Word: humanism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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THIS WINTER, many poor Americans will not be able to afford one of the most basic of human needs: warmth. For old age pensioners struggling to survive on a monthly $300 Social Security check, this winter's heating bills, which will run well over their entire income, could lead to a choice between freezing and starving...
According to Tibetan Buddhist belief, the material world is a school through which all souls pass in order to learn the spiritual lessons of sympathy for human suffering, patience, humility, and love. Death, they feel, is simply a release from the illusion of the material world. They believe in each life the soul within its body acts on the environment for a limited time, until, like a lightbulb, the body burns out, allowing the soul, or electricity to flow on. This soul is born again and again in material form, until it has learned all the lessons of the earth...
Sometime during his first incarnation as leader of Tibet in the late 1500s, the Dalai Lama came to a momentous decision. For the sake of Tibet, he decided to reincarnate life after life in the same human niche, as leader of his country, to preserve its spiritual welfare. Each lifetime, before he dies, the Dalai Lama gives several clues as to where his soul will next be born...
...This description is accurate enough, but it may mislead some into expecting much less than this dazzling novel actually delivers. Shikasta owes more to Gulliver's Travels and the Old Testament than to Buck Rogers; it is at once a brief history of the world, a tract against human destructiveness, an ode to the natural beauties of this earth and a hymn to the music of the spheres...
...Arens acknowledges occasional acts of cannibalism. Two weeks ago, for example, Emperor Bokassa I, the deposed leader of the Central African Republic, was reportedly accused of practicing cannibalistic rites. Examples of eating human flesh for survival in emergencies (e.g., the siege of Stalingrad, the Andes plane crash in 1972) also abound...