Category Archives: Philosophy

World Peace Conference

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A Hollywood director with a reputation for making violent, bizarre films is headlining what’s billed as a world peace conference in southeast Iowa this weekend. Known for movies like “Mulholland Drive,” “Blue Velvet” and the T-V series “Twin Peaks,” David Lynch is also on the board of directors at Maharishi University in Fairfield. He says perpetual world peace will result by assembling eight-thousand people to continuously practice transcendental meditation. Lynch says “It brings peace, real peace, and peace is not just the absence of war. This real peace, being enlivened, drives negativity away like light drives darkness away.”

“Americans face forward”

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“The greatest country in history. We can do so much. We will do so much. This country was, after all, founded to move into the future, not to hold onto the habits and ideas of the past. For most countries, if you ask them what they are, what’s unique and defining about them, they’ll point to their past. Not us. Americans have always pointed to the future. If you want to understand us, look at what we’re going to do. Americans face forward.”

A speech that David Weinberger wrote but never gave.

Life in a box

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“…about how we all spend so much time having a life that seems to be the kind of life other people have — get up, get breakfast, get dressed, go to work, get there at 9:00, leave there at 5:00 or 6:00 or whatever, come home, eat dinner, watch TV — and I suddenly found this really sad. That we come to this earth and that’s all we can come up with for a life. I don’t want to be the fire-eating woman in the circus or something, but I think I want more of a life than a person who lives in a box, leaves their box in the morning, gets in their box-with-wheels, drives to another office box, sits in that box for 8 hours, their butt spreading a little wider every day from just sitting there, goes home to their box, sits in front of the box, eats a frozen dinner out of a box, goes to sleep on their mattress and box spring.”

— Halley Suitt

Pick one memory

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Jonathon Delacour on the movie After Life.

“The premise of After Life is simple. Every Monday, people who have died walk through an open doorway suffused with pale light into what looks like a derelict boarding school. Each is issued with an ID number and assigned to a counselor who will assist them in preparing for the journey to the other side. Much of the film is taken up with these counseling sessions, which commence with an explanation of the rules:”

You’re going to stay here for a week. Everyone gets a private room. Please feel at home. But while you’re here there’s one thing you must do.

Out of the __ years of your life, we’d like to ask you to choose one memory, the one you remember and cherish most. There is a time limit. You have three days to decide.

After you choose your memory, our staff will recreate it on film as exactly as possible.
On Saturday we’ll show the films to everyone. The moment the memory comes back to you most vividly, you’ll go on to the other side, taking only that memory.

Via Halley’s Comment

Rules for Being Human

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From Cherie Carter-Scott’s “If Life is a Game, These are the Rules.”

Rules for Being Human

1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period of this time around.

2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called Life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant and stupid.

3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error: Experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately “works.”

4. A lesson is repeated until learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson.

5. Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.

6. “There” is no better than “here.” When your “there” has become a “here,” you will simply obtain another “there” that will again look better than “here.”

7. Others are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects something you love or hate about yourself.

8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.

9. Your answers lie inside you. The answers to life’s questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.

10. You will forget all this.

“Life is too short because we die”

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“Life is too short for office politics, for busywork and pointless paper chases, for jumping through hoops and covering our asses, for trying to please, to not offend, for constantly struggling to achieve some ever-receding definition of success. Too short as well for worrying whether we bought the right suit, the right breakfast cereal, the right laptop computer, the right brand of underarm deodorant. Life is too short because we die.”

— Christopher Locke, The Cluetrain Manifesto

Virtual Eternity-Part 2

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Jeff offers some enhancements to my Virtual Eternity idea:

“The website (posted 5 minutes after time of death) could have many features. You could post a general greeting (“Hi, it’s me Jeff, yes I know I’m dead, but I feel great, come on in!”). A seperate video post that sends condolences for your own death and the hardship it is causing family and friends (“Boss, I won’t be in today….I’m dead!) You could have a link to a video clip where you say all the things you always wanted to say (“I killed Rover! I did it, I admit it! It was an accident!”). … Dispense your dark secrets (“Honey, ever notice how the kids next door have my ears?”) … Speak openly to friends, read your own will, tell off-color jokes, read the kids a bedtime story, talk to grandkids you don’t have yet, summarize your life in your own words, and on and on.”

Virtually eternal

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Here’s what I’m thinking… I’m going to endow a trust to keep this website going after I’m not. I’ll record a brief video message that will be posted 5 minutes after I’m gone. We’ll have a little chat room where visitors can share their thoughts. Nobody will have to travel because there won’t be anyplace to go. (There you go, I’ve already got the title for my eulogy.) This is such a good idea it has to have been done. If you come across such a site, email me.