mindfulness

Maybe the Climate meeting in Paris is the start point for a change. Most world leaders seem to accept what is going on because to the high CO2 level in the atmosphere. Right now the temperature is about +2 degrees C in Stockholm. When I was a kid almost every winter gave us opportunities to ski, build snowmen and so on. Now its seldom so... What most of us don't understand is the total impact of the human activities on the planet. The Nobel price winner Paul Crutzen popularized Antrophocene as a term for the geological era we now live in. "Anthropo" means mankind: We have now influenced the The Earth so much, that the whole biosphere has changed. To be mindful means to see things as they are, and to accept them - and know it's time to see the very dangerous scenario that can be our future. But Crutzen also wants us to see the great achievement that we have made; democracy, United Nations and so on.... He was also one of the researchers that found the

Maybe Brian Swimme has an answer; "We are composed of the sacrifice of a star" "We are a later phase of a transformational process that requires enormous sacrifice and yet gives birth to the possibilities of a new complexity to emerge. We are the human phase of that... we participate in that in concerns of the mystery  of what we can give birth to. " So we are involved in the process of a self organizing organism - the Earth.... Its as the Earth is curios and want to know more about itself..... So we are more small parts of the Earth, more than individuals. And the Earth is a small and beautiful part of a solar system...    and so on Life wants to know                                                                                             Life wants to see So life invented eyes about 40 times.... It is as the Earth really wanted to see..... So whats next in the evolution of life?

"Everything changes and nothing remains still ... and ... you cannot step twice into the same stream" (Heraclitus according to Plato)  But even the foot changes, since new cells die and are born continuously..... So you cannot even step twice in a river with the same foot. Change seems permanent...  Even sorrow and depression will pass.  Though early wounds from childhood can be hard to get rid of, it is possible to be aware of them and to take care of them...  Like you would treat an inner child. But don't let sorrow and fear guide you and don't project it on the surroundings. Then you will end up with more trouble.... Metta meditation is a way to handle deep wounds... (though there may be other ways)

silence makes your thoughts more visible  so you can listen to them they are children of your ancestors , your upbringing and your environment and only partly yours just listen to them without condemning you cant get rid of them but you can embrace them  and make them calmer can you hear your mother and father? (music by Peteris Vasks from Lithuania, you can see him at the end)

What does that mean? In a postmodern time, with no solid values - religion seems to be old fashioned, belongs to an older society, at least the rituals and the religions that take away our own responsibility. God is taken down to earth, or is something to believe when we are in real crises. We  now know that we can make a disaster on earth and that we , as long as we have been on earth, have chased the big animals to extinction. We know that we no longer are in the center of the solar system. And that the solar system is in the outskirts of the galaxy and so on....                                           Freud and other after him, has shown that we even cant control ourselves. Dawkins with friends mean that the genes control us. Religion is just superstition. What is left? What to believe in? Is it really just to believe in oneself? Can it be as Wittgenstein has written; meaning lays in the context of language. We construct the meanings.Or maybe can the meanin

The young professor of philosophy from Germany, Markus Gabriel, explains that our  personality's is a kind of art. And this a theme in modern painting and theater: We are also our own painters and actors. Men is a living creativity. Creativity, fantasies and originality show the personality of man and they can to be thought away from humankind. So unicorns exist, at least in fiction and songs. His answer to the question; "Who am I?" is;  What ever holds my mental life together. But there are much less unity of my mental life then I will think it is. there is not a unity my mental life that is "me".Most of us are not schizophrenic and we can separate from other people and from our fantasies, at least to some extend. But as I have claimed; what holds us together is our stories about ourselves, our story about history and so on. And as we have a quite bad memory the stories will never be completely true. We also tend to emphasize our good moments, a

If you walk in a forest you are influenced by the trees and the sun and so on... And you will influence the forest too... How you behave to other people and animals will pass over to them and spread in time.... But its probably impossible to hold on to things, people or pets or even to yourself Everything will melt away like snow; It's more easy to accept that everything change  if you sometimes can feel that there are no independent self, and it has never been... When we were very small we could feel this naturally. The body of our mother and our body felt as if it was the same... When we get older we loose that feeling - but try to reach it again through sexuality.... When we get even older we might understand that concepts  like "me" and "you" can fool us. We need them and the names we have, but that doesn't mean that we are closed entities ... We are both individuals and  one with everything.... There are two realities. And I t

Yuval Harari says this in the end of this lecture and explains why....  He even means that when we started to be farmers we lost the ability to be here and now as the hunters had to be. We always crave for more, because the genes want us to go on, we want to achieve, we will never be totally satisfied.  Maybe its time to understand this if we don't want to be ruled by the selfish genes....

If you do some planting you soon understand the middle way. The plants need water, but not too much. They need sunshine but not too much. The need fertilizer, but not too much. They need the insects, but not too much of them. To plant and see it grow means that we see that the soil is needed. Some see this as a metaphor; we need the suffering to be happy... The lotus need the mud to grow. But for me the mud is not dirty, I'm more afraid or too clean areas as shopping gallerias Today I made some planting. Its actually wonderful to feel the soil in your hands and to see the worms helping the soil to be watered. Today I saw some black aphids on one of my plants. And there were some ants too. I first thought that the ants were feeding on the aphids. But soon I understood that the ants were "milking" the black aphids;  A nts feed on the sugary honeydew left behind by aphids. But they can also tickle them with their antennas to get the honeydew. In

False dilemmas or false dichotomy are quite common. I guess it's a way of thinking that is convenient. One example is black and white thinking. Lets say, Europeans behave like this but people from Asia behave like this. Animals is like that and huma beings like this. Our concepts betray us. Therfore its good for som time to stop thinking or at least have som distance to our thoughts and to ourselves. Not seldom we look at ourselves in this way. We condemn our selves to be loosers, poor or not good enough. Then we are stuck in false dichotemys. Life is more complicated than our thinking can grasp. And those dychotemys can be dangerous; this kind of thinking has led to wars and hostility. We tell stories about ourselves and other people.  Therefore it can be good to have a look at our beliefs and at the stories we tell to ourselves and to others. To take a break from them; it may be stories that are inherited from our ancestors or from the culture. It can be stor

Yuval Harari, the historian from Jerusalem, ends his  book "Sapiens" with the words: We cause disasters for other animals and in the surrounding eco-system when we chase more comfort and entertainment.  In the book he has given us  "a brief history of humankind" in a kind of satellite perceptive. In that perceptive he includes animal as chickens and cows... Even if we in some ways now live a more comfortable life than our for-fathers, we are no more happy and our comfort is payed by the animals that we eat and  by the devastated nature. As soon a  Homo Sapiens got to the American continent we started to hunt the big animals as the saber toothed tiger and the mastodonts to extinction. So maybe it's time to leave our anthropocentric view and to examine our way of life. It's a question of to survive in the long run or not Is a new narrative maybe a solution? As Harari explains we anyway  tell stories to each other everyday. That is what dif

We are moving in space - spinning around the sun and the sun is spinning too, as the galaxy is - everything is moving and maybe without direction? It seems that we are spinning without direction too... When I'm going to sleep I can feel the desires rumbling around in my head - like small and sudden flashes; Longing for some food, for tenderness, for a warm body near mine, for security.... It's too late to let the come true and I can name them as desires. And  I can watch them with curiosity... They are probably under the surface in the daytime too. Maybe I know them better after these years of meditating... Joni Mitchell sings; too much people and too much desires on this earth. She is probably right... But can it be that those desires is driving us to places and situations that we cannot foresee A man on the subway beside me - an umbrella costume and an I pad in a basket. He is fingering on his tie, stretching it. His fingers on the other hand are also moving in

I have been here before. A month ago - same bar, same table at the pavement. Probably the same chair. Drinking the same kind of coffee. Then everything was new to me. The stream of motorcycles, the sellers (some of them are the same) and the thin men with their cyklos. A lot of guesthouses and travel centers. It's in the backpackers area and the guests in the bar is also about the same: Young westerners sipping Saigon red, the local beer. An open Lonely Planet on the table, planning their next move: Cambodia? Mekong river? Phu Quoc? I have just visited the two last places and even stayed some days at a friends place in Bien Hoa, a smaller town an hour on bus north of Saigon. A smaller town means about one million, in Saigon there are at least nine million inhabitants; as in the whole of Sweden. A month in this country is of course a too short time too understand  it. I'm just a visitor, a stranger - living in a country that has not seen war for 250 years. Of course