Love you, mate.

What is it that you carry and cannot be replaced?

The fascinating tale of a inventor and creator Juan Manuel Gallegos a.k.a. The Backyard Rocketeer.

Good evening.

I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to read my speech from my new iPad.

Yep. I’m not only a humanist, I’m also an early adopter.

I want to start by saying that, to me, any discourse from me about how one can live a moral existence without religion or the church would sound improperly defensive. That there’s an opposite to be defended is absurd and based on a provably false premise. So let’s dispense with that.

(To be clear: I’m referring to the humanist axiom “Good without God,” whereby “good” means morality. It’s provably false that there exists no morality outside of religion, therefore the statement sounds defensive to me.)

By what route does anyone come to believe what they believe? We all like to imagine that it’s based on a set of logical facts, but it’s often a much more circuitous route.

For me it was pretty simple. I’m actually the fourth generation in my family to have no practical use for the church, or God, or religion. My children continue this trend.

Here are a few things I’ve learned.

Prayer doesn’t work because someone out there is listening, it works because someone in here is listening. I’ve paid attention. I’ve pictured what I want to happen in my life. I’ve meditated extensively on my family, my future, my past actions and what did and didn’t work for me about them. I’ve looked hard at problems and thought hard about their solutions.

See, I order my life by the same mechanism that I use to build things. I cannot proceed to move tools around in the real world until my brain has a clear picture in it of what I’m building. The same goes for my life. I’ve tried to pay attention. I’ve tried to picture the way I want things to be, and I’ve noticed that when I had a clear picture, things often turned out the way I wanted them to.

I’ve concluded by this that someone is paying attention—I’ve concluded that it’s me. I’ve noticed that if I’m paying attention to those around me, to myself, to my surroundings, then that is the very definition of empathy. I’ve noticed that when I pay attention, I’m less selfish, I’m happier—and that the inverse holds true as well.

I think one of the defining moments of adulthood is the realization that nobody’s going to take care of you. That you have to do the heavy lifting while you’re here. And when you don’t, well, you suffer the consequences. At least I have. (And in the empirical study I’m performing about interacting with the universe, I am unfortunately the only test subject I have complete access to, so my data is, as they say, self-selected.) While nobody’s going to take care of us, it’s incumbent upon us to take care of those around us. That’s community.

The fiction of continuity and stability that your parents have painted for you is totally necessary for a growing child. When you realize that it’s not the way the world works, it’s a chilling moment. It’s supremely lonely.

So I understand the desire for someone to be in charge. (As a side note, I believe that the need for conspiracy theories is similar to the need for God.) We’d all like our good and evil to be like it is in the movies: specific and horrible, easy to defeat. But it’s not. It’s banal.

There’s a quote I love: “Evil is a little man afraid for his job.” I always thought some famous author said it, but I asked my 200,000 followers on Twitter today, and it turns out that Roy Scheider said it in Blue Thunder.

No one is in charge. And honestly, that’s even cooler.

The idea of an ordered and elegant universe is a lovely one. One worth clinging to. But you don’t need religion to appreciate the ordered existence. It’s not just an idea, it’s reality. We’re discovering the hidden orders of the universe every day. The inverse square law of gravitation is amazing. Fractals, the theory of relativity, the genome: these are magnificently beautiful constructs.

The nearly infinite set of dominoes that have fallen into each other in order for us to be here tonight is unfathomable. Truly unfathomable. But it is logical. We don’t know all the steps in that logic, but we’re learning more about it every day. Learning, expanding our consciousness, singly and universally.

As far as I can see, the three main intolerant religions in the world aren’t helping in that mission.

For all their talk of charity and knowledge, that they close their eyes to so much—to science, to birth control education, to abuses of power by some of their leaders, to evolution as provable and therefore factual (the list is staggering)—illustrates a wide scope of bigotry.

Now, just to be clear. If you want to believe, or find solace in believing, that someone or something set these particular dominoes in motion—a cosmic finger tipping the balance and then leaving everything else to chance—I can’t say anything to that. I don’t know.

Though a primary mover is the most complex and thus (given Occam’s razor) the least likely of all possible solutions to the particular problem of how we got here, I can’t prove it true or false, and there’s nothing to really discuss about it.

If Daniel Dennett is right— that there’s a human genetic need for religion— then I’d like to imagine that my atheism is proof of evolutionary biology in action.

There may be no purpose, but its always good to have a mission. And I know of one fine allegory for an excellent mission should you choose to charge yourself with one: Carlos Castaneda’s series of books about his training with a Yaqui indian mystic named Don Juan. There’s a lot of controversy about these books being represented as nonfiction. But if you dispense with that representation, and instead take their stories as allegories, they’re quite lovely.

At the end of The Eagle’s Gift, Don Juan reveals to his student that there’s no point to existence. That we’re given our brief 70-100 years of consciousness by something the mystics call “The Eagle,” named for it’s cold, killer demeanor. And when we die, the eagle gobbles our consciousness right back up again.

He explains that the mystics, to give thanks to the eagle for the brief bout of consciousness they’re granted, attempt to widen their consciousness as much as possible. This provides a particularly delicious meal for the eagle when it gobbles one up at the end of one’s life.

And that, to me, is a fine mission.

Thank you.

Via BoingBoing.

Allow your painful emotions. Give yourself time. Spend unstructured time with your loved ones. Exercise a few times a week. Cultivate your gratitude. Simplify, slow down, quality is more important than quantity.

Sometimes it takes an expert so we can hear the obvious.

What are YOU avoiding when you step behind the camera? Or remain in the moving car? Or stand behind the window? In front of the TV?

It is not enough to just know about it. Not anymore.

“Tyrants Retaining Their Own Waste (Anal Retention)

Often when you are caught at a dumpster by store owners, you are treated with contempt.  What is contemptible and inexcusable is the waste, and what is  both contemptible and ridiculous is locking up your waste (called anal retention) to keep hungry people from eating, and having the gall to act self-righteous in the process.  This is mental illness, institutionalized and whitewashed.  Notice how they almost always tell you it is “for your safety”.  Notice that tyranny in all its forms all over the world is almost always done “for your safety”, “for your security”.  The corporate tyrant is turning the tables to look like the compassionate one, the intelligent one.  The tyrant is telling you you are not smart enough to take care of yourself.  Simply because the tyrant is a have and you are a have-not somehow makes the tyrant worthy to treat you like a child, when in actuality it is the tyrant who is living in ignorance and needs educating.

The tyrant is also not speaking his or her own mind, not speaking from the heart, but is speaking a script programmed into him or her by the corporation that is paying him or her.  Notice how the tyranny in humans is not from reality, not from human-ness, but is scripted programming, paid programming. A human running from the heart and not from a program is not going to guard a dumpster from the hungry.  A human running from the heart has common sense, because he or she is not motivated by dollars and cents.  This is the secret in human relations, learning how to see the human beneath the scripted program, and appealing to that human.  Believe it or not, there is actually a human beneath the facade of corporate managers and cops and their lackeys.  Learn how to be totally real, totally sincere, with these robots and, as a result, you learn how to wake up the sleeping human within them.  I mean, respect them, as humans.  Never respect them as robots.  You can love a human.  You cannot love a robot, so don’t pretend.  Try it.  Be bold, be brave, be real: be wise as a serpent, gentle as a dove.”

Read more at  http://sites.google.com/site/livingwithoutmoney/

Her music is touching, honest and profound. In Touch the Sound, the documentary about her work, I saw her fascination with music, her playfulness, humility and surrender.

She listens when she plays. Her appreciation and gratitude of what comes through her is palpable. Sometimes tears roll down her cheeks.

There is a door to inspiration and creation that Evelyn has opened, showing the way for everyone ready to listen.

Open your door today, for a minute, and surrender to your creativity. Feel it and receive it as the gift that you are.

What are the “dangerous” things you avoid playing with?

Your fear is the only thing between you and creativity.