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Ironic, then, that the atheistic Camus and the Church Father Augustine reach the same point from different directions: that longing for permanence in a fleeting world leaves us feeling — odd. It leaves us feeling saudade.

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The sense of self therefore is the first fracture in our connectedness, imposed upon us by a world of others who are lost in the same illusion and have learnt to call it reality. (This is what Anthony de Mello means when he says “The whole world is crazy. Certifiable lunatics! The only reason we're not locked up in an institution is that there are so many of us.")

That is, because of language, we have each gradually learnt to separate the world off from our perception of self. We therefore treat the world and its inhabitants as 'other', thereby reifying their and our own experience of otherness, and so the merry dance continues.

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trees insects compassn 

Suzanne Simard and Brandon Keim , ‘ Never Underestimate the Intelligence of Trees ’, Nautilus , October 2019 , www.nautil.us/issue/77/underworldsnbsp/ never-underestimate-the-intelligence-of-trees . In this brilliant interview, leading forest ecologist Suzanne Simard explains why plants and trees are intelligent creatures that can learn, remember and experience emotions. Why Consciousness Matters 9 Peter Singer , ‘ Are Insects Conscious? ’, Project Syndicate , May 2016 , www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/are-insects-conscious-bypeter-singer-2016-05 . In this short piece, ethicist Peter Singer asks whether we have moral responsibilities towards the world’s insects. Although we can’t determine if they’re conscious, Singer suggests that – like Jain monks – we’d do well to treat them with compassion.

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The language we use to talk about the world shapes how we then perceive the world. And how we perceive the world shapes the language we use. That is, they pull each other down in vicious cycles. But they may also pull each other up. And pulling either lever will affect the other.)

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THE BANANA BOY

Moral Story Of The Day.

A frail old man stopped a young boy carrying a bunch of bananas, and said to him.

"Can I get some bananas for free? I'm really tired and hungry"

The young boy dropped his bunch of bananas, pulled three off it and offered them to the old man.

But the man frowned his face, as if they were some pieces of crap.

"Oh, no! They aren't ripe!" he grumbled. "How I'm I supposed to eat these?"

The boy was taken aback by the old man's attitude, but said humbly.

"I'm so sorry sir... Uhm, I've got some ripe bananas at home. Why not wait here while I get you some?"

"Hurry up then" the old man said.

The young boy carried his banana bunch and dashed off. He returned shortly with three big ripe bananas. He smiled as he handed them to the old man.

But the ungrateful old man had a look of discontent flashing across his face. He wasn't impressed at all.

"Good grief! Why would you bring me over ripped bananas...? Boy, you should know I'm an old man and these will upset my stomach"

The boy became confused and worried about the nagging old man. He said.

"I feel sorry that I'm unable to please you sir. But what else would I do?"

"Just bring back the unripe bananas. I'll have to keep them until tomorrow. Hurry up, my legs are hurting" he croaked.

In the hope of pleasing him, the young boy left in a hurry. He came back in few minutes with the first bananas. But the old man became angry.

"You really are a slow kid! I've lost my cravings already and I no longer need bananas. Just go with your bananas!"

The boy shuddered. But he was surprised at what the old man did next. His wrinkled face broke into a smile, then he tapped his shoulder and said calmly.

"Boy, the most valuable lessons in life cannot be taught, they must be experienced. You should know that all the bananas you presented to me were perfect but my ungrateful attitude was an act I put on to teach you a valuable lesson of life, something I learnt too late. In life, people are like that and they will make you feel like you're not good enough. It is important to know that you can not please everyone no matter how hard you try, and it can run havoc in your life, rob your peace of mind and the courage to follow your goals and dreams. Even if you lie on the ground for people to walk on you, they still will complain that you aren't flat enough. So, don't live your life to please anyone. Be yourself and do what you know is right"

Author: Chima_Dickson Official

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consciousness might be the very thing that makes us who we are. Our lives appear to us as a string of experiences: each linked, each connected, from the moment we’re born to the moment we pass away. Life is consciousness, or so it seems 

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Consequences of a Language based around Separation

Once established, this sense of separation - of a world as composed of subjects and objects - reinforces itself and becomes more and more deeply embedded over time.

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 Christof Koch is one of the world’s leading neuroscientists. Koch is widely associated with ‘integrated information theory’, the view that conscious experiences arise when the information within a system (such as a brain) is deeply interconnected

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chalmers - hpoc 

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One consequence of the objectification of our reality has been the development of technology. Most technology can be seen as the imposition of human intelligence in order to subordinate the environment to its own ends (although there is also technology which operates in harmony with the natural environment). From a pitchfork to a rocket ship, technology allows us to manipulate nature to achieve ends that would not be possible according to the restrictions nature places on us by default.

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Qualia (singular: quale) are the subjective, qualitative properties of experience.

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Tesla meant when he said:

“Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment and merging of races, and we are still far from this blissful realization.”

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There are two ways to be rich: One is by acquiring much, and the other is by desiring little."

-- Jackie French Kolle

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As Krishnamurti points out, once the child knows the name of the creatures it sees, it no longer truly sees them. Because those things have become reduced to instances of a category, not unique manifestations of life.

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But yet, we must call things something. And so let us try to see before we name, or at least let us acknowledge that we are seeing through our naming, and try to come a little closer to witnessing the thing-itself.

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What is the world, and how does it serve the evolution of consciousness? There are myriad views of the world, and they can be calibrated according to their level of truth:

- The world as karmic opportunity: 600.

- The world as karmic expression: 575.

- The world is actually an opportune place for redemption and salvation: 575.

- Human life is an expression of God’s Will by which the Godhead fulfils the actualization of infinite potentiality: 560.

- The world and humanity were created by God and are therefore divinely inspired and intrinsically holy: 545.

- The world is a rare opportunity for maximum spiritual growth and evolution by the undoing of bad karma and the earning of spiritual merit: 510.

- One’s view of the world is consequent to the observer’s level of consciousness: 485.

- Survival is due to natural selection by survival of the fittest: 440.

- “I have invented the world I see”: 350.

- This is a purgatorial world of hardship and suffering; therefore, seek heaven: 350.

- The world is a comedy, a tragedy, a political game board, and more: 240.

- The world and the universe are merely passing illusions created by the ego to keep itself separate from God: 220.

- The world as unfair: 200.

- The world and human life are the consequence of the fall of Adam and Eve due to disobedience and succumbing to the temptation of curiosity. Life is therefore penitential for original sin: 190.

- The world is merely a physical product of the physical universe: 190.

- Life and therefore humanity are purely accidental products of Darwinian biological evolution (mechanistic reductionism): 190.

- The world as exploitative: 180.

- Humanity descended from the stars and fell from the heavens: 160.

- Humanity descended from monkeys: 160."

~ David R. Hawkins

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 Th omas Nagel (also known as ‘the Batman’) has made enormous contributions to a range of philosophical topics. His bat thought experiment is probably the most discussed idea in contemporary philosophy of mind

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Without this felt sense of really being in the world, of aiming to see it for what it is and not just living in a world of oblique referencing, we are all just thrusting in the dark. When we try to proceed with an understanding of reality based first on thought, we encounter a perception that is automatically separative and exclusionary. We cannot think our way out of it, because it is part of the structure of the thought we employ itself. We must therefore relax back into feeling reality itself, and allow a new language to arise based on this more fundamental perception.

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banana mango

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consc line

? To fi nd out what my students think, I sometimes collect some objects I can fi nd at home and lay them out in what I call the ‘consciousness line’. I might have a stone, a calculator, a woodlouse in a jar, a potted plant, a doll to represent a baby

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We must rediscover a nonconceptual, noncognitive relationship with being which is our birthright, which is the child’s default mode of being. We must become mindful. We must reinject our perception with the apprehension of beauty, of the aching thrum of life. Who knows, perhaps the things of this world will whisper their true name to us when we fall back simply into seeing.

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Biologists, philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists – experts from lots of diff erent disciplines – are now investigating the mystery of consciousness. What caused this upsurge of interest? Th e turning point came when, twenty years aft er Nagel’s bat-paper, a young Australian philosopher called David Chalmers coined the phrase the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. A

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"So the downside of human naivete then makes us all vulnerable. If it wasn't for the fact we were all vulnerable, we all would have become Buddhas thousands of years ago. It's because we didn't know any better out of ignorance and innocence that one is prey to those who are more advanced in deception."

~ Doc

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 Th e mind–body problem is the problem of trying to explain how minds are related to bodies

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Th ey say, ‘It’s just too diffi cult. Just as a dog can never understand how to read the newspaper it carries in its mouth, so are our brains incapable of understanding consciousness.’ Steven Pinker captures this view nicely: ‘Beats the heck out of me!’

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Indeed, the planet sings. Think of birds calling, bats echolocating, tree leaves fluttering in the breeze, frogs croaking, and bush crickets stridulating. We live in a euphonious theatre of life.

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Into the Mirror is a call to cultivate wisdom and compassion—right within this world of illusion—and an insightful challenge to the rampant materialism of modernity

 offers critical insights and reflections that help us deconstruct materialist and reductionist ideas that pervade what we call modernity. 

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GET OFF OWN SANSKARAS

“The Buddha taught that freedom comes from overcoming habitual patterns and confused assumptions about reality. A Searle introduces his famous Chinese room thought experiment. He argues that a machine could translate English to Chinese, but it couldn’t understand the meanings behind its inputs, outputs and the rules which it applies a Nagel tells us that no matter how much we learn about a bat’s biology and behaviour, we’ll never know ‘ what it’s like ’ to be a bat. Consequently, Nagel suggests that it’s unlikely that a purely physical theory of the mind will be able to explain where this ‘ what it’s like-ness ’ (consciousness) came from. a  consc has no evo advantage  Remember that, by defi nition, a zombie is indistinguishable from a conscie in every detectable way. So, natural selection has nothing to work on a "Life is life's greatest gift. Guard the life of another creature as you would your own because it is your own. On life's scale of values, the smallest is no less precious to the creature who owns it than the largest." -- Lloyd Biggle, Jr. a blue and purple foods can sharpen your memory, boost your brain power, and protect you from the world’s most expensive disease. A two views of emptiness, “empty-of-other” (Tib. zhentong) and “empty of self” (rangtong), and why it’s important to understand the difference  a There is a big difference between empty fatigue and gratifying exhaustion. Life is too short not to focus more on what matters most. a EMPTY FATIGUE V GRATIFYING EXHAUSTION  a “Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” ―Lao Tzu a Galen Strawson has argued that for life to be interesting (which it certainly is), we’d need a special type of experience called ‘ cognitive phenomenology ’.  Cognitive phenomenology is just a fancy way of saying ‘conscious thought’. a  Whether one’s a thinker, scientist, or whatever, all must work with an empty mind. If least hint of ego sneaks in, things fall apart.’ Buddhadasa BhikkhuaTh ere is a sense in which both you and the zombie-you suff er. You both break 206 bones, which stops you from fulfi lling your plans and projects – you certainly can’t go rock climbing any time soon. Because of that, some philosophers would say that you’ve both suff ered. But there is a glaringly crucial distinction, one which seems to make all the diff erence: you feel the pain, agony, fear and anxiety that goes with breaking 206 bones and having all your future plans ruined. Th e zombie-you doesn’t.a Sri Adi Shankaracharya gives a vivid description of upasana in his commentary on the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Upasana, or meditation, means approaching an object of meditation as presented by the scriptures, making it an object of one’s own thought, and dwelling on it uninterruptedly for long by continuing the same current of thought with regard to it - like a stream of oil poured from one vessel to another.’ The analogy of the stream of oil is very appropriate. When we pour oil from one vessel to another, there will be a constant flow of oil without any sound or splash. But when we pour water in similar fashion there is so much of noise and splash all around. If the current of thought flows towards the object of meditation in an uninterrupted stream without this kind of restlessness, that state is called meditation. A a PRATYAHAR AND DHARANA (DHOREY RAKHA)  This state is reached only after one has passed through two other stages of meditation. pratyahara and dharana. Pratyahara consists in making the mind free from the clutches of the senses. The mind is always running after sense objects. When we see a particular object or hear a particular sound, the mind immediately grabs it and starts building a castle of thoughts. Same is the case when a particular thought arises in the mind. When we sit for meditation, the mind constantly goes away from the object of meditation, drawn by the objects of the senses. We withdraw the mind from these and fix it on the object of meditation. This withdrawal of the mind is called pratyahara. This state is reached only after one has passed through two other stages of meditation. pratyahara and dharana. Pratyahara consists in making the mind free from the clutches of the senses. The mind is always running after sense objects. When we see a particular object or hear a particular sound, the mind immediately grabs it and starts building a castle of thoughts. Same is the case when a particular thought arises in the mind. When we sit for meditation, the mind constantly goes away from the object of meditation, drawn by the objects of the senses. We withdraw the mind from these and fix it on the object of meditation. This withdrawal of the mind is called pratyahara. A Consciousness is the wellspring from which meaning,  value, persons and ethical subjects are brought into the world. Without consciousness, the world would be an empty, meaningless wasteland. A A

• Intake of dairy, including low-fat milk, is associated with increased risk of prostate cancer. The more calcium is consumed from dairy sources, the higher the cancer risk, but non-dairy calcium sources have been found to be protective. 
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