Technically speaking, going by the astronomy tables, the actual Fall Equinox isn't until sometime around Monday, meaning day after tomorrow from the standpoint of today, the Saturday morning prior.
However, our Wanderers group, which at one time met weekly (more like Mercado Group for me), now meets about four times a year, to celebrate / acknowledge the two solstices (winter, summer) and two equinoxes (fall, spring). The closest Friday to this fall's equinox was yesterday, so I'm looking back on our most recent gathering (wave to everyone).
When we get to a part of the conversation where people are talking about their first religion (which could still be their religion, or not, life stories vary), my standard line is "OMSI was my religion" by which I mean the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, just across the parking lot from Oregon Zoo when I was little. OMSI has since moved, to the east bank of the Willamette River, taking over the site of a PG&E power station, incorporating that building into its own footprint. Oregon Zoo has continued morphing and expanding.
By "OMSI was my religion" one might think I'm claiming loyalty to materialist reductionist science, however in 2nd grade (the age I'm remembering), I wasn't yet school enough to think in those terms. For me, it was about the interactive exhibits, the giant heart we could walk through, and all those buttons. You'd push some button and a little show would take place, better than a stiff-still diorama, the more standard alcove exhibit when one walks the great halls of any random museum about something 3D (add motion for 4D -- some of the dinos might swivel their heads).
A museum one might in retrospect call the MotherShip is the Deutsches Museum in Munich (Munchen) Bavaria, Germany. I got to visit there when I was a little older, and Nirvana Я Us (or were us), I have to say. That's when our family lived in Rome and Bavaria was but a few autostradas and autobahns away.
Speaking of "backwards R" (Я), you may pronounce that "
Yar!" in Cascadian, connoting "talk like a pirate" like in cartoons. Yesterday, September 19, was also
Talk Like a Pirate Day, a theme in these blogs. Portlanders like their
pirate memes. "Piracy" even still has current meaning, as in "what the FBI is up against" when it comes to kids using Napster and like that. Pirate Bay and all that.
Come to think of it, I recall attending a luncheon seminar in an OMSI conference room (near the entrance) where the topic was how police were monitoring electronic copying at PSU (this was back when I was affiliated with the Hillsboro West Precinct via Saturday Academy).
As a capital of Software Libre (you wonder where that "liberal" went, a favorite flavor), Portland doesn't advocate breaking the dinos' laws, but does encourage co-creating alternative ecosystems wherein copying digital assets around among network hosts is not considered illegal; it's a feature not a bug.
When we make our media, our business models already work backwards from the assumption of infinite free copiability, as a rule of thumb. Some call it the "Grateful Dead model" (for good reason: the Dead encouraged private recordings and bootleg distributions of their performances).
Free copiability is not incompatible with restricted access. We're not compelled to share; a treasure might still get buried, per the map. Sometimes a puzzle only resolves per the individual in a not-copiable way. Published solutions come across as a lot of blah blah to most readers. Nature has lots of membranes, barriers, other semi-permeable manifolds (veils, curtains...).
So,
full circle: last night I found myself in the OMSI planetarium getting brainwashed by my old boyhood religion, like getting reinitiated. But now that I've been a Princeton philo guy, I wouldn't say materialist reductionist would describe it. OMSI was casting (projecting)
Trusting the Universe: the Philosophy of Alan Watts, a mesmerizing experience by Amir Aziz wherein we get mandala computer graphics (animations) mixed with Alan Watts in his own words (a voice recording, subtitles projected, in English, in the margins, slightly above the planetarium's horizon line.
Most people there last night likely didn't need the subtitles, as their native tongue is close enough to English to make Watts pretty easy to understand.
At the moment I decided to buy a ticket for this event, an electronic document in my Apple Wallet, a QR code admission thing, I'd spaced out that the Wanderers Fall Equinox Gathering was that same night, the nearest Friday as you'll recall. Fortunately, our gather starts at 7 PM and the show wasn't until 9:30 PM and OMSI is not far away in terms of time, by motor vehicle.
Per plan, I dropped Sydney the dog back home around 9 PM and was paying for parking via ParkingKitty (another app) well before they started running their program.
I got to relax in a comfy seat (even if my back was killing me, not literally) and trust the universe for a little while, while Alan poked holes in the idea of our treating him as a guru, opening his hand (nothing!), putting his cards on the table, to show we each had an instructive vantage point, and letting ourselves be shaped by our own experience of Universe is no crime. He also wanted to talk us out of making "experiencing nothing" our goal in meditation, moving the needle closer to the "experience everything" end of the spectrum.
