Professor Randy Pausch your Final Lecture Shall Never End: "Experience is what you get, when you get what you don't want"

Professor Randy Pausch
◙ October 23, 1960 - July 25, 2008 ◙



Photo courtesy from Los Angeles time.

• His Personal Website: Here

• OBITUARY Article Here

• His Journal up to his last post: Here

• Carnegie Mellon University - CMU: Here

We had hosted this video in "El Arado" sometime before, because its meaningful message about living and how Randy was able to describe the value of learning. Professor Randy Pausch is an inspiration for all of us. He shall live forever. ¡Viva la Vida! We want to celebrate his life, his merits, and his teachings. I think he shall guide us with love and courage ... for the rest of our lives. Randy you are our angel among us... just like Randy Travis sings: "...guide us with the light of love"

Here is the Eternal Lecture

The Ruminated Apple

By JMK

Wow! Life by itself is the most difficult subject to learn, it just takes all your life and after one Life-cycle you are perhaps just starting to understand something about it, more likely so, if you become educated! Because, education allows you to learn from the knowledge learned by others, and more importantly, it is to learn those inquiries (subjects) that have taken and are taking many thousands life-cycles to grasp, document and applied to improve our way of living. Education is a shortcut and it is an anthology, a compilation of our very best, so we can repeat it and also of our very worse, so we won't dare to do it again.

Notwithstanding, I am glad to be enrolled in this course [Life] even though nobody have formally, asked me to be enrolled in it, and before I knew it, I was getting registered in at the maternity unit of some unknown hospital. For the some part of my life I did not know that I existed at all. Now, that I know better, I so embarrassed thinking about my mother changing those pampers. I just did not know that I was a part of this huge class, but it seems that enrollment has rapidly increased since I have born and now we have around 6 billion or so of students in class. What can I say? I am living a class that I don’t know when will be ended but I know it will continue after my existence, and paradoxically this seems perfectly fine for me, it is natural to die; moreover, I willingly want to stay in it for as long as I must! Gosh! I am ‘fighting’ every minute for being in here even though my growing bills and pains keep rolling every day or so.

What do you think or for this matter feel? I am curious about your ‘take’ on this. Therefore poste it in here when you fell like it.

A moment of reflection or rumination every day is like eating “one apple a day” only that instead to keep the doctors away from you, keeps the psychiatrists, psychotherapists, mind-readers, gurus, shamans, astrologers, counselors, social workers, case planners, financial advisers, lawyers, and a cadre of others like them, away, especially from your pockets. You only need an effective mind-opener, i.e. a teacher or perhaps my blog or many blogs, to assist you to acquire those skills needed to be an effective life-long learner within our global class in which many people are learning as well as competing for the same limited resources.

Therefore the recipe at hand is: For your metabolic diet: Eat one apple a day, and on the other hand, for your metacognition diet: take a brief moment for conducting one elemental reflection or rumination per day [Self-awareness].

There is happiness in harmony too. Reflecting on yourself or others or both, enhance your chance for obtaining a positive balance, tolerance and proper understanding of your circumstance and how to go about your needs and objectives. Your comments are always welcomed and highly appreciated.

My Art is just living-Being a Human Being

I feel that a great part of being a human being consists in expressing thoughts, [whether these are conceptual or non-conceptual, i.e., a priori] sensations, observations, feelings and emotions. The behavior of my art is hyperactive after rather random periods of prolonged contemplation. When I paint, I enjoy the most doing it using Oils; but l have produced some paintings in gauche, watercolors, temperas, and pastels.

I worked in wax as in clay or wood and stones as well to create my 3D forms or sculptures. I have designed, and produced Jewelry with diamonds and other color precious stones. I created logos and posters for several companies or commercial and educational events. I enjoyed working in Photoshop, and GIMP. I have produced, directed and written scripts for "shorts" created for academic dissemination.

I consider that my art is living. I am a multi-disciplinarian and since we are living again the dark ages but in its digitalized version, far from being a crusader, I see my self as a compacted renaissance man. I will work until the end of my days. Living is communicating, and learning how to bring beauty to one's own life while changing uncontrollably the unknown and obscure to a yet another unknown; but with this new version, we somehow could build one or perhaps many pleasant paradigms for helping us to cope with whatever the reality outside us is. From this "neounknown" we then, could foresee possible futures, all of which we, kind of, do not want to calculate it with exact precision either, e.g. few people want to know in what day, at what time and how they would eventually die. We even do not want to think about it. I remember in here, those thoughts attributed to Socrates, "Those who know how to die, Sure they know how to live".

Art is many things as for the many people of the world, each has their own way of perceiving it, but even though we all appreciated it when we see it. Then, Art "acts" for us like a door that "opens", before our mind's eyes, all our knowledge, ignorance and wonder, almost at once and with such an intensity that we could recognize it instantaneously, even if we do not know what that object means, we are attracted to it. Perhaps it does not matter, at all, to know it but to feel it. Nietzsche wrote : "It is not the duration, it is the intensity what makes a feeling superior." Art is Art because resolves our living with a meaningful minimum set of impressions, expressions or both at the same time and forever. Keats in his "Ode the Urn Greek" explain to us: "Truth is Beauty, Beauty is truth." That is it! You have experienced eternity and this will form part of you. It will never change in you no matter how many times you think you have changed. It will remain the same. Hence and thereof we have always this human urgency or need to search for all things that we consider Art.

It all depends what you are looking for or even though Art can awake you when you were not even looking for, aware of or paying attention to it. It traps you. Therefore impels and propels our most deepest emotions. It gives us a direction, a purpose, a sense with full desires. Opens our Skinner's box. Injects full ideas in our blood and dilates our arteries and pupils. It makes us conscious of our existence.

Point blank, the only fact of being able to survive one minute more, as being alive and knowing it, constitutes art. Therefore, as Siddhartha emphasized, my truly profession is to know myself as I found out this today, and Gurdjieff and Outspenky knew it all along. Art is just living.