(thesouljourney) ' What's New!?'

What’s New?

Many people today suffer from neophilia – not a new disease, but a fascination with whatever is new. NEW is a word that gets an arousal within the brain. A new car! New and improved! How many different ways is this word used in advertising and in our search for value?

Novelty often rules as a substitute for value. Having lost the internal references for value, brainwashed by commercialism, we equate value with what is new or said to be new. We put an S on this word to describe what we call ‘the News.’

Of course not all people value the new – only those steeped in excessive consumerism. There are some cultures that even value the old – not because it is old, but because many things that are old have character and are rife with symbolic value. The old has a way of maintaining or establishing relationships – connections with culture, history, people and time.

When modern life lacks soul, the standards for what is of value are very superficial. Appearance means more than substance. The inner is neglected in favor of the outer. Image becomes a substitute for intrinsic worth. Status is sought from some external association rather than uniqueness and inherent worth.

When we see with the eyes of the soul we realize that new is not better than old, and that old is not better than new. We see beyond these superficial categories and recognize the inherent value and uniqueness of people and things.

Soul perspectives enable us to find the true value of everyone and everything. We can see through the hollowness of image and appearance that the magicians of the media create, allowing us to experience the substance and value of our own life and the true gifts that others have to give by simply being themselves.

Exercises: 1. What values attracted you to purchase or acquire some of the things you possess? 2. Examine some of the things in your life or possessions from the point of view of character, uniqueness and soul. 3. In what aspects of your life does the superficial dominate, and what effect does that have on your relationships with yourself and others?

Cosmix : Chandra Limit and Future of the Sun

To make life more than matter
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Do things matter? Both believers and non-believers, conscious creatures, partly aware animals and almost totally insensate one-celled beings behave and live out their lives exactly as if it did. What's more, it seems to make no difference to the rest of the environment. Or, even if it does, there's nothing to show for it. Whether it's building intricate systems of political thought, raising leopard cubs and teaching them to hunt or flowing into pseudopodia to engulf a speck of nourishment, we do it with a mix of creativity, caution and élan to ensure as much success as we can under the circumstances. As if things like these really mattered a lot to us.

Yet the Sun which keeps pouring its life-sustaining juices out, and without which we wouldn't have been around to question such matters, is a physical process with a finite life of its own. In about five billion years from now it will have expanded outwards to many times its current diameter due to internal pressures till it billows beyond the orbit of Mars and vapourises all the inner planets in its path.

Much before that, however, its rising luminosity would have burnt the life out of all living beings and made Earth a completely barren and sterile world awaiting final destruction. Soul will of course shrink back in times to come but by then the ultimate destruction would have been irrevocably wreaked.

But it's also true that Earth would have by then returned to the same roots of nothingness it sprang from. Some five billion years ago there was no ground beneath our feet for us for instance to step on and be conscious, semi-conscious or inert. If at all our future world existed it was in the form of a whirling disc of dusty matter spinning around a newly formed star.

Uneven gravitational forces would slowly begin to ball it up till it became globular and then start a long process of cooling - adding, as it went, an atmosphere, water, breathable oxygen and, finally, in a one-off or universally mundane manner spawn that quality of being which is so different from the inanimate.

In short, we would get a life. One which is so fraught with the fragile that it's a wonder we make is so liveable without the thought of a past or future or wherever we came from or are going to. It's not important whether things matter or not. We must only insist that they should. Otherwise how would it have ever mattered?