themselves superior." More . . .

Here is Koyaanisqatsi , Hopi for "life out of balance":

Poppa Neutrino: The Happiest Man In The World?

Poppa Neutrino is the free spirit (or lunatic according to some) who sailed across the Atlantic with his family on a raft made of scraps.

In his book The Happiest Man in the World, Alec Wilkinson chronicles the life of Poppa Neutrino. Now Poppa is supposedly preparing for a solo journey across the Pacific. You can listen on NPR.

You can check out the DVD featured on the picture above at this site. Here are earlier links in Mind Shadows: Poppa Neutrino: "The road to the mystical is triadic. To get through the doorway is nomadic." and 72 Year Old To Cross The Pacific On A Raft of Scraps as well as Latest on Poppa Neutrino

Below is a video of Poppa.

The Resurrection and Belief

I find a mystery novel by Maggie Hamand, The Resurrection of the Body, interesting because it explores the theme of Christ's resurrection on several levels, theological, psychological, sociological, and faith.

Its main character, Richard Page, is vicar of a parish in a seedy part of London. On Good Friday a man stumbles into his church and dies there in a pool of blood. Nobody knows who he is and he is taken to the morgue. Early Sunday morning, his body disappears. People start seeing him, or think they do. He trims roses in a public garden. He eats fish in a restaurant. He pays a prostitute and follows her up the stairs to her flat. The reviewer has this to say:

" If we had lived in Jerusalem in the first century of the common era, would we have believed Mary Magdalene when she said she saw Jesus in the garden? Thomas when he said he saw Jesus' wounds? Peter when he said he had breakfast with him on the beach?

And even though we know those stories well, how do we relate to the tales told by Rev. Page and his parishioners? Has an odd event triggered mass hysteria? Is an overworked pastor losing his grip? Is physical resurrection possible? Is it OK to go to church—to pastor a church, even—when one's faith is shaky? What is faith, anyway?

Such are the mysteries evoked by this strange little story, and to [Maggie] Hamand's credit, she does not neatly solve them. Ask a book group what point this author is trying to make, and you may get three or four mutually exclusive answers. This, I think, is the book's chief charm: it re-creates some of the bewilderment people surely felt in Jerusalem during the weeks following Jesus' crucifixion."

Elsewhere in the review we find, "Readers hoping for a conventional whodunit or thriller will be disappointed as the story unfolds. The mystery here is theological and psychological, not procedural." The review's subtitle is what caught my eye. Here it is: "The aftermath of a Good Friday murder raises disturbing questions for an Anglican vicar who doesn't believe in the physical reality of the Resurrection" More

Peter Singer & Ethics For The Rich

"Peter Singer has always asked a lot from his fellow human beings: that we give till it hurts, respect animals as we respect ourselves, consider coolly such flint-hearted arguments as the needs of strangers and the drain on social resources in decisions about life and death.

In the new book, he argues for a radical extension of our notion of responsibility for others: well beyond the minimum tax required by law to a hefty percentage of discretionary income; and well beyond our shores, since poverty in the West is relative, to the truly miserable who live in distant parts of the world. " More . . .

Whistling Past The Graveyard: Overcoming The Fear of Death

There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern—why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be? I have no wish to have been alive a hundred years ago, or in the reign of Queen Anne: why should I regret and lay it so much to heart that I shall not be alive a hundred years hence, in the reign of I cannot tell whom? (On The Fear of Death, by William Hazlitt (1778-1830))

Here is a lively and entertaining discussion of the subject ;-). Check out psychiatrist and novelist Irv Yalom, author of Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death. He is interviewed for Philosophy Talk before a live audience at The Marsh theater in San Francisco. A good listen for every thanatophobe. Even for thanatophiles, if there are any. (Of course, there is Ella Fitzgerald singing, "I'll be glad when you're dead, you rascal, you!" But that is not about one's own death.)

A post on Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) can be found here. People who have experienced an NDE lose much of their fear of death, and this loss isn't temporary. Surveyed decades later, they still feel the same. They say they have found meaning and purpose in life, are less competitive and are more compassionate.

Wilder Penfield & Brain Maps, V.S. Ramachandran & Phantom Orgasms

Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield performed pioneering experiments in the 1940s and 1950s. During extensive brain surgeries, he applied electrodes to different regions of the brain and stimulated them. He then asked patients what they felt. He recorded and correlated sensations, images, even memories, as reported by the patients. By this means he mapped the brain and found, for example, that the brain area involved with lips and fingers occupies as much space as the area which handles the entire trunk of the body. Of course, the lips and fingers are highly sensitive, and such a large dedication of neuronal space helps explain why. Interestingly, he found that the areas did not always correspond to places on the body. The genital area is not on the brain next the area for thighs. Instead, it is located next the area for the feet. This is a fact that has far reaching implications for the account which follows.

V.S. Ramachandran, University of California, San Diego, received a call one day. An engineer from Arkansas wanted to talk about something that was puzzling. Here is the narrative:

"Is this Dr. Ramachandran?"

"Yes."

"You know, I read about your work in the newspaper, and it's really exciting. I lost my leg below the knee about two months ago but there's still something I don't understand. I'd like your advice."

"What's that?"

"Well, I feel a little embarrassed to tell you this."

I knew what he was going to say but . . . he didn't know about the Penfield map.

"Doctor, every time I have sexual intercourse, I experience sensations in my phantom foot. How do you explain that? My doctor said it doesn't make sense."

"Look," I said. "One possibility is that the genitals are right next to the foot in the body's brain maps. Don't worry about it."

He laughed nervously. "All that's fine, doctor. But you still don't understand. You see, I actually experience my orgasm in my foot. And therefore it's much bigger than it used to be because it's no longer just confined to my genitals."

Patients don't make up such stories. Ninety-nine percent of the time they're telling the truth, and if it seems incomprehensible, it's usually because we are not smart enough to figure out what's going on in their brains. This gentleman was telling me that he sometimes enjoyed sex more after his amputation. The curious implication is that it's not just the tactile sensation that transferred to his phantom but the erotic sensations of sexual pleasures as well. ( A colleague suggested I title this book "The Man Who Mistook His Foot For A Penis.") (From Phantoms In The Brain: Probing The Mysteries of The Human Mind, by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee. NY: Quill (Harper Collins): 1998)

To read more on phantom limb syndrome read Silas Weir Mitchell: Civil War Amputees and Pain from Phantom Arms 22 June 2004, and the clever trick Ramachandran used to relieve an amputee of his phantom pain, 14 February 2012.

Upload Your Mind To A Computer: It Beats The Alternative

You are driving 65 miles per hour, you are drunk, and your dog growls as she does every time she smells alcohol on your breath and you go over 60, but you are too drowsy to notice. Then it happens. That brick wall just leaped out into the middle of the highway.

If you awaken in the hospital you would learn that your car is totaled, and so is your head.

But you don't. You are brain dead. You are S.O.L., or sh*t out of luck, as my friend Louie would say.

Don't despair, though. Maybe you can survive drinking and driving if you wait a while. If you hold on until science figures out how to upload your mind into a computer. Then, if you hit a brick wall, your "you" will have been digitized. All that science needs to do is this: "Scientists must learn to extract your memories, feelings, values and beliefs in all their complex working relationships from your brain. Then they must be able to create a medium where you can thrive without your birth body." That shouldn't be too difficult, so wait a couple of years before you go on your next binge. . . . More at Obit.

Notes From a Q&A With Philip Jenkins, Author Of Lost History of Christianity

In The Lost History of Christianity, Philip Jenkins reveals aspects of the religion that are far from popular knowledge. If widely understood, this Christianity would show the televangelists in their limitations.

Here are a few excerpts from the interview with Jenkins. The full Q & A can be read at the link below them.

Religions really do die. We think of ancient religions like those of the Aztecs or Mayas, which had millions of followers, not to mention copious scriptures. Also, something like the Manichaean faith once stretched from France to China, but that is now extinct. The Zoroastrian religion is not exactly extinct, but it has gone from being a vast world religion to the creed of a few hundred thousand believers.

One thing that strikes me is how much a dead religion influences its successor - how for instance the old Christianity left its mark on the successor faith of Islam.

Finally, there is a major theological issue that nobody addresses, the theology of extinction. How do Christians explain the death of their religion in a particular time and place? Is that really part of God's plan? Or maybe our time scale is just too short, and one day we will realize why this had to happen. But as I say, nobody is really discussing these questions.

Also, this Eastern world has a solid claim to be the direct lineal heir of the earliest New Testament Christianity. Throughout their history, the Eastern churches used Syriac, which is close to Jesus's own language of Aramaic, and they followed Yeshua, not Jesus. Everything about these churches runs so contrary to what we think we know. They are too ancient, in the sense of looking like the original Jerusalem church; and they are too modern, in being so globalized and multi-cultural. Found at Belief Net.

___________________
This has nothing to do with religion, but in these times of high unemployment, Hoofy and Boo offer tips to keep your job.

Darwin's Moral Compass: Mutual Interdependence

In Origin of Species, 150 years ago, Charles Darwin opened a can of worms. Or so it has been to his detractors, who blame society's ills on evolution. Church attendance fell, ethnic supremacists arose, and God got lost somewhere in all of it. With God went man's higher moral purpose. All was a case of nature red in tooth and claw.

They overlook that Darwin described a system of mutual interdependence that "had governed life on Earth for billions of years; a system that managed simultaneously to be incredibly liberal and fiercely restrictive."

In this was Darwin's moral compass. If his guiding principles are followed by later generations, humankind could continue to survive. Ignore mutual interdependence and expect extinction. We will go the way of other species.Unlike other species, we can read the compass. Will we follow it? More at The Australian.

When Jesus Met Buddha

What would you say if you discovered that what you had been taught about Christianity is wrong? If you found out that the doctrine you learned as a child failed to acknowledge a part of Christianity that could undermine the teachings?

There is such a history, lost to orthodox Christianity.

First, though, consider the orthodox view.

I

Orthodoxy. When they die what happens to those souls who practiced their beliefs, be they Hindu, Buddha, Muslim, Zoroastrian, if they never had the chance to hear of the one truth faith, as proclaimed by Christian doctrine? They will be unable to enter the Christian heaven according to centuries-old dogma.

In comparison to Pope John Paul II, Benedict XVI displays a conservative hard-line bent and has done so once again by making clear that strait is the gate to heaven and the faithful had better believe it.

He has set the path for the Catholic church today. The church holds to the unique role of Christ.

In an open letter to Italian politician Marcello Pera, Pope Benedict declared that "an inter-religious dialogue in the strict sense of the term is not possible." Cultures other than those informed by Christianity are not equally valid, although Christians should hold conversations with them, according to the Benedict.

This view is not peculiar to Catholicism. Most Christian churches see Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and they believe it with missionary zeal, so much so that they must take their conviction to unbelievers in heathen lands. As we know, Muslims become outraged to see Christians trying to convert their people, and Buddhists are bemused, as well as amused.

To be sure, the Vatican does not see Mohamed or Buddha as demons. But it does fear modernity in which other faiths might mix with and dilute what it perceives as Christian truth. The church has a strong tradition developing out of Ancient Rome, and she has guided her flock through the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance into the Twenty First Century. She has a long history as shepherd, one which she will never easily surrender.

II

The problem here is that Europe's is "not the only version of the Christian faith, nor is it necessarily the oldest heir of the ancient church. For more than 1,000 years, other quite separate branches of the church established thriving communities across Asia, and in their sheer numbers, these churches were comparable to anything Europe could muster at the time. These Christian bodies traced their ancestry back not through Rome, but directly to the original Jesus movement of ancient Palestine. They moved across India, Central Asia, and China, showing no hesitation to share--and learn from--the other great religions of the East. Something remarkable happened when evangelists for two great religions crossed paths more than 1,000 years ago: they got along." Christianity, for much of its history, was just as much an Asian religion as Buddhism. More at Boston Globe.

Charles Bonnet Syndrome & V.S. Ramachandran

The last moments happened in slow motion as the car collided in a sickening crunch. His head smashed into the windshield, fracturing the frontal bones above his eyes and the orbital plates protecting his optic nerves. He was comatose for two weeks until he woke up. When he did, he could not walk or talk. For Larry MacDonald that was just the beginning. When he opened his eyes he could not "distinguish what was real from what was fake." He looked at the doctors and nurses standing by his bed. Behind and next them stood football players while Hawaiian girls danced the hula, hips swaying gently. His head was flooded with voices. He couldn't tell who was saying what, nor where the voices came from. He was thrown into panic and confusion.

Weeks passed, then months, and years. Gradually, as he gained control over his body functions, as he learned to walk, he also began to distinguish real voices from the imaginary. It was tough going, and he was not the same, but he kept at it. Five years later, he met V.S. Ramachandran.

He no longer saw football players and hula dancers as he once did, but he still had visual problems. Visual hallucinations occurred where he was blind, which was in the lower half of his field of vision. Everything in the upper half was normal; the lower half presented strange things indeed.

Ramachandran asked him what he was seeing. He saw dogs and elephants as they spoke. A monkey was sitting on Ramachandran's lap.

Ramachandran asked him how he knew he was not hallucinating. MacDonald explained that it was highly unlikely that a professor would have a monkey with him. Nonetheless, the monkey was "extremely vivid and real." Larry knew it was not real because after a while the image faded. Here is a review of the book in which this is described, Phantoms in The Brain: Probing The Mysteries of The Human Mind.

Larry MacDonald was a victim of Charles Bonnet syndrome. First described by Charles Bonnet in 1769, and named after him, Charles Bonnet Syndrome (CBS) is a disease that causes patients to have complex visual hallucinations.

Its victims are mentally healthy people who have vivid, complex recurrent visual hallucinations. An occasional characteristic is that things seem much smaller or larger in relation to oneself. If things seem smaller, the viewer feels like a giant, and vice versa.

CBS tends to affect people in old age, particularly some people with visual damage such as macular degeneration. More here and here.

Jill Price: The Woman Who Can't Forget

In an old vaudeville routine, a comedian asks his straight man, "Who was the lady you were with at 7:18 pm on the night of July 23, 1903?" to which the straight man scratches his head, looks puzzled at the audience, then answers, "That was no lady. That was my wife."

The audience laughed partly because of the improbability of remembering specifics on an exact date and time, and partly because of the unexpected reply.

Maybe Jill Price would not know what happened at an exact time but she can recall any day and she can remember it. Unlike vaudeville audiences, people don't laugh at all.  They are astounded by her feats of memory.  She can recite details of the days of her life since she was fourteen years old, be they sad or happy. The details can be what she had for dinner or saw on the TV.