Birthday
It is 12:20 am on 4th May. I am sixty years old today. Sandy is in kitchen getting help from Mike, Anita, Marissa and Kelly in doing the initial preparation of food for a birthday event. About fifty people are expected.
Rupert Sheldrake
Rupert Sheldrake argues in his Science Delusion talk that consciousness is fundamental to the universe; not ‘all in the brain’.
He identifies 10 materialist dogmas that science subscribes to:
1. Nature is mechanical or machine like.
2. Matter is unconscious.
3. The Laws of Nature and its Constants are fixed.
4. The amount of Energy and Matter are fixed.
5. Nature is purposeless.
6. Heredity is based on material in the genes.
7. Memories are stored in the brain.
8. Your mind is inside your head.
9. Psychic phenomena are impossible.
10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.
Sheldrake shows that these dogmas can and should be challenged. Suggests that nature has ‘habits’ rather than ‘laws’; both are metaphors but maybe one is a biological metaphor and the other a mathematical metaphor.
Sheldrake’s thesis is that minds are “field-like” and extend beyond our brains. In another fascinating talk Sheldrake argues that minds reach out in every act of perception and our attention can be felt by others so we can sense when others are looking at us.
Ajhan Brahm on Life After Death
Ajhan Brahm talks about life after death in this video. In my experience it is unusual for a Buddhist teacher to talk this way and to be so explicit about what happens to consciousness and individuality after death. I understand that Buddha refused to say much about the afterlife or reincarnation because he felt it did not help people live this life. Too, language is designed for the experiential, physical realm not for whatever lies outside of this. Nevertheless Ajhan Brahm’s talking about the afterlife makes sense, as he says making the unknown known takes away the fear that goes with the unknown.
Ajhan Brahm has a voice that is difficult to listen to but what he says was compelling enough for me to persist for the hour that he speaks in this video. Key points for me were:
1. The notion that the mind/consciousness is more than the brain. Consciousness uses the brain while it is functional but not not need the brain. Brahm cites the case of a university student with “virtually no brain”; there are interesting discussions on this here and here.
2. The suggestion that Near Death Experiences happen when the brain stops functioning not when the heart stops.
3. In really deep meditation consciousness stops using the brain and there is a state similar somehow to an NDE.
Tai Chi and Qi Gong
Attended my second Tai Chi and Qi Gong class yesterday evening. It helped me reorient towards reality and I noticed that my vision which had been blurry on my way to the class was clearer. I felt clear this morning then still in bed I picked up my phone and started playing a game and noticed my vision blurring again. I’ve been spending far too much time staring at screens. My habits in recent weeks and months have become really bad; disconnected to reality. The Tai Chi/Qi Gong course is a way back. Too, I’ve not been getting out much and it’s good to interact with new people.
The class, in a hall at Stratford Circus, is run by Dan who is a White English man in his late twenties. Slightly built, he appears to know his stuff and is a reasonable teacher. His assistant is a young White woman who is not English; her accent is perhaps East European I forget her name. I am making an effort to remember the names of the people in the class.
Camille is a black woman around 27 years old. She is slim and taller than I am. This is her second term doing the class.
Maggie is a black woman about 45 years old. She is slim and shorter than I am.
Merle is white, late forties, she has a tattoo on her right upper arm.
Priya is Asian. She is aged about 25.
There is another Asian woman, she brought some food to share during our break between the Tai Chi and Qi Gong classes. She is in her late twenties maybe early thirties. She has an extraordinary smile but I have forgotten her name.
Yuri is Russian and in his late twenties. He mentions that he does power lifting. He is well built, not very tall but taller than I am.
There are others in the class but I did not interact with them. Besides Yuri and myself, there is one other male student in yesterday’s class. He is Asian and quite heavily built. Perhaps in his mid thirties.
It is important to note names and characteristics. I am aware that I do not do this enough. It is important for memory, for reflection and for improving my writing skills.
My Political Compass
“I think in a way we’re all Thatcherites now because, I mean, I think one of the things about her legacy is some of those big arguments that she had had, you know, everyone now accepts.” — David Cameron, Radio Four Today Programme, today.
Source: Telegraph Blog
There has been some discussion in the media about David Cameron’s remark that “we’re all Thatcherites now”. Nick Clegg denies being a Thatcherite saying:
“I certainly wouldn’t call myself a Thatcherite. I’m a Liberal, she wasn’t a Liberal. I’ve always called myself a Liberal, I always will.”
He conceded that Lady Thatcher had brought in some “necessary” economic changes to improve Britain but said it was wrong to suggest everyone has wholly accepted her policies.
“I don’t feel comfortable saying she was a role model in everything,” he said on his weekly LBC 97.3 Call Clegg radio phone-in.
Source: The Telegraph
Sounds like he’s just denying being “wholly” a Thatcherite.
A website called The Political Compass has some interesting charts that map political orientation by answers to a series of questions. According to the site Labour was with the Conservatives in the Right-Authoritarian (Thatcherite) quadrant at the time of the 2010 general election while the Lib Dems were in the Right-Libertarian quadrant. Since then the Lib Dems have of course joined the Conservatives.
My answers to the questions on the website make me a Left Libertarian, apparently more Left than any of the named parties and a little more Libertarian that the Greens who are in the same quadrant:
Maybe I should vote Green if that’s where my ‘political compass’ leads. While I’m now very cynical about Parliamentary Democracy, it’s the system that we have and can’t be completely abandoned as a tool for change. This broadcast by the Greens comes across as very genuine:
They are certainly worth looking at. More information on the Greens at the Bright Green website.
Out of the Sewers?
This LA Times cartoon from an article by cartoonist columnist David Horsey is amusing because it is easy to see Alex Jones this way; it is however unfair. Horsey writes:
Usually, it would be best to ignore conspiracy-mongers such as Alex Jones and not reward him and his angry gaggle of paranoiac followers with any sort of attention. But, in a week when thoughts of the dead and maimed victims of the Boston Marathon bombings weigh heavy on the hearts and minds of most Americans, it is worth pointing out what a worthless waste of skin and bones Jones and his minions happen to be.
Alex Jones comes across as a self publicist and can  be seen as dangerously irresponsible in his advocacy of guns. But I don’t think that Jones is a ‘worthless waste of skin’. He may be wrong in his speculations about the Boston Marathon bombings but the behaviour of elements of the US government opens them to suspicion. An article from the New York Times notes that several terrorist plots foiled over the past few years were instigated or facilitated by FBI agents cajoling those they identified as probable terrorist sympathisers to commit terrorist acts. This video makes the same point:
http://youtu.be/anYwmWlwZuA
Pantheism
This Facebook post prompted some thoughts on my own religious orientation:
Is pantheism really all that different from atheism?, it seems to me all the pantheist is really doing is to say that the universe is “God”, but as far as I can tell, this doesn’t mean the pantheist believes the universe is a person, or anything of the sort.
Pantheism is the only logically consistent way in which God can be omniscient and omnipresent. If you are present everywhere and aware of everything you are necessarily everything. Pantheism differs from Atheism insofar as Pantheists understand that consciousness is as fundamental to constitution of the universe as matter, energy, space and time. Universal Consciousness cannot be said to be personal without contradiction but that does not mean that we cannot have a personal relationship with It or that it is not responsive to us. Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism are essentially pantheist believing essentially in transcendent and immanent divinity (Brahman and Atman in Hinduism). Christian and Islamic mysticism are also affectively pantheist.
There were some other interesting responses among these was a link to a classic Asimov short story:
I haven’t listened to all of this yet – though I read it decades ago.
Also someone posted a link to an interesting blog Ownerless Mind.
Thatcher’s Legacy
I saw this succinct comment on Thatcher’s legacy in a post by Simon Emmerson (I don’t know him) on Facebook. Very well put:
When a political leader dies it becomes compulsory to lie about their record.Â
She won three elections, each with a lower percentage of the vote than all previous post-war Tory victories. She never gained the support of more than a third of eligible voters. She won her second and third elections because a section of the Labour Party split off to form the SDP and the two squabbled over second place. I am happy to say I was part of the two third majority who didn’t vote for her.Â
It’s said that Thatcher restructured the economy and made British capitalism competitive. She didn’t restructure anything. Restructuring would have required a plan, which was anathema to her. Instead, she simply destroyed. Between 1980 and 1983, capacity in British industry fell by 24 percent. Unemployment shot up, eventually topping 3 million. Thatcher effectively shut down British manufacturing, much of it forever. In its place, she turned to the banks and the City, making their wildest dreams come true with the financial ‘Big Bang’. We know how that ended.Â
It’s said that Thatcher restored law and order. She didn’t. Crime increased by a staggering 79 percent under Thatcher.
It’s said Thatcher stood up for freedom and democracy in the world. She didn’t in South Africa, where she opposed sanctions against apartheid and called Nelson Mandela a ‘terrorist’. She didn’t in Chile, where she supported the murderer and torturer Augusto Pinochet. She didn’t in Cambodia, where she gave support to the Khmer Rouge, of all people.Â
It’s said that Thatcher’s greatest free market legacy is privatisation. It isn’t. Thatcher’s privatisations did not create competitive free markets. Instead, the government went for as much money as it could get by selling off public assets in big, monopolistic lumps. The cash came in handy for the chancellor, Nigel Lawson, who used it to claim he had balanced the budget in 1988. But the legacy is one of parasitic cartels, like in the energy sector, where a few big companies are free to bleed customers dry.Â
It’s said that Thatcher created a ‘property-owning democracy’ through the sale of council houses. But this led to a chronic shortage of social housing which has pushed up house prices.Â
It’s said that Thatcher ‘rolled back the state’. But, with the exception of the economy, where the state did retreat, Thatcher’s government intervened in areas of British society like none before it. It imposed draconian laws on one particular type of voluntary organisation – trade unions.
She told the truth later in life when she said that her legacy was New Labour. In so many of her other goals, she failed.Â
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did more to institutionalise Thatcherism than the woman herself. Before New Labour, in the early 1990s, in the midst of a recession, it was a truism that Thatcherism had been an economic failure. The fact that many of the myths discussed here have been revived is in large part due to New Labour.
Stones and Glass Houses
The story is about the tweets of a 17 year old ‘Police Youth Commissioner’, one of those token jobs set up so that the System can boast that they are listening. The picture comes from The Daily Mail which asks:
Is this foul-mouthed, self-obsessed Twitter teen really the future of British policing? Youth crime tsar’s sex and drug rants
Paris Brown, 17, boasted about her sex life, drug taking and drinking
In one Tweet she wrote: ‘I really wanna make a batch of hash brownies’
And she also said: ‘Everyone on Made in Chelsea looks like a f****** fag’
Appointed to change perceptions of young people
Keith Vaz MP says she must be removed from her £15,000 post immediately
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2305118/Paris-Brown-Is-foul-mouthed-self-obsessed-Twitter-teen-really-future-British-policing.html#ixzz2Pyg0j7XE
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
I posted this comment on Facebook. Reposting here because of some thoughts on social media that are worth following up.
Paying a 17 year old £15000 to ‘represent young people’s views on policing’ seems pretty stupid but the demonizing of this young woman is unfair and an example of media hypocrisy. Her comments are not ‘deeply racist’ or ‘deeply homophobic’ they are ‘superficially racist and homophobic’ and connote impoliteness rather than hatefulness. I know what hateful racism is and this is not what Brown expresses. Her tweets offend aesthetic rather than moral sensibilities and it’s important to distinguish between the two.
Then there is the nature of social media. I use Facebook and blog and post to forums, I don’t really ‘get’ Twitter but I understand that the new social media, in general, facilitates a kind of ‘brain dumping’; you say what’s on your mind without a lot of self censorship. Some of us self censor because we want to appear intelligent but we can all say things that are going to make us look stupid or are going to be misinterpreted by others and this doesn’t just apply to the younger generations. I’m not sure that this is a bad thing; there is a sense in which brainstorming rules apply and a key rule is don’t be afraid to say stupid stuff because if you’re inhibited, you’re likely to miss some really creative ideas. The thing is that when we get into social media we, to greater or lesser extents, agree to ‘glasshouse’ our minds and for any of us to be safe we need to stop throwing stones.
Rebecca Meredith writes in the Huffingdon Post:
Everyone loves social media – and everyone makes mistakes – but we should probably start reminding teenagers that saying horrific things on the internet will be viewed exactly the same way by employers, and by society, as saying them in person.
‘Horrific’ is ridiculously strong for what Brown wrote and possibly employers and society need reminding that saying something on the Internet is not and should not be viewed as the same as saying it in person to a person.
The Pain Body
http://youtu.be/f0TMxz9BNDY
Tolle’s discussion of the ‘Pain Body’ is important. The Pain Body is the accumulation of distress in us that takes on a life of its own. Instead of interacting with each other as human beings in the now we interact out of  our past and that past is often pain.
Tolle talks about watching violence in films and in the news. Violence in the news is not to be ignored. Maybe it is an expression of a collective pain body. As we watch the pain body in ourselves, we need to watch, too, the collective pain body that results in war, torture and cruelty.