Chuang and earlier Zen living

We will all die. That reality can cause us to think in two completely different ways about life. The first way is despair, sadness, and similar negative feelings. The other way is to jolt yourself into a realisation that we need to make the most out of the precious moments we - and those we love - have. The first way is the automatic mind's reaction. No one would choose to despair or see life in that gloomy way, but it is a natural response from our genetic programming. The second way is a deliberately created alternative to despair, formed by the imaginative, creative mind which seeks to make the most out of any situation.

As I write this my wife is painting in another room, while I was doing my work. I was vaguely aware that she was listening to music while she was painting, and my mind caught some of Bob Marley and the Wailers "Three Little Birds". But my focus was on writing so that opportunity to listen to the wonderful Marley slipped away from me. However a couple of minutes later my automatic mind alerted me to the fact that what was now playing was "Bridge over Troubled Water". I paused to deliberately hear it better and gauge where in the song it was at. It was just at the start of the last verse, so I stopped my writing, closed my eyes and just absorbed. Musical tastes are unique, but for me that last part of the Simon and Garfunkel song is one of the crowning achievements of music in my lifetime. I listened with joy and awe as Art Garfunkel sang it. His voice in general, and especially in that song, is often described as angelic, and whilst I don't know any angels, the v...

What will push this world forward in the direction of peace, prosperity, and security for all humans is the growing awareness of philosophies like mindfulness, the benefits of nature, simple living, the need for the rich to voluntarily give their wealth to those in greater need, progressive ways based on scientific research. We need to keep up the promotion of wellbeing, our misuse and abuse of animals, handling climate change, stopping the loss of biodiversity, increasing human diversity in all walks of life and in all positions of power and leadership, and other truly life-affirming and life-uplifting ways of being. We need mindful Islam, mindful Christianity, mindful Hinduism, and so on, reinterpreting their faiths and teachings, even their definition of God, in the light of science and for the wellbeing of all living things, not just humans, and not just those of their own faith.

The two great issues are loss of biodiversity and climate change. They are interlinked by a common cause; man's behaviour in our industrialised processes of growing, catching, mining, and otherwise creating and selling products to our species and others. It is a story of epic greed and unnecessary barbarity. The people hit hardest will be the poorest, who are the people who least caused the two problems. The people who will be least impacted are the people who have most caused these twin tragedies and disasters. In the long run none of it will matter. In the long run nothing matters. Everything dies. Planets are consumed by heat or freeze to death. But it didn't have to be this way. It still doesn't have to be this way. All it takes it some thought, intelligence, and hardest of all for our rapacious species, self-restraint and a more modest consumption philosophy.

Introduction So the chances are high that this won't last; a commentary of The Bible as I read it page by page. My ideas usually fizzle out pretty damn quickly, but I'm hoping The bible is sufficiently important to sustain my attention and stimulate my intellect and emotiojnal intelligence and mindfulness to keep me commenting on it until I've done the whole lot... and educated myself enormously in the process. Why do such a thing? Well, it is probably the most important book in human history as it has been the most influential, at least until thesecond half of the twentieth century. Even now, if you consider the influence of evangelical Christians in the USA, and the State of Israel, you can still see how strong an influence The Bible has in today's world. Yet most people, myself included, have probably only heard children's versions of some of the Bible stories, or those carefully chosen extracts read in church or school in our childhood. The vast majority of The ...

I used to read novels by the bucketload. From around sixteen to my late twenties. Hesse, Camus, Undset, Hamsun, Boll, Vidal, Vonnegut, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Greene. I lvoed them. They told me ways of seeing life. But the attraction waned. I don't know why. Maybe my four years of travelling and working my way around the world replaced novels as a way of seeing with seeing sites and meeting people as a way of seeing life. Maybe my subsequent settling down to full-time work, marriage, and parenthood did likewise, though I know many people who devour novels despite or because of these duties. Anyway, periodically I try to reignite the passion, perceiving that I'm out of touch with contemporary fiction, and that all literature is a "good thing". As an aside the one writer who managed to break through my disapointment and lethargy about novels was - maybe still is, as I haven't read him in the past five years or more - Somerset Maugham. Not the most fashionable of novel...

As I only started this blog a day or so ago there's been no mention yet of covid, but given it's the biggest thing happening in the world it would b remiss of me not to share some perspectives. Personally it hasn't affected me too much, mentally, physically, or financially. I guess the biggest change has been the absence of live talks which prior to covid I was doing regularly, at least a couple a week, sometimes more. Ironically the biggest effect of this has been physical health, not that it is bad. But getting out to the car, then out from the car, walking to the venue, standing for an hour or an hour and a half talking, all add to the positive effects on the body of movement and standing. During covid I've almost certainly been sitting much longer than usual, which is not a good thing for my body. I haven't put on any weight however; indeed, through a concentrated effort over three weeks I lost half a stone, and was only a stone overweight to begin with. I'v...