{"id":1109,"date":"2009-08-25T12:51:15","date_gmt":"2009-08-25T17:51:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/08\/25\/spinning-the-earth\/"},"modified":"2009-08-25T12:51:15","modified_gmt":"2009-08-25T17:51:15","slug":"spinning-the-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/08\/25\/spinning-the-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"spinning the Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"500\" height=\"282\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/p86BPM1GV8M?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Just by linking Carl Sagan&#8217;s eloquent little <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M\">Pale Blue Dot<\/a> to the teachings of Gautama Buddha, James Ure&#8217;s <a title=\"The Buddhist Blog: Earth: The Pale Blue Dot.\" href=\"http:\/\/thebuddhistblog.blogspot.com\/2009\/08\/earth-pale-blue-dot.html\">Buddhist Blog<\/a> brings out the buddhism inherent both in Sagan&#8217;s words and in the imagery of the Earth from space. That imagery (as I&#8217;ve discussed before <a href=\"http:\/\/aivakhiv.blog.uvm.edu\/2009\/07\/man_on_the_moon.html\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/anotherheideggerblog.blogspot.com\/2009\/07\/interview-with-adrian-ivakhiv.html\">here<\/a>) is multivalent, but <a href=\"https:\/\/planetary.org\/bluedot_poster.html\">Sagan&#8217;s spin<\/a> on it &#8212; the pale blue dot as &#8220;the aggregate of our joy and suffering&#8221; on which &#8220;everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives&#8221; &#8212; deepens its ability to carry useful meaning. That ability will one day exhaust itself, if not turn into its opposite, but for now I don&#8217;t think it has. &#8220;The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled [. . .] the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner [. . .] Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\nIn claiming there&#8217;s an &#8220;inherent buddhism&#8221; in the image, here&#8217;s what I mean: By &#8220;buddhism,&#8221; uncapitalized and thus not specific to a &#8220;religion&#8221; (such as big-B Buddhism), I mean the recognition of interconnected and codependent origination of all things &#8212; i.e. the recognition that what&#8217;s primary is not subjectness (&#8220;me,&#8221; &#8220;you,&#8221; et al.) or objectness (this thing or that thing) with any inherent self-existence of their own, but rather the process by which subjects and objects arise and emerge, a process persistent in its creativity (emergence into novelty), its desiring-production (Deleuze\/Guattari&#8217;s term), its forward motion. This recognition comes accompanied by a feeling of sharedness, giving rise to compassion for all those entities that arise and perish alongside us.<\/p>\n<p>And by &#8220;inherent&#8221; I mean something like what Deleuze means by the &#8220;virtual&#8221; and Whitehead means by the &#8220;extensive continuum,&#8221; a field of potential out of which emerge the occasions of becoming, or bits of experience, that make up the world. (Whitehead&#8217;s worldview is panexperientialist, a view of the world made up of &#8220;experience all the way down.&#8221;) This buddhism, as I&#8217;m calling it &#8212; though I could also refer to it as a process ecotheology (Whitehead was a Christian) or a paganism (in the sense used by many neo-Pagans today) or a process-relational, liberationist social ontology, or something like that &#8212; is there as a distinct possibility that can be made actual or real when drawn out in that direction.<\/p>\n<p>Capturing the sense of forward motion and affective solidarity of this kind of panexperientialist metaphysic, Whitehead writes: &#8220;The creativity of the world is the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact. It is the flying dart of which Lucretius speaks, hurled beyond the bounds of the world.&#8221;  Incidentally, it&#8217;s Whitehead who is largely responsible for the use of the word &#8220;creativity&#8221; in the way we now take for granted. (Thanks to Steven Meyer for pointing this out and for highlighting this particular quote in his introduction to the special issue of <a href=\"http:\/\/muse.jhu.edu\/journals\/configurations\/toc\/con13.1.html\">Configurations<\/a> on &#8220;Whitehead Now.&#8221;)<\/p>\n<p>For background on the buddhism (capitalized or not) and on the means, or one set of means &#8212; and perhaps the best we have available &#8212; for internalizing that recognition, I highly recommend Lutz, Dunne, and Davidson&#8217;s state-of-the-art overview of <a href=\"http:\/\/bernardbaars.pbworks.com\/f\/lutz+dunne+davidson+2006+meditation+Cambridge+Handbook.pdf\">Meditation and the neuroscience of consciousness<\/a> from the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Cambridge-Handbook-Consciousness-Handbooks-Psychology\/dp\/0521674123\">Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just by linking Carl Sagan&#8217;s eloquent little Pale Blue Dot to the teachings of Gautama Buddha, James Ure&#8217;s Buddhist Blog brings out the buddhism inherent both in Sagan&#8217;s words and in the imagery of the Earth from space. That imagery (as I&#8217;ve discussed before here and here) is multivalent, but Sagan&#8217;s spin on it &#8212; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[196,4415,688977,691847,689354],"tags":[4417,228,354,9,423],"class_list":["post-1109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecoculture","category-ecophilosophy","category-geo_philosophy","category-religion-spirituality","category-image_nation","tag-buddhism","tag-deleuze","tag-imagination","tag-visuality","tag-whitehead"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-hT","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":14158,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2025\/07\/21\/r-i-p-joanna-macy\/","url_meta":{"origin":1109,"position":0},"title":"R.I.P., Joanna Macy","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 21, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"Joanna Macy, who passed away at age 96 a couple of days ago, was a profound inspiration to many in the environmental activist world. Among other things, she taught us that \"environmentalism\" was about dedication to the world around us and the relations that constitute it, that it begins from\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Spirit matter&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Spirit matter","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/religion-spirituality\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/07\/image-3.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/07\/image-3.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/07\/image-3.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/07\/image-3.png?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/07\/image-3.png?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1062,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/04\/24\/with-jesus-on-our-side\/","url_meta":{"origin":1109,"position":1},"title":"with Jesus on our side&#8230;","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 24, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Greenpeace International's Earth Day video looks like a recruitment ad for an army of media-guerrilla climate warriors. From the techno-martial drumming, rapid-fire camera movement, shots of the troops in action, eco-doomsday imagery (including an image of the sun rising over the Earth looking like a mushroom cloud), and Christ the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Eco-culture&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/zVu9eawb1QY\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7016,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/11\/08\/society-space-interview\/","url_meta":{"origin":1109,"position":2},"title":"Society &amp; Space interview","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 8, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Society and Space has posted a conversation\/interview that Harlan Morehouse carried out with me in early October. While it's focused on Ecologies of the Moving Image, we talk about plenty of other things -- nature and culture, the eco-humanities, the Anthropocene, ontology, critical geography, Buddhism, Zizek, Peirce, nationalism, withdrawn objects,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Cinema&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1026,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/02\/06\/on-ground-and-groundlessness-jamesonian-marxism-v-derridean-deconstruction-v-buddhist-onto-phenomenalism-w-guest-appearances-by-lacan-and-freud-spiked-all-the-way-through-with-ecology\/","url_meta":{"origin":1109,"position":3},"title":"On ground and groundlessness: Jamesonian Marxism v. Derridean deconstruction v. Buddhist onto-phenomenalism (w\/ guest appearances by Lacan and Freud, spiked all the way through with ecology)","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 6, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Or, Toward an eco-Buddhist-processualist cultural criticism Note: This is work in progress and probably won\u2019t be published for a while, and not in this form in any case. It comes from an attempt to theorize an 'ecocritical' understanding of culture that is in dialogue with the Marxist tradition of social\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Eco-theory&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Eco-theory","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecophilosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1210,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/03\/04\/spiritualizing-science\/","url_meta":{"origin":1109,"position":4},"title":"spiritualizing science","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"March 4, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"or, Carl Sagan rides again, and again... http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=XGK84Poeynk&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1 Prometheus Unbound raises questions about the atheist spirituality of Symphony of Science's star-scientist-studded videos (pun only slightly intended -- they are mostly men, yes, but drumming on djembes (!), and it's well worth waiting to see Jane Goodall tell us about the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Science &amp; society&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Science &amp; society","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/science\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/XGK84Poeynk\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1014,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2008\/12\/14\/rigpa-meets-anima\/","url_meta":{"origin":1109,"position":5},"title":"rigpa meets anima&#8230;","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 14, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Rigpa is the state of compassionate awareness that, according to Mahayana Buddhism, is the innermost nature of the mind. It is the primordial, nondual mind that shines through when unobscured; intelligent, cognizant, awake. \"Empty in essence, cognizant in nature, unconfined in capacity.\" Recognizing and dwelling within rigpa is the goal\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Eco-theory&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Eco-theory","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecophilosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1109\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}