Dear Friends and Colleagues:
What would it be like to know the sum total of all suffering on the planet at any one instant? How does an evolved being - or an evolved ecosystem - experience and respond to such suffering? Will we ever choose to abate our suffering and that of our fellow passengers on spaceship Earth? For THIS Thursday, July 13th, Poetry Science Talks is pleased to present scholar and researcher, writer and teacher, earth scientist and spiritual explorer, Carleton Schade, on suffering - planetary, animal, spiritual. – Neal Goldsmith
The perennial philosophies conclude that life holds much suffering and that this suffering not only can be transcended, but is the mean for transcendence. Beginning at least as far back as 10,000 years ago with early forms of agriculture, and since then greatly amplified by Western Civilization, in particular, there has been an attempt by humanity to escape suffering and death through denial and a control of nature.
Inadvertently, one major outcome for the 'haves' of the world has been a heroin-like existence that has neither time nor space for, nor a memory of, transcendence. For billions of the 'have nots' physical suffering has been so extreme as to be beyond the capability of a human (at our present mean evolutionary stage) to transcend.
The suffering at every level of being (consciousness, animal, living, material, etc.) has accelerated in J-curve fashion along with just about every other measure of the human experience. The degree of suffering may not be unprecedented in earth's history, yet it must surely rival some of its greatest calamities (glacial periods, mass extinctions from bolides, supervolcano eruptions, methane exhalations, etc.)
All our efforts (politically, technologically, philosophically) to save the civilization project is likely as misplaced as it will ultimately be ineffectual, even counterproductive. This July 13, I'd like to contemplate suffering and death and how the transcendent probabilities for the human and for humanity are similar."
PRODUCER: Carleton Schade
What is it that represents the true biography? The graduate degrees, professors studied with, papers written, seminars given, projects completed? The six months one spends in jail, the trek through Ladakh, mushroom's invitation to God, the beatings from a mad step-father, the typhoid of wife and lover in New Delhi, the home birth of a daughter, the night-time life of dreams and nightmares? The answer, of course, is yes, and all the rest as well.