LifeGame

Time Management: Great Lecture from Randy Pausch ("The Last Lecture" guy).

Just fantastic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0

All There Is, Is All There Is

Consider when you are driving down the freeway...

consider that you are in the traffic, among the cars, driving to your destination - be it work - be it home. Where are you going? Where are all the other people going? I mean, where are they going - really.

We all have these kinds of thoughts... it's as if, for a moment, the fabric of what we see and experience is kind of peeling away and revealing behind it something more. As if what we experience is kind of like bad wallpaper or the walls of a hollywood set. It's like those stars that shine in the corner of our eyes only to disappear when we gaze directly at them. Once in a while, we see how thin the veil is.

Then we "snap back" into reality. We go to work, we go home, we pay our bills, go to bed and forget about the experience. But it leaves behind a nagging sensation - a burning question. I believe this is a cause of great anxiety and ultimately a loss of "meaning." This idea that meaning is this thing out there somewhere, but we are stuck in here somewhere. But this disintegration is ultimately an illusion. The traffic, the bills, work and home, the wallpaper and the stars in the corner of our eyes is all and everything. It is simultaneously the something more and the disintegrated meaninglessness.

This is because our instruments for comprehension and experience are selective and limited. The process of experience and understanding is by definition discriminatory. These words I write and you read travel through at least 3 stages of limitation. The first is me using my instruments to understand (my senses + my brain). The second is the technology (i.e. language) I use to express it. The third is your comprehension of the second. I have to pick and choose and in doing this I leave out most of everything. It's very clumsy system.

To imagine this limitation, we can do some experiments. Imagine for a moment what it would be like to see the world through heat differences. No sound. No feeling. All you can sense is differences in heat. How different your commute would seem now! Perhaps you would notice the hotness of the cars compared to the coolness of the grass. Your fellow commuters would show up as red masses - their clothes and makeup would not matter - their choice of car would not be noticeable (outside of engine heat, perhaps).

This exercise may seem pointless, but in going about your day thinking about what is being missed in both experience, understanding and expression - we can consider how much more there is. People often intuit that there must "be more." This can be afterlife, or a hidden world of some kind. But all there is is all there is - and there's a lot.