skipper

  • As mariner suspected, suggesting the definition of pieces that together comprise a base for religious practice is challenged by many who have unique beliefs already in place. Mariner has no business disturbing […]

  • Robert, you appear already well founded in your faith. That is an advantage over the Starter Kit. You can imagine the mariner trying to put together a skin-and-bones instruction manual on how to reintroduce religious values into one’s daily life. If any premise thwarted your faith or theology, it was not intended. Religion is a very personal…[Read more]

  • Review your accomplishments.

    You are aware that there is a different kind of existence than you know in your current life; your current life exists in a state of duality. The different existence is a state of […]

    • I can accept God as a singularity, but I cannot accept that that Singularity is a mindless aimless thing. I have to believe that this Singularity is headed somewhere and we are part of this movement. That being said, I feel it is right for us to respect this Singularity. I feel that I can get in touch with the Singularity through prayer, ritual, and music. Religion without these is, for me, a dry sterile thing.

      • Robert, you appear already well founded in your faith. That is an advantage over the Starter Kit. You can imagine the mariner trying to put together a skin-and-bones instruction manual on how to reintroduce religious values into one’s daily life. If any premise thwarted your faith or theology, it was not intended. Religion is a very personal construct. The Starter Kit attempts to lay a road to positive ethics that will hold the course in one’s life while oppressed by the negative abuses we experience in the present.
        Singularity is an important concept that often is not addressed in traditional afterlife – instead being pushed aside to paint a three dimensional heaven with nothing but reunions. Even this image is accepted if that anticipation represents perfection and is a reward for living a positive life. The bottom line is none of us living folk have experienced singularity as a holistic life experience but as you anticipate, it is a dynamic perfection, not a static one.
        Look at singularity as a glorious experience that will be meaningful to you, not a communist ward of blandness. Look at singularity as a state of continuous bliss with duality left behind.

        • You didn’t thwart my faith or theology, in fact what you’ve been saying is, I think, right on the button. It’s good stuff. Keep it up. Your latest post about love, seems to me, says it all. Love must be the big “antibiotic” for the “germs” (racism, selfishness, bigotry, xenophobia etc., etc.) that infest our current society. But it’s really really hard for me to manifest any love for some of the characters on today’s landscape. I do try, but I constantly fail.

  • Thanks for ‘elegant.’ Your curiosity about the hero’s path, a description of the arc of one’s life from Joseph Campbell’s writings, is an excellent description of the path to singularity. It is covered later in the Religion Starter Kit. If you are interested in extracurricular research, DVDs of his works are available online as well as a book.…[Read more]

  • In one way or another, the past three posts deal with H. sapiens’ relationship with the physical world. Other post series deal with H. sapiens’ treatment of fellow humans and some deal with how H. sapiens has all […]

  • Increasingly, but now only a lightly utilized technology that soon will alter dramatically our economic theories of value, solar energy unbelievably will modify every nation’s model of what it costs to live a d […]

  • skipper wrote a new post, Too Smart 9 years ago

    As a creature on this planet, we weren’t supposed to be super smart. We were supposed to be the smartest primate, perhaps, but not super smart. We’ve always known it was a mistake. To be honest, as a primate, hum […]

  • skipper wrote a new post, The Real News 9 years ago

    Tom Friedman, a prolific writer of politics and economy, has a favorite phrase to describe the behavior of human society. In regards to our attention to really important issues like global warming, environmental […]

  • Usually, in our late teens and early twenties, each of us comes across a special person. This person is a mentor; not a teacher from school but someone who enters your life in a direct way – perhaps someone you g […]

  • With great resistance, mariner must turn his attention to Donald. It has become a spiritual duty. The mariner prides himself on not following policy backed by ulterior motive, hearsay rumors, unjustified gossip, […]

  • This post qualifies as something for the musing category but if the world’s circumstances happened to shift in a different direction, this musing could well be a literal event in the future of human b […]

  • A new book is out worth a trip to the library. It is Thomas L. Friedman’s newest book, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations. The book recognizes the fact that as […]

  • It’s a truly rare moment in a person’s life when they can bring a life’s work to a close in an instant in front of 20,000 people with a simple statement: “Yes we can.” One thing is certain: Barack is a skilled s […]

  • In the book 1984 written by George Orwell in 1949, the evil element is totalitarianism. Orwell was afraid of the suppression of individual thought and individual expression – both empirically and emotionally. H […]

  • Thoughtful response Becky. The large corporations, no matter what they produce, are having the same effect: if living species aren’t useful, they disappear because of vanishing ecosystems; if they are profitable, they are modified to maximize production and increase profit. The whole new option of corporate management of species is a latent…[Read more]

  • The subjects in this post can be considered ‘new ideas’ but like all new ideas, they have been percolating through thinkers and tinkerers for decades. Just now though, these ideas are emerging into the public con […]

    • Interesting to get your post today as last night I attended the showing of the documentary “Seed”. This is an excellent movie about how the world has lost an amazing amount of seed varieties for producing food and how big agribusiness or Monsanto is pretty much taking over and controlling agriculture world wide with GMO seeds that they own the patent for. They are now wanting to develop and sell GMO modified grass for your lawn! Oh My! So why wouldn’t GMO modified animals we use for food be next as well as humans? We have the ability, is right, and it is just a matter of time before it is introduced as a way to inprove our lives.
      Once GMO plants contaminate a pure plant source it can never be bred out of the plants, ever. That variety is lost, for etenity. Currently, farmers can only raise crops from seeds owned and produced by Monsanto. If you grow crops from your own seed and they become contaminated by a GMO crop then Monsanto has the right to legally sue you for illegally growing their GMO plants! Yikes! What next? Truly a Pandora’s Box!
      So think about what they could do with animals and humans. They have already come up with glow in the dark pigs! Not sure why, but they genetically inserted some genes from a certain starfish or some other marine creature that can glow in the dark into some pig embryos and sure enough the piglets glowed in the dark! I try not to think of these things too much as it is just too scary!
      If you get a chance everybody needs to view the movie “Seed” and then you will have an idea where we are headed and what is being done on a grassroots level to prevent it. Very inspiring.

      • Thoughtful response Becky. The large corporations, no matter what they produce, are having the same effect: if living species aren’t useful, they disappear because of vanishing ecosystems; if they are profitable, they are modified to maximize production and increase profit. The whole new option of corporate management of species is a latent problem and further creates the same effect on humans as well.
        We are in a bind between mismanaging humans toward extremely over-populated issues and must manage resources to feed all these people and, in an aberrant way at the same time crushing the natural environment.
        Mariner has visited a Monsanto hydroponic operation where the Corporation tests new varieties. It is a massive operation! Monsanto holds the patent to a variety of bean that is no longer threatened by fungus; mariner has forgotten the small African country that counted on the bean as a main crop but the beans were the old variety and often failed. The country could not afford Monsanto’s price nor would Monsanto consider some other arrangement until the Federal Government pushed them.
        This is the fear the mariner has of corporate ethics; corporations greatly interfere with our lives and social ethics but feel no accountability to our reality.
        One last comment: GMO tactics disturb natural ecosystems, leaving them unbalanced.

  • Seems folks are knocking myth around lately. Not so much using the word myth necessarily though some do. It’s more an evacuation of confidence on what the role of myth is and ignoring the fact that myth is a m […]

    • This is almost too big to ponder. We hardly know the myths we live by, as we do not think of them as myths. Maybe this is one of your points. It makes me examine my own life for clues about the structures I have built. We think the entire culture shares our mythos, but of course that is not true. It is most obviously not true as we enter this new world of presidential politics. Sorry to remind Mariner of that, since I greatly appreciate this post that does NOT go into politics!!

  • Welcome to 2017. As we roll into our new year, the entire world is beginning a new bounce. Politics is part of the bounce but looks more like blowing trash; economy is part of the bounce but looks more like a […]

    • At the end of this very bleak litany of abuses, which are very real, Mariner has some good suggestions. They are probably meant to be ironic, but getting rid of junk, preparing for the tornado, securing finances and having a good time seem like practical ideas to embrace. I would exchange the Valium for a long walk, as it has more benefits with fewer side effects.

      I wish a very happy New Year to Ancient Mariner and all of his readers–and to our nation and our world.

  • On the Live Science website this week are a number of news items about the nativity in the Christmas Story.[1] The findings depict accurately the story of the nativity but are 3000 years older. It is no wonder […]

  • Have you seen the TV commercial where a fellow hits a tennis ball over an off-camera net and receives hundreds of balls back? So it is with ‘The God Thing,’ a recent post. To mix metaphors, mariner thought he cou […]

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