Don’t interfere with the flow

“There is a profound Buddhist doctrine that speaks of a great river that flows through all of reality. Once you have found yourself, there is no more cause for action. The river picks you up and carries you along forever after. In other words, effort from the personal level, the kind of effort all of us are used to in daily life, becomes pointless after a certain point. This includes mental effort. Once you become self-aware, you realize that the flow of life needs no analysis or control, because it’s all you. The great river only seems to pick you up. Actually, you have picked yourself up — not as an isolated person, but as a phenomenon of the cosmos. No one gave you the job of steering the river. You can enjoy the ride and observe the scenery.”

I like that. I found it in a book by Deepak Chopra (“Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul”). I’m not recommending the book (you’ll read it if you’re supposed to). But this is where I jot done some of the lines and passages that I want to remember or find again.

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Scott Adams: The building blocks of God

“Humanity is developing a sort of global eyesight as millions of video cameras on satellites, desktops, and street corners are connected to the Internet. In your lifetime, it will be possible to see almost anything on the planet from any computer. And society’s intelligence is merging over the Internet, creating, in effect, a global mind that can do vastly more than any individual mind. Eventually everything that is known by one person will be available to all. A decision can be made by the collective mind of humanity and instantly communicated to the body of society.

A billion years from now, if a visitor from another dimension observed humanity, he might perceive it to be one large entity with a consciousness and purpose, and not a collection of relatively uninteresting individuals.”

“Are you saying we’re evolving into God?”

“I’m saying we’re the building blocks of  God, in the early stages of reassembling.”

— From God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment, by Scott Adams

Scott Adams: Reality

“I believe our reality is a holographic simulation, and you and I are just software running within it. Our creator, or creators, who presumably had bodies like ours, made this simulated universe so they could live forever, in a fashion, because their own reality was about to be annihilated in some sort of cosmic catastrophe. Or maybe we’re someone’s seventh grade science project. The point is that we only think we are real because that’s how we were programmed.”

Excerpted from Mr. Adams’ blog. I happen to subscribe to a marginally more spiritual version of this theory.

The Rev. Knute Rockne will deliver today’s message

This morning I overhead two friends discussing religion. Their “conversation” quickly became tense and strained with one party walking away angry.

Kids, listen to your Uncle Steve. The ONLY safe place to talk about religion is in a big room with a bunch of people who feel exactly the way you do about it.

jesus_footballOrganized religion (a redundancy) is like the NFL. It’s made up leagues (Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, etc) and the leagues are made up of teams (Southern Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Sunni, Shia, etc).

Now, the league officials (the Pope and whatever they call the top guys in the other leagues) don’t want you just getting together on a Saturday afternoon, choosing teams and playing touch football for a couple of hours. That might be fun, but you won’t make it to the Big Leagues like that and those pick-up games sure won’ keep the lights on.

You need uniforms, play books, cheer leaders, a band… and officials to blow the whistle when you break the rules.

With verrrryyyy rare exceptions… every “discussion” of religion (and politics, for that matter) is one person validating his or her beliefs by demonstrating that yours are wrong.