Tendency Toward Complexity

i'm currently reading "shantaram," by gregory david roberts. it's a fascinating book about a fugitive's life in india, first living in a slum, then working with the mafia. however, there are many times in the book when he waxes philisophical and it just annoys me, usually because it's not quite how i view the world.

but in one conversation they discuss the meaning of the universe and how you define good and evil. i couldn't believe how much it seemed to sum up my thoughts these days about evolutionary extinction and how nothing in the universe is random. i will insert those passages here when i have time, but basically since the "big bang" the universe has been expanding and forming more complex, moving towards an order. it is the "tendency toward complexity," and maybe "god" is the ultimate complexity.

i haven't wrapped my mind yet around the good and evil aspect of it; that good is anything that helps the universe along toward the ultimate complexity, and evil is anything that holds it back.

i'm looking forward to exploring this further!

another life taken by the DEA

a young man, only 24 years old, hung himself today in the spokane county jail after being arrested for smuggling pounds of marijuana into the U.S. by helicopter - arranged by the DEA! entrapment sickens me...

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008806775_websuicide03m.html


Pot smuggling suspect hangs self in Spokane Jail
By The Associated Press
SPOKANE — Police say a Canadian man accused of smuggling marijuana by helicopter hanged himself in the Spokane County Jail.
The 24-year-old from Revelstoke, B.C., Samuel Jackson Lindsay-Brown, was alone in the cell where he was found Friday hanging by a bedsheet from a light fixture. Sgt. Joe Peterson told The Spokesman-Review police are investigating the death.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Rice says Lindsay-Brown had been charged with possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver.
He was arrested Feb. 23 unloading 350 pounds of BC bud from a helicopter in a remote spot in the Colville National Forest. The delivery had been arranged by undercover Drug Enforcement Administration agents.

from the february 2009 issue of harper's magazine.

By chance, of course

By Wendell Berry. His essay “Faustian Economics”appeared in the May issue of Harper’s Magazine.
while attending the annual convocation of cause theorists and bigbangists at the local provincial research university, the mad farmer intercedes from the back row

“Chance” is a poor word among
the mazes of causes and effects, the last
stand of these all-explainers who,
backed up to the first and final Why,
reply, “By chance, of course!” As if
that tied up ignorance with a ribbon.
In the beginning something by chance
existed that would bang and by chance
it banged, obedient to the by-chance
previously existing laws of existence
and banging, from which the rest proceeds
by logic of cause and effect also
previously existing by chance? Well,
when all that happened who was there?
Did the chance that made the bang then make
the Bomb, and there was no choice, no help?
Prove to me that chance did ever
make a sycamore tree, a yellow-
throated warbler nesting and singing
high up among the white limbs
and the golden leaf-light, and a man
to love the tree, the bird, the song
his life long, and by his love to save
them, so far, from all the machines.
By chance? Prove it, then, and I
by chance will kiss your ass.

existence is not mutuallly exclusive

what is meant by nonduality, mahatmi? it means that light and shade, long and short, black and white, can only be experienced in relation to each other; light is not independent of shade, nor black of white. there are no opposites, only relationships. in the same way, nirvana and the ordinary world of suffering are not two things but related to each other. there is no nirvana except where the world of suffering is; there is no world of suffering apart from nirvana. for existence is not mutuallly exclusive.
-lankavatara sutra