A Quiet Watercourse

I recently came across this picture here. It shows the solar eclipse of March 29th as seen from the ISS.

I wanted to share it as I feel it underlines how fragile and precious our planet is, and how much we’re a part of a huge system which extends far beyond our world.

On another note, my fellow traveller on the watercouse, The Rambling Taoist has made an informative and alarming post regarding the nuclear power industry, whch I strongly encourage everyone to read, especially if you’re in the UK!

I came across this news story recently. It’s a good read.

The short version is that a climber is going to carry Seiji Uchida, a Japanese quadriplegic to the top of a Swiss mountain. Pictures of the mountain helped bouy his spirits during his convalesence and he’s decided to visit it in person.

This is a cool story by itself, but the even cooler part? The climber will be assisted by a HAL robotic exo-skeleton. I like stories like this, technology assisting a human being in achieving his dream.

A lot of people take a negative view of technology, that technology is somehow the enemy of the human spirit, Robert M. Pirsig touches on it in Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance. Of course, there’s good and bad to be said about technology, but it’s all about how you use the tools.

Personally, I think technology can assist us in our spirituality, the internet being a prime example. As long as it’s used as a tool and not as a crutch, it can be our greatest asset.

It’s a bad day to be a supporter of Intelligent Design, scientists have found a fossil that bridges the evolutionary connection between animal life exisiting in the sea and then making the move onto land. Check out the story here courtesy of the Guardian newspaper.

Not only does this shows that opponents of evolution are in a very King Canute type position, but it shows the incredible predictive power of science. The scientists could predict what they were looking for, and even where to look with a high degree of accuracy.

Quite simply, this is a massive body blow for opponents of Evolution, it shows what happens when you let indoctrinated religious rhetoric rule your world view to the point that you’re unable to make an objective assessment of what’s right in front of you.

The beauty of Taoism is it’s all about of taking account of nature and the universe and keeping an open mind, it works much better with science than anything else I’ve seen.

I see Nicholas Negroponte, the creater of the $100 laptop, has criticised the IT industry (including the Linux crowd) for putting out bloated products. In my own view, he’s completely right to do this and he echoes my own feelings on the matter totally.

A major theme of Taoism is keeping things simple and small, the simpler and smaller you keep things the less there is to go wrong and the less overhead they take. This also is part of working in harmony with the system you’re within, in this case the computer systems you’re developing for, Wu-Wei for computers, if you will.

Inefficiently hogging system resources is about as far from harmony with the computer as you can get, not to mention causing disharmony between your software and it’s users. It’s not all doom and gloom, the GNOME desktop team, for example, have recently started to do wonders with their software’s peformance.

Let’s hope everyone else listens, we need to change the downward trend.

So I’m a 31 today, it’s only a pity I have to spend it working, but them’s the breaks.

I don’t really feel any different, but I’ve been thinking recently about aging, and I don’t think you really get to know yourself till your third decade. I seemed to spend my twenties finding my feet, all the real development, both personally, spiritually and professionally seems to have happened since I hit the big three-zero.

I’d be interested to hear feedback on how other people feel on this, does life begin at 30?

I like to keep on eye on cool new things on the web, so I’d encourage everyone to check out Pandora. It’s mostly RIAA tunes, but it’s an extremely interesting concept!

You have to supply a valid US ZIP code to get signed up, but it lets you create custom radio stations and then rate the songs it plays you. I supplied a California ZIP code, but I figure it’s on my head not theirs. It changes the playlist depending on your ratings, so it’s kinda of like having your own DJ.

Well, I find out this morning that the music industry is launching yet more lawsuits against file sharers in Europe. What a great way to utterly alienate your customers!

Now, I don’t share music, but if I did and I got targetted by one of these lawsuits, it would only make me resolve never to buy from the record industry again. What people don’t realise is that you have a choice. Seriously.

What the RIAA don’t want you to know is that you can get good music independently of them.

Check out this page of RIAA free CDs at freeculture.org, also check out the Creative Commons Audio page.

This is kind of a continuation from that quiz I posted a few days ago. Star Wars (more accurately the Jedi) always struck me as being similar to Taoism.

So, as I like both, I’ve been poking around a little further. I’ve dropped a couple of links in below. It’s actually fascinating the way things have come full circle. The whole fictional Force/Jedi things being inspired by Taoism and Buddhism, then coming full circle and manifesting as a religion in it’s own right.

The Tao of Star Wars

The Jedi Force as Religion - Faith in Star Wars

Light and Dark, thanks to films like Star Wars, it’s powerful imagery. In most spirituality too, we’re encouraged to favour the light, to utterly exclude the darkness. It this a good thing? Im not so sure that it is.

It’s nessecary to understand that the darkness isn’t evil harmful or negative, but it can have it’s benefits, it’s share of the beauty. We have to remember that the darkness and the light are complimentary, two sides of the same coin. To deny one of them only gives it more power, eventually balance will be restored, and the worse the denial the more devastating the swing back to balance will be.

Taijiquan has a lot to teach us here, it can be practised for health reasons and it makes a good calming meditative technique, not a replacement for sitting meditation though. But within the form are the seeds of a potentially deadly martial art, and in order to practise Taijiquan properly you need both the light and the darkness. I really think there’s a lesson in that.

I got involved in a thread over at the Tea House recently, and it started me thinking about bad times. Many of us see ourselves as spiritual people, and that’s easy to see when things are going our way. But when the going gets tough, and the cracks in our composure start to show, we often feel like we’ve failed spiritually.

I feel that there’s a tendency to overlook our very human limitations, we over-focus on the nice things and forget that there are other nastier traits there as well. When these traits surface, we’re shocked because we’d been so busy tending to one side of things, we’d quite neglected the other side.

These things are part of our nature, we try to pretend they’re not there and we set ourselves up for failure by trying to match up to the image we have of our spiritual idols. Thing is, they were human too, we just never got to see the nasty side of them.

When the going gets tough, we may not match up to our lofty ideals, but that doesn’t make us spiritual failures. These times can be as much a source of true spiritual development as the good times.