For one of my Christmas present's this year I asked for Carl Sagan's Cosmos on Dvd. I'm very slowly working my way through it. It is a series that needs to be appreciated slowly, as one appreciates a fine wine.
Carl Sagan was a poet, as well as a scientist, and every word he say during Cosmos deserves to be savoured, and fully appreciated, before moving onto the next one.
This is an old video I know, but it never ceases to amaze me. Carl Sagan sums up in this 8 minutes my connection to all of life, to the earth itself, and to the universe, so beautifully, that I can't hope to mimic it. And, so, instead. I will let him do it for me.
This is the famous Star Stuff Video. Take a moment to encounter it once again. Let Sagan remind, how you were formed by the stars.
Wednesday, February 16
Star stuff which has taken its fate into its own hands!
Monday, February 14
A Scientific Self-Help Guru
This is the problem with the self help industry. It has become, by and large, a massive money making machine. Nowadays anyone can become a self help guru. With the littlest of effort, anyone can begin to make money telling other people how to live their life.
It's a system that works brilliantly for the self help gurus. But, I'm increasingly beginning to realise. It doesn't work so well for the rest of us. For example I've been a fan of Dumb Little Man and Stepcase Lifehack for sometime, but increasingly find their articles to be unreliable. They have articles urging me to drink 8 glasses of water a day, or Feng shui my office. When they have that kind of information on them how can I believe anything they say?
How do you tell the good advice from the bad? How do you know what works and what doesn't? For someone like me, struggling to start their own journey to self-improvement, the choices are overwhelming.
And so I plan set about to separate the plausible from the ridiculous, the stupid from the successful, the rich-in-quality from the morally bankrupt.
I will be looking to review all the self help techniques I can and find the hard evidence. Do they really work? Or are they just ways of distracting yourself until you feel better? I want to make this blog the place to go to find life changing techniques that really work. From now I hope to not only find the spirit in a spiritless world, but track down the self-help success stories from the Snake oil Salesmen.
And then, when I have tracked them all down, and I know they all work, maybe then I can put them in book form, and sell them to people for $19.95 a go...
Sunday, February 13
A short History of Personal Problems - Savage Chickens
I rant for a entire blog post about this modern problem and still don't come to a conclusion.
Doug Savage, as ever, sums it up in a single post-it-note.
Wednesday, February 9
I am Completely Different
I think a lot of my quest for spirituality stems from needing a reason, a logos, for living. This is something I've always had, a desperate need to feel I am here for a reason. Like the Apollo Astronauts I want to leave my footprints behind me, for a long, long time after I am gone.
I used to think I knew how to do that, but right now I'm having to rethink, and without knowing my logos I'm feeling, almost void, it whatever it is you would call the soul. I'm having to remind myself what it is like to feel real emotion.
And so I was pleased to pick up an old book of poetry from my shelf and find the following poem, by Kuroda Saburo, which brought tears to my eyes, even if just for a second.
I Am Completely Different
I am completely different.
Though I am wearing the same tie as yesterday,
am as poor as yesterday,
as good for nothing as yesterday,
today
I am completely different.
Though I am wearing the same clothes,
am as drunk as yesterday,
living as clumsily as yesterday, nevertheless
today
I am completely different.
Ah ...
I patiently close my eyes
on all the grins and smirks
on all the twisted smiles and horse laughs---
and glimpse then, inside me
one beautiful white butterfly
fluttering towards tomorrow.
- Kuroad Saburo
Tuesday, February 8
"Most of us aren't special" - Finding a Purpose
We've been hit by more self help seminars, more life coaching books, and more self-made success TV shows that it could cope with. Nowadays it is no longer a choice to be sensational, it is an obligation. And any one who is unable to stand out from the crowd has failed to live a life worth living.
This never used to be the norm. Not so long ago you were happy enough to have a job to do, or a family to support. We didn't feel the need to have any purpose higher than that, because we never really knew such a purpose existed. Now, with so many of our other basic needs filled, with lives so much more generally satisfying, we have time to look towards greater goals. And most of the time, our greater goals are too great for us to hit.
I'm feeling this a lot myself recently. Due to some tragic realisations last year, my goals, or at least the way my goals were envisioned, are no longer possible, and I'm having to rethink my whole life. I'm not doing a very good job at it. Trying to find a new purpose in life is like trying to understand the Holy Trinity. People may pretend that they can do it, but ask them for the details, and suddenly they go all quiet.
Right now my mind has gone all quiet.
I remember, when I was in church, such thoughts didn't really occur to me. Back then I had a definite purpose in life, even though I didn't know what it was. The church, and my faith, guaranteed a purpose. God had something in mind for me. All I had to do was wait, and it would be revealed.
That was a long time ago, and I was still very young when I left the church. Maybe, as a christian now, I would no longer feel the same way, but in my memory at least, the Church gave me a purpose and direction for my life.
Now, thanks to last years reality check, and the simple, scary fact ,that we live in an uncaring universe, I don't know in slightest what I'm meant to be doing anymore.
I'm not trying to be all Avenue Q here. I don't believe that all of us have a grand purpose, that all of us are destined to change the world, but I would like to have some kind of aim in life, something worth achieving.
As a Generation X'er I've been told time and again that I can achieve anything I put my mind too, but time and again, from the lives around me, from history, and from my own story, I've seen that that's not true, but I still can't shake the feeling that I should be doing something worthwhile. That I should be striving towards some greater good.
So right now, I'm on a mission to find meaning to this silly little, highly unimportant spec of a thing, called my life, just 1 of 6 billion, on a tiny blue dot, in a tiny galaxy, in an infinite universe that doesn't even know I exist.
As you might be able to tell, it's not the easiest thing to get to grips with.
And so I wonder, what's your reason for living? What drives you on everyday? What is the one thing that keeps you going?
Sunday, January 30
A Little Help From My Friends
I don't make friends all that easily. I'm fussy, and tend to put potential friends through a series of tests first. Are the capable of holding an opinion? Can they defend their stance? Do they have the ability to question things? Do they ask lots of pointless highly judgemental questions?
Mostly I just want to see if they'll willing to let me into their mind. If they are, they are rarely dull. I'm pretty sure my tests scare many people away. Apparently most people don't like being asked probing questions about their childhood within half an hour of being introduced. I've never been sure what's so wrong about it. I mean how else do you get to know someone? But whatever it is I do, not many people stick around.
But that means the few friends I do have are extra special to me. They're people who've let me explore their inner psyche. People who aren't afraid to be themselves with me, and who I can be myself around. People who are happy to share some of their darkest thoughts with me. A friend like that is fascinating. And they help me learn more about myself, about life, and about spirituality than anything else I can imagine.
For example, every Thursday I meet up with a group of friends for a 'writer's group.' We call it a writers group but it's really an excuse to spend time together, although we may briefly discuss someones last short story if we run out of other things to talk about. And it's probably the best night of my week. For a few hours I can forget about being work Simon, or husband Simon, I can forget about trying to be clever, or being the IT geek, or even about trying to be sociable. For a few hours I'm with people who accept me as just Simon. These are people who've let in the actual Simon, and not any particular version of him. It doesn't matter If I'm tired, stressed out, or halfway through a bottle of wine, they are my friends and they'd be happy to see me. And as osly true friends can, they'd also be happy to help wake me up, cheer me up, or prise the wine bottle out of my hand.
For a few hours I can be myself and be with others feeling the same. Together, in our most natural state, we achieve more in the way of spiritual development than can be found in a whole month of church services. In those few hours we become that little bit more entwined. As we share our stories, drink our wine, and, most importantly, eat our cake, we learn a little bit more about ourselves, and about the world around us.
It's hard to feel more connected to others than where you're sat around a table so enjoying each other's company that you forget the world around you. That little circle of people becomes the world for a while.
And no matter I go home Thursday night, that little bit more energised and that little bit more aware than I was before the night began.
Friday, January 28
Can this blog be a 'personal blog'?
The problem with this blog is that I've made it a little too specialised. By trying to write only about spiritual atheism experiences I have, I think it's fair to say written myself into something of a corner. Sure there are lots of things an Atheist can do to experience spirituality. The difficulty is finding something I want to write about at the moment!
And then I realised. This blog is meant to be about me, and my quest to be a spiritual atheist. So it makes sense every now and then to maybe write a little about me, or my life, or what I'm actually going through. That way I can update more regularly, keep getting my practice in, and still be able to deliver great Spiritual Atheist themed posts without worrying about letting the blog die in the interim.
I'm not talking about turning this blog into a journal, or anything like that, but it will start to become a bit more personal. Hopefully that will make it that bit more interesting.