mindfulness

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