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...

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...

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 ...

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.