Living Funerals, celebrations of life, Seizenso - 3 words that all describe roughly the same idea - holding a ceremony to honor the end of a person's life, while they're still alive.   

It's often said that "funerals are for the living" because the person being honored is already dead and gone, and only the living benefit from the ceremony of remembrance. Doesn't this seem a bit backwards though? Why is it that a person usually never gets to hear their own eulogy, the very words that are supposed to wrap up the most impactful parts of their life? This is the reason for the idea of the living funeral, a practice known in Japan as seizenso or "funeral while living". Why wait until somebody is gone to share all the things about their life that were important to you, and often live with the regret that you never cherished those things while they were here?   

Some people even take the idea a step further. At the Hyowon Healing Center in Korea, participants sign up to go through a staged mock funeral. They take memorial pictures, write out final words that they would wish to leave to those behind them, and then lay in a coffin for a meditative process that reenacts the process of dying and leaving the earth. Not just for people who believe they may die soon, this ceremonies are also popular with younger people who say that it helps them put the important things in life into perspective, and to let go of the little unpleasant things which are not so important in the big scheme. This is similar to the now popular phrase memento mori, which commands us to remember that we will die, and to use that knowledge to frame decision making for the rest of our lives.   

This video also covers another social practice which is growing, known as the death cafe. Although this sounds ominous, a death cafe is a gathering dedicated to talking about questions and thoughts around death. This is aimed at breaking the taboo of talking about death in many cultures, which some feel can hold us back from having healthy attitudes about it. If you want to find out more about this practice, and possibly even find a meet up in your area, I recommend going to deathcafe.com.

Content Warning: Nuclear, chemical and biological warfare; human experimentation; global war  

World War 2 was a war marked by rapid advancement of technology, newly destructive weaponry, and changes in tactic as the militaries of the nations involved learned to adapt to a new era of warfare. Some of the atrocities of the war are well publicized - such as nuclear weapons, firebombing, and concentration of labor camps - while others aren't.   

In particular, chemical and biological warfare had a much larger presence in the second world war than is commonly acknowledged. One of the most shocking examples is Japan's Unit 731, a Covert Research group which engaged in highly secretive chemical and biological experimentation on human subjects. Surgeon General Shiro Ishii of Unit 731 believed that these types of warfare had strategic value, and planned to use them against American Forces at several points. But the largest and most audacious plan was Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night: an attack plan which involved sending submarines across the ocean to US shores to launch bomber planes which would drop plague bombs over American populations.   

Many don't realize that this operation was just five weeks away from being enacted when the war was ended. Although it's a matter of speculation whether or not the plan would have worked, it's a great thing that we never had to find out.   

Discussion around weapons of mass destruction today often means nuclear devices. But, I think it would be hard to argue that the deliberate spread of something as insidious as plague would easily fall in the same category.   

I hope you enjoy this video essay/mini documentary  

Further reading on the Subject:  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operati... 

https://www.history.navy.mil/about-us... 

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/worl... 

https://www.historynet.com/the-last-s...

The Dark Night of the Soul and Positive Disintegration are two concepts which are closely tied together - the belief that some forms of extreme emotional duress are unfortunately necessary for growth and reaching a higher, more preferable state of the human condition.   The Dark Night of the Soul is a phrase that came to be popularized based on a poem by St. John of the Cross, and represented a religious and spiritual journey. On the other hand, positive disintegration is a theory of personal and social development by Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski. Though originating from two very distinct sources, they both point to the truth of using discomfort to make positive change.   This video covers both of these phrases as well as aspects of dealing with depression and existential crisis and turning them into positive catalysts for greater personal well being.   

Article from Psychiatric times which is linked in the video: https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view...   

Thomas Moore's book on Dark Nights of the Soul: https://amzn.to/339lrpv  (Amazon Affiliate Link)  

Background music through Epidemic Sound  

Thumbnail Photo by Damir Mijailovic from Pexels

The panopticon - a place where all contained can be watched at any time, unaware of the status of their observers. First proposed by social theorist Jeremy Bentham, the idea of the panopticon was that the constant potential for being observed would lead to behavior which would fall in line with the moral requirements of society. Although this concept applied to many different building types proposed by Bentham, the one that we are most familiar with today is the panopticon style prison.   

The concept is as simple as it is effective; if you are always under surveillance, or not able to tell when you are or aren't, you can only act as though you are being watched. Proponents believe that this will lead to causing people to behavior, and can eventually lead to moral reform as societal pressure causes people to adapt. But at what cost? What level of paranoia and emotional anguish would result from such a situation? There's a reason the Panopticon has been proposed not only as a model for social reform, but for emotional torture.   

There are few true Panopticon style prisons we can look to in history - the most famous example is likely the Presidio Modelo, where Fidel Castro and his brother Raoul were held. Of course, institutional power with even the best intentions can be abused by a lack of oversight.   Today, the concept of the Panopticon is relevant once again; as electronic and digital tools lead to the ever-increasing capability of constant surveillance - not too dissimilar to the dystopian societies conjured by writers such as Orwell.

Having your head taken off and surgically implanted onto another body sounds crazy, right? Maybe, like me, you remember hearing about plans by an Italian neurosurgeon to perform the first human head transplant, but what happened to that? It seemed to have dropped out of the news cycle one day. So I decided to find out. 

The weapon systems we see in science fiction inspire awe, fear and wonder about the power of humanity and the boundaries we push. As technology advances, sometimes real life technology comes closer than we expect to the capabilities imagined in science fiction. 

Today's episode is the first in the series where we talk about real science-fiction weapons. The subject is the orbital kinetic bombardment system - sometimes referred to ominously as "Rods From God". This system imagines tungsten rods the size of telephone poles dropped from orbit to create an impact rivaling nuclear weapons, without any explosives or fallout. Although this system is not real in the sense that it's ever been deployed (as far as we know), it has been designed and pitched for very real purposes.