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 di...

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 ...