The Universe: planetarium reflections

I know I steal a lot from Whiskey River. Trust me, I don't want to but I can't help myself. Their quotes are so amazingly relevant that I can't help but think to myself, so and so has to read this. So please do us both a favor, add it to your reader.

This one particularly reminds me of my trip to the planetarium and teeny my reflection after.

"The universe takes on a whole new meaning when you know that your place in it was not foreordained, that it was not designed for us, indeed, that it was not designed at all. If we are nothing more than star stuff, how special life becomes. How inspiring it is to share in the sublimity of knowledge generated by other human minds, and perhaps to even make a tiny contribution toward that body of knowledge that will be passed down through the ages, part of the cumulative wisdom of a single species on a tiny planet orbiting an ordinary star on the remote edge of a not-so-unusual galaxy, itself a member of a cluster of galaxies millions of light years from nowhere."
- Michael Shermer

Mudita and the Pursuit of Happiness

This past week I met a buddhist writer and the founder of a meditation center, named James Baraz. We talked casually about writing with all the distractions from modern technology and he encouraged me to come to a talk he was giving at the NY Insight Center about "Awakening Joy" a course that he teaches at Berkley. Though I've always been hugely curious about Buddhist practices the new agey title of the seminar made me feel a little wary. I decided to go on a whim, he was standing there gazing at me expectantly with his hippie mustache, how really could I have said no.

I took a few notes while I was there but the idea that captured me the most was Mudita- the buddihist word for rejoicing in another's happiness. The wiki definition is finding pleasure in another person's well-being. It is supposed to be the most difficult of the brahmaviharas (buddhist virtues) to cultivate which I've find generally true in my dealings with people. We, selfishly, may be less happy if for instance, whatever makes someone dear to us joyful simultaneously takes them away from us or if someone does well while we experience misfortune, but Mudita encourages people to connect with a sympathetic sense of joy We meditated on the principal. I think it was my favorite part of the whole experience.

The whole thing strikes me as a bit over the top, but it was moving and cheesy and kind of great. I'm quite glad I met Mr. Baraz and look forward to keeping a regular correspondence with him.

Pleasure, Reason and Vulnerability

So I was thinking about Freud and the pleasure principle (and subsequently the reality principle), all creatures will naturally gravitate toward things that cause them pleasure and avoid things that cause them pain. The reality principle says that once people begin to learn about life or reality, they still seek pleasure but in the manner that experiencing the initial pain might lead to a more happiness in the future.

Its kind of been a starting point for a lot of ideas I've had over the past week about my life in regards to the different stages of maturity and how certain things in my life fall on either side of these principles. I was trying to write a post about vulnerability, but its obviously not happening, using this principle to dissect my attitudes toward openness. So I have decided to post about the post that I never wrote...even though there isn't much direction to it, just because I think its worth thinking about.