mindfulness

Yuval Harari has practised Vipassana meditation for 15 years. He means that it is because of this  practise  that he has been able to write  two very interesting books. They have even sold very well. The first is about our history in the long run and the other about a possible future for us. The meditation has helped him to remove some trash from his mind. We are all loaded with ideas, preconceptions and so on.... But to face the way it is can be hard. Harari saw the dark side of the meat industry and became a vegan. He faced this very cruel reality which he calls one of the biggest crimes in our time. And he also become clear of that things like humanism, liberalism, Christianity and so on just are stories or ideas, they can be good or bad. But we may have things like religion or spirituality to decide if  it's good or bad. Anyway science doesn't care about ethics. Harari's own way of  thinking about ethics is to decide if an action causes suffering or not.

Two quotes from her book For the Time Being(1999):  There is now , living in New York, a church sanctioned hermit, Theresa Mancuso, who wrote recently, "The thing we desperately need is to face the way it is." When a person arrives in the world as a baby, says one Midrash, "his hands are clenched to say, 'Everyting is mine. I will inherit it all.' When he departs from the world, his hands are open, as though to say, ' I have acquired nothing from the world.'"  ( In Judaism, the  midrash  is the genre of rabbinic literature which contains early interpretations and commentaries on the Written Torah and Oral Torah) Thank you Annie  

Is it so? We can ask ourselves.... Do we all feel a little bit alienated? A bit out of course? A ship without a port. Running for meaning, and if we don't find it; entertainment. Are we hunted by our thoughts and feelings, our desires. And if look for another way, people say that we are lost, that we are losers. We should walk the broad way. But maybe some of us don't want to see suffering inside, don't want to stop the ratrace. We are really strange creatures. Nature has made us. Yes, we are nature. As we are a part of the universe looking at it self. We are aware of death and the suffering around us, more now than ever, because of the media. It may be an idea to not look too much at the news - because they seldom talk about the good things. They say we are not interested in it. But things change for the better too. At least in the long run: https://www.facebook.com/Avaaz/videos/10154488492703884/ Now we have to let the earth be a

A rare creature under swinging palm leaves great coconuts hanging imminent  above waiting for the next                                 typhoon  her moves are singing her voice is clear as small church bells ringing from  distant   towers from east and south away, away                 they say - like a prayer - or an invocation for fertile land in her hands;  seeds  tiny but some big as her thumb to bring to foreign hands              and soil or just for the pleasure of giving  with a smile and a ”good luck” in the gaze of her eyes her names are Two one for gladness and one for sadness one necessary for the other in an never ending               dance may the sadness never stay too long may the gladness always sing along ----------- The twelfth of February the sun higher now at last above the house south of mine shining in through my open balcony door and

Humanism is a man made ideology, as religion and capitalism and communism  are. It sets the individual homo sapiens in the center. Its no longer the King, the Pope or some Bishop that will say what is right, was is wrong and how we shall behave, If there are no God, there cannot be any absolute truth, at least about such things as ethics, politics and what can write and say about it. The individual should choose  the politicians, and nowadays also the school for their children, the best pharmacy, and as I recently found, even the best inspection firm for the car. Maybe one firm will be more willing to approve your  car... This is quite new in Scandinavia and Sweden. For a long time led by  Social Democrats that was for state owned institutions. Now it seems that  we are in the lead of the opposite trend. Its up to the individual to decide as much as possible Yuval Harari, the Author and professor from Jerusalem, means that this will be complicated as there are no central me o

The headline can mean many things. The word "oneself" can be interpreted in many ways. Is oneself the acts that I do? Or is it the interaction with the environment, as people, animals, nature and material stuff. Or is oneself some kind of core in oneself, a "me" or a soul. There may be no steady soul in oneself. There may be no me at all. If we listen an old thinker as Heraclitus, everything is fluid. Like water. You cannot put your foot in the same river twice. Even the foot will change a little bit. And a person can change as time goes by. If we have no core, change can be fundamental. Sam Harris, the journalist who tried and liked meditation, puts it like this; Just as one wouldn't draw a lasting conclusion about oneself on the basis of a brief experience of indigestion, one needn't do so on the basis of how one has thought or behaved for vast stretches of time in the past. A creative change of inputs to the system - learning new skills, f