mindfulness

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 ...

Marx is supposed to have said; I am no Marxist. Perhaps Buddha would have said the same about Buddhism. (Perhaps Christ about Christianity) Dan Harris Writes in an article about this: We have to differ Buddhas Dharma from Buddhism or from religion as a phenomena. Even if Buddha was right his teachings have been popularized and vulgarized. But the original teachings can be used in a context outside of Buddhism Harris argues: Algebra comes from the Arabs, but now it's used by the whole world. Science came from the west but belongs to everyone that practice it - and so on. Harris is the US news anchor that found out that mindfulness helped him - though it was no miracle cure. I use to practice mindfulness with a "light" Buddhist group inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh. You don't have to be a Buddhist to join in, but they emphasize some ethics that is fine for me: http://plumvillage.org/mindfulness-practice/the-5-mindfulness-trainings/    It was hard from th...

If you are interested in Philosophy or religion, you probably also are interested in ethics. The fruits of the earth belongs to everybody but the earth belongs to nobody.... We have found out that we live in a very small planet in a giant universe. Just a blue water drop in a sea of planets, stars and galaxies. We have done this because of our intelligence. But even though there are things we cannot measure and things that mathematics is of no use. Maybe the most valuable experiences are like this. for instance birdsong. If the birdsong finished most of us would be missing it badly. But how many dollars are the birdsong worth? What would we do to save for our children? It's easier if we look at a bigger picture - if we destroy our forests and lakes it will in the end decrease our chance to survive on this planet Most of us understand that. Anyway we have problems to grasp it. First comes the stomach, then the moral, as Bertold Brecht puts it in the play, Mutter ...

  Well, Wittgenstein didn't write directly about mindfulness.  But his first book.  Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,  ends with the world;" Whereof  one   cannot     speak , thereof one must be silent." That resembles meditation; If you want to experience the absolute reality you have to stop thinking. If you will have some space between your thoughts you will feel less separated from everything else.  And then again -we always have to return to the conventional truth – it's where we live. In the book Wittgenstein also claim that religion and science speaks different languages and shouldn't be mixed up.  As religion is about myth's it show us way to live our lives.  That can also be said about mindfulness in the Buddhist context.   It is for sure shown in the five mindfulness trainings. A version of the eightfold path prepared by Tich Nath Hanh in Plum Village.  It is meant for a guide for...

In her book, "Are you an illusion?" Mary Midgley supports holism She argues that the thoughts we have, the longing and the choices we make are important - it's i not only signals in the brain. Perhaps obvious, but not if you are a 100% reductionist... We also have some freedom, I can lift my arm when I decide to do so... So our will  seems to influence the brain and the muscles in the arm - we are not totally ruled by the genes, as Dawkins seems to mean. A Buddhist would say that the  brain and the mind is interrelated. Without the brain there would be no mind. But without the mind - no brain. Or; the brain has been developed to construct mind - without the mind the brain would have no function and would therefore be smaller and smaller  like our smallest toes are... - because of that we now seldom climb trees, There must for sure be a self in each men, she argues. and mocks the philosophers  that  claims that the self just is an illusion, though ...

If we have no permanent or separate self, we probably would change quite often. And we do... Our mood swings not just with aging - less testosterone in men and more in women - but also over days or weeks. So the teenager and the old man cannot be really the same... But some things in us seems to remain the same - do you for instance like the same music now as when you were seventeen? Or some of it? Or maybe some music  are timeless... (doesn't matter what genre) ? Anyway - in this guys there are many hormones acting - but there must be something more... I suppose we are not just matter.... For instance - what is music?