Happy New Year!

What do we actually celebrate on this day?  Why is January 1 so special on the calendar?  I would much rather wish everyone a happy new day every day.  And I do, from time to time, but I’d rather make it a habit.

The new cycle of the calendar, so important to the Chinese Emperors in time past. They were responsible for the ‘harmony’, the alignment of the human rhythms to the celestial cycles of sun, moon and planets – typical for agrarian countries.  How far have we since deviated from harmony?

Happy New Year, Happy New Day, Happy New Hour, Happy New Minute, Happy New Second.... Happy Life!

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Be Happy!

The latest popular trend that seems to be pushed to the public is the topic of happiness.  Bookshelves full of publications by happiness experts or those who claim to know how to do it.  How to be happy, what happiness should be…  it is all destined to sell well.

Because in the end, the number of people openly stating to be happy is significantly small.  Most of us just carry on regardless in everyday life, seeking the adrenaline or the endorphin depending on the situation to escape the dragging routines of a life they find themselves in.

So now there’s the new norm: be happy!  And if you are not a seeker of happiness, you are not part of the pack. Yet if you are just happy like everyone else, you are not creative, unique, or standing out from the masses. 

In this dual mindset, how on earth can anyone find themselves, let alone find happiness?

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Higgs

Hurray!  Finally, the Higgs boson has revealed itself!  This new energy quantum, indirectly observed but consistent with the theoretical predictions…  this missing link (where did I hear that before?), this great leap forward (!) for science. 

But this new phenomenon - hardly worth being called a thing – this new quantum then, more energy than particle in fact, was it really ‘un’covered as Heidegger would say? Was it there or did we see it because we wanted to see it, the latest figment of the human scientific mind?

What will be next on the theoretician’s whiteboard, I wonder.  It must be like facing the black hole. At least now I am assured that the universe won’t fall apart.  At this eve of Halloween, knowing this is somewhat comforting.

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Full Void

The Hubble Space telescope – yes, the one that keeps sending through such wonderful images from space – has now taken a picture of the universe such as it was 13.2 billion years ago.  A ‘baby picture’; a magnificent image of the beginning of time, with myriads of galaxies and gas.  An image in which time is concentrated, the image’s remote past and the present of the observer that we are.

At the same time one of the prominent cosmological theories states that the universe came into existence from a ‘fluctuation of the void’ – or, to say it with a newspaper headline: “the void in action’.  Is your head turning? No worries, let’s just stick with the mystery of existence.

Yet I cannot free myself of the idea that all the cosmic rhythms, the universe’s past and our current time, were present in that big bang.  The full void.

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Being apart together

A strong image in Buddhist philosophy is that of the ocean of existence on which the waves of the phenomena come and go.  It means that, despite differentiation on the surface, all things are actually of the same order, one large field of unity.

If we look at the ways in which things originate in the cosmos, we know that on this cosmic scale it is a play of energies that determine where, when and how stars exist.  Also, in living nature, it becomes more and more apparent that energetic patterns are at work in the origination long before ‘visible’ things materialize.

This great energetic ocean of the universe, from which informative patterns (us!) bubble up…  Is our belief, our faith even in the fact that we are separate from one another and from the world, still valid then?  Does life’s richness really lie in surfing the tips of our own wave?  And how ‘own’ is this then?

 

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“All our actions demonstrate who we are”

This summer, I came across the following in Michel de  Montaigne’s Essays: “Each trait in man, every activity characterizes and reveals him as much as another.” One of Montaigne’s main themes, and also important criterion for living a valuable life, is facing the world in authenticity.  This authenticity manifests itself through your actions – the broad sense of the word: apart from your actions it also includes your ideas, opinions and value statements. How this is done?  We read on: “Things may have their own distinct measurements, weight and characteristics, but our mind shapes them as it understands them.”  This relates to the glasses through which we perceive the world, and the color of the glasses tells us a lot about ourselves.

“Health, conscience, authority, knowledge, richness, beauty and their counterparts lay off their covers upon entering, and are then dressed by the mind in the colors that appeal to it: brown, green, light, dark, hard, soft, deep, flat, as it suits each mind separately, because they did not discuss or agree any rules or models between them for one single style: every mind is king in its own realm.”

Whether we are happy or unhappy, only depends on ourselves.” (Book I, Essay 50)

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Too many ‘Q’s

When I was younger, there were times when we were tested on our IQ.  For everything else, we just drew on our talents and education to develop our so-called socio-affective skills. Until the arrival of the EQ, the quotient for emotional intelligence.  In past years, we added the SQ or spiritual quotient to the list. So far, I’m OK with that.  Recently, a new quotient has emerged: the RQ or risk quotient that describes to what degree one is capable of understanding the risk levels in situations.

“To measure is to know”, but the question is: is man measurable and more importantly, does he have to be measured?  What does it contribute?  Does not it just mean that we will end up with  a statistical or mathematical calculation of what we should call a ‘normal human being’?  I prefer the smallest common multiple…

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Chores philosophy

Life is activity – from the elementary breathing and pumping of the heart, over thinking and feeling, to the painting of walls and tending the garden...  No action, no life.  Aristotle speaks of ‘action within the things’, the en-ergeia (energy), that can only be observed when it actualizes its potential. The Greek philosophers’ starting point is the thing, then the energy – and this requires a cause, a ‘maker’.  Alternatively, in the eastern view there is first the energy (always been, having neither start nor end) of which nothing further can be said.  Taoists call it ‘Qi’, Buddhists a conceptual Void, inaccessible to the mind.

How does all this relate to chores?  With each action, we express this energy – ‘filtered’ though it may be by our individual self.  And by my actions, my life, the whole is no longer as it was before.

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The minds of plants

For centuries, the exact divide between man and animal has been the subject of many a philosophical debate. And just when it was agreed to some extent that man – that creature knowing good from bad – is the summit of creation, Darwin came along upsetting everything again by stating that the animal ‘man’ was just a product of evolution just like all other creatures on this planet.  To date, there are still those who find this an unacceptable thought.

But whatever the difference between animal and man, here comes the next surprise: scientists have found that also plants have cognition. They are able to remember circumstances and facts, and adapt to new conditions. At the base of their stems, we find the same cells that have become neurons in humans.  How surprising can this be?

It is scientifically almost a fact that one single amino acid from space entered earth piggy-backing on a meteorite and produced all life on our planet.  And it goes without saying that, since our Milky Way and all other galaxies in the universe are swarming with similar meteoroids, life is a general phenomenon in the universe (not necessarily in the same forms as here, but life nonetheless).  And that one amino acid originated from chemical elements produced in stars.

Plant, animals, people .... we are made of the same stardust.  What a wonderful thought!

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Third rock from the sun

Nicolas Copernicus, for fear of being excommunicated by the Church, kept secret his discovery that not Earth but the sun stood in the center of our planetary system (it only became known after he died).  I believe he stiffened somewhat more in his grave recently.  Because science now knows: there is not one Earth, there are billions of earths in space.  With this estimate (that is just what it is: an extrapolated estimate based on a sample count, the geographical scope of her research for extraterrestrial (is this still a valid word?) life expanded with a factor followed by several zeroes.

Nothing is so beneficial for the human mind as the broadening of perspective, the placing of the self in the whole. How small we are, in that whole.  We àre also that whole.  We’re just too busy quarreling on this tiny piece of rock to notice.

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Flatworms incarnated

“Experts at Nottingham University have been examining how two species of flatworms are able to regenerate themselves again and again – raising hopes that scientists could find ways of alleviating the effects of ageing in human cells. […]During the study 20,000 new and fully-formed flatworms were created from just one original worm by splitting it into tiny pieces.”  [Why flatworms may hold the secret to immortality]

I’m not going to raise the ethical question about lab animals again this time (see January entry).  I just wonder what 20,000 forced new incarnations of flatworms add to the world other than quantitatively proving the repeatability of this scientific experiment.  A related question is whether resuscitation is needed ‘in all cases and at all cost’ (cf. the Dutch royal prince Johan Friso recently ‘brought back’ to a life of coma after 25 minutes of cardiac arrest and almost an hour of RCR), or life support for that matter (cf. Ariel Sharon, since 2006).   

I ask myself what we would truly be contributing to the world by regenerating ourselves ad infinitum.  I would not consider myself, nor most other individuals, all that essential to our planet’s well-being.  And most of us have hard times trying to live happily while it lasts. Just forget about the ‘ever after’ bit; it is supposed to be a timeless state, and hence not part of this universe.

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Collateral damage

“Blood researchers have created a mouse with a bone disease similar to human myeloma - a form of blood cancer that affects the bones."  It sounds like an ordinary phrase. 

This 'ordinary-ness' is what bugs me. First of all I think that the way this is phrased is worrying, as it secretly lets the 'normality' of the fact seep into everyday conversation so that it soon will become a commonality.  It distances us even further from any form of ethical or critical questioning of the practice.

The research is founded on purely homocentric basis: man first & foremost.  Man "makes" mouse, mouse is forced to suffer a terminal disease which - on average - hits 1 to 4 people per 100,000 in the world. Mice are so unfortunate to have their genome more or less resemble that of humans.  A handy lab animal, then, since any casualties are quickly replaced, given the mouse's capacity and speed of procreation.  

Am I then so heartless not to wish others a cure to their disease?  Of course not.  But where's the heart in all this? The question is not whether medical research should be conducted.  I believe the question should be brought to another level: Why are there so many "civilization diseases"? Less than half of all known diseases can be caught by animals, all the rest are caught by humans.  Should we perhaps rethink our concept of 'civilization'?