mindfulness

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