A place of my own!

A place to call my own in this universe...
Do I need to reassure myself that I am an inevitable part..?
whether I try to secure a place or not..
i will have one no matter what!
when will realize this?

Fusion of Contradictions- Part I

Artificial-Natural

It would not be an exaggeration that on all the efforts in defining and redefining the conception of ‘living’, a great importance had been endorsed upon one of the most significant aspect known as ‘soul’ in the great course of human history.

There had been the emergence of distinct schools of thought exactly opposite to each other and opposing philosophies and opposing ideologies in the conceptualization of ‘soul’ and the objective realities of existence.

The emergence of such exactly opposite values and the equal recognition they could attain in the course of development of mankind, it is evident that the quest for truth is inherent in the mankind that expresses an innate feeling for harmony.

In the search for truth there is inevitability for the correct inference of ‘untruth’, only which would distinguish the ‘truth’ with clarity.

The search for truth is mostly associated with the concept of ‘soul’; that accommodates in it also the objective realities of the world, which in turn encompasses the subjective contradictions in the objective world.

In the search for defining ‘living’ and realization of ‘soul’, human mind crosses several contradictions; one fundamental among which is the contradiction between ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’ in the mind and practices of people.

The mankind in its course of growth has an inevitability to be compatible with nature to retain the very existence.

But in the course of growth an attitude of haste and aggression infiltrated in the mankind that is a tendency of opposing nature, both in the practices and also in the mind set of the people. This tendency is known as ‘artificiality’.

But on a generalized stand point, man is nothing but a product of nature and in this view whatever man does must also be natural.

But it has been widely recognized that whatever man does is artificial.

We recognize the nest of a bird as natural; a termite mound as natural; a bee hive as natural; a spider’s web as natural. But if a man builds a house then we normally say it as artificial.

In such a state of affairs it becomes necessary to distinguish the line of division between the artificial and natural, with lucidity.

In the struggle for survival at first man had made attempts to understand nature to adapt himself and also for protecting him for ensuring his survival. In the due course he became better comfortable with nature and started using it for his further comforts and also realized his inadequacy in the understanding of nature, when he formed groups towards organizing the search for solutions for various problems, when a tendency of fighting the insecurity in life became primary focus towards monopolizing the so called natural resources, which paved way for betterment of living standards and also productivity, focusing on trade and commerce. Abundant methods and means of production instigated various autonomous and isolated institutional structures while greatly curtailing human freedom due to the fetters of the so called institutional structures.

In the due course, the institutional structures became the depiction of authority, direction, regulation, guidance and so on when all the practices of the human race became focused towards strengthening the so called institutions, essentially economically, which had been assumed as the only means to attain the so called authority, thus getting far deviated from humanity, when the individual humans had no other option but to become slaves for the institutions of various forms and at times even countries turning out to be institutions.

The so called institutional structures of various forms oriented towards security, authority, power and economics did not permit even several heads and the members of the institutions to practice humanity, love, compassion and all those great virtues of mankind but to get involved in various acts against the conscience crossing various ethical and moral barriers with reduced sensitivity and increasing ignorance, while coining a tricky word known as ‘duty’ for obstinately justifying such ignorance. It is also a bitter fact that man is forced to compromise and overlook even his self respect on various occasions due to the institutional compulsions.

That is human invented institutions for his own alleviation to get organized and he got trapped with his own invention towards destruction of ‘self’.

On the other hand mankind invented a lot of means to enhance and betterment of living and the so called comfort ability. With all those inventions and various means for hurried usage of nature towards more and more comfort ability and establishment of authority, almost all the practices of man got focused towards exploitation of nature in a hasty manner.

That is, mankind invented a lot of technologies and gadgets to improve living towards more and more sophistication resulting in a very big question that, ‘where exactly are we heading towards?’

It is obvious that mankind is heading towards self destruction.

Now on the view point of the knowledge and practices of the human society, ‘artificial’ could be defined as something which is invented by man as the product of ignorance coupled with selfishness to get himself trapped in the due course towards destruction of ‘self’ and on the human society as a whole towards ‘self destruction’ and pseudo living.

In the same sense, ‘Natural’ could be defined as something which is invented by man as the product of awareness of the ignorance coupled with selflessness that elevates him towards an upper plane of consciousness and realization of ‘self’ and on the human society as a whole towards ‘existence’ and true living.

With such an understanding of natural and artificial when both of these prevail in the mind and practices of the society, a normally justified and accepted notion through the scientific perceptions is that, whatever materials invented by man that do not decay on natural course are known as artificial.

To be continued...

A Part of the Whole - 4 - Triveni Sangamam

the unity of oceans..and my thoughts..and contradictions..the moments..
the bay of bengal, indian ocean and the arabian sea..

Republic of Lakota = Lakota Oyate

I got this email from a friend recently...I am just sharing it with you all...
Less than a month has gone by since some Lakota people announced their re-assertion of sovereignity as either Lakota Oyate http://www.lakotaoyate.net/index.html or the Republic
of Lakotah http://www.republicoflakotah.com/. Everything I read about the situation looks like it could use a stiff infusion of intentional communication and social design. Is anyone following this or interested, and does anyone see this as a festering opportunity for us to roll up our sleeves and do something revolutionary?
the email ends here.
What do you think about this my dear friends...i had no idea this was going on within the U.S...and how many such individual movements are going on around us that we have no idea about..??
Let us keep our eyes open to the world around us instead of confining ourselves to the system that surrounds us...the internet is the new social consciousness and it is time we 'see' the world as it is...and not what it appears to be..!
But personally on this topic of countries wanting to separate from each other, I feel there should come a day when all of them want to unite as a single EARTH...it should not be 'us' and 'them'...but a complete "WE"!!!

OPEN CONTENT ALLIANCE-Libraries going open!

Imagine a world where each human can have access to information from books, no matter where on earth he or she is! Open Content Alliance is striving to get the books from libraries in universities, online, for each of us to access...the abundant information that would be possible will enable us to view the world with endless possibilities...and alternatives...
This would also unite a lot of elements which are disjointed from each other..in this world..in the current system!
A new consciousness would evolve bringing us together and giving meaning to the yet unrealized phrase - WE ARE ALL CONNECTED!!!

What is the Open Content Alliance?

The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. Content in the OCA archive will be accessible soon through this website and through Yahoo!

The OCA will encourage the greatest possible degree of access to and reuse of collections in the archive, while respecting the content owners and contributors. Contributors to the OCA must agree to the principles set forth in the Call for Participation.

Building a Digital Archive of Global Content for Universal Access.
For further details please visit: http://www.opencontentalliance.org/
http://www.openlibrary.org/details/oca_test_004
This movie was commissioned by Internet Archive for the 2007 Open Content Alliance meeting held on October 17, 2007. click here for the movie

A few quotes your way...

Your Thoughts Build Your Life

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday,
and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: Our life
is the creation of our mind.
The Buddha

Stay Positive

I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can't make it through one door, I'll go through another door - or I'll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.

Rabindranath Tagore

Positive Action

Welcome every morning with a smile. Look on the new day as another special gift from your Creator, another golden opportunity to complete what you were unable to finish yesterday. Be a self-starter. Let your first hour set the theme of success and positive action that is certain to echo through your entire day. Today will never happen again. Don't waste it with a false start or no start at all. You were not born to fail. Og Mandino

One Positive Thought

It takes but one positive thought, when given a chance to survive and thrive, to overpower an entire army of negative thoughts.
Robert H. Schuller

Courtesy:Lucy MacDonald

A POSITIVE PEOPLE'S NETWORK

What does being Positive mean to you??
If you were to say something positive to a fellow human being, what would it be??
Do you think staying positive makes a difference? If YES, why?? and If NO why??

These are some of the questions we intend to ask anyone we see...anywhere..
give it a shot, ask people what they think about being positive and take down a few answers and post it to us...
We are in the process of starting a network of people who will come together and spread all the positivity they can in this largely chaotic and negative world where a majority of us still struggle for basic things like food and shelter...and where more than a normal majority struggle just to stay positive and Happy!
join us in this venture of making this world and universe a positive place to live on!!

Intima-seeee!!

Lead by example!!

This is a very simple video of how you can be the change and do something about a situation instead of complaining and doing nothing about it. Anyone can be our teacher...so what are we waiting for??

Documentary clip on Summer School for Designing a Society

This is the initial 3 minutes of the documentary I did on the summer school I attended at Gesundheit for the School for Designing a Society...if you need a copy of this movie please contact Rob Scott

Composing Utopia with words

Articipatory Music and other weird things by Jessica Corey-Butler

Last weekend Articipatory Music happened at the Olympia Community Free School during “A giant party for a better world,” the Love, Imagine, Network, Kindness (LINK) Symposium, an extension of “A World Beyond Capitalism,” The Third Annual International Multiracial Alliance Building Peace Conference. An activist folk music collective called Riotfolk performed and a Secret Café fund raiser was held, benefiting a residential permaculture project. And eight people created compositions, but not made out of notes and played on flutes and guitars.

Huh?

Articipatory Music was an idea originally born when it’s facilitator (and creator) Michael Gaiuranos attended a summer session with the School for Designing a Society, held on Patch Adam’s Gesundheit! Institute in West Virginia.

Initially, Gaiuranos thought he was going there to compose music with the experimental musicians associated with cybernetics.

The second time he attended the school, he recalls, “I knew I was aiming for something else.” He credits the school for “encouraging me to do weird things.”

As such, he feels his extrapolation of one exercise he had learned where participants composed responses, one inane and one an elaborate ideal, and then negotiated within larger groups.

“That was the really really really interesting part,” Gaiuranos remembers, adding, “How do you negotiate your Utopia?”

would you like to read more and more....?

Designing Freedom - Stafford Beer

This is a part of the collection of articles under the title READINGS THAT MATTER TO ME which was suggested by the School for Designing a Society.
This excerpt is from the article Designing Freedom by Stafford Beer
1. The Real Threat to “All We Hold Most Dear”
The little house where I have come to live alone for a few weeks sits on the edge of a steep hill in a quiet village on the western coast of Chile. Huge majestic waves roll into the bay and crash magnificently over the rocks, sparkling white against the green sea under a winter sun. It is for me a time of peace, a time to clear the head, a time to treasure.
For after all, such times are rare events for today’s civilized man. We spend our days boxed in
our houses, swarming in and out of office blocks like tribes of ants, crammed into trains, canned in aeroplanes, locked solid in traffic jams on the freeway. Our unbiblical concern for what we shall eat, what we shall drink, and what we shall put on is amplified and made obsessional by the pressure to consume—way, way beyond the natural need. All this is demanded by the way we have arranged our economy. And the institutions we have built to operate that economy, to safeguard ourselves, protect our homes, care for and educate our families, have all grown into large and powerful pieces of social machinery which suddenly seem not so much protective as actually threatening.
Mankind has always been in battle with his environment. But until quite recently in history his
battles were on a reasonable scale, a human scale.
For more on Designing Freedom click here.

Memory of the physical 'self'

Just the other day I got back to my Keyboard...not that I regularly play music...(though I listen to music a lot)...I was trying to play something I had composed a few months ago...I just couldn't remember the notes...so I kept trying to think of the tune...though I had vaguely caught the tune...I still couldn't play it...and..
and amazing thing happened...I closed my eyes and kept my fingers on the keyboard...expecting to just play it...and my fingers did the magic...the muscles remembered the tune...actually...how strange is the co-ordination...between the soul and the physical self...
and so does the mind remember all the tiny details of an encounter...this always puts things in place for me that there is some underlying unifying connection...
what can i say?? i am happy to be given this opportunity...of sensing this and integrating it with my perceptions...

Nature of Time - HUMBERTO MATURANA

HUMBERTO MATURANA
Excerpts from Readings that matter to me shared by The School for Designing a Society
Living

Living takes place in the now, in the moment in which it is taking place. Living is a dynamics that disappears as it takes place. Living takes place in no time, without past or future. Past, present and future are notions that we human beings, we observers, invent as we explain our ocurrence in the now. We invent past as a source of the now or present, and we invent future as a dimension that arises as an extrapolation of the features of our living now, in the present. As past, present and future, are invented to explain our living now, time is invented as a background in which past, present and future can take place. But life, living, takes place as now, as a flow of changing processes. To say this, of course, is a manner of explaining the experience being now in which we find ourselves as we ask for the explanation of our living, of time, . . .
Language
I have maintained, and I think shown, in other publications, that language is a manner of flowing in living together in recursive consensual coordinations of behavior, and that languaging consists in operating in a network of consensual coordinations of consensual coordinations of behaviors, in a relational dynamics of consensual coordinations of behaviors that is constitutively open to endless recursions1. Moreover, we are, as living systems, structure determined systems, and nothing external to us can determine or specify what happens in us. So, the external agents that at any instant impinge upon us can only trigger in us structural changes determined in us by our structure at that instant. As a result, all that we do at any instant arises in us determined in us by our structure in that instant, either as a result of our closed internal structural dynamics, or as a result of the modulation of that internal structural dynamics by the structural changes triggered in us by the interactions in which we participate. In these circumstances, we would have to say that we are constitutively ”blind” to the intrinsic features of the medium as an independent reality , if to speak about the intrinsic features of an independent reality had any sense.
This situation has the following basic consequences for understanding what we do and for more click here

Question I posted on Dropping Knowledge...

What would happen if everyone in the world were paid equally for any job they did? Would that put Money and equality in place??

I think if all were paid the same for any profession, job, there would be freedom to do whatever you wanted to do, whatever you were interested in doing. However, it might also stifle seeking a higher potential and a higher reward. As far as making all peoples equal, I don't think that would happen until societal groups cease thinking they are better than another group. The Human Being is very judgmental still.

by marianne

You make a good point but you also need to consider that many people will simply not work if they get paid the same. There would be less motivation to be great as you pointed out but there is also much less motivation to at least be average. Often this is what destroys communism that refuse to force citizens to work. This makes communisms either doomed or a society of forced labor.

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by visionofuture

Can your Film change the World??? PANGEA DAY!

Mountaintop Removal or Life-on-Earth Removal???

Mountaintop removal mining (MTR) is a form of coal mining in which up to 1,000 vertical feet of a mountain are blasted away to get to the thin coal seams underneath. MTR requires that the targeted land be clear-cut and then blasted by heavy use of explosives. The debris created is typically scraped into the adjacent river valleys in what is called a valley fill. Most mountaintop removal for more click here to wikipedia.org
Mountaintop mining is basically high-altitude strip mining. Enormous machines scrape away the ridges to get at the coal seams below. The residual rock and dirt are then dumped or carted down the mountainside into nearby valleys and streams. By one estimate, this serial decapitation of Appalachia’s coal-rich hills has already buried 1,200 miles of streams while damaging hundreds of square miles of forests. for more click here...
What are we waiting for?? When there are so many things we can try and stop...
Try to figure out what and where your purpose in this lifetime is...and then act accordingly...please help save the planet and its beings in some way or the other...make a difference somewhere!!
For other resources on Mountaintop Removal and how to take action...
http://www.stopmountaintopremoval.org/
http://www.blackdiamondsmovie.com/
http://www.ilovemountains.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountaintop_removal_mining

Stories from Peace Tree Spirit Blog !!

These stories are from kids who participated in the WWPCS and their blog site called PEACE TREE SPIRIT...

Story 1:
Hello! Ni Hao! Today I want to share a story I experienced in China when I was a little girl.
Unfortunately, there is a long history between Japan and China, and many older generations don’t like Japan. Even the smallest part of it.When I was in China, I was a little angry after I heard about Japan. I still remember that scary unbelievable moment.
“What are you folding, Kalin?” Asked my old homeroom teacher. “A paper crane from Japan. It represents peace, right?” My teacher’s face suddenly looked very angry. She pushed my hands away...
for more click here http://peacetreespirit.blogspot.com/2007/03/blog-post.html

Story:2
Hello, my name is Israa. I’m from Palestine. I like Canada very much because there is a lot o fighting in Palestine. Everyday, I was scared to live in Palestine. I couldn’t go outside to play, I couldn’t walk on the street because I would always be afraid. I would be killed. But here in Canada, everyone is free and...
for more click here Canada Means PEACE

Story:3
Hi, salaam alaykom everybody. My name is Anas, I’m from Palestine. I came to Canada on June 5th, 2006.
When I was in Palestine, one day my friend told me: “Come with me to write on the wall about Israeli soldiers. But I refused because I didn’t think it was a good idea. I remember when...
For more click here From Palestine to Canada

The More Than Warmth quilt project !

More than Warmth is an educational project for students of all ages to learn about world cultures. It fosters understanding, knowledge and compassion among cultures through nonviolent, nonpolitical, and nonreligious means.

They create a forum allowing American students a place to process international events. While helping to create a growing awareness of world cultures, students also learn about regions of strife and conflict in the world. More Than Warmth offers students a chance to effect positive change in their world.
For more click here...
This is so encouraging for kids all over the world and is similar to our World Wide Post Card Sharing project where children from all over the world share their art, creativity, love and time for kids all over the world...See how many humans are coming together to unite the world!
I am so inspired...our children of today, all over the world, will bring the world together...!
Picture Courtesy: MORETHANWARMTH

WORLD STREET CHILDREN NEWS...

What can i say about this?? Action has to be taken...by all of us, COLLECTIVELY!!
It is so depressing that there are so many of our children on the streets...I recently came across this blog where there is so much information about children who are on the streets from various countries...I could not believe my eyes when I saw the list of countries with such children...This blog has all the possible news about street children from all over the world and it has been collected with utmost responsibility for whoever wants to research or help these children..take a moment and ask yourself this question...
Isn't this our collective responsibility??
please take action in whatever way you can...and please help spread the word...
Streetkidsnews