....This is my 149th web piece this year. I am going for 162 by the completion of the regular baseball season, and then I suppose the playoffs would be this book that's coming along slowly but surely.
Of course, I am thinking of the San Francisco 49ers, mining for gold. Today I officially handed in my printed notice that I will be leaving the English teaching job at the end of next week. I had informed my employers over a week ago, but they'd actually made me an offer to try to get me to stay. After considering it at length, I still decided that based on my faith I need to go to New York and based on my rational finances and future I need to go to New York. But I got more than physical money from that endeavor. There are many forms of gold. For example, the day I got hired, I took my canoe on the bay and paddled next to Candlestick Park, where the 49ers used to win many conference championships.
The 49ers didn't win the Super Bowl back in February of this past year. Instead, the B. Ravens won the crown given in 2013 but basically earned in 2012, because they had a tremendous defense. Even so, the 49ers have won more Super Bowls than just about anyone. When Joe Montana played, they were unstoppable. The greatest receiver of all-time, Jerry Rice, helped them win four Super Bowls in the 1980's and a fifth in the 1990's. Einstein, the greatest scientist of all time, says that all time is simultaneous, so those 49ers might as well be winning the Super Bowl as we speak. Einstein also said that imagination is more important than knowledge, so let's be creative and say that the 49er metaphors who mined the world for gold poetry won Super Bowl's, and those digging for shiny gold metals did not.
Although I still work in San Francisco, I do not live there anymore. Now I live in Oakland. Their team is the Raiders. The last time they won the Super Bowl, they were from Los Angeles, and it was a few months before I was born. When I was young, my dad always used to tell me that he played tight end for the Oakland Raiders, or linebacker, or safety. He still does. I demand evidence when he tells me these things, and he plays up a big front of being hurt because I don't trust him. He's funny like that.
I don't know how the Oakland Raiders did last year, and I don't care. In fact, all I care about is loving humans. The poem will do as it pleases, but I care more about what's in my heart than what happens in the athletic matches, regardless of the profound poetry to be mined as means of transforming the world into gold.
This morning I woke up, happy to be alive and doing my best day-in day-out attempts to transform this world as I experience it into gold. I walked to work a different route than usual, happy to have something to do to earn more life. On the way I listened to this song by Tenacious D called "Tribute":
During class we had a vocabulary game where the two sides battled for supremacy. One side was the Imaginary Team, and the other was The Rationalists, who won handily. I wouldn't read too much poetry into that. After all, if it had been the "rationalists" versus "the team with an imagination," Einstein's rationale would predict a different result.
Afterward we did an imagination exercise where I had them brainstorm for five minutes on a sheet of paper. They had to imagine a scene or a painting and simply list everything they saw. Then I asked for three examples from each soul's imagination, and wrote them on the board.
The first three were from a girl who loves animals and zoo's: journey, dog and cat. I asked her if she had ever seen the movie Homeward Bound, which is about two dogs and a cat trying to make it back home from the wild. She hadn't. How strange. There was already a movie for her imagination.
After everybody listed their three images, we had a full board, and then we began combining them into stories. I would draw a line amongst the columns, and they would guide me to each word. Once we had a string of seven words, I attempted to create a plot based on what we saw. Scientifically speaking, I took a survey of the imaginations available to me, compiled the results, and then filled in the gaps with my own imagination. That's a little exercise I do with the world pretty much all the time.
Later I was back home reading Leaves of Grass. I was listening to this song, "No Woman, No Cry," by Bob Marley, which I got into a year before I discovered his favorite leaves of grass. Once I met a woman who claimed that she hated that song because she heard it played by other people all the time, so that it lost its meaning. I felt bad for her. It's always a shame when people ruin a good thing that's beautiful at its core.
Anyway, I was reading "A Passage to India" from Whitman and listening to Bob. When Bob started singing, "my fear is my only courage, so I've got to push on through, but while I'm gone, everything is gonna be alright, everything is gonna be alright, everything is gonna be alright, everything is gonna be alright," Whitman started singing:
I realized I needed food very much if I wanted to continue to stay in this superior universe and enjoy the music and poetry, so I made a sandwich made of fish and then read over some writing while I digested.
I read about a holy sadhu I met in India. He drank Ganges water even though it was polluted because he believed in its holy powers. Then he lifted a very large rock (at least 2' x 2') with his penis. One of his friends told me, "It's all in the mind."
My mind wasn't advanced enough to turn off the hunger signals, so I drove to get some more groceries.
First, though, I visited Best Buy. As I rode on the streets, I was overcome by an enormous yet wonderful sense that I was small and insignificant compared to the world, even though I am the world, as are you. I am a unique vessel of the universal love's imagination, yet everything else is going on as well, whether as people like you, or as bears and fish and plants, or as mountains, and rivers, and super strings, and suns and stars.
I bought the first Indiana Jones movie because I'd promised my students we'd watch a movie this week. Tomorrow I'm going to announce to them that I am moving to New York and that next Thursday will be my last class at that school. I figure a movie will prepare them for the news, and many of them have never seen it. As our vocabulary is "Media" this week, I think that one of the most famous and beloved adventure/action movies of all time is in order. It's about an adventurous scientific professor who comes across the mysterious religious secrets of the human race whether he likes it or not, and continually has to ask himself what he believes.
When I got home I ate broccoli because I did research a long time ago and the internet told me it was very healthy. I already knew that it was healthy because I had faith in the word of mouth review of broccoli that had gotten to me through my life, but it felt better to see a scientific person list a bunch of complex terms about parts of my body I didn't know about and explain that these microscopic compounds were going to do great things for them. The same goes for the carrots, the bell pepper, and the portabella mushroom, the onion, the tofu, and the tomato juice. They all had superpowers I couldn't possibly understand with everything else going on around me to capture my attention.
Speaking of which, afterward I watched The Daily Show interview segment, where Jon Stewart interviewed Atheist Superstar Richard Dawkins. Although intelligent and open-minded, he really doesn't like the idea of "faith." He likes having faith in the scientific method as the only way to get to the truth. I thought that was funny. Theology professor Huston Smith disagrees:
HS: Science consists of the actual discoveries of science and the method—the scientific method—which produces those discoveries. Scientism adds to those, first, the belief that the scientific method is, if not the only reliable way of getting at truth, then at least the most reliable method; and second, the belief that the things that science can get its hands on—physical, material, measurable things—are the most important things, the foundational, generating things from which all else derives. Nothing that science has discovered supports, much less proves, that those tacked-on points are true. They are no more than opinions, which my teachers led me to assume are true—there is truth in A.K. Coomaraswamy’s quip that it takes four years to get a college education and forty to get over it. I’m fortunate that it didn’t take me that long.
Robert Pirsig, the philosophy genius behind Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, points out that scientific method can't prove the scientific method as the best means of learning truth. And he wasn't even religious. He was just calling it as he thought it:
He saw philosophy as the highest echelon of the entire hierarchy of knowledge. Among philosophers this is so widely believed it's almost a platitude, but for him it's a revelation. He discovered that the science he'd once thought of as the whole world of knowledge is only a branch of philosophy, which is far broader and far more general. The questions he had asked about infinite hypotheses hadn't been of interest to science because they weren't scientific questions. Science cannot study scientific method without getting into a bootstrap problem that destroys the validity of its answers. The questions he'd asked were at a higher level than science goes. And so [he] found in philosophy a natural continuation of the question that brought him to science in the first place, What does it all mean?
I wondered what thoughts stirred in the synapses of the superior universe to first spring this show on my screen. I watched in awe as Stewart and Dawkins sparred. Dawkins spoke a language the universe taught him at some point and spit out reasoning that the superior universe gave him at some point. He said that we know that all consciousness comes from our brains, even though we really barely know anything about the foundation of the universe, according to physics. Stewart challenged him with the "live and let believe" approach and the appropriate self-deprecation of his own intelligence, perfectly, every time. Also on my screen I could see an ad that said, "There's more to it."
Now I think back to earlier today when I re-discovered my first memorable Whitman poem. As a senior at university I saw this poem and I loved poetry instantly.
Of course, I am thinking of the San Francisco 49ers, mining for gold. Today I officially handed in my printed notice that I will be leaving the English teaching job at the end of next week. I had informed my employers over a week ago, but they'd actually made me an offer to try to get me to stay. After considering it at length, I still decided that based on my faith I need to go to New York and based on my rational finances and future I need to go to New York. But I got more than physical money from that endeavor. There are many forms of gold. For example, the day I got hired, I took my canoe on the bay and paddled next to Candlestick Park, where the 49ers used to win many conference championships.
The 49ers didn't win the Super Bowl back in February of this past year. Instead, the B. Ravens won the crown given in 2013 but basically earned in 2012, because they had a tremendous defense. Even so, the 49ers have won more Super Bowls than just about anyone. When Joe Montana played, they were unstoppable. The greatest receiver of all-time, Jerry Rice, helped them win four Super Bowls in the 1980's and a fifth in the 1990's. Einstein, the greatest scientist of all time, says that all time is simultaneous, so those 49ers might as well be winning the Super Bowl as we speak. Einstein also said that imagination is more important than knowledge, so let's be creative and say that the 49er metaphors who mined the world for gold poetry won Super Bowl's, and those digging for shiny gold metals did not.
Although I still work in San Francisco, I do not live there anymore. Now I live in Oakland. Their team is the Raiders. The last time they won the Super Bowl, they were from Los Angeles, and it was a few months before I was born. When I was young, my dad always used to tell me that he played tight end for the Oakland Raiders, or linebacker, or safety. He still does. I demand evidence when he tells me these things, and he plays up a big front of being hurt because I don't trust him. He's funny like that.
I don't know how the Oakland Raiders did last year, and I don't care. In fact, all I care about is loving humans. The poem will do as it pleases, but I care more about what's in my heart than what happens in the athletic matches, regardless of the profound poetry to be mined as means of transforming the world into gold.
This morning I woke up, happy to be alive and doing my best day-in day-out attempts to transform this world as I experience it into gold. I walked to work a different route than usual, happy to have something to do to earn more life. On the way I listened to this song by Tenacious D called "Tribute":
One day, we were hitchhiking down a long and lonesome road...
I remember hitchhiking. That's a leap of faith if I've ever taken one.
This is not the greatest song in the world,
This is just a tribute
During class we had a vocabulary game where the two sides battled for supremacy. One side was the Imaginary Team, and the other was The Rationalists, who won handily. I wouldn't read too much poetry into that. After all, if it had been the "rationalists" versus "the team with an imagination," Einstein's rationale would predict a different result.
Afterward we did an imagination exercise where I had them brainstorm for five minutes on a sheet of paper. They had to imagine a scene or a painting and simply list everything they saw. Then I asked for three examples from each soul's imagination, and wrote them on the board.
The first three were from a girl who loves animals and zoo's: journey, dog and cat. I asked her if she had ever seen the movie Homeward Bound, which is about two dogs and a cat trying to make it back home from the wild. She hadn't. How strange. There was already a movie for her imagination.
After everybody listed their three images, we had a full board, and then we began combining them into stories. I would draw a line amongst the columns, and they would guide me to each word. Once we had a string of seven words, I attempted to create a plot based on what we saw. Scientifically speaking, I took a survey of the imaginations available to me, compiled the results, and then filled in the gaps with my own imagination. That's a little exercise I do with the world pretty much all the time.
Later I was back home reading Leaves of Grass. I was listening to this song, "No Woman, No Cry," by Bob Marley, which I got into a year before I discovered his favorite leaves of grass. Once I met a woman who claimed that she hated that song because she heard it played by other people all the time, so that it lost its meaning. I felt bad for her. It's always a shame when people ruin a good thing that's beautiful at its core.
Anyway, I was reading "A Passage to India" from Whitman and listening to Bob. When Bob started singing, "my fear is my only courage, so I've got to push on through, but while I'm gone, everything is gonna be alright, everything is gonna be alright, everything is gonna be alright, everything is gonna be alright," Whitman started singing:
"Ah more than any priest O soul we too believe in God,
But with the mystery of God we dare not dally.
O soul thou pleasest me, I thee,
Sailing these seas or on the hills, or waking in the night,
Thoughts, silent thoughts, of Time and Space and Death,
like waters flowing,
like waters flowing,
Bear me indeed as through the regions infinite,
Whose air I breathe, whose ripples hear, lave me all over,
Bathe me O God in thee, mounting to thee
I and my soul to range in range of thee
(everything's gonna be alright! everything's gonna be alright!)
O Thou transcendent,
Nameless, the fibre and the breath,
Light of the light, shedding forth universes, thou centre of them,
Thou mightier center of the true, the good, the loving,
Thou moral, spiritual fountain--affection's source--
thou reservoir,
thou reservoir,
(O pensive soul of me--O thirst unsatisfied--waitest not there?
Waitest not haply for us somewhere the Comrade perfect?)
Thou pulse--thou motive of the stars, suns, systems,
That, circling, move in order, safe, harmonious,
Athwart the shapeless vastnesses of space,
How should I think, how breathe a single breath,
how speak, if, out of myself,
how speak, if, out of myself,
I could not launch, to those, superior universes?
(everything's gonna be alright! everything's gonna be alright!)
I read about a holy sadhu I met in India. He drank Ganges water even though it was polluted because he believed in its holy powers. Then he lifted a very large rock (at least 2' x 2') with his penis. One of his friends told me, "It's all in the mind."
My mind wasn't advanced enough to turn off the hunger signals, so I drove to get some more groceries.
First, though, I visited Best Buy. As I rode on the streets, I was overcome by an enormous yet wonderful sense that I was small and insignificant compared to the world, even though I am the world, as are you. I am a unique vessel of the universal love's imagination, yet everything else is going on as well, whether as people like you, or as bears and fish and plants, or as mountains, and rivers, and super strings, and suns and stars.
I bought the first Indiana Jones movie because I'd promised my students we'd watch a movie this week. Tomorrow I'm going to announce to them that I am moving to New York and that next Thursday will be my last class at that school. I figure a movie will prepare them for the news, and many of them have never seen it. As our vocabulary is "Media" this week, I think that one of the most famous and beloved adventure/action movies of all time is in order. It's about an adventurous scientific professor who comes across the mysterious religious secrets of the human race whether he likes it or not, and continually has to ask himself what he believes.
When I got home I ate broccoli because I did research a long time ago and the internet told me it was very healthy. I already knew that it was healthy because I had faith in the word of mouth review of broccoli that had gotten to me through my life, but it felt better to see a scientific person list a bunch of complex terms about parts of my body I didn't know about and explain that these microscopic compounds were going to do great things for them. The same goes for the carrots, the bell pepper, and the portabella mushroom, the onion, the tofu, and the tomato juice. They all had superpowers I couldn't possibly understand with everything else going on around me to capture my attention.
Speaking of which, afterward I watched The Daily Show interview segment, where Jon Stewart interviewed Atheist Superstar Richard Dawkins. Although intelligent and open-minded, he really doesn't like the idea of "faith." He likes having faith in the scientific method as the only way to get to the truth. I thought that was funny. Theology professor Huston Smith disagrees:
HS: Science consists of the actual discoveries of science and the method—the scientific method—which produces those discoveries. Scientism adds to those, first, the belief that the scientific method is, if not the only reliable way of getting at truth, then at least the most reliable method; and second, the belief that the things that science can get its hands on—physical, material, measurable things—are the most important things, the foundational, generating things from which all else derives. Nothing that science has discovered supports, much less proves, that those tacked-on points are true. They are no more than opinions, which my teachers led me to assume are true—there is truth in A.K. Coomaraswamy’s quip that it takes four years to get a college education and forty to get over it. I’m fortunate that it didn’t take me that long.
Robert Pirsig, the philosophy genius behind Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, points out that scientific method can't prove the scientific method as the best means of learning truth. And he wasn't even religious. He was just calling it as he thought it:
He saw philosophy as the highest echelon of the entire hierarchy of knowledge. Among philosophers this is so widely believed it's almost a platitude, but for him it's a revelation. He discovered that the science he'd once thought of as the whole world of knowledge is only a branch of philosophy, which is far broader and far more general. The questions he had asked about infinite hypotheses hadn't been of interest to science because they weren't scientific questions. Science cannot study scientific method without getting into a bootstrap problem that destroys the validity of its answers. The questions he'd asked were at a higher level than science goes. And so [he] found in philosophy a natural continuation of the question that brought him to science in the first place, What does it all mean?
What's the purpose of all this?
-Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
I wondered what thoughts stirred in the synapses of the superior universe to first spring this show on my screen. I watched in awe as Stewart and Dawkins sparred. Dawkins spoke a language the universe taught him at some point and spit out reasoning that the superior universe gave him at some point. He said that we know that all consciousness comes from our brains, even though we really barely know anything about the foundation of the universe, according to physics. Stewart challenged him with the "live and let believe" approach and the appropriate self-deprecation of his own intelligence, perfectly, every time. Also on my screen I could see an ad that said, "There's more to it."
Now I think back to earlier today when I re-discovered my first memorable Whitman poem. As a senior at university I saw this poem and I loved poetry instantly.
"When I Heard the Learned Astronomer"
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams,
to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured
with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars
Yes, but it's always fun to imagine what's in between...
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