Tag curiosity

Imagination and Curiosity murdered by Entertainment

Arthur Ruger Leave a comment

julie andrews shut up GIF

Or maybe my title would better fit as “Entertainment and Laziness: The Imperfect Couple.”

Wise ones tell us over and over how the more things change the more they stay the same. The more we pride ourselves on invention and the progress of civilized society with technological wonders, the more our majority loses its innocence and the most vital aspect of living, imagination.

We trust what legalistic thinking minds tell us in terms of science, technology, gadgets and consumer pleasure.

We trust what legalistic thinking minds tell us politically. We replace our own ability  to imagine peace, justice or community with assumptions based on some persuasive legalistic mind whose theories represent the ultimate bookishness.

We trust what the legalistic thinking minds tell us  in the pseudo-spiritual realm of religion. We seem to have lost our ability to imagine a loving non-judgmental God of compassion who is not interested in power, control, authority, or spiritual warfare against a satanic banshee that does not exist.

We retreat to our entertainment in the shallowest end of our swimming pools. Is there only an endless repetition of increasingly shallow entertainment and conformity-addicted mental processes?

Laws, Entertainment and Where They are Worshipped

Let’s see now, ya got yer laws of gravity, planetary motions, conservation of energy, thermodynamics, and on … and on … even a law of motion that had to be replaced by a theory, of all things, of relativity.

Where do these laws accumulate, hang out together, fester like bats in a cave? Where else but in sacred science volumes; textbooks, treatises, and the journals of the priesthood of science.

The notion of a cutting edge of research and development of new science and technology breakthroughs is offset more and more by the death of imagination and creativity as a prevalent consciousness among humans.

The more we become satisfied with newer and lower levels of entertainment, the greater the death of that restless spirit that moved our predecessors across unknown oceans.

We become dominated by an imaginative and creative few who – willingly and knowledgeably or otherwise – work themselves into monopolistic dominance of what we as an entire race are willing to attempt, imagine or accomplish.

And then ya got yer laws from the One Who Created It All, more frequently expressed as “commandments” although the actual legal aspects can be found in the guise of “theology” which is nothing more than unprovable opinion. You know, stuff that promises that if you break the laws when you die and God will slap you around and make you damn sorry you ever doubted.

We seem infested with  unimaginative and non-creative authoritarians who attempt entertainment models based on economic formulas and lists. We seem infested with parasites attempting to establish in personal celebrity a monopolistic dominance of what we as a society are willing to attempt, imagine, believe and accomplish.

Lives constructed totally around a blind acceptance of someone else’s definition of non-existent laws is a process of deterioration. We devolve from a society of courageous explorers, doubters, and adventurers to a cowardly collection of believers seeking safety in the restricted confines of entertainment.

In that regard there is no difference between which entertainment you choose to relieve you of will and ambition.

If imagination is dying because of your fear of being thought of as marching outside the parade, you will lose.

Then we will lose you.

… a form of soul murder

 

Spirituality Past, Present and Future

Arthur Ruger Leave a comment

grandad_and_child_2

Why are my thoughts drawn so much to the past
where pleasure and pain of remembering doth last?
How is it I struggle to ponder the Now
where life is most vivid but wrinkles my brow
 
in confusion and wondering just why there is haste
that moves days so swiftly — and they have no taste?
The future is also approaching with speed,
with oblivion’s grave and the thing I must heed.
 
So into the past I find anchor to slow
the pace of the march played by Now’s singing bow.
The music remembers the living while young
and vibrates the harp from which thinking hath sprung.
 
A time that was strengthened by youth in its age
of vigor and wishing outside of the cage
that aging doth bring with its ups and its downs,
its joys and its pleasures with smilings and frowns.
 
Experience teaches a spiritual tune
that prompts us to seek from the holiest rune
a whisper of God in our mid-life-tuned ear
that something else needed is coming quite near.

© 2000 Arthur Ruger

At Play With Life

Arthur Ruger Leave a comment
Seven Years Old

Me and my brother: Cowboy Bob and the Rustler

The soul knows its secrets, the body does too.
With an infinite wisdom do both speak to you.
Listen inside, hear life whisper its plan
where to play – and play well – is one purpose in man.

Are not playing and working both one and the same?
Is not testing one’s thoughts a rule to the game?
Challenges question the game into play.
With reason and passion you choose where to lay

a piece from your thinking created within
to add to your portrait of playing to win.
To play is to work with a pleasure to find,
and working is playing with treasure in mind.

© Arthur Ruger, 2000

My eyes get more out of words on a page than Words With Friends and Online Scrabble

Arthur Ruger Leave a comment
Of COURSE He Does!!

Of COURSE He Does!!

What?
Put down my techno-hypnotizer and read actual books?

From the library?

Well we could compromise and I could read on my Kindle or something.

But ain’t reading books a much harder entertainment than the little doofus I put in front of my face most of the time?

Found these guys this morning: Brain Pickings … and immediately subscribed to their weekly updates.

Gabriel García Márquez’s Formative Reading List: 24 Books That Shaped One of Humanity’s Greatest Writers

by

“Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.”

The most reliable portal into another’s psyche is the mental library of that person’s favorite books — those foundational idea-bricks of which we build the home for our interior lives, the integral support beams of our personhood and values. And who doesn’t long for such a portal into humanity’s most robust yet spacious minds? Joining history’s notable reading lists — including those of Leo Tolstoy, Susan Sontag, Alan Turing, Brian Eno, David Bowie, Stewart Brand, Carl Sagan, and Neil deGrasse Tyson — is Gabriel García Márquez.

Woven into Living to Tell the Tale (public library) — the autobiography that gave us the emboldening story of Márquez’s unlikely beginnings as a writer — is the reading that shaped his mind and creative destiny. “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it,” Márquez writes, and kindred-spirited readers instantly know that memorable books are the existential markers of life’s lived and remembered chapters.

Here are the books that most influenced Márquez — beginning with his teenage years at boarding school, of which he recalls: “The best thing at the liceo were the books read aloud before we went to sleep.” — along with some of the endearing anecdotes he tells about them.