Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Misguided Brilliance

This is a copy of a post from my blog called misguided brilliance. It is very relevant to the search for the meaning of life so I copied it here. Gives you something to think about.

Misguided Brilliance - What is it?I used to work at a very peculiar company. It was very progressive and very successful. Many millionaires were made from this company. It hasn't been around very long.Anyway, one of the things that makes this (high-tech) company successful is their ability to attract amazing people. After all it is the people that make any company.

Ask anybody with Merger & Acquisition experience and they will tell you that the product almost doesn't matter. If you get the right (talented) people you could sell anything to anybody.

This company was a triple shot of good fortune. They had the right people and they had the right product and at the right time. Needless to say they skyrocketed in value and size.

Back to the story.

I was sitting in a meeting, at a large oblong table with a dozen people at the top of their game. we were discussing strategies and plans of action. In particular we were focused on the A53-173b product. (Note that this isn't the real product. I made this number up. But it doesn't matter. It's all the same.)
Ideas were flowing freely amongst the group and I was amazed at the brilliance in the room. Really. I'm serious here. These are some smart people. And a thought hit me like a thunderbolt.
Why were they spending this brilliance on the A53-173b product?
Why don't they apply this brilliance to something that really matters? Next year the 173b will become the 173c and the b will be long forgotten. If you extrapolate this a bit then next century all of this will be a silliness.

Why do we spend so much of our brilliance on so much that matters so little. Why don't we spend it on things that really matters?Why is our brilliance so misguided?

Somewhere in the past we made a wrong turn and have been following the wrong path all this way.Misguided Brilliance will look into the past and find out where we went wrong. I will stand at the fork in the road and point you to the right path.

more coming, come back

Sunday, May 28, 2006

Help with this question

I caught a snippet of a tv show on pbs. It was some kind of a travel show and the host was somewhere in South America (I believe) He said that the people who lived here believed that we are all living life in a dream. This is their true belief.

Do you know who these people are? I would like to add them to my quest.
send me an email: willkalif@comcast.net

The dream of a cube



I had a dream that a man showed me a multi-colored cube that swirled and moved. He told me that the answer I sought was inside and all I had to do was look. I didn't. I awoke and spent the rest of the night and the following morning making a cube that looked/felt like the one he showed me.

I first drew it on a sturdy piece of thin cardboard so it could be later folded into a cube. Then I painted it flat. As it was in this flat shape and waiting to dry I thought that I will fold this piece of flat into a shape and inside will be nothing.

I fear that the problem with the cube and the quest is that even if you have the courage to look all you will see is the shadow.

I will allow you to see the cube I made Darkness

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Release bottle messages

I will put messages in bottles asking about the meaning of life and I will release them into the ocean. I have a friend with an ocean worthy sailboat. We will sail out into the atlantic and release them. I don’t expect a serendipitous event out of this. After all will my message be found by someone who knows the answer to the meaning of life? But it is something I have to do.

steg ti rehtruf eht yrt I redraH ehT

The Harder I try the further it gets.
I have been reading a lot and researching the meaning of life and it's discouraging. There is so much material to sift through. I keep hoping that I will find a gem that will set me on the right course.
I keep getting these recurring thoughts that interrupt my search:

Maybe it isn't meant to be found. Maybe it has to come to me

Sometimes I think that there is a way to titrate it down -cut it in half; then cut it in half again and again until eventually it all comes down to one syllable and that would be the answer to the search.

It sometimes feels like there is no answer, or it simply wasn't meant to be found. I just find it so hard to believe that this is all a meaningless accident. There should be a great nothingness -there should be even less than a nothingness. Defining nothing implies something. But there is something We see and feel it all around. How did this happen? and has it really been going on forever? And on into forever?

I remember this great quote from Carl Sagan "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch you have to first create the universe." Staggeringly deep. I wonder what he is doing right now?

Beethoven's Fifth and the Meaning of Life

I have a lot of artistic pursuits. I draw, paint, play classical guitar, and write among other things. One day I was reading a book about being an artist. It about being a traditional artist in the sense of using paint and palette. One line in the book struck me. It was something like this: An artist uses his medium to express things that can't be expressed in words.

This statement is actually quite profound. We are, after all, verbal creatures. Verbal communication is at the very center of what we are. But artists transcend this.

It got me thinking about the various art forms and how they can travel toward each other. So a thought hit me. Is it possible for me to write a piece on the guitar that expresses the color blue? It's an interesting thought.

That thought lead me further along and I began to wonder about this thought in existing music. Has anyone ever composed a piece that probes into the question of the meaning of life?

Beethoven Did; and it's one of the most recongnizable pieces of music that ever existed. Who can't hum that four note motif; dah, dah, dah, dum.

I am not going to give you a long essay to prove my point. Besides, how well could I do it? It goes back to my earlier point about an art form expressing something that the word cannot express.

Let me just leave you with this: In the middle of the first movement there is a stunning oboe solo