Peter Buffett, son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, is an Emmy Award-winning composer, NY Times best-selling author and noted philanthropist. Currently, he is releasing socially-conscious music and touring his "Concert & Conversation" series in support of his book Life Is What You Make It .
 
 

George Harrison may have said it best:"With every mistake we must surely be learning." 

It’s phrased in such a way that there’s hope and questioning. It sure makes me question. We certainly learn from our mistakes on a personal level. At least it’s a clear possibility if we choose to take responsibility for the mistake.

But do we learn from our mistakes on a collective level? Does the phrase “never again” really mean anything? I’m not sure we can make collective change if we don’t see individual acts as reflections of the greater whole. So when a person with an automatic weapon kills, or a group of men destroy a woman’s life through rape and torture, we must know that these horrific acts do not happen in a vacuum. They are stories within a story. Our story.

Let me see if this analogy makes sense: the sun's energy unfiltered comes to the earth and allows life to take place. Through what appears (to me) to be a miracle, plants can convert the sun's energy and the nutrients of the earth and sky into fuel for life. You could say that plants are the result of a conversation between the earth and the sun (actually, somebody did say that and I forget who it was). But I digress.

The point is, nothing in this equation is doing anything other than fulfilling a purity of purpose.

Through focusing the sun's energy, other things can take place. The first thing that came to me (I sort of hate to admit) is taking a magnifying glass and watching something small go up in flames.

So here’s what I’m getting at: Maybe there’s a universal force or consciousness. That’s what I’m guessing most people through the ages have named as God, or love, or spirit, or Gaia. Maybe there’s a natural purity of purpose in all things—a purpose that is life itself.

And when we hear about horrific acts of violence and destruction, it’s like the magnifying glass burning an insect. Culture is the magnifying glass that distorts and amplifies a particular quality of the sun (energy as heat) and creates a very different outcome—death instead of life—but only because of an intermediary distortion.

Our magnifying glass is scarcity and fear. Can we remove it?

What do you think? Share your story at changeourstory.com . Visit www.peterbuffett.com to learn more and Change Our Story to join the conversation on how we all can become active participants in shaping our future.   

Image courtesy of angeloangelo, licensed under Creative Commons.  

Peter Buffett, son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, is an Emmy Award-winning composer, NY Times best-selling author and noted philanthropist. Currently, he is releasing socially-conscious music and touring his "Concert & Conversation" series in support of his book Life Is What You Make It .     

And then someone sees the power of that and puts up a tollbooth.

There is no such thing as original sin. Period. There is an original wound—the disconnection from source—that we’re all searching for. But that source is actually with us all the time—like Dorothy’s shoes. That’s what all the great teachers and prophets tell us.

But we’re so hungry for it that we’ll believe others before we believe ourselves. And before you know it, it’s a religion, a political system, a social construct.

It’s natural for man to create systems to create meaning. It’s happened since we came down from the trees (or wherever you believe we came from). Gods were in the seasons and then we domesticated plants. Gods were in the wild beasts and then we domesticated the animals. Gods were in the heavens and then we charted the stars and planets.

Only then did we start to look inward. It must be us! Monotheism begins ... science gets smaller ... psychological thought begins ... everything starts to look like a mechanism just waiting to be analyzed.

Culture is just a construct built to make sense of the world and our place in it.

And now—in this time and place—nearly every construct is broken. Education, politics, religion, and economic systems are all institutions that have lost the connection to the people within them. But we are still here.  

All you have to do is combine our knowledge of history with the lessons of nature to know that nothing lasts. So why do we hold on so tightly to things that no longer serve us? Fear, of course. And that’s what culture loves the most. Culture will hold on at any cost. It doesn’t care about you or me. And fear is the go-to position.

From the fear of God to the fear of paying the mortgage to the fear of not being seen as cool. It’s a lockdown. Culture has us in a chokehold.

But none of it is real. Oh, it looks real—unimaginable to get out of. That’s the neatest trick of all. But check your shoes: the power of God is within you.

It’s written that Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” And by neighbor, that means whatever relationship you happen to be in at the moment.

The divine is not in anything, but it’s between everything. 

Everything has turned into a transaction. But we live in a world of relationships.

Love is the only power that can counter fear. This is not a feel-good platitude. It’s truth. And sometimes it can be hard work, but not as hard as seeing children die and billions suffer. No prophet could have imagined that we would put this level of so-called profit over humanity.

It’s said that, for instance, these taxes on the rich will stifle capitalism. Seriously?? The most important thing to rich people is to get richer? What world do we live in that puts more stuff for people with a bunch of stuff above compassion?

The human experiment is about to fail. I don’t believe it will. But we must be willing to see the skin we’re in and that it’s infected with fear. It must be shed.

What do you think? Share your story at changeourstory.com. Visit www.peterbuffett.comto learn more and Change Our Story to join the conversation on how we all can become active participants in shaping our future.  

Let’s put our ideological and spiritual differences aside for just a moment and, through reasoned argumentation, decide what happens to human beings after they die. Easier said than done. Should we approach the mystery from a high philosophical horse, or whittle it down with the empirical edge of the scientific method? And don’t forget: the cozy theologian will have something to add to the discussion as well. Even if we strip passion from our assumptions about the afterlife, we come no closer to understanding its feasibility.

After reading four recently published books regarding life after death, Jacques Berlinerblau is as clueless as he ever was. But what appears at first to be a run-of-the-mill book roundup in The Chronicle Review becomes a careful examination of the difficulties of talking about the afterlife in a useful, scholarly manner.

Berlinerblau first tackles books that try to prove the existence of an afterlife through modern science. One such book, Life After Death: the Evidence by Dinesh D'Souza, is a spirited read, Berlinerblau writes, but the alleged scientific accuracy of D’Souza’s claims is questionable, and far outside the realm of a lay-person’s ability to second-guess. “[D’Souza] devotes great energy and imagination to popularizing complex scientific ideas for his readers,” says Berlinerblau. “Whether his distillation of those ideas is accurate is something that only physicists, neuroscientists, astronomers, and biochemists, among others, can answer.” Looking to the humanities is just as unsatisfying.

Theological and philosophical writing is infamous for its convoluted complexity. Berlinerblau tried, with marginal success, to unpack the metaphysical arguments for an afterlife in Princeton professor Mark Johnston’s Surviving Death. Things don’t start well: “From the outset, let me confess that Professor Johnston's argument went so far above my head that it jettisoned booster rockets into the poppling ocean of my incomprehension.” After numerous dense, jargon-y chapters, Berlinerblau concludes that “It would be pointless to try to summarize [Johnston’s] hypotheses.”

Berlinerblau speculates that rational conversation about the afterlife may be impossible and offers his own modest solution: “There is, of course, a counterpossibility: If we do in fact perdure, perhaps we transit into a realm beyond good and evil—a realm so radically other that science, theology, and philosophy cannot fathom its contours. That does not mean we should stop asking questions. But insofar as there are no answers, a recommended course of action might consist of living according to some minimal standard of decency and cherishing our bright moments.”

Source: The Chronicle Review

Image by Qole Pejorian, licensed under Creative Commons.

Philosophers. Sort of.

Why? Because they haven’t equipped us with the kind of thinking that would help us wrap our minds around the problem and devise a way to stop it. That is to say, they haven't taught us how to change the way we live in the world.

To do that, we’d need a wholly different kind of academic inquiry, writes Nicholas Maxwell, author of the recently revised From Knowledge to Wisdom, in the latest issue of Philosophy Now (subscription required):

Global warming is the outcome of the way we live, and in order to arrest it we need to change the way we live... Having a kind of academic inquiry that gave intellectual priority to articulating, and working out how to tackle, problems of living, would have helped enormously with alerting the public to the problem of global warming, and to what needs to be done in response to it.

But we have not had, and still do not have, academic inquiry of this type—devoted to helping humanity learn how to tackle its problems in increasingly rationally cooperative ways. Instead we have science—this long tradition of inquiry devoted to improving knowledge and technological know-how.

Take that, science.

In fact, Maxwell isn’t railing against science per se, but rather “science without wisdom.” And this wisdom comes from a sense of purpose: Knowledge should not be an end in itself, but rather a means toward resolving a problem.

So what would this living-oriented academic inquiry look like? Maxwell elaborates in a short piece for the New Statesman:

Academic inquiry as a whole would become a kind of people’s civil service, doing openly for the public what actual civil services are supposed to do in secret for governments. Academia would actively seek to educate, rather than simply study, the public.

—Hannah Lobel 

While many faith-based responses to antireligious rants by Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great), Sam Harris (The End of Faith), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), et al. have been published, some of the more interesting critiques have come from fellow atheists. Theodore Dalrymple—an atheist and a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute—has a lively and thoughtful piece in the institute’s City Journal.

Dalrymple’s basic, but crucial observation is that this latest spate of antireligious book lack originality. “[They] imagine themselves to be like the intrepid explorer Sir Richard Burton, who in 1853 disguised himself as a Muslim merchant, went to Mecca, and then wrote a book about his unprecedented feat,” he writes. “They advance no argument that I, the village atheist, could not have made by the age of 14.”

The piece also criticizes these writers’ deeply condescending attitudes toward people of faith, as well as their selective use of evidence in support of a foregone conclusion (“First you decide what you hate, and then you gather evidence for its hatefulness”).

Dalrymple is at his best when challenging the new atheists on their own intellectual consistency, questioning, for instance, Dawkins’ wisdom in suggesting “a new set of Ten Commandments for atheists…without considering odd the idea that atheists require commandments at all, let alone precisely ten of them.”

At times, the prose is as self-important as, well . . . Christopher Hitchens. And there’s enough gratuitous name-dropping to make even a young graduate student blush. Still, it’s a sharply written and argued piece.

See also the Berlin weekly Jungleworld’s interview with Mitchell Cohen—reprinted in Dissent­—in which Cohen, another atheist, offers some useful context for the debate. —Steve Thorngate