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 12 Aug 2004 @ 08:38, by ming. Environment, Ecology
It is so easy to forget how magical and amazing life is. Not just my life, but the life in nature. You drop a seed in the ground, water it a bit, and the sun shines, and this seed strangely knows how to turn into a big plant, and to reproduce and make more, ad infinitum. I kind of wouldn't believe it if it wasn't so normal. And, ok, I'm not really much into gardening, but I do go out and water every day, which I can just about handle. And I can't miss all the stuff that comes up all by itself from what was just a piece of soil. OK, we dropped a few seeds and little plants in there, but the weeds are just as interesting.
People who're into technology often have little regard for nature. Messy, primitive, dirty stuff, which we think we can do much better. Where really we have little clue. Most of our technology is horribly primitive compared with the technology of nature. We are incapable of making anything like a seed. We can dream about it, in the form of nanotechnology, but no real results. A little unit, weighing a few milligrams, and you drop it into some random soil, and on its own power it extracts building materials from the surroundings, and reproduces cells, and builds a rather fancy construction with billions of parts and a whole infrastructure. Which is then solar powered, in addition to the water and minerals it keeps extracting. All at room temperature or worse. And not only that, but it is self-replicating, and will produce new seeds that do the same.
The best competition we can come up with is to mess with these things, and poke inside them, and see if something different comes out. Kind of typical for how our technologies work. We know how to poke around and learn to exploit something, by seeing what happens if we poke it different ways. You know, like psychiatry by cutting off different parts of the brain and seeing what happens. But we're very ignorant on how to actually make any of the stuff we're messing with. We haven't succeeded in making a single cell, despite having taken many apart to see what they consisted of. We don't really get it yet. Life, on many levels. More >
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11 Aug 2004 @ 06:45, by scotty. Philosophy
“Presence is needed to become aware of the beauty, the majesty, the sacredness of nature. Have you ever gazed up into the infinity of space on a clear night, awestruck by the awesome stillness and inconceivable vastness of it? Have you listened, truly listened, to the sound of a mountain stream in the forest? Or to the song of a blackbird at dusk on a quiet evening? To become aware of such things, the mind needs to be still. You have to put down for a moment your personal baggage of problems, of past and future, as well as all your knowledge; otherwise, you will see but not see, hear but not hear. Your total presence is required.”
“The Man Watching the Storm Approaching,”
I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend
I can’t love without a sister.
The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age;
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.
What we choose to fight with is so tiny!
what fights with us is so great!
if only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers in the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.
Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who so often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
( taken from this [link] More >
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 9 Aug 2004 @ 17:51, by centrifuge. History, Ancient World
I'm about half-way through this book. Here's a synopsis and a timeline. More >
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 9 Aug 2004 @ 15:16, by magical_melody. Preparedness, Self-Reliance
I received the following message from a good friend Chris back in the US. Chris and his partner Michele are both very clear channels with very good hearts. They have passed along a message from another channel along with an excerpt of an earlier message of their own.
I myself have been working as a Spiritual Intuitive for over 25 years, and am very committed to inner listening daily for personal and professional reasons. I do find this timing and message to ring true. A few nights ago, my husband Max, my self and another good friend of ours, we joined hands before dinner and prayed that there would be an acceleration of karma that would allow more choice to be supported and realized. Aha, very interesting indeed! I believe we tuned into the request being made by ourselves at the higher soul level along with that of the Angelics.
Picture of Uriel by Artist Marius Michael-George. (Archangel Uriel and his feminine complement, Aurora, acting on the purple and gold rays, bring us the selfless flame of love used in devotional worship and service to all life). See Sacred Images Site More >
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8 Aug 2004 @ 00:18, by ov. Spirituality
8th Aug -- Duality Night
Two / Duality
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Mysterious as the question, "To be or not to be? Here is the recognition of the separation of self from all else and the desire to be rejoined. Walking a balance while making choices of all kinds, light/dark, male/female, good/bad, Ying/Yang, is the energy of this number. Experiencing the differences between one and another is the use and purpose of this number's energy.
Night
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Bringers of the dawn. Dreamers who bring the new sun to clarify and illuminate the road of life. Thus the insecurities and doubts born of darkness or the sub-conscious mind are dispelled. These persons travel the Void, a place where nothing exists but all potential dwells, the womb of creation. From this void, Night persons bring forth new solutions and artistic inspiration. Night's voyages of dreams build confidence and happiness with a sense of well being. If Night does not bravely journey into the void they may find themselves waundering the darkness of self-doubt and insecurity.
A good day to: Spend time contemplating the stars. More >
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7 Aug 2004 @ 22:57, by skookum. Knowledge Management
No Magic
I heard it muttered that there is no magic in the world
The slamming doors of imagination closed in
And they stood there alone in the cold. More >
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 6 Aug 2004 @ 10:49, by quinty. Politics
Yes, like the proverbial bull in a China shop we have created a mess in Iraq and now we, the US, have a responsibility to clean up after ourselves. And this sense of moral obligation is understandable. But before concluding that we have no other choice but "stay the course," I think we should also ask ourselves some questions. More >
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6 Aug 2004 @ 09:42, by ming. History, Ancient World
Jon Udell quoting Alan Durning:Play back the last 10,000 years sped up, so that a millenium passes by every minute. For more than seven minutes, the screen displays what looks like a still photograph -- the blue planet Earth, its lands swathed in a mantle of trees. After seven and a half minutes, there's a tiny clearing of forest around Athens. This is the flowering of classical Greece. Little else changes. At nine minutes -- 1,000 years ago -- the forest gets thinner in parts of Europe, Central America, China and India. Twelve seconds from the end, two centuries ago, the thinning spreads a little farther in Europe and China. Six seconds from the end, eastern North America is deforested. This is the Industrial Revolution. And of course, in the last 3 seconds things get to look really alarming.
 Anyway, Jon talks about David Rumsey, a philanthropist who collects historical maps, scans them at high resolution, and makes them freely viewable on the Internet. He gave a speech at an open source conference. He says:I thought about donating it to a university, but their libraries focus on preservation, they'd have put my collection in a vault and there would have been no access. Along comes the Internet, and I found we could do even more with the digital content than with the originals. We serve over 7000 visitors a day. A typical map library will serve 200 visitors a year. Historical maps, who cares about that? Well, he's apparently put a lot of work into providing some very impressive high tech tools for exploring them. One can sequence maps for different time periods, to see how things change. One can overlay maps on each each other, including overlaying old maps on modern 3D elevation maps, and you can then take a virtual flythru through an old map.
Maps are a good thing when they help us see the world and our history more clearly. Which they do much better in online interactive form than as paper in the basement of a university. More >
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5 Aug 2004 @ 00:20, by craiglang. Personal Development
Promise, peril and joy, they go together; signposts and milestones along the road of life.
Some thoughts on possible pending job changes - voluntary or otherwise, and life in Corporate CubeWorld. More >
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4 Aug 2004 @ 23:49, by centrifuge. Personal Development
The mind, where our experience takes its perceived form, is a vast sea, where manifold dimensions present their illusions and revelations. Here, swimming among the glory of pure morning mist and humble dew drops – along with the terror of floating corpses of false-self and rotten ambition, our true center always finds ways to keep itself afloat; ways to breathe truth.
It seems that the mind’s eye learns its own spectral capacity and therefore learns not to strain at that which lay beyond its view. The same mind does also have an ear, however, and learns to steadily tune into the sounds of those illuminations that are beyond.
The sound of truth! Ahhh, it is the sweetest music that can be heard throughout the entire Universe. The sound of truth rings both quietly and loudly, both distant and near. But as it rings, it always sounds the pattern of harmonic resonance. This resonance is the tune of truth, as one principle meaningfully relates to another.
Such strange vegetation greedily grips the ruins of a once glorious consciousness. Through the cacophony of modern awareness – that jungle of commercial and egotistical error - this mind has at last begun to hack away the overgrowth blocking the light and muffling the sound.
Back on the path of seeking, the traveling mind hears the sound of home.
More >
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