I am watching Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
“Jeremy Renner > Tom Cruise ”
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"The cosmos was originally all hydrogen and helium. Heavier elements were made in red giants and supernovas and then blown off to space, where they were available to subsequent generations of stars and planets. Our sun is probably a third generation star. Except for hydrogen and helium, every atom in the Earth was synthesized in other stars. The silicon in the rocks, the oxygen in the air, the carbon in our DNA, gold in our banks, the uranium in our arsenals were all made thousands of light years away, and billions of years ago. Our planet, our society, and we ourselves are built of star stuff."
Carl Sagan
Love is often the floor to which people fall after the collapse of other dreams. It is held to be solid when nothing else is, and though it frequently gives way and dumps them into a basement of despair, it still enjoys a reputation of dependability. No matter that this reputation is illogical — it still flourishes and will continue to flourish regardless of what is said in any book. Love, or possibly the myth of love, is the first, last, and sometimes the only refuge of uncomprehending humanity. What else makes our hearts beat so fast? What else makes us swoon with feeling? What else renders us so intensely alive and aching? The search for love — the sublime, the nebulous, the consuming — remains sacred in a world that increasingly despises the sacred. When the heroic and the transcendental are but memories, when religious institutions fill up with bureaucrats and social scientists, when nobody believes there is a sky beyond the ceiling, then there seems no other escape from the prison of self than the abandon of love. With a gray age of spiritual deadness upon us, we love, or beg for love, or grieve for love. We have nothing higher to live for….
Granted that few will shun the pursuit of romance out of fear of unhappy consequences, what can be done to ameliorate those consequences? If we really have nothing higher to live for, nothing to fall back on, the lugubrious truth is that nothing much can be done to ameliorate them, given the volatile nature of human affections, so it would be wise to make sure there really is no superior, sustaining ideal before committing ourselves exclusively to the chase.
Buddhism, of course, teaches such an ideal, which is nothing less than deliverance from all sorrow, called Nibbana. While worldly joys are mutable and fleeting, Nibbana is established, sorrowless, stainless, and secure. While worldly pains are piercing, unpredictable, and unavoidable, Nibbana is altogether free from pain. It is the end of suffering, the supreme refuge, the ultimate emancipation. The Buddha himself applied many terms of praise to it while recognizing their essential inadequacy. Nibbana cannot be grasped by language or concept, but it can be known and realized by one who makes the right efforts. This is a critical point.
Nibbana is not something that happens to us through an external agency; rather it is something that we ourselves may achieve. The Buddha certainly never would have troubled himself to teach had he not understood that his own realization was not fortuitous but rightly won and that those who followed his instructions could win realization for themselves. That understanding, passed down, has sustained the Buddhist religion to the present day. The diligent are not powerless. Suffering can be overcome.
Bhikkhu Nyanasobhano (Leonard Price)
Smelling Salts
I’m just waiting for the Intervention episode where they’re addicted to huffing these
I wanted to post “Imagine” this morning. I found this version on YouTube and it’s pretty cool.
I’m posting it because there’s been so much racism and bigotry that I’ve been seeing the past few days that I feel pretty sick about it really. Just watching this video and hearing this song performed by so many people of all kinds all around the world made me cry.
Viagra was approved by the FDA on this day in 1998.
Hard to believe its been so long… (see what I did there?)