Where do we get off?

I'm all for the advancement of technology, advancement of scientific knowledge and the pursuit of living harmoniously with the world around us both for our own betterment (ie not pumping chemicals toxic to our own health into the atmosphere so that we can go someplace real fast) and for that of the larger whole. Ultimately, no man, and no thing in the universe for that matter, is an island, everything exists within the context of its surroundings.

There are numerous cultures around the planet that understand this concept at a much more fundamental level than we do in "the West." In this context, in the Guugu Yimithirr language, you cannot refer to your right or your left devoid of your surroundings. The individual does not exist independent of its environment. If you were walking on your way with the sun setting on your right, and a mountain on your left, then when you turn around to head home in Guugu Yimithirr you would say that the sun is still setting on your right, and the mountain is still on your left, while in English these conditions would have changed. Two people facing each other will talk about things on their right and their left. It is a communal experience.

But how can we explain control of a system we don't understand? This isn't an isolated chemical reaction found in a sterile lab in Connecticut or Cambridge or CalTech. Ego aside, we don't know smack about the weather. We have no context for global climate change, every time it appears in the fossil record (The earth’s climate, tectonics, atmosphere, oceans, and periodic disasters invoked the primary selective pressures on all organisms, which they either adapted to, or they perished) or an ice cores it happens too quickly in a geologic sense (aka thousands of years) for us to know what could possibly be happening.

That's why this is a very bad thing.

The difference between playing god and fulfilling our potential is taking responsibility for the outcome.

Brainframe

We are all either victims or champions of our own past. Constrained either way, we consider ourselves products of our experiences and our environments. But just as buddhism teaches that you are not your thoughts, and to be present in yourself, your body (which is implicitly included in the self, but often thought of as seperate to us westerners), the same is true of your experiences and your past.

In this i am a missionary, a zealot and a mendicant: the human brain, biologically speaking is the most amazing organ in all existence, precisely because of its ability to change and manipulate itself. How it does this is still a mystery to modern medicine. We claim to be able to control and manipulate it through things like surgery and medicine, the truth is that we have only begun to unlock its interlocking, interwoven secrets. We do know this, the human brain has an inherent ability to change, in biological terms, be "plastic," maleable (even according to the Dalai Lama). Neuroplasticity describes this growing field.

This video shows the physical effects of mind on the brain, literally mind over matter. Simply by exercising, by focusing energy and attention in the right places, the physical shape of the brain can be molded and expanded.

Hope, belief, faith, these things become much more than immaterial things created by religious institutions to keep the masses in order, but exist as energy and power that can be tuned to create, to produce, to manifest physical reality. The belief that you will be healed, produces its own healing effects.

Like anything else, it takes hard work and practice to get out of the well worn trenches of habit. In the end "It is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation." Rudolf Virchow

Ultimately, it is up to us. The power to choose.

थिस इस वहत इ'म तल्किंग अबाउट!

(for those of you who can't read Hindi, sorry about the confusion)

THIS is what I'm talking about! Stewards to our planet! encouraging of things that grow and develop. We have the capacity to concieve of things such as responsibility and fostering growth, so why isn't our ultimate potential as catalyst to help life around us reach its fullest potential as well?