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Non-violent revolution We can’t know what is happening on the streets of Cairo. Our press is not free or ambitious enough to investigate deeply and report on the motivations of protestors, or the organizations that worked in the background to enable the current movement. But given what we know, it looks quite hopeful. It appears that people have come together, angry but not violent, to demand more democratic control over their government. Whatever will be the outcome of this uprising, it is not too early to celebrate its occurrence. The Middle East has been a tinderbox for decades. In the past five
years, we have seen significant uprisings in Lebanon, Iran, Tunisia, and
now Egypt. These protests all have one thing in common: people
screaming for more self-determination...Hosni Mubarak has been in power since 1981,
taking control after the assassination of Anwar Sadat. Mubarak’s
stanglehold on the country wears thin, as he grows old, and rumors of
his son ascending to the leadership position are rampant. Democracy
activists feel this is their opportunity. Mubarak is sick and weak, his
son has yet to consolidate power, and with the economy in shambles,
there may never be a moment such as this for Egyptian democracy. ...and if democracy comes to Egypt, can the USA be far behind? More than the anti-Soviet protests of the late
1980s, the Egyptian uprisings reveal what might eventually come home to
the empire itself. Under the right conditions, and at the right time,
there might come a time when the consciousness will dawn right here in
the USA. It could happen here for the same reason it could happen
anywhere. |
1 February 2011
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Chaos from order ‘The recognition that simple and fully deterministic rules or equations can generate dynamical patterns which are effectively indistinguishable from random noise has very deep implications for science. It effectively marks the end of the Newtonian dream that knowing the rules will enable prediction.’ |
2 February 2011
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If If you can disentangle |
3 February 2011
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“Sing like no one’s listening, love like you’ve never been hurt, dance like nobody’s watching, and live like it’s heaven on earth.” — Mark Twain |
4 February 2011
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not to be hoodwinked by our genes Physics and philosophy are our maps. They can be judged as true or false according to whether they correspond or do not correspond to fact. But mysticism (or religion) is a journey, and about a journey one does not ask whether it is true or false, but only where it goes. Will it take me to the goal? Our problem is to reach the goal. To see beyond the screen. You remember that Swami Vivekananda said that the Universe is the Absolute seen through the screen of time, space, and causation. It’s no use asking how the Absolute became the Universe. The Absolute has not become the Universe any more than the rope has become a snake. Our problem is to see it straight. And you remember that Sri Ramakrishna said that maya is nothing but the egotism of the embodied soul. And that is genetic. The
prime directives of the genetic programming are to direct a stream of
negative entropy upon ourselves and to pass on the genetic line. That is
why we feel ourselves to be the doers of action and the enjoyers of its
fruits. It is just a genetic mirage. The genes have us persuaded that by
following their dictates we’ll reach the peace of the changeless, the
freedom of the infinite, and the bliss of the undivided. They don’t have
it to give. We don’t get the undivided; we get a family. You must have
noticed. |
5 February 2011
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In praise of truthiness We lie to ourselves about our importance and our unique abilities. As a community, we have myths and outright falsehoods that provide the common basis of our interactions and the choices we are called upon to make as a body. If we held ourselves to a strict standard of truth, we would be dysfunctional, isolated and depressed. Ethel and Esther were twins, separated at birth by a natural disaster and adopted into different homes. Ethel was told by her parents that she would grow to be a world leader, thus it was important that she thought deeply about what she believed, practiced exemplary behaviors and cared consistently for herself and others. Esther was taught that most of what happens in the world is beyond our control, and often beyond even our understanding. We never really know what the consequences of our actions might be, and we must live each day knowing it might be our last. Esther grew to be moody and sullen, with trouble concentrating and few friends. Ethel grew to be gregarious, good-natured, hard-working and well-loved by everyone who knew her. Neither of them accomplished anything of consequence. On their 53rd birthday, Esther was driving from Bremen to Berlin at the same time that Ethel was driving from Berlin to Bremen. Ethel hit a patch of ice, lost control of her car and swerved into Esther’s lane. They were both killed instantly. Based on a benign falsehood, Ethel had lived a full, engaged and happy life. Esther had struggled with loneliness and depression rooted in a broad, realistic outlook on the world. Caution: You must not take the moral of this story to heart, nor should you believe any of what you have read above. Though it may be true, it marks the beginning of a slippery slope, leading only to dissolution. A habit of indulging small lies that are truly benign inevitably metastasizes into lying for convenience, and eventually you will retreat from reality sufficiently to make some disastrous misjudgment. — Josh Mitteldorf |
6 February 2011
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Untouched by cars, plastic and antibiotics There remain tribes of people who have never been visited by an anthropologist, let alone a drilling rig. Most of them are in Brazil. Not much is known about them, by definition. Some have been photographed from the air. Perhaps they are a potential source of information about our stone age forebears. BBC article If I had the opportunity to meet these people, what would I have to teach them that they might value? The next steps in their development, historically ought to be agricultural monoculture and smelting copper. I’m afraid they might not see the value of monoculture, and I wouldn’t know how to tell them to smelt copper. But what might they teach me? I imagine that they are sensitive to aspects of themselves that I’ve lost through disuse. Perhaps they can navigate in the forest, and know how to get home, no matter how many times they’ve been turned around. What herbs and forest remedies do they know about? Perhaps they can smell each other’s emotions in a way that needs no words. Perhaps they have intuitions or premonitions that tell them when a relative is in trouble and needs their help. I would like to learn another way of paying attention to the ongoing experience of living in my body. I don’t imagine that their society is peaceful, democratic, or tolerant of outsiders, but I could be surprised. |
7 February 2011
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Can I remember a time before I learned to be separate?
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8 February 2011
Elizabeth Bishop in 1916 |
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Working for social change and working for personal growth We sometimes hear from spiritual teachers that working for social change places a Band-aid on human suffering, that it doesn’t address the deep existential roots of the problems, and that it distracts us from our real spiritual work. This mirrors the comment of my activist friends that inner work is at worst a fundamental delusion and at best an escapist luxury – as Marx proclaimed, religion is the ‘opium of the people.’ To really address the roots of suffering, they say, we need to change economic, social, and political structures and ideologies. ...We don’t have to make an impossible choice between these two paths. We can bring them together. We can link deep inner work with action in the world, in which our spiritual values infuse our response to the needs of the world, whether we are community organizers, teachers, activists, lawyers, or parents. The two paths need one another, and our times desperately call for both spiritual and social commitments. — Donald Rothberg, from The Engaged Spiritual Life |
9 February 2011
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Community thrives in hard times We believe our society has almost everything we need to build stronger communities, reduce inequality, live in harmony with the earth, and make a graceful transition to a new sustainable economy. But we won’t get there ignoring the data, and we won’t get there disconnected from one another. There is no need to face the future alone. Find your own “reality support group” (we’ll tell you how below). This year, make a resolution to deepen your relationships with people around you with whom you can face what’s coming down the pike. |
10 February 2011
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Who would have imagined that the computer’s earliest achievements would be in the domain of logical analysis, a capacity once held to be what made us most different from everything else on the planet? That it could fly a plane and guide a missile before it could ride a bike? That it could create plausible preludes in the style of Bach before it could make plausible small talk? That it could translate before it could paraphrase? That it could spin half-discernible essays on postmodern theory before it could be shown a chair and say, as most toddlers can, “chair”? As computers have mastered rarefied domains once thought to be uniquely human, they simultaneously have failed to master the ground-floor basics of the human experience—spatial orientation, object recognition, natural language, adaptive goal-setting—and in so doing, have shown us how impressive, computationally and otherwise, such minute-to-minute fundamentals truly are. We forget how impressive we are. Computers are reminding us. — Brian Chrstian, writing in The Atlantic, describes his experience participating in the annual Loebner Prize competition. Experts are given 5 minutes converse IM-style on a keyboard with a human and with a computer impersonating a human, and their job is to tell which is which. |
11 February 2011
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Panthea WE are resolved into the supreme air, With beat of systole and of diastole And we two lovers shall not sit afar, We shall be notes in that great Symphony — Oscar Wilde |
12 February 2011
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It may be argued whether virtue is its own reward. Sometimes virtue seems to be its only reward. But when it comes to love: surely love is its own reward. To love is a richer, more wondrous experience by far than to be loved. The yearning to love leads always to elevation of the soul, while the pursuit of another’s love leads to degradation of the soul, often to humiliation and failure as well. Resolving to love, you cannot fail. Pursuing the rainbow of another’s love, you can hardly succeed. — Josh Mitteldorf |
13 February 2011
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i carry your heart with me i carry your heart with me(i carry it in — e e cummings |
14 February 2011
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The Buddha’s Last Day Thus have I heard. At one time, the Buddha was staying at Kusinagara in
the land of the At that time, there were present such women as Kuddara and such bhiksunis [nuns] as Subhadra, Upananda, Sagaramati, and 6 million bhiksunis. They were all great arhats. All ‘asravas’ [inner defilements] having been done away with, they were unmolested in mind and could act as they willed. They were parted from all illusion and all their sense-organs were subdued. Like great nagas, they were perfect in virtue. They were accomplished in the Wisdom of the All-Void. Also, early in the morning, after the sun had just risen, their hair stood on end all over their body and their blood so ran through their vessels that they looked like palasa flowers. Tears filled their eyes, which bespoke great sorrow. They desired to benefit beings, to give peace and bliss, and establish the Transcendent Truth of the All-Void of Mahayana. They meant to manifest what the Tathagata had by expediency latently taught, so that all his sermons would not disappear. In order to subjugate the minds of all beings, they sped to where the Buddha was, touched his feet, walked around him a 100 thousand times, folded their hands, paid homage, stepped back and sat on one side. — from the Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Suttra, Like so many religions, Buddhism began in a
radical, mystical vision of the human experience and our place in the
cosmos, and, as it achieved success, was subverted by the priests until
it became a cult of superstitious ritual and human deification. This
text was written down by high priests of Buddhist religion a thousand
years after the event it purports to describe. I find comic relief
in the numerical hyperbole and the bald appeal for money in
¶1. And yet there remain embedded in the text
the elements that Westerners find so appealing in Buddhism: the value
placed on conscious clarity, the
imperative to transcend our logical minds, and an appeal not to the
authority of doctrine but to the cultured examination of our own
experience. Here is another take on politics and scandal in the death of the Buddha. |
15 February 2011
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Train the brain Ed Cooke: “Photographic memory is a detestable myth. Doesn’t exist. In
fact, my memory is quite average. All of us here have average memories.” Today we have books, photographs, computers and an entire superstructure of external devices to help us store our memories outside our brains, but it wasn’t so long ago that culture depended on individual memories. A trained memory was not just a handy tool but also a fundamental facet of any worldly mind. It was considered a form of character-building, a way of developing the cardinal virtue of prudence and, by extension, ethics. Only through memorizing, the thinking went, could ideas be incorporated into your psyche and their values absorbed... Cooke and all the other mental athletes I met kept insisting that anyone could do what they do. It was simply a matter of learning to “think in more memorable ways,” using a set of mnemonic techniques almost all of which were invented in ancient Greece. These techniques existed not to memorize useless information like decks of playing cards but to etch into the brain foundational texts and ideas. — Joshua Foer writes in the NYTimes Magazine about training with a memory champ |
16 February 2011
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Genius and other brain disorders Stefany Anne Golburg takes off from a medical article speculating on Chopin’s trances and hallucinations. The diagnosis is distinctly medical. Chopin was having “hallucinations”. What many have read in [Georges] Sand’s words to be an example of Chopin’s mysterious genius are in truth the result of a neurological condition. Caruncho and Fernández present a laundry list of possible diagnoses that could account for the Chopin’s hallucinations: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, fever, migraine. Eventually, the authors decide that the best explanation for Chopin’s hallucinations is temporal lobe epilepsy... “The hallucinations of Frédéric Chopin” is thus in the tradition of what some call neurotheology, the attempt to medically explain spiritual experiences. The not-always-subtle subtext is that unexplainable visions, or other divine madnesses, have no place in our enlightened, modern world. Neurotheologists have never been comfortable with the idea that romantic visions exist, and far less comfortable with madness as the catalyst for works of genius... In its romantic form, genius is irrational and beyond our control. In fact, true genius requires a loss of control. In a way, the romantics shift genius away from what we do and toward what we feel, from what we create to what we are experiencing. Thought of this way, genius is really a state of being, closer to a state of ecstasy. Whether we call them reveries or hallucinations, (mostly) everyone
agrees that Chopin had extraordinary visions of some kind that
corresponded with distinct physical effects...The hallucinations and the
man and the music are all one package... Listen to the
Raindrop Prelude of Chopin Read the rest of Stefany Anne Golburg’s essay |
17 February 2011
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Failure is not the opposite of success. Failure is the vital ingredient in the recipe for success. |
18 February 2011
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Meditation -> Peace Maharishi started to talk in the seventies about the results of a
critical proportion of the population practicing meditation. He stated
that one percent would have impact not just upon themselves and people
immediately around them, but also they would have an impact on the
collective consciousness. His prediction was that practice of meditation
techniques would result in reduced violence in the community, and
enhance positive cooperative behaviors. ... That was a wonderful little study we did with a Lebanese medical doctor, Tony Nader. He had taught his patients in a village in the Schouf mountains to meditate. It was a small village, and before long, more than one percent of the population was meditating. This was a village previously subject to the continuous violence that plagued the whole area. But then there were just no more bombs in that village, even though the level of bombing continued, and even increased in both Muslim and Christian villages nearby. Because Dr. Nader was aware of the Harvard-led research in the area on the impact of meditation, he checked out the statistics maintained by the police on bombing. The only thing that had slowed the bombing over the last several years was heavy snow in the winter. People would pack up their guns for the winter when there was snow in the mountains. The statistics showed that when one percent of the population meditated, the bombing stopped, and relative peace was sustained from then on, snow or not. |
19 February 2011
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If I were your best friend... ...I would ask you what you most want. I would be patient while you asked unselfishly for boons that benefited others. I would encourage you when you modestly constrained yourself to requests that seemed possible and reasonable. I would stay with you, using phrases like “imaginary world” and “daydream” until you named your aspiration, perhaps with great embarrassment, then qualified it immediately as self-centered and unreasonable. It would then be my task to convince you that what you wished was neither selfish nor impossible, that it was a reasonable aspiration. I would tell you to go for it, and cheer you on. …kinda makes me wish I were your best friend. But what’s the use? That’s just an idle fantasy. — Josh Mitteldorf |
20 February 2011
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Hymn to the United Nations With his inimitable mix of hopefulness and skepticism, W. H. Auden wrote this poem for the 25th Anniversary of the United Nations in 1971. Pablo Casals set the words to music, and Leopold Stokowski orchestrated the result.
Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that -
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21 February 2011
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Father of his country counsels international friendship, reluctance to wage war It is well known that Peace has been (to borrow a modern phraze) the order of the day with me, since the disturbances in Europe first commenced. My policy has been, and wil continue to be, while I have the honor to remain in the administration of government, to be upon friendly terms with, but independent of, all nations of the earth. To share in the broils of none. To fulfil our own engagements. To supply the wants, and be carriers for them all: being thoroughly convinced that it is our policy and interest to do so; and that nothing short of self respect, and that justice which is essential to a national character, ought to involve us in War; for sure I am, if this country is preserved in tranquility twenty years longer, it may bid defiance, in a just cause, to any power whatever, such, in that time, will be its population, wealth, and resource. — George Washington, Letter to Gouverneur Morris, December 22, 1795 |
22 February 2011
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All the terms used in the science books, ‘law,’ ‘necessity,’ ‘order,’ ‘tendency,’ and so on, are really unintellectual .... The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, ‘charm,’ ‘spell,’ ‘enchantment.’ They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched. I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is simply rational and agnostic. — G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chapter IV: The Ethics of Elfland, 1909 |
23 February 2011
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Biocentrism Robert Lanza is head of research at a company that is at the forefront of stem cell technology. He has written a book that goes way beyond the ‘next thing’ in medical science to re-interpret our relationship to the Universe. His starting point is in two profound discoveries from 20th Century physics.
Lanza takes these facts not as peculiar things to be tacked on to an old worldview but as the foundation of a new worldview. It’s a picture that may reconcile science and mysticism. Biocentrism unlocks the cage where we have unwittingly confined ourselves. A new paradigm is usually considered nonsense from within the existing paradigm. But allowing the observer into the equation opens new approaches to understanding everything from the tiny world of the atom to our views of life and death. Above all, biocentrism offers a more promising way to bring together all of science as scientists have been attempting to do ever since Einstein. Until we recognize the universe in our heads, attempts to truly understand the world will remain a road to nowhere. |
24 February 2011
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Brahma IF the red slayer think he slays, — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1856 |
25 February 2011
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It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms. |
26 February 2011
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Wisdom from our own hearts, via a circuitous path What is the advice that we urgently wish to convey to our children, or to others most dear to us? Frequently, the answer is what we most need to hear for ourselves. — Josh Mitteldorf |
27 February 2011
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IPS cells have arrived Dear Readers, But recently we’ve seen a perfect storm of incredible advances in
biology that changes everything. It is now possible to take adult cells,
from the skin for example, and to transform them into stem cells, which
can then be converted into complete individuals. It works quite well for
mice, and there is every reason to think it would also work for humans. Lecture by Shinya Yamanaka, who discovered the lab technique |
28 February 2011
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