Deep Thoughts About Life

Have you ever marveled at the sight of a flock of birds, a swarm of insects, or a school of fish, all moving as if with one mind; not just in a single direction, but almost as a living cloud, twisting this way and that, over and around invisible obstacles in air or water.  And every time we wonder, how do they do it?  Might one of them set the course for all the rest to follow by visual, auditory, or other cues, or do they together somehow intuit where the entire flock is headed and where each individual in the swarm belongs?  Does the first minnow actually lead, or is he or she merely the front fish for the will of the school?  And if the one at the head of the formation falls back, how is it decided that another--and which one--will automatically take over?  The answer is that they function as a Group Soul.  (Illustrated): The Elephant in the Room, Banksy exhibition, 2006 Barely Legal show, Los Angeles But how can we humans understand that,...

What if o ur li ves were a kind of mini-evolution, which begins at the moment of birth and ends at the moment we die. Whether our evolution picks up where it left off, in another life, is a hot topic for another post. In a sense it's the purpose of life, to evolve, to improve, to grow in every way, to change in a positive way. As I learned for myself, in the most dramatic way (bankruptcy), making a few tweaks to your life can also tweak your luck, self confidence, career, success, prosperity, happiness, finding a soulmate, the dreaded Mid-Life Crisis, also in a dramatic way!  This is the broader picture where finding the real purpose of your life - just any old purpose won't do - is the very foundation of the mix of life we need to get right if we are to succeed at anything! "There is nothing wrong with change," said Sir Winston Churchill, the British wartime Prime Minister, "if it is in the right direction." And that's the crucial question,...

H ave you noticed? Yin and Yang. Good and evil. Hot and cold. Male and female. Rich and poor. Up and down. In and out. We make sense of things when we can apply one or the other extreme to things, feelings, sensations and existence as a whole. Then we find somewhere inbetween those two opposites, two extremes of everything, to position every experience in our lives. Sometimes we need to find that inbetween point between two extremes to succeed, to find where we're at at any given time. So it is with life - there are two extremes which set up this concept of Two Evolutions. Those two opposites we call flesh and spirit, you know, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. We might also identify those two extremes as physical and non-physical. There you are, saying something is non the other is unsatisfactory, but it shows how little we know about this set of opposites. We know so little about spirit and matter, that we tend to lump them both together a...

Considering Rudolf Steiner's rather unconventional ideas, maybe Charles Darwin had only half the truth about evolution. This was a very small part of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), a very complex Austrian social philosopher and mystic. I want to talk about Rudolf Steiner's ideas about reincarnation and the evolution of souls.  Such an evolution is not the same as the evolution of physical bodies or of physical people (and other living creatures).  It's in effect, a second evolution. And,for that matter, philosophy itself. If he was right then to place his ideas side-by-side with Darwin's Theory of Evolution - whether you agree with Darwin or not - offers us an extraordinary new dimension to our ideas on the whole question of evolution. And if you ever had reason to doubt, or disagree with, Darwin's ideas of natural selection and survival of the fittest, then here is more material to question, at least, whether he had "the whole truth and nothing bu...