Old year, new day

To what
Shall I compare the world?
It is like the wake
Vanishing behind a boat
that has rowed away at dawn.

(Manzei / Cranston - from: ISBN 9781857157383, 1999:75)

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A Thing of Beauty

Neurology is revolting against philosophy.  Nothing new, actually: physics did the same 5 centuries ago and started off on its long evolution towards 'objective science'.  It was then the logical consequence of an age-old fight between 'believing' and 'knowing' - a fight which is strongly linked to monotheistic cultures, and one which is still not entirely ended. Even today, there are still efforts at building bridges and bringing these two closer together.

But going down the road of reductionism, where one (mostly 'believing') is reduced to the other ('knowing'), may be a bridge too far.  Now there is Kevin Nelson, near-death neurologist, who claims that divine experiences find their origin in an error message emitted from the brainstem.  That sounds about the same as a statement that the Mona Lisa is a piece of wood with a little red, brown, green and a swab of black paint.

With all due respect for the scientific research on near-death experiences, of course.  But unless room is given to accommodate man and his feelings, his experience of beauty, in short: human existence, such reductionism reveals only a piece of the story of life.  Beware of megalomania... there is a difference between mechanism and cause.

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Me, You, and other distinctions

"Life is suffering", said the Buddha, and one does not have to monitor the newsflashes to be convinced of the truth of this statement.  It appears everything is shifting at once; the world we knew and which made us secure, is shaking in its roots.  Old structures, institutes and mentalities need to make place for new ones - willing or not. Even the trusted rhythms of nature are confused: is it fall, or spring?  The forsythia is blooming while its leaves fall; blackbirds, after 5 months of breeding in shifts this year, are getting territorial again....

And people feel increasingly, often subconsciously, cornered.  This feeling is expressed in a fossilization of opinions and behavior, in traffic, in business, in communications and politics....  ever more short-temperedness, suspicion and rigidity. We should take care not to fall into the ego-intentional habit of 'I don't care, as long as I get mine' of the heartless ego confronting all the not-ego (which is the rest of the world).  The stronger this exclusive 'either/or' approach, the sharper the situations which require an 'and/and' approach will be posed, and remain unsolvable.  It affects the socializing power of a community in its core.

Perhaps we should also rethink our old structure that distinguishes 'me' from 'you' ?  Are we not two waves on one and the same ocean?

Faster than light

Anyone aspiring to acquire omniscientia will have to be patient some more.  Even science can still be in for a big surprise.  Faster than light?  Impossible, except recently maybe a bit possible after all...  And the Grand Unifying Theory combining all physical forces of the universe remains a mind-boggling caleidoscope of more than three dimensions.

We're not even talking living matter then.  If we consider the living nature, we often as not get news of species becoming extinct almost as much as of the discovery of new ones. Not surprisingly then that Steady State-type theories of biodiversity keep popping up. .

But in the end, we can seek to know the real speed of light, but isn't the summum of speed just BEING THERE?

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To live is to die a little every day

In our society, death is still ignored as much as possible.  Dying is for others, and should be 'avoided as much as possible'.  But this just makes the confrontation extra hard.

The difference between an incurably ill person and a healthy one is not that the one is going to die, but that he can no longer ignore death.  We all know somewhere in the back of our mind that we will die some day. But life gets a whole different meaning when we are suddenly forced to integrate the dying into it.

This may just be the biggest lesson life has to teach us.  And the hardest...
Are you ready?

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How certain is reality?

It appears we still have a lot to learn in chemistry.  Mendeleev's table is up for review: an atom is no longer necessarily a core with a fixed number of electrons; that number can vary.  Variable atoms, among which hydrogen and oxygen - two key elements for life on earth. (For the curious, check this link) 

Also recently, a gene was discovered that develops characteristics according to the sex of the body it is in.  In other words: one gene, different characteristics based on context.  This reminds me of quantum physics, where the results of the observation become dependent on the context of the experiment.

Conclusion: nothing is as certain as we would expect.  The question is: doesn't this go straight to the heart of western philosophy, which thinks in terms of 'beings'? Shall we finally be forced to relinquish thinking in boxes and pigeon holes?

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The war against plants

Recently a bunch of young protesters stormed onto a field and started pulling out all the plants they could lay their hands on. It hit the news for a moment, but that attention went away just as fast, and their action did not meet the approval of the community. 

I believe there are other, more efficient ways to communicate one's disagreement. Admitted, the plants were gmo's, and there are question marks to put against that, because: how far can we trust that, once science achieves useful results and releases these to the world and to commerce, there will be an ethical framework within which they will be used?
Who can claim to have enough foresight to understand what the long-term impacts are of gmo's on man and environment?

And yet ...  would science be what it is today if her scientists of the past had had this long-term vision?

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Culture mix?

I spent a big week in Kathmandu this Spring.  It was 10 years ago since I last passed through there coming down from Tibet. A salesman asked me whether things had changed in the past decade.  In an attempt at diplomacy, I replied that a lot was still the same, only 10 years older.  He laughed, and agreed.
In this city, mostly Hindu but including different cultures - of which a large part Buddhist - cultural segregation is visible.  The communities live alongside one another, but moving from one part of the town to another, it is almost like passing a frontier. Singapore makes it more official: you have the Chinese, the Indian, the 'Colonial' quarters; in Xi'an there is a muslim quarters like a cell within the ancient city walls...

We recognize it all. There used to be the 'Polish' and 'Belgian' quarters in Detroit.  It is human nature to seek out and connect to the like-minded.  It is a survival technique: to create some sort of permanence in an otherwise impermanent world. But evolution is only possible in the intersections, where the challenges lie, and we need to consciously and conscientiously deal with those in order to progress.


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Wonder-ful

There is no such thing as a miracle in science, and that is the correct mindset if you want to practice it.  There is no room for miracles in the scientific field, and it should remain so.

But when I see the spring garden burst with life, then I myself burst happily along on that stream of young energy, which - admit it - is wondrous and mysterious.  Despite all our science, we still do not know what life really is.  Perhaps because we are part of it?

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6.999.999.999 and I

Soon, there will be 7 billion of us on this superb, blue planet. Chuang-tzu said that it is thanks to the smallness of my feet that there remains so much space to walk around in, but this space is shrinking. And 7 billion ecological footprints (or are these then 14 billion tracks?) is a squeeze, not counting those of exploding nuclear reactors and burning oil wells.

The time has come for a new society.  We need to think of new forms of society; the old 'institutes' no longer fit the reality. Because the pressure of living together only mounts, the space is dwindling, the stress increases. We continuously invade one another's space. Tolerance and flexibility are harder to maintain. We can no longer maintain the sovereignty of self: how can we digest 7 billion ego's?

What to do? Should we collectively age ourselves out? Turn green? Philosophically ride this wave? Move to planetary leadership? Just love one another?

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Will to live

With their most recent trendy research of consciousness and mind, neuroscientists enter the domain that used to be reserved for philosophers.  And although we should carefully guard that they do not fall into any reductionist traps, it is time that we move back towards the human body, and that our culturally embedded mind/body dualism is shaken up.

We already know that nature, not wasting anything, has had the brain evolve in different stages. The human brain produces  behavior, mind and consciousness, but the brains of other animals produce behavior only, or often also mind but not always consciousness.  It depends on their place in the evolutionary tree.
Basically, however, at cell level, it was (and still is) a question of increasing the efficiency with which our organism - this complex community of cells - is able to react to external influences, thus responding to the common drive of every single cell to live. (Can it still surprise us that Buddhism considers the mind as the sixth sense?)  

The parallels with our human socio-cultural community are obvious. They are rooted in our cells; the unity of all living beings is literally physical in origin. Man, and mankind, are each a complex living community, and with every fiber of his body man provides "the blueprint for the thought patterns and intentions of the conscious mind" (Damasio), and évery individual, without exception, contributes to the community.

In which light does this bring such themes like discrimination, mental illness, loneliness, suicide?