Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Stages of Spirituality - Ignite Bangalore

Just gave a 5 minute talk at Ignite Bangalore last Friday. The organizers posted my presentation on slideshare and the video of the session.

Video: http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=rmguZ5agjuU

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/rajivmathew/jonathan-mc-cracken-the-stages-of-spirituality-presentation


Sunday, January 11, 2009

A brave new world

So here we are. Western civilization in the 21st century. 12 billion web pages, six billion people, and Septillion Zimbabwe dollars ($1 CAD = ~8 million ZWD as of time of this post).

I remember taking a physical anthropology course many years ago that discussed the evolution of the human brain (or skull rather) and how over the course of 2 million years we essentially have only increased our brain size by about 450 cubic centimeters or about 33%.

So with all that extra space most of us have managed to break away from millions of years of hunter-gatherer society and enter the information age. However, despite all the boons of science, technology, religion, and art why are so many of us completely lost? I know that I often find myself asking the question "what the hell am I doing with my life?"

Things kinda fall apart when you work everyday in busy downtown environments, keeping up with the Jones, and losing ourselves in fetishism of product. I know that I spend far too much time obsessing about the "next upgrade" to my 21st century hot rod, my personal computer.

It's like the meaning of our lives have just turned into some movie about a super hero that lives an 'ordinary' life but has no idea of the super powers he has. Except in this movie we never figure out the super powers and instead just live on auto-pilot wondering where the true meaning of life will come at us.

So where does that leave us? How can we ever get that sense of meaning to be consistently in our life?

Exploring these questions is one of the purposes of this blog, and I hope to share the answers that work (and don't work) for me.