koleeta

I saw Do Make Say Think last night and at the begining of the show Charles Spearin (bassist) said gave a little insight to the importance of living your life.

He said there is a museum in Canada where there is a big wheel with all these different animals and living organisms that you could be born as. So say a little kid comes up and spins the wheel and it stops on an insect. That means they are born an insect. Another kid spins and gets insect and so on and so forth. This pattern continues on and somewhere on the board, among the many things that you could be, is a human. There is a one in like 4 thousand or something (can't remember the statistic and I can't find it online for some reason) chance of being born human.

He also said there was an Buddhist analogy about it. Think of it as being a blind turtle and you're just swimming around in the ocean. There is a single hula hoop (although, I doubt the Buddha actually used a hula hoop in this teachings) out there floating on the surface of the water somewhere in the world. The chances of you coming up for air and sticking your head through that hula hoop are same as the chances of being born human.

Spearin then pointed out that the museum gives better odds than the Buddhists. He finished by saying that this teaches us that we should be mindful of how we use our lives and not waste this rare occasion. For the past couple years I've tried to live by that idea...and now I have a new way of reminding myself.