Pursuit of Happiness

A nice series on philosophy presented by popular British philosopher Alain de Botton, featuring six thinkers who have influenced history, and their ideas about the pursuit of the happy life:

Schopenhauer on Love
Epicurus on Happiness
Nietzsche on Hardship
Montaigne on Self-Esteem
Socrates on Self-Confidence
Seneca on Anger

Here’s another interesting documentary on the same topic: Living Luminaries.

Searching

“While the thoughts that make us feel as though we know ourselves are easy to experience, they are notoriously difficult to explain. To find out where they come from, Professor Marcus du Sautoy subjects himself here to a series of probing experiments…” A documentary about the search of what can´t be found, science on its need for translating reality into belief.

Wars

In the answer to why we fight? lays the reason why our actual political, social and economic systems are not yet updated to the current state of knowledge.

Permission to Hope

“Because nature builds in previous achieved levels of complexity, and each advance in complexity proceeds more quickly than the stage that preceded it.”
__Terence McKenna

One

Around the world, many are having the perception of a grey chained reality, believing that we need to control or manipulate to satisfy conditioned behaviors, illusionary desires or falsely perceived needs.

But now a global consciousness is emerging within, gradually unfolding a new precious unexpected way. It’s showing us that, up on these blinding beliefs, we created a unsustainable reality based on fear, which will not persist indefinitely.

At this time in our planet’s history, a tremendous transformation is taking place, multiple challenges lie ahead for us all. You already know why, don’t you?

What is needed to collectively reorient ourselves towards a viable future?
How could we help each other in developing our greater human potential?
How can we re-imagine the relationship between us, and with our Earth?

–ONE–

Imagine two tuning forks standing one next to another, and you strike one to create a note. Without touching the other, it will begin to play its own note too.

“Be a lamp unto yourself. Don’t search for light anywhere else;
the light is already there… Just probe a little deeper into your being.”
__The Buddha

Matrix

Imagine infinite parallel universes continuously expanding, dumb individual entities creating complex neverending networks. A place where the shadows pretend to be the origin of any light, where they use the knowledge that makes all around to seem, in spite of it, meaningful.

An eternal landscape beeing painted, rounded by machines skilfully engaged to react to our environment, running under a bottom line governance. All designed and assembled to make, what is virtual, more real than real. The man not as architect of his own, but a laboratory pet, trapped in an anti-reality made by neuronal impulses. And, in the roots of the matrix, the slave, unable to recognise himself in any mirror.

Consider now instead that this slave had always been the creator, sleepily unconscient painting the same exact landscape. An apparently equal world, but opposite in essence. This one, ran by our thoughts is where consciousness is key… Could we have been dreaming us, during ages, and be now just about to wake up?

We

‘We‘ visualizes the words of Arundhati Roy, specifically her famous ‘Come September’ speech, where she spoke on such things as the war on terror, corporate globalization, justice and the growing civil unrest.

An amazing document, a lesson in modern history, given free by an anonymous producer. An unparalleled benchmark in documentary filmmaking. A wicked soundtrack. Powerful imagery. Arundhati Roy’s speech strikes to the heart, every word poiniently and poetically weaving an intricate tapestry of our modern global ache.

Geoff, the webmaster of resist.com.au, says he received the film anonymously in the mail one day with a simple note that read:
“Feel free to pass this on to others who you know will be interested in its relatively unique content and perspectives (either by copying this DVD, dubbing to VHS, by dissemination through internet download, holding private screenings etc). Using the technology of this information age you have the freedom to be as imaginative as you like in the different ways which you can choose to make this accessible to others.”

Our Dumb World

Never before in the history of humankind we’ve had such amount of information, opportunities and resources to develop our knowledge, and never before we’ve seen such an epidemic of stupidity around.