mindfulness

We are going towards a society where artificial intelligence will have more and more importance and power. Descartes meant that animals are automates. But if they are, we are too! Animals are conscious, they have feelings and so on, even insects at some level. Though we have more  intelligence than other animals. But machines can be intelligent too. Even more intelligent than we are (depending on what we mean with the term intelligence). Yuval Harari and others mean that we will interact with AI and be super intelligent and become so different that we can call it a new specie. But just very rich people can afford it. So we will have different species on earth, as when the neanderthals lived here. The physician Michio Kaku means that the brain is not more or less than  a biological machine. And it may be replicated, even if it will be very difficult. But what about ethics?  And what about art? What about meaning? Immanuel Kant meant that he had moralistic laws in

Well it´s not a question about win or loose - it's about definitions. Empathy often means something like ; the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. The keywords is "share the feelings of another".  Of course it's okay to share the feelings of a friend, or a happy person. But many around us is not happy, and if we read the news we may think that no one is happy. So empathy can be exhausting.  In mindfulness compassion often means "love and kindness". Also called metta. That word  derives from Pali, an ancient language in India spoken and written in the lifetime of Buddha. It can be helpful to meditate on compassion, specially if it is for all beings, without discrimination.  You may feel well after a metta meditation.  But it will be to no use if you don't act in some way. But the action doesn't have to driven by just feelings.  We can look at our feelings and not act immediately. Maybe we can find a more effecti

In times of nationalism and talk about borders and fences, it's important to see the bigger picture. From the time that humans spread from Africa, our world have become bigger and bigger. And the interaction between different parts of the world have increased. As Yuval Harari has stressed, is this trend supported by dark events like wars, colonization and in these days the climate effect. In the long run this trend seem unstoppable. Once the Romans built a wall in England to secure the empire, Hadrian's wall. It's still there. Very long, from shore to shore. Hadrian was an emperor from 117 to 138 AD. The western part of the empire was soon going to undermine itself. But now, in a much more peaceful time, the borders in Europe is secured on other ways and its still possible for  the most of us to travel in Europe. We live in quite peaceful time, compared to the last centuries. Media reports of every incident, so it seems not to be so, but it is. And

John Grays book is titled after a sentence by Lau Tzu: Heaven an earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs.  Near the end of his book Gray is more direct: The good life is not found in dreams of m progress, but in coping with tragic contingencies. We have been reared on religions and philosophies that deny the experience of tragedy. Can we imagine a life that is not founded in the consolations of action? Or are we too lax and coarse even to dream of living without them? A life without action would be a meditating life, I guess. But meditating that includes the destructive forces in the universe. Even forces like depression or worries or hatred. The person who can have a look at it dark sides, without suppressing them, may not let the be outlived in action. Even so, catastrophes may lead to new life. When another planet crashed  in to the earth in the early days of the universe, the remains were, more or less, only small dust. But by time the dust

Carlo Rovelli is trying to explain the riddle of quantum mechanics. The riddle resides in the fact that the theory works very well but we don't know how. How can the a wave suddenly act as a particle when it's observed? Rovelli means that its about interaction. We should not see manifestations as photons or mountains as independent objects: "I believe that in order to understand reality we have to understand that reality is this network of relations, of reciprocal information, which weaves the world..... reality is nor made up of discreet  objects. It is a variable flux. Think of an ocean wave. Where does a wave finish? Where does it begin?.... a wave and a mountain is not objects in themselves, they are ways that we have of slicing up the world to apprehend it, to speak about it more easy". ( From Rovelli - Reality is not what it seems) So it seems that Rovelli has the same view as Buddha. Things and persons have no intrinsic selves. And it's about the

David Chalmers is a supporter of that view.  He is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Counsiousness at the Australian National University. We now understand that mice have some kind of empathy. An experiment has shown that if one mice in a group is suffering, the other will suffer too and will try to help the first one. (not a very emphatic experiment though): http://www.onekind.org/education/animal_sentience/empathy/empathy_in_mice/ We have also learnt that trees and other plants can help "friends" with the help of the roots. For instance has Peter Wohlleben written a book about that; http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/30/world/europe/german-forest-ranger-finds-that-trees-have-social-networks-too.html?_r=0 So in a way even trees seem to be conscious, but in to a lower degree than animal like us. David Chalmers theory is still a hypothesis, but indeed a very interesting one and close to the Buddhist view that  everything is conscious In a

Some says that the universe seems to be self-organizing organism. Well, if it is some kind of huge organism, we cannot know.  But it is for sure self-organizing. The galaxies formed itself into different kind of shapes.  Supernovas have exploded and created the stuff our whole planet are made of, our selves included.  So, anyway some part of the universe is conscious. Some part of the universe write songs and are looking at other galaxies.  Brian Swimme is a supporter of this view;  He gives us the bigger picture of our history, and that is for sure needed.  When I do metta meditations I often end with the universe. I try to imagine the expanding universe and wishing it peace, safety, good health and to live in peace. I now it sound naive and a bit crazy, but try it for yourself for a shirt time. But begin with yourself, and maybe the other people around. A actually did that today at a small vegetarian restaurant with just a few guests.  My view of my

Pollution is here to stay, it seems. Peteris Vasks, the composer, lives by the Baltic sea, as I do. This sea is quite fragile because not so much fresh and salty water reach it from the bigger Atlantic sea. Its a semi-enclosed inland sea. Most fishes and organism as jellyfish are less common and smaller compared to the Atlantic. A lot of fertilizer comes from the countries around the sea and it is, for instance, problems with algal blooms in summer. Vasks knows this and is troubled with it. He anyway wants to give us beautiful music, but its easy to, at least in some of it, see a nature in pain. Some of us who are mindful of this are maybe willing to decrease our living standard for the sake of the environment. But must of us would not do it. vote for a government  which  would like to stop economic growth. According to Yuval Harari, the historian,  no political leader  would stay long on the top if he/she wasn't for economic growth. No matter if it is in a democra

To be by yourself in nature is a gift from the Earth to you. Enjoy it and maybe you can hold the moment in yourself like a hidden flower for a long time. You don't have to speak about the beauty with someone. But you may be grateful for it and in your turn give it to someone else in the form of a hug or a smile. So the great gift will pass on and on from person to person in different forms. And may come back to you, even if you don't recognize it.

Andrej Tarkovskij is a legend in film  history. Though that history is quite short. In a short video by the philosopher Zizek there is an interesting view of Tarkovsky's film Stalker. '   If T has a special view of time it must be something like this. T often let work of famous painters, like da Vinci or the icon painter Rublev, be seen for some seconds, just a glimpse. Or the characters seem to be in an arcaic landscape. According to T it's because his will to connect his media to the rest of the history of art. Film is a young media and needs to connect to older art. But T also had an eye for the complexity time, nearly as Einstein had; the room or space cannot be separated from time.   T didn't do films for the masses and just made a few films and had problems with censors in the Soviet union. He wanted to live there but couldn't make the films he wanted to there, so the last film he made in Sweden. He had a great longing for Russia but also fo

We believe that there is an up an on down. The floor in my apartment is a ceiling  for the people in the place below. For me up is in the sky, but for the people in Australia the same direction is means down. Einstein discovered that time and space is one thing, space-time. This is not our gut feeling or intuition want to understand. we have no use for it in our daily life. Therefore our thinking is not used to it. Instead our thinking is more or less useful for a life in the savanna, looking for snakes, enemies in the bush or people with another kind of looking; they may be dangerous. So we have a tendency for racism or for film with much violence and with "bad" persons in it. And so we will be even more afraid for the unknown. Scientist invent more and more things and our frightened brains use many of them as weapons. Fabrics produce a lot of things, as cars and cloth as we use to impress each other as we are looking for love. If we have time for it we can

Prospero's speech at the end of The Tempest could be Shakespeare's own view. It is said that he was a melancholy man. At least he was influenced by of the very violent time he was born into He wrote The Tempest at his hometown He had returned to Stratford-upon-Avon for the last years of his life. And Prospero is said to be his Alter Ego. Carlo  Rovelli ends another speech in England, but nearer in time, with Prosperos's words. Rovelli  reveals, in this iaitv speech, that time is not a straight arrow to the future, instead we are living, not in dream, but it in the web of spacetime. The structure of reality is like a fabric that makes waves and bends. Here's Rovelli at iaitv And when you can hear Shakespeare's words at YouTube  in a new video, it's a kind of bending of time, isn't it? Time goes a little bit slower at the surface of the Earth than one meter above it, because  spacetime is bending toward our planet. As you can see Rovelli wou

The EPR paradox was a thought experiment by Einstein and two other scientist. They wanted to proof that the Copenhagen interpretation of quanta mechanics was wrong. There can be no chance involved in the normal world and not even in the really small world of atoms and photons. The paradox showed that the outcome of the quanta mechanics was that two atoms or photons that are entangled and then separated could react to each other with no time in between in the quantum world according to the thought experiment - and that would be impossible, said Einstein. Some information must sent between the particles - and that takes time... But experiment done later have shown that it is so. If you measure  one atom/photon the other will react immediately to the measurement. John Wheelers solution to the paradox was that the human thought creates reality. If we decide that a book is something to read it will be like that. If someone decides to build a house of books, they become "brick

View from my meditation place

Its' not a foolish question. I have seen two films who one more time send this question to us. As we are animals made to survive as individual and as a specie, we seldom ask this kind of questions. We have no use or them in our strive on earth. We want too feed our selves, make children and look or enemies, to fight or to flee from. We want some status, we want to improve our reputation and so on. One man working in a cool mine i Germany said to some demonstration who wanted to put down the mine; "Why - it's going to and i disaster anyway.." As he meant that it was too late... Maybe evolution is the director of our drama; it´s good for a specie to have some fights, so the strongest ones will survive and have children. But I guess the director hadst calculated with  technology. Now we can destroy most life on Earth very fast. So we have to evolve very fast, and we can evolve through culture and ideas. The way we have behaved have changed a lot because of

Love and freedom. To give of yourself to another person is great thing. When I help mentally retarded people they help me too - and often I feel great love for them. Often I admire their sensibility and innocence. I guess it's an act of agape, but without a god. Just loving one person seems to me very childish or futile. But it may be me that is childish. And love without freedom can be dangerous; to not give the other one space to do her own moves and maybe mistakes. We must try to love other people as they are, even if it can be hard. In Dostoevsky's The Karamasov Brothers, he let's one of them say; it's only possible to love people from a distance... It may be so, but maybe it's also only possible to love oneself from a distant and humble view... To have a look at our feelings and thoughts without judging or condemning them. In meditation its possible to do that... And it may also be possible to understand where the feelings and thoughts co

I'm not sure there is a path in ones life. And if it is, it must be crossed by other paths. It's impossible to have a path totally for oneself. Other people or animals, for sure, have had the same experiences like you; the same joy, same anger and the same longing. Even if we go to the other side of the continent, we will meet the same needs. When I stayed with a Vietnamese family  for a week, I soon understood that we had much in common. Just different languages made it difficult to communicate. Maybe it's about the weather, but the way to act was a little bit more relaxed than in Scandinavia. And of course the culture and the experiences differ. The older people that have gone through the war may have invisible scares. But we share many problems, as the pollution of the air and the sea and too much drugs and so on. And if I drive a car here i Sweden I will contribute a little to the rising see level that can threaten cities like Saigon. J Krishnamurt

In a former blog post Asma had a conversation with Robert Wright in a video. Now I'm reading a book by Asma where he explains why he is a Buddhist. The subtitle goes; "No-Nonsense Buddhism for Modern Living". Asma is a professor of philosophy at Columbia University in Chicago and author of several books. In the book he shows us his interpretation of western Buddhism today. He has lived, for instance, in Cambodia and is familiar with the traditions there. In the video he explains that the traditions in Asia often is mixed with animism. That's why you can find holy Coke blessed by the deities in the temples in Vietnam and other eastern countries. Pure and very original Buddhism only exists in some temples in Sri Lanka, and is only practiced by a few monks, according to Asma. But he means that you don´t have to believe in karma or reincarnation to be a Buddhist. Since we have no permanent soul we cannot go on after death. And our actions doesn't seem to com

I'm back outside of a little house at the countryside at Gotland, a big Island in the Baltic sea. It's nighttime and the sky is clear. I can see a lot of stars and some planets as Jupiter and Venus. I can hear the sea nearby and a nightingale's intense song. But what most struck me is the small and moving things up in the sky, so fast and so steady; satellites. We are everywhere, we dominate the Earth and now we are exploring new planets too. The satellites help us too see the beauty of the Earth, and also the complexity and interacting side of our planet. For instance, the cool streams from Antarctica helps the whole sea system to be balanced an to have the same average temperature. More and more often the Earth is called "a living organism", even by scientists. But nowadays it's an organism that is threatened by mankind. In the Chauvet caves in southern France, there are paintings on the walls that are more than 30 000 years old. Mostly i

... but not the one we think of. In a conversation with Robert Wright  and Stephen Asma  the latter speaks about research of the brain in animals that has shown that there be an early part of the brain that can be seen as a permanent self. Both for humans and animals, and anyway as long as we stay alive. The thoughts and the stories we tell about our selves are not a self, for instance because of our tendency to deceive our selves. So we have much in common with other animals and maybe even with plants. A core-self that not has anything to do with personality or language - but probably with feelings and cravings. So we cannot get rid of the cravings with thought, but we can handle them... Maybe not always with sitting  meditation,  exercise or drawing may sometimes be better..... But as a lay Buddhist Asma can drink some whiskey in the evening if he's not attached to it... As the craving never will go away why not respect them a little...  Here's the conversation (

Body and mind are impermanent, suffering and are out of our control. We cannot stop the chattering monkey in our mind, but we can listen to him/her and let the chattering go. As we know, our health also is impermanent, one day we are not able to do do the things we wish to do. Here is was dying people mostly regretted on their deathbed; She talked to old people who was dying in Australia and summed it up in five answers. Maybe the answers had been a bit different in another culture. Number five shows that the fear of changes  may make us to put up a facade, and stay in old habits and patterns. So the knowledge of the ever changing world can be of great value, o not get stuck. Number three says that people regretted that they hadn't shown their feeling more often. I guess that means feeling of love, gratitude and compassion etc. I don't thing we are proud of our feelings of shame, hatred, jealousy and so on, Maybe many of us have been afraid of the word "no&q

Lets go a little bit further... lets say that it is like many people that have a NDU mean:. We are quite violent or at least ignorant towards each other lets say that this life is just a short visit in an quite hostile environment... Lets say that what counts is small moments of kindness. In that case, even a cat, a dog or a parrot can be as much kind as a human being. Prince also had the idea that this life is very short and we shouldn't identify with it too much. Maybe he here was influenced by the Jehovah witnesses. But or may also be his own thoughts. The witnesses couldn't stop him from doing very sexy videos, even in the late years. But they were never violent. He didn't seem to be so interested in violence. As many of us sadly are. As Janis Joplin he was bullied on the young years and later tried to compensate for this. He involved humor and some irony in the music in an intelligent way. And he surely wanted to entertain, as

Not only Shakespear's  Prospero, but also Rich Kelley claims this. It may be that was he says is false, but he has the right to have his perspective. And in this perspective meditation shows up in a new light. Buddha spoke about the five skandhas; material form, feelings, perception, mental formations and sensory consciousness. In Kelley's view the senses brings us the experience on Earth. But they also bind us to the Earth. That means, we think that the stage and the play is for real. But we are only here to have experiences that we have wished and  be entertained  and in that way learn new things. And therefore we have to live in an illusory world. It's looks like the Buddhist talk about of conventional and fundamental truth's. We have to deal with one truth at a time. But we can be aware of the other. The fundamental truth that Kelley experienced may be just imagination but is anyway interesting. And the idea that meditation can give us a tem

Its all about angles. If we use another perspective we can see everything in another light; Anat Fort speaks about that in this video The tunes  can be listened to in different ways. Dependent, for instance, on the mood we are in that day... But what about silence, is it possibly to listen to silence in different ways? or is the silence a reduction of all angles. To stop the interpretations and just leave things as "they are"... To accept that you fully can't understand the world. To leave concepts an ideas.... and anyway be alive.... as dog and cats are alive It's clear that language  isn't enough when we look at the stars on a clear night... Its impossible to really describe what we see Someone have said that we would go crazy if we really understood our insignificance in the universe... To meditate is in way to be smaller as the ego disappears when we empty ourselves. For a while the words  and all angles disappear. But inste

Maybe art is the best describer of life. As for instance dance. We are complex organisms. Its hard for us be guided by principles or rules. And if we do we often want to brake them, as we want freedom too. Evolution works in us and lights up our brain with desires like power, sex, food and so on....                                          But we may have have other and more subtle desires too Words speak in us.  The body moves in strange ways of itself, like cranes dancing.  We loose control, and we love it. suddenly life dances in us in new ways If we are in despair we have to remember;  everything changes and ends even bad times  we can all resurrect  from the dead and start to dance in joy                                           

The paintings of Turner is often recognized as representations of the sublime. The terrifying  powers outside of us, that we are drawn to and rejects. Schopenhauer divides the sublime in four different parts; The fullest feeling of the sublime is for him, "immensity of universes extent or duration (Pleasure from knowledge of observers nothingness end oneness with nature)." Wikipedia Note that it's about pleasure  even here. But it's not a pleasure that we desire, because we don't  fully know it, it comes sudden and unexpected, beyond all possibility and calculation. It can also include some horror or greatness that is hard to perceive. So its nor about beauty, though beauty can be a part of it.... Its more of sudden greatness... Nowadays we may relate to an indifference cosmos                                           Two galaxies colliding forming a giant heart                                           Beauty combined with horror. But som

It's Easter Listening to the Johannes Passion The powerful beginning is a foreboding of the crucifixion. Mythology is so important. Christianity has meant a lot, even if its just ideas. Before resurrection it must be suffering Buddha suffered too when he saw the handicapped, the sick and the old people. And when he tried too hard with fastening and mediation. Both Jesus and Buddha meant that there is a way from suffering. Follow me, they say.  But suffering seems to always be there. Why? Perhaps because everything is impermanent. And deep inside we know it, even though commercials often stops when everything is perfect.... And often we want to believe in a perfect world, at least for ourselves.  Even religions, as Buddhism, want the perfect luck. they have "commercialism" about Nirvana and so on. Mindfulness can for sure make it easier for us, but it cannot take away the suffering, but its a tool to handle it. But we also need companionsh

"Reality" - what does it mean? If you look for the word in a modern dictionary or at Wikipedia, you will probably no longer will be so sure what it means. Is it more of a dance than something stable? We can have the view of Markus Gabriel or Yuval Harari; a mountain is a mountain. It's there wherever we see it or not. So the Earth. Science can best describe the mountain, though there are different angles to see it from. But what abut nations, novels, human rights, kings, music; all the man made things made by concepts. Lets include mindfulness and Buddhism? And those things are the most important things for us. I it reality or not? Gabriel argues that those things are so different from physics, that they must be seen as different worlds; The brain creates the reality for us, and can be important to know that if you help people with brain damages. But, as we now when we are voting for new politicians;  even without brain damages we can see or

Immanuel Kant took long walks in Königsberg (nowadays Kaliningrad). He didn't want to "work" when he walked, so he didn't think of his philosophy. I'm sure he sometimes just walked without thinking at all. Then he was mindful. When he wrote about the thing in itself  he for sure was near the Buddhist view of no concept. The iaitv maker Hilary Lawson writes in his book about how we close our view of the world when we label a thing and narrow the interpretation of it. His book is called Closure - a story of everything. I haven't heard him relating to Kant, though often to Wittgenstein. But Kant and Wittgenstein plays in the same football team, so to say. Maybe they would argue about the tactics and what the world ball means ;~} We can only now the thing for me, according to Kant and for me includes categories of understanding as  for instance time and space (we have to see, for instance, a chair in special place and in a special space, may