Clique no link, digite a sua renda mensal no campo indicado (não é necessário dar nenhuma outra informação) e saiba quantas pessoas tem rendimento maior e menor que o seu no país. É bem provável que se assuste com o resultado.
“Be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clarke and Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes… Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice.—Henry David Thoreau”
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Gifts Of Forgiveness
Bill Hicks
Track 08 off of Bill Hicks’s brilliant 1997 CD Rant in E-Minor. Buy it, download it, borrow it from a friend.
I must’ve been about 18 or so when I first listened to Tool’s timeless masterpiece, their hypnotic, thought-provoking sophomore album, Ænima. Still one of my all-time faves, I gotta tell ya. Fifteen tracks and no fillers. Ænima’s last tune, “Third Eye”—apparently named in reference to the brain’s mysterious pineal gland—is, perhaps, the album’s most intense and entrancing moment, the perfect ending to a cathartic tour de force. It starts off with some dude talking about drugs, and he has a refreshingly atypical take on the subject:
“See, I think drugs have done good things for us, I really do. And if you don’t believe that drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor. Go home tonight, take all your albums, all your tapes, and all your CDs and burn them. ‘Cause you know what? The musicians who made all that great music that has enhanced your lives throughout the years… rrrrreal fucking high on drugs.”
Sitcom-style laughter. Tribal drums crawl in. A screeching guitar sound announces itself, and the fellow who was just trumpeting the virtues of drug use continues:
“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather!”
This last segment, delivered in an authoritative news report fashion, seemed particularly “trippy” and cool to me when I first heard it. At 18, I had no idea what the heck that man was going on about, but nor did it matter—I was hooked.
The man? His name, I would later discover, was Bill Hicks.
Esse ano, mais uma vez, ignorei o Carnaval. Não que tenha algo contra a alegria e o clima festivo típicos da época; não que tenha problema algum em ver o povo se divertir, de forma saudável ou não. Cada um que se divirta como queira, com a condição de que não infrinja os direitos alheios.
É que o Carnaval sempre me causou uma certa indigestão. O que me embrulha o estômago é a demonstração pública, ultra-televisionada, da estranhíssima relação vigente entre governantes e governados, milionários e miseráveis de ignorância compatível e poder econômico inversamente proporcional. O Carnaval, pra mim, é símbolo latente do paradoxo sócio-econômico brasileiro.
O Brasil ocupa a posição de sexta maior economia do mundo: nosso PIB recentemente ultrapassou o do Reino Unido em US$37 bilhões. Infelizmente isso não quer dizer, nem de longe, que somos um país rico, ou que o brasileiro tem uma qualidade de vida no mínimo razoável. Mas poderia.
Quando digo “o brasileiro,” me refiro aos 51% da população com renda mensal assustadoramente abaixo de $900 Reais, cerca de 57 milhões de pessoas. Como se vive com menos de $900 Reais por mês no Brasil? Pergunte a seu Zé quando ele for buscar o lixo amanhã. Pergunte a dona Carmen enquanto ela faz a faxina semana que vem. Eles são “o brasileiro.” Você e eu somos a minoria que abstrai, apesar do nosso nível de abstração não ser tão grande a ponto de vivermos por trás de portas blindadas e cercas elétricas. Mas estamos trabalhando pra chegar lá.
Outro dia li numa Super Interessante que “No atual ritmo de crescimento e distribuição de renda, o Brasil vai levar 304 anos para atingir o mesmo nível de distribuição de renda dos países ricos.” Na mesma reportagem, Olavo Egydio Setúbal, ex-presidente do Banco Itaú, resume: “A distribuição de renda gerou dois países: o Brasil Rico e o Brasil Pobre. O primeiro não quer pagar para que o segundo atinja um nível maior de desenvolvimento. E os ricos são difíceis de tributar.” E agora?
Se o povo um dia acorda desse transe, boa sorte aos ricos. Nós da classe média continuaremos a assistir sem fazer porra nenhuma, como sempre. Se muito, vamos nos preocupar em fazer o possível para manter o nosso nível de vida meia-boca, naquela velha ilusão de que uma roupinha da moda, um carrinho bacana, a última versão de alguma engenhoca inútil da Apple, e tá tudo bem. Como agora.
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Fantastic animated talk by Sir Ken Robinson, which I think illustrates quite well some of the key points I made in my previous post, Critical Thinking 101.
Here, Robinson suggests that our current education system, “designed, conceived & structured for a different age,” might be, in fact, stripping kids of their creativity and capacity of “divergent” thinking. Well worth watching.
“Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.”—H. L. Mencken
“Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.”—Malcolm S. Forbes
This is an imaginary syllabus for an imaginary class. I made it up. It’s called Critical Thinking 101.
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Critical thinking, one may say, is thinking about thinking. It is refining our thinking by applying logic, reasoning and intellectual discipline to it.
It entails questioning our most basic assumptions, often those which we hold most dear to us. It urges one to seek understanding of where such assumptions come from and analyze if they’re actually working to our benefit. It is a vital faculty that one must develop if they are to make real—as opposed to illusory—progress in anything at all.
In contrast to what some may suppose, critical thinking has nothing to do with deliberately criticizing other people for their thoughts, opinions and beliefs. Instead, it involves cultivating an open mind and an emotional/intellectual distance from ideas in general—other people’s and our own—in order to successfully evaluate their truth, validity and reasonableness.
This course is aimed at anyone who suspects that what they’ve been told throughout their lives by the people and institutions that keep the machine running might not be the whole story. More than that, it is aimed at anyone who feels that there is a fundamental discrepancy between our inherent needs for a satisfying life and the unreasonable, ill-fitting socioeconomic system that we are forced to conform to.
This course does not intend by any means to promote or propagate any philosophy, doctrine or belief system; it does not have a political agenda or religious affiliation of any sort behind it, nor does it intend to preach Atheism, Agnosticism, Anarchism or any other “-ism.” It simply attempts to plant in each student a seed—a seed which they may or may not choose to germinate into a fully independent mind, one that is intellectually disciplined and contains the necessary skill set to question and analyze the deluge of “truths,” “facts,” and “hypotheses” that they are inundated with daily.
As the late Christopher Hitchens cleverly put it—and this may as well be this course’s motto— “The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.” Amen.
Howdy. My name is Rodrigo.
“Howdy” is a friendly greeting that, says Wikipedia, originated as a shortened form of “How do ye?” It seems like it’s used quite a lot in Texas. I’m not from Texas, or from any other state in the US, and yet I chose to use this word to introduce this blog post. Such are the inner workings of the human brain.
Wikipedia is “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” Doesn’t seem trustworthy.
Even though my native language is Portuguese, I usually prefer to write stuff in English. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I’ve done most of my reading in said language, or because I spent most of my adult life in sunny California. I just find it slightly more difficult to express myself in Portuguese nowadays. My girlfriend, who is American, says I write in English better than most Americans. I don’t know how much of that has to do with the fact that we often have sex.
I can only speak these two languages. Two and a half, if you consider my awkward and clumsy Spanish. I used to try and speak Spanish when I talked to people from the Latino community in Los Angeles. They laughed at me. While laughing, they seemed to forget that I actually spoke another language. I had the impression that they thought I was a retarded adult who just wasn’t very good with expressing himself. Sometimes I wonder if that is really the case, even when no one is laughing.
(Continued from Pt. 02)
“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.”—C. G. Jung
The Establishment Vs. Psychedelics
Sadly, we have come to the unfortunate situation in which, unless affiliated with certain religious groups that have fought numerous battles in court to legalize the use of their sacraments, no individual is able to possess and make personal use of psychedelic substances without the threat of being thrown in jail. The Establishment has decided what is best for you, and self-exploration and direct spiritual inquiry are simply not on the menu. So I often ask myself, why is it that adult, mentally stable individuals should be denied the right to, at their own expense, ingest substances that may provide them with valuable insight and greatly enhance their lives? Furthermore, why are certain harmful, highly addictive mood and mind-altering substances accepted and sometimes even endorsed? The answer to that, I suspect, lies in the nature of the insight provided by the psychedelic experience.
The term psychedelic (mind-manifesting) was coined in 1957 by British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond in an attempt to classify a group of very promising substances, which, at the time, were simply known as “consciousness-expanding drugs.” Unlike any other substances familiar to modern Western societies, psychedelics, when ingested, often propelled subjects to unprecedented ecstatic heights, almost invariably accompanied by floods of deep existential insight and a profound sense of wonder. More than that, and perhaps more importantly, they displayed the unique ability to, in a few hours, successfully decondition and deprogram one’s mind, allowing the individual to suddenly awaken from the hypnotic trance of modern life and reconnect, as McKenna put it, with “the real network of values and information inherent in the planet, the values of biology, the values of organism, rather than the values of the consumer.”¹ In a nutshell, psychedelics caused a shift in perception so dramatic that it undermined the very foundations of our essentially flawed materialistic worldview.
It’s been roughly twelve months since I posted on this blog a text fueled by a profound ayahuasca journey I experienced in Brazil back in early 2010. You can read it here if you like. While I initially wrote the text in two parts, I soon decided not to upload Pt. 02, for I judged it to contain far too many personal insights for it to be of public interest. As time passed and I got to drink the sacred brew another handful of times, though, I realized I still owed this blog a few more words on this controversial and wondrous subject; more than that, I once again felt compelled to write about it in an attempt to, perhaps, better understand what to make of it. So here we go.
At the end of part one I exposed a little hidden knowledge that has been discovered by many throughout both recent and ancient human history, whether with the aid of psychedelics, meditation, fasting, hypnotic drumming, rhythmic dancing or other practices known to cause a dramatic shift in sensory perception, capable of unveiling nothing short of the true nature of reality: that we are all fundamentally interconnected, and that the self is, in fact, an illusion, a hoax which we have built our entire society around, and that we can never get any real fulfillment from. This experience of oneness has been commonly labeled—for the lack of a better term—mystical; by attaining this sort of egoless communion with the universe, one becomes aware of their own inherently eternal and, therefore, divine nature, which spans inconceivably beyond the small mind that we cultivate, like an evolutionary trait, in order to survive.
Does time really exist “out there,” independent of our perception of it, or is it actually an illusion, a projection of our brain’s need to register the world in an orderly, sequential manner? This may at first seem like a silly and unreasonable question, but, in fact, it calls attention to an issue that’s been discussed by scientists and philosophers for almost as long as we can trace human thought.
For good reason, twenty-five hundred years later, “The Arrow” paradox, conceived by the philosopher Zeno of Elea, still puzzles the minds of intellectuals throughout the world. It states that “if everything, when it occupies an equal space, is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless.”¹ In other words, since nothing can occupy two spaces at once, an arrow can only be at one place at a time during its flight from A to B. That means that its flight is actually composed of a series of instants at which the arrow is at rest. So Zeno reasoned that motion is not really occurring, but rather a series of separate events that happen only in the eternal now. Time is, therefore, nothing but a feature of our minds, a construct of our brains that helps us navigate through an otherwise abstract and overwhelming reality.
“Visualize for a moment sand dunes. And notice, when you look at these sand dunes in your mind, that they look like wind. Sand dunes look like wind in some sense.
“Well, then analyze the situation: what is wind? Wind is a pressure variant phenomena that fluctuates over time. In a way, the sand grains moved about by the wind are like a lower dimensional slice of the wind itself. And from photographic analysis of dunes, you can calculate the speed and duration of the wind that made them. So the dune is a lower dimensional slice of time, of the wind ebbing and flowing that made it.”Now lets change the metaphor a little bit. Instead of grains of sand, let’s think of genes; instead on a windstorm, let’s think of a billion years of evolution. It moves the genes around in a pattern, which is a lower dimensional slice of the force which created the situation.
“In other words, on every living organism there is the imprint of the higher dimensional force which made it. Now, somebody could say, ‘Well, that’s God.’ Well, but in a scientific context, we don’t speak like that. But whatever it is that made blind matter into whales, squirrels and human beings, it left its calling card inside each human being, each squirrel, each whale.
“That’s the DNA.”
Excerpt from Terence McKenna’s final video interview. Watch it in its entirety here.
Photo © RM Nunes, 2008
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