How strange is to be alive

Today a peculiar feeling crept into my mind: "how strange and fantastic is to be alive". Normally we are aware that we are doing something or that we want something or that we feel something ......Not the feeling of being able to do things or to think something....... No, just to be aware that one is alive.....simply that....

(from the dictionary: fan·tas·tic:

1. Quaint or strange in form, conception, or appearance.

2.

a. Unrestrainedly fanciful; extravagant: fantastic hopes.

b. Bizarre, as in form or appearance; strange: fantastic attire; fantastic behavior.

c. Based on or existing only in fantasy; unreal: fantastic ideas about her own superiority.

3. Wonderful or superb; remarkable: a fantastic trip to Europe.)

Impermanence II

I have been thinking a lot and looking at things under the "impermanence" optic....

In the entry "Impermanence I" of october 11th, I wrote that:

"In the millions of years of the universe existence, has there been two moments in which the universe has been identical? Does this continuous change anything to do with impermanence? If there are not two moments in which the universe was identical, that means that there is no permanence.....not only it does not exists now, but there has never been.... That means that from the very beginning of the universe, impermanence has been a constant feature......"

And these days it seems to me that our mind, essentially, works on the premises of permanence. It is almost as if it would not consider the fact that impermanence is a kind of law...
Yesterday I got a "feeling" that was difficult to crystallize in words, but I will try here. It was something like this: when the mind projects a future, this projection is based on permanence, it is a kind of permanence.....it does not take into account impermanence......not to take into account such an important law makes this projection a kind of unreal projection.......which makes the present the only real thing.....
Same with the so called "ego". It is a kind of "permanent" projection......

(Picture is titled "impermanence" by Jason Theaker, http://www.flickr.com/people/photoimage/)

dentist waiting room

One of the best things about going to the dentist is to sit in the waiting room. I always feel very relaxed, as I know I have to be there, I am not wasting time, there is not the feeling that I should be doing something else....

Yesterday I went to the dentist (my dear and admired J., it is so obvious that he tries to do the best work he can, that always when I come out I feel like doing also my best in my job). The waiting room was quite full, and the "gossip" magazines were all taken, so I had to take a kind of "scientific" magazine titled something like "Very Interesting".

And I found an article titled "how do we spend our life?", and I found it very interesting, so I asked the nurse for a pen, and I copied a graph from the article: "If a person lives 70 years, he/she spends:
- 11 years: in housekeeping (washing, cleaning, cooking, etc)
- 13 years: studying and/or working
- 17 years: free time
- 29 years: vital functions (sleeping, eating, hygiene, etc.)

So, I thought, only 17 years of free time out of 70......and something came to my mind then. If we leave the religious "practice" for our free time, kind of separate from the rest of our lives, it is a very small proportion of our life....and I remembered what Krishnamurti said: "meditation" should be all the time, even in our "normal" daily life...

life outside Earth

An Earth-size planet has been spotted orbiting a nearby star at a distance that would makes it not too hot and not too cold — comfortable enough for life to exist, researchers announced (Sept. 29).

If confirmed, the exoplanet, named Gliese 581g, would be the first Earth-like world found residing in a star's habitable zone — a region where a planet's temperature could sustain liquid water on its surface.

And the planet's discoverers are optimistic about the prospects for finding life there.

"Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say, my own personal feeling is that the chances of life on this planet are 100 percent," said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, during a press briefing today. "I have almost no doubt about it."

The star is located 20 light-years from Earth in the constellation Libra. One light-year is about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km).

Red dwarf stars are about 50 times dimmer than our sun. Since these stars are so much cooler, their planets can orbit much closer to them and still remain in the habitable zone.

Estimates suggest Gliese 581g is close enough to its star to be able to complete an orbit in just under 37 days.

With support from the National Science Foundation and NASA, the scientists — members of the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey — collected 11 years of radial velocity data on the star. This method looks at a star's tiny movements due to the gravitational tug from orbiting bodies.

The subtle tugs let researchers estimate the planet's mass and orbital period, how long it takes to circle its star.

Gliese 581g has a mass three to four times Earth's, the researchers estimated. From the mass and size, they said the world is probably a rocky planet with enough gravity to hold onto an atmosphere.

Just as Mercury is locked facing the sun, the planet is tidally locked to its star, so that one side basks in perpetual daylight, while the other side remains in darkness. This locked configuration helps to stabilize the planet's surface climate, Vogt said.

But whether Gliese 581g harbors life may not be the most striking aspect of this find. Vogt says the discovery of a potentially habitable world less than 100 light-years away means that habitable worlds may be much more common than astronomers thought. Given the number of stars in the Milky Way, Vogt explains, that could mean there are "potentially billions" of Earth-like worlds out there.

With the vastness of the universe, and the innumerable possibilities of combinations, it seems to me that the existence of life outside Earth might be not only possible, but unavoidable.... What if this life has been only 1000 years ahead of us in development? If they have gone through the challenges and difficulties we are going through now? their consciousness has gone through the evolutionary shaping process? What would be the impact on us if we could eventually communicate with such forms of life? By the way, what is life? is it something that comes up from a certain environment and evolves interacting with the evolving environment? is it just a type of manifestation in the universe?, is it separate from it?......


(This artist's conception shows the inner four planets of the Gliese 581 system and their host star, a red dwarf star only 20 light years away from Earth. The large planet in the foreground is the newly discovered GJ 581g, which has a 37-day orbit right in the middle of the star's habitable zone and is only three to four times the mass of Earth, with a diameter 1.2 to 1.4 times that of Earth. Credit: Lynette Cook) (Text and image taken from www.space.com)

The Obsolete Consciousness VII: The Holocaust part II

(Children walking to the gas chamber in Birkenau)

In 1933 approximately nine million Jews lived in the countries of Europe that would be occupied by Germany during the war. By 1945 two out of every three European Jews had been killed by the SS Men. The Holocaust was the systematic annihilation of six million Jews.

But Jews were not the only group singled out for persecution by Hitler’s Nazi regime. As many as one-half million Gypsies, at least 250,000 mentally or physically disabled persons, and more than three million Soviet prisoners-of-war also fell victim to Nazi genocide. Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Social Democrats, Communists, partisans, trade unionists, Polish intelligentsia and other undesirables were also victims of the hate and aggression carried out by the Nazis.

The number of children killed during the Holocaust is not fathomable and full statistics for the tragic fate of children who died will never be known. Some estimates range as high as 1.5 million murdered children. This figure includes more than 1.2 million Jewish children, tens of thousands of Gypsy children and thousands of institutionalized handicapped children who were murdered under Nazi rule in Germany and occupied Europe.

The SS Men wore black uniforms with a skeleton's head on their hats, the motto "Unsere Ehre heisst Treue" (Our honor is loyalty) on their belts and their symbol was the double S-rune. They had sworn eternal faith to Adolf Hitler and they were his most ruthless henchmen, men often seen as the very personifications of evil.

These masterminds of death were found to be quite psychologically normal. They were men of fine standing, husbands who morning and night kissed their wives, fathers who tucked their children into bed.

But murders, brutalities, cruelties, tortures, atrocities, and other inhuman acts were an everyday occurrence.

Stangl (Treblinka's commandant), Hoss (Auschwitz's commandant) and Bergen commandants were quite "normal" people, Eichmann the same, they wanted to do a good job, wanted to ascend in the ranks, be respected in the SS, be loyal to their group, be somebody.....

The "will to power" (german: "der Wille zur Macht") concept, describes what Friedrich Nietzsche believed to be the main driving force in all living things. Briefly, it means that all living species try to prevail over the rest of species, even if that meant to violently exterminate those species.

The holocaust is very difficult to comprehend. But it comes to my mind several factors that led to it:

1) It seems to me that a big part of our conditioning does not come through things that happen in our life time, but rather we inherit from our long distant evolutionary past. So, one possible factor is this "will to power" that Nietzsche is referring to, the intrinsic tendency in all living things to try to prevail over other living groups. The tendency of one group to destroy other groups, and thus survive better.

2) The strong "drive for security" of all living creatures. And the security inside a group is to be well regarded, to do a good job, to be respected in that group, to be somebody....This is also a conditioning coming from a long distant evolutionary past...

3) The tremendous conditioning through propaganda that happened in the 3rd reich ("Jews are evil", "ubermensch", to get more "lebensraum" (living space), etc.....)

1, 2 and 3 are not separate entities, but there is a lot of overlap between them. We already may be conditioned with 1 and 2 when we are born. Number 3 may happen during our life time, with different degrees of intensity.....

And now comes the terrible question: properly conditioned, could any one of us be a nazi?