"Everybody dies but...

NOT everybody lives"

(Red Bull)
  

After flying to an altitude of 39,045 meters (128,100 feet or 24.26 miles) in a helium-filled balloon, daredevil "astronaut" Felix Baumgartner completed a record breaking jump for the ages. He is "the man who fell to Earth."

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From the edge of space, exactly 65 years after Chuck Yeager first broke the sound-barrier flying in an experimental rocket-powered airplane, Felix broke the record in a special airtight suit. He reached a maximum freefall speed of 1,342.8 km/h (833 mph) through the near vacuum of Earth's stratosphere.

Beavis & Butthead, Jackass, are teens already trying this at home?

He was later slowed down by the friction of our atmosphere during his 4:20-minute-long drop. The 43-year-old Austrian skydiving expert also broke two other world records (highest freefall, highest manned balloon flight), leaving the record for the longest freefall to project mentor Col. Joe Kittinger, who was manning Mission Control during the jump.

 

Watch the full Recap

 
Red Bull sponsored extreme sports compilation (2012)
 
Parkour (Freerunning) in Kuwait at The Art of Motion
  

What is "Red Bull"?

Pat Macpherson, Seven, Wisdom Quarterly (COMMENTARY)

I'm not real, just here to sell mo' sugar.

Legend has it that a traveling toothpaste salesman was passing through Buddhist Thailand when someone offered him an energizing syrup. It worked (caffeine kick), so the salesman tracked down the elixir-concocter and said, We should sell this to the West. But first we carbonate it. 

The taste, apparently, never mattered. Is it healthy? Who cares? Do people drop dead at raves chugging it with Vodka? Maybe. So what, the maker says. That's not his problem. Red Bull gives you [corporate jingle] wings! There is no evidence that Felix Baumgartner was a drinker. But Aunt Jemima don't eat no pancakes neither. That doesn't keep a room full of mostly White male executives (at RB or General Mills, Inc.) from cashing in on their comforting brand logo/mascot. 

  

Auntie J originally came from an old timey racist minstrel show of White people in blackface promoting stereotypes. The corporation puts the best spin doctoring on its product's public face. Red Bull may not be good for human consumption, but they do sponsor great feats in extreme sports and funny commercials. If the Honey Boo Boo Thompson Family uses it to make Go-Go Juice and bring on obesity, diabetes, and gray hair, why would anybody blame the corporation that produces it? Soda doesn't help anyone do anything worthwhile, but brand affiliations might. White sugar is toxic, but the artificial sweetener Aspartame is worse.

  

 

RECIPE: How to make Go-Go Juice at home using Red Bull

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Red Bull sponsored extreme sports compilation (2011)

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Meditation on Growing Younger (video)

Amber Dorrian, Wisdom Quarterly

 

(Matt Groening/Highvoltageilene)

Buddhism has an interesting teaching. It is redeath. Time is cyclical, circular, spiraling. We imagine a straight line and do not see it bend away to come around again -- in much the same way, but not exactly the same way.

   

Death after death, there is life. Life keeps coming. One grows young again and again and again. What people mostly misunderstand is that it is not us. No one is reborn. What is reborn is a process. The process does not stop, so it cannot really be said to start again with each death and rebirth.

  

What is now? Some body, feelings, perceptions, willed formations, consciousness. They are altering every moment. They do no reoccur but utterly pass away. If we are them, we are dying. If we are something else, an owner or watcher of them, the owning and watching are dying. It's redeath, redeath, redeath.

   

The body passes quickly, but the mind passes much more quickly.

  

And with each death there is "again becoming." For all the aging, sickness, and falling away, there is rearising, health, and again-coming-to-be. What then would it be like to talk to ourselves, to say to the young ignorant version of the future that keeps reiterating?

   

My pets? They're all dead. My friends? Gone. My family? They wished you well. But all of these tend very strongly to come back again. They are not lost to us completely, just in this form, which utterly passes away as they hurtle toward destruction.

  

But what about me? Dead. My consciousness (awareness)? Gone. My feelings? They wished me well.

   

I'll be young again! But it isn't living "forever" if it isn't living for even two moments.

  
In the future I may become male or female or indeterminate (neuter or androgynous), any race, any nationality, any caste, any planet, any form (a deva, being of light, or dense), any kind of being in 31 very general "planes" of existence.

   

What would I say to that newborn? If it is a deva, it comes fully formed without birth parents. Similarly, if I slip into the Downfall, perdition, the Great Waste (subhuman planes of existence), rebirth is immediate, even if it is into an intermediate state, it comes fully formed. But on the human and animal planes, transformation and impermanence are very obvious.
  

Meditate. End all suffering.

There is no need to "meditate" to see youth fleeting. But meditation, whether as contemplation or profound stillness in non-discursive awareness, is necessary to see ourselves cyclically growing younger only to die again.
  
It works in our favor and can be taken for granted only so long as we have wholesome karma to exhaust. When the profitable is exhausted, we painfully face what the Buddha warned about suffering and taking the Dharma for granted as if it were always available to us.

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