Humility

This is not an age of humility. It is an age of celebrity and self-promotion. Youtube has enabled the ad man in everyone with a digital camera or mobile phone. "Look at me." is the underlying mantra of videos of cute cat tricks and gurgling babies. There are, of course, exceptions, but Google Ads belie a certain egocentric materialism generally.

As a humanist and atheist who admits ignorance of what I cannot see or understand in The Universe, I do experience a natural humility every day. My tenuous grip on life and consciousness allows me to appreciate the vastness of The Universe. I do not live comparatively in relation to other human beings. I understand that we are all smaller than bacteria in the great Universe around us. The famous will sicken and die no more elegantly than the man sleeping under a bridge.

Admission of the smallness of my life in the great sea of life and non-life around me is liberating. My greatest possession, perhaps my only possession, is this moment. Though it is precious to me, it is fleeting and so easy to miss. I choose to share my moments with you because I feel our greatest quality as human beings is our ability to share our internal experiences of The Universe with each other. Bringing our shared awareness to life's successive moments breeds compassion and mindfulness. Each tiny light of shared consciousness, like my own, joined with millions like itself, may eventually illuminate a world darkened by selfishness, poverty and violence. This is my idea of a great vision of a better world.

Celebrity

Today's Scott Brown is tomorrow's Tiger Woods.

Accidents

All of life is accidental. This is not a statement of equivocation. This is an alarm. Wake up.

If you are pretty, healthy, well built, a racial majority where you live, born to a wealthy family by world standards, all of this has come to you by accident. You have not earned any of it. Therefore, you are not any more special than someone who wins the lottery. Society will reward you for these favorable accidents, as long as you conform to what society wants from you. And, because these favorable accidents may have spoiled you in many ways, you may well do everything you can to remain privileged and to feel superior.

Turning the mind away from the conformist view of favorable accidents is very hard for those blessed by them. This is at the very root of a celebrity culture, pumped up by capitalist advertising. It is also at the root of social stagnation. The pretty and rich often call the shots. They are elected to public office. They determine the fashions. They portray the heroes in cinema.

Compassion requires turning away from one's reliance on one's own happy accidents of birth. This, after all, is the story of the historic Buddha. When a person truly abandons the trappings of his accidents of birth in favor of becoming a person of change and intent for the benefit of all beings, it is indeed inspirational. Part of my practice is acknowledging the accidental nature of life and death for all beings.

Bimbo

Last week, a famous drug-addicted woman killed herself in a Florida hotel. She was a woman with an 8th grade education from humble beginnings in The South. She married an ancient man in his 80s when she was in her 20s. He was an oil baron. Subsequently, when he died, she wrangled in court battles over the man's estate with his surviving relations. She managed to buy her way into celebrity, since she had no education and no ostensible talent, other than her shameless exhibitionism of her surgically modified body. She even had her own TV show. She could have used her money to educate herself, to find the help she needed to control her addiction, to share what she might have learned with others. Instead, she chose to feed her addiction to attention and drugs. She managed to give birth to two children. One has already killed himself. The other, an orphaned infant, survives her. Posthumously, she received even more attention than she did when she was alive from people apparently fascinated by her useless and self-indulgent life. Perhaps this story is a barometer of the times. Rather than craving liberation from stupidity and dysfunction, many, it seems, now seek validation of those traits in themselves. This can only mean that there is a sickness in this society which might be healed by more vigorous efforts to educate and rehabilitate. However, the government obsesses on war abroad and horror of global warming, seen as a threat to the high-tech toys of today's wealthy. Man's social and intellectual evolution is at a low ebb. One can only hope that the tide will soon reverse.