Reality

Donald Duck – Mathmagic Land

Through this journey, Donald shows us how mathematics is not just numbers and charts, but magical living things.
– Donald in Mathmagic Land (1959)

“The cartoon is a good medium to stimulate interest. We have recently explained mathematics in a film and in that way excited public interest in this very important subject.”
Walt Disney

Related  –  Geometry of Circles –  Fibonacci Numbers –  4th Dimension

Alan Watts – Existence Is Weird

“It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd – uncanny and highly improbable. G. K. Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at a gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don’t. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things. Why, of all possible worlds, this colossal and apparently unnecessary multitude of galaxies in a mysteriously curved space-time continuum, these myriads of differing tube-species playing frantic games of one-upmanship, these numberless ways of “doing it” from the elegant architecture of the snow crystal or the diatom to the startling magnificence of the lyrebird or the peacock?”
Alan Watts

Cornel West – Truth

“The language of failure and disappointment, disenchantment, disillusionment, is a little bit Romantic for me…. Why not have a sense of gratitude that you’re able to do as much as you did? That you’re able to love as much and think as much and play as much? Why think you need the whole thing? Where’s the expectation that you need the whole thing coming from?…

America’s a very fragile, democratic experiment predicated on the disposition of the lands of indigenous people and the enslavement of African people and the subjugation of workers and women and the marginalization of gays and lesbians. It has great potential, but this notion that somehow we had it all or ever will have it all, that’s got to go, you’ve got to push it to the side.

And once you push all that to the side, then it tends to evacuate the language of disappointment and the language of failure. And you say, OK, how much have we done? How have we been able to do it? Can we do more? In some situations you can’t do more. It’s like trying to break-dance at seventy-five, you can’t do it anymore! You were a master at sixteen; it’s over! You can’t make love at eighty the way you did at twenty, so what? Time is real!”
Cornel West

Clips from “Examined Life” by Astra Taylor – Trailer

John Hagelin – Consciousness

“It’s important to recognize that our body is really the product of our thoughts. We’re beginning to understand, in medical science, the degree to which the nature of thoughts and emotions actually determines the physical substance and structure and function of our bodies.”
– John Hagelin

Related – Mind Over Matter – Peace from the Quantum Level

V.S. Ramachandran – Consciousness, Qualia & Self

“The human brain, it has been said, is the most complexly organized structure in the universe and to appreciate this you just have to look at some numbers. The brain is made up of one hundred billion nerve cells or “neurons” which is the basic structural and functional units of the nervous system. Each neuron makes something like a thousand to ten thousand contacts with other neurons and these points of contact are called synapses where exchange of information occurs. And based on this information, someone has calculated that the number of possible permutations and combinations of brain activity, in other words the numbers of brain states, exceeds the number of elementary particles in the known universe.”
– Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Michio Kaku – Will Mankind Destroy Itself?

“It’s humbling to realize that the developmental gulf between a minuscule ant colony and our modern human civilization is only a tiny fraction of the distance between a Type 0 and a Type III civilization – a factor of 100 billion billion, in fact. Yet we have such a highly regarded view of ourselves, we believe a Type III civilization would find us irresistible and would rush to make contact with us. The truth is, however, they may be as interested in communicating with humans as we are keen to communicate with ants.”
Michio Kaku