Uncategorized on Purpose

Sadhguru talks about stuff.. ouch it is happening.. soap bubbles /  by mirena

It is everyone's favorite thing to know how things are done. In fact I believe we are here to find out how things are done. While we are here going about charging phones and having dinner - our bodies are made of particles that have profound connection to everything else in the universe, and tremble. We are ships, traveling. Yes, we are having conversations, and checking out social media, yet profoundly and very close to us we have absolutely no idea what we are. We are light lattices that constantly consume and give off light.. . .

Dali VR /  by mirena

the Dalí-conceived piece entitled "First Cylindric Chromo-Hologram Portrait of Alice Cooper's Brain" created in April of 1973, which depicts a three-dimensional Alice Cooper who sat for the artist wearing two million dollars worth of jewelry including a tiara and necklace while holding a statuette of Venus De Milo as if it were a microphone. A plaster sculpture of Alice's brain, topped by a chocolate éclair covered in ants, another Dalí oeuvre, was placed behind the cross-legged rock star and the set-up was documented by Dalí using (then) cutting-edge hologram technology.. . . . Yep, that happened. . . ,

What my Mac Reads to Me - Edge.org annual question - 2017 : WHAT SCIENTIFIC TERM OR CONCEPT OUGHT TO BE MORE WIDELY KNOWN? /  by mirena

2017 : WHAT SCIENTIFIC TERM OR CONCEPT OUGHT TO BE MORE WIDELY KNOWN?

 

https://www.edge.org/responses/what-scientific-term-or%C2%A0concept-ought-to-be-more-widely-known

 

A fascinating read so I had my mac read the entirety of it and I just put it in dropbox for your listening pleasure. It is 1gb, 16 hours of smarts- Actually, need to backtrack a bit here - what is smart? is a blade of grass smart or.. stupid? Why would anyone be stupid? how is a thing stupid? Killing is stupid and abuse is stupid,.. anything else is fair game.

So follow 16 hours of a computer voice talking about things that people found interesting in their fields and worthy of several paragraphs and I found them interesting too. Although to be fair i'd be interested to know what anyone thinks, of their field of inquiry, i don't think a street sweeper is any less worthy of the computer voice, i guess they are simply being ignored as of now. For one reason or another we are conditioned to believe that school and science is more elevated in certain respects than street sweeping. I don't think so, I just am brainwashed like everyone else. I'd love to be be less so..:

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/vikxurpt70wrd5q/Answers-to-EdgeOrg-Annual-Question-2017.m4a?dl=0

Just watched Les Misérables and reminded me how many men have fought to have the liberties we take for granted today. /  by mirena

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Just seen now the Les Misérables ( the movie, it is beautiful  ) and i think of this great book and the incredible ideas in it that fascinate us century and a half and more later. The idea that man is born free, that thought is important, that the rights of peoples are important, that having Monarchs rule over peoples is idiotic, and that examining civilization from a moral perspective is a noble pursuit.

some excerpts:

The book which the reader has before him at this moment is, from one end to the other, in its entirety and details ... a progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsehood to truth, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from corruption to life; from bestiality to duty, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God. The starting point: matter, destination: the soul. The hydra at the beginning, the angel at the end.

 

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I don't know whether it will be read by everyone, but it is meant for everyone. It addresses England as well as Spain, Italy as well as France, Germany as well as Ireland, the republics that harbour slaves as well as empires that have serfs. Social problems go beyond frontiers. Humankind's wounds, those huge sores that litter the world, do not stop at the blue and red lines drawn on maps. Wherever men go in ignorance or despair, wherever women sell themselves for bread, wherever children lack a book to learn from or a warm hearth, Les Miserables knocks at the door and says: "open up, I am here for you".

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Waterloo, by cutting short the demolition of European thrones by the sword, had no other effect than to cause the revolutionary work to be continued in another direction. The slashers have finished; it was the turn of the thinkers. The century that Waterloo was intended to arrest has pursued its march. That sinister victory was vanquished by liberty.

thank God I can read.

 

 

Imagine having to spend a life as a slave, having never learned about the world, the great noble things in it, never read a decent book or seen a great painting, never learned about science or the planets, never created anything beautiful or meaningful, having to serve soup to people who treat you badly. oh my.

Beyond the Mundane - The annual question /  by mirena

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Mundane is the most reliable circus and a source of endless entertainment so i wouldn't discount it at all - it is just that we can appreciate it more when we raise above it. Like in a hot air balloon, when you see the patterns on the nearby fields and the curvature of the earth becomes clear. We need to reflect on ourselves and what surrounds us and ask good questions.

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Here is the annual question which is posed by edge.org to the greatest minds working today.

2017 : WHAT SCIENTIFIC TERM OR CONCEPT OUGHT TO BE MORE WIDELY KNOWN?

https://www.edge.org/responses/what-scientific-term-or%C2%A0concept-ought-to-be-more-widely-known

Alan Watts - The Tao of Philosophy (Full Lecture) /  by mirena

Bits and pieces of things from Alan Watts.. .

it seems to have a sense of wonder and enthusiasm is bad form...

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I personally promise to hang onto every idea and whim that crosses my mind. To indulge in frivolous speculation and to use words from different languages in one sentence.  I am interested in answers not much contrived, genuine things and fools persistent in their folly.

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Well ordered soul - a self portrait developed in subtle glazes - an old masters technique of 500 years. Happy new Year /  by mirena

Happy New Year from me wishing all the most pleasant and gracious things. ..

This is a self portrait developed using old masters techniques and materials, it is built with subtle and very transparent glazes that i usually leave to dry for six months before applying the next layer. Here the pigments i use are genuine vermillion, ultramarine, ivory black, yellow ochre, mars black. These pigments are very gentle and the painting shifts if applied too vigorously so i give them lots of space. I also use a glaze i made myself using stand oil and damar varnish, which I also made from scratch melting damar crystals in turps for several weeks. Each glazed layer has a sheen that reflects light and the final effect will be more luminous as a result. .

mirena-rhee-well-ordered-soulself-portrait-old-masters-technique-painting-large

strange days /  by mirena

  There is a word that we really like.. it is the word strange and weird. We apply this word to a variety of things. At the same time we occupy our little caves and in these caves we store things. We accumulate useful items and carefully crate them in the corner of our cave. To make space for more things we carefully arrange the things we already have.

Weirdly enough we miss the obvious fact that we are on top of a round sphere hurling through space.

Weirdly enough the question we usually preoccupy ourselves with is - did we ever store enough in our caves? We never seem to be satisfied with the amounts accumulated and always come out to look for more and store more.

The bigger the pile of things the happier we usually are.

It seems to me that, weirdly enough, our religions have been an attempt by perhaps an enlightened source to tell us that, ahem, we shouldn’t really busy ourselves that much with the stuff in the caves. We should perhaps look into building qualities in ourselves that will allow us to work better together and develop for a world beyond that round ball.

Image that it took several billion years of evolution to create ambitious and talented creatures so they can gather things in caves. I doubt that was our purpose, we are incredible problem solvers and abstract thinkers. We now communicate with each other via space. A signal goes up and then down, we managed in a short amount of time to do that.

It is weird that we like our caves with all the stuff in them. That we rarely look into the sky wishing to be there or to do something about it. I look around and i see piles of things, many not even digestible. What is even more weird, between digesting or accumulating more piles, we manage to sneak in a destruction or two. And this happens on a mass scale and is done by seemingly decent people.

Oh, well, well obviously without carefully scheduled destruction  we'd soon run out of space wouldn't we? That's why we like to put nice people in charge to encourage both gathering and destruction at the same time. It is a win win situation.

 

I often have a hard time distinguishing between all the weirds, between the commonplace weird and the really off weird. The fact is the true reality of our situation perched on top of a round ball is more weird than any other actual weird I can come up with.

HOW TO FIX IT IN 10 EASY STEPS /  by mirena

I have identified 10 easy steps that we, together, can fix this country. And number three is…

3. Eliminate the lawn...

Imagine the entirety of this nation gets busy cutting useless weeds for a couple of hours every weekend - we can figure out practical fusion propulsion if the same amount of resources was applied to doing science.

The solution - either plant something useful like fruits or vegetables and take care of them instead, get a robot ( pictured below) or get goats ( the African kind ).

grass cutting robot