Richard Rose: Zen and Death

Do we want the Truth or do we want to be "educated"? There is a tendency of people in control, whether in universities or in governments, to want to "educate". Not for the Truth, but for the convenience of the moment, thinking they are the prophets of the zeitgeist, and by their manipulation of the public mind the will bring people around to the "right" direction.
- Richard Rose

Richard Rose talks on everything. He talks about the four categories of mystical experiences, how society conditions us to believe lies regarding who we are and what death is, the near death experience, and the importance of finding the Truth and who we really are. We exist before we are born and continue to exist after we die. The purpose of life is finding this Truth out for ourselves through direct experience. Runs 1 hour 10 minutes.

What Drives Radical Islam?

Why do all these really hardcore jihadis come from the West? "Jihadi John", the man in all those beheading videos, is from Britain, all the 9/11 terrorists were educated in Western universities. Why? All of a sudden, in a flash of insight, it makes sense. The West is so empty of meaning, so narcissistic, so apathetic, so materialistic, suffused with extreme relativism and leftism that despises religion, despises family, despises community, worships sin. When I see Westerners practice other religions – Hinduism, Buddhism – about 90% seem to me to be fake, empty. Most Christians seem fake, most Jews seem fake, but there are still millions of Westerners who are authentic Christians and Jews, but when they practice other religions it comes across as nothing but feel-good-ism. These people hate Christianity and authentic Western values, the values that led to a few backwater kingdoms in Europe to dominate the entire world in a couple of centuries, to rise above everything all other empires had created, to develop modern science, to develop industry, to delve into the depths of space and microscopic physics, these people hate the values that built all that. They want to get together, to practice "religion" with no strings attached: no sin, no morality aside from progressivism. They're all hippie leftists. Occasionally you'll get a Westerner to adopt religion fully, like Muho Noelke, the German man who became a Zen abbot, but most are just cafeteria style "spiritual but not religious" leftists. Disgusted by the lack of values, the lack of true religion in the West, the men who become jihadis latch onto the one system that promises them the rigor and authenticity they seek: radical Islam. It reaches its hand out to them, beckoning them to kill the Western world that has embraced everything they despise. Ken Wilber says that these people reject modernity, but they don't, they reject boomeritis, they reject the diseased version of modernity, not the healthy version of modernity that existed up until the 1950s. To defeat Jihad we need a rebirth of religion in the West. No military solution will do. Bombing jihadis will solve the problem for now, but they'll always keep coming back, just like the tumor that you cut out will keep growing back. Jihad is a disease of the mind, and no pill, no surgery can cure the mind, only right thinking can cure the mind. The only cure for bad religion is good religion.

Creative Education

Orson Scott Card talks about how the public education system is designed to kill creativity and children's ability to enjoy learning. He mentions how homework is counterproductive and evil, which alone makes this worth listening to.

Runs 18 minutes

Dean Radin's Extraordinary Synchronicity Story

Dean Radin wanted to create a psi laboratory many years ago. So did Jon Krakower. This is the fascinating story of how they met. Runs 7:40.

Building a Civilization of Love

Catholic priest Rev. Jeffrey Mickler explains what love really is, what it is not, why every society in history has built itself around the natural family, and what horrors result from modern societies breaking with fifty thousand years of common sense. Runs 30 minutes.

Mind over Matter

Another 5th Dimension documentary. This one rates a solid A. There is a nice history of psychical research, including Ted Serios, Nina Kulagina, and Uri Geller. They talk about the work of J. B. Rhine and the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program, then move on to the random event generators of the Global Consciousness Project and the work of Dean Radin. Unlike the last program this was not a debunking exercise. Overall this was a much better, more honest work that presented data and asked the viewer to draw one's own conclusions.

The Sisyphus Gambit

Think about the purpose of reproduction. Nobody cares about it anymore, as evident in declining birthrates and three hundred million aborted Chinese babies (just let than number sink in for a minute, it's more than the deaths from every war fought in the Twentieth Century combined). Reproduction is old hat. In fact, it's so old hat people get offended if you even bring it up. But think of the purpose of biological life for a moment and you'll see it all comes down to reproduction, but what's the point of that? This goes beyond asking why sex exists at all, why did bacteria divide long before sex existed?

It's real simple, but it may come as a surprise. Reproduction is an attempt to cheat death. It's a clever gambit that's been going on for billions of years. At least they tell us it has. There's no real way to tell just how long life's been going on, as I mentioned earlier in "Dreaming of Genesis" and "Dating Anything". It's based on a misperception, that just because something seems old does not mean it really is, but we're talking about appearances here. The truth may be we're in the Matrix and everything is only a hundred years old, or however old the oldest human is. However far back living memory goes there's no way to tell if it ever went back any further, but that's a different topic for a different day.

Let's just say it's billions of years old because that's what convention says. It doesn't really change how you live your life either way. Over time a cell accumulates damage that it cannot repair, mostly from free oxygen, but also from cosmic rays and other environmental hazards. At this point the cell can do one of two things, either it can die or it can divide and give half its damage to each new cell. Now, these new cells can never be as immaculate as the original cell, which started out with zero damage, so over time this whole thing is winding down unless the cells can get smart enough to find a way to repair all the damage. That's the whole point of reproduction: the cells are trying to cheat death long enough to find a way to defeat death for good. Reproduction delays the inevitable.

And somewhere along the line complex forms develop (or don't, but that's another topic), and now they can't well divide in two because there's a brain here and a heart there and to split all the cells in half and restructure everything would be too difficult, so sex has to be invented. Special cells have to be produced that can divide trillions of times and form a whole new body. And you need to bring two members of the same species together for the same reason that bacteria swap genes (plasmids: special bits of DNA that can deliver genes between different bacteria), because otherwise you keep producing copies of the same exact thing and if something comes along and knocks one off then all of the others will be susceptible too. That's why you need diversity.

Now, why there has to be two different specialised units coming together rather than have every individual be a hermaphrodite I can't really say. That part doesn't make sense to me. Maybe it's a trick. Some designer set it up to trick males and females, who aren't all that alike, to come together out of some sadistic joy in seeing if they can get along long enough to reproduce, who knows. These bacteria not only became smart they became psychopathic too, maybe.

Whatever the reason, now you have a system in place where these cells can keep at it, keep multiplying, keep cheating death just a little longer. All in the hope that one day one individual will become smart enough to find a way to repair the damage and then the whole business of reproduction will be over. There will be no reason to make new cells because the old ones are now immortal, or at least until a black hole destroys them. They'll keep making new cells until they figure out how to get rid of the black holes too.

Think about it. You're a door. Through you energy is transmuted to make more people, themselves destined to suffer, reproduce, and die, to keep this race going until either death or the cells get the upper hand. For each individual it doesn't much matter, does it? Unless you're on a farm and you need lots of kids to help plough the fields and milk the cattle, but for city dwellers, for individuals there's no real purpose for any of this, is there? For society yes, for life, yes, but what is the individual supposed to do?



Well, that depends on the individual. Where do you place your faith, in your own abilities or in some promise of a future where descendants you may never see get to live in a paradise on Earth that may never come to pass?