Even as citis swell, filling up with people, we seem to feel more like a crowd than a community.
Jon Jondai shares his thoughts about being in community in this video.
“Its not easy to be together now a days. Most of the people have no skill to be with other people…” He starts, and shares his perspective about human society today, and living as a community.
Minds stuffed
down their throats
through device pipes
dipped to the gut.
Predigested scraps
flooding bellies
that crave nourishment;
Meaning, truth, satiation?
Suppliments for sanity;
A numbing supply
of entertainment.
— rawjeev
“The path isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.”
— Barry H. Gillespie
“The experience of understanding involves a shift from what seems initially chaotic or formless, to a coherent stable form or picture, a Gestalt — or from an existing Gestalt to a new better one, that seems richer than the one it replaces.”
— Ian McGilchrist, The Matter With Things
“I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps but other people emphasize my loneliness.”
— Anais Nin
Modern, conventional science has long presumed to observe the natural world from a detached position entirely outside that world. And the science of “ecology” inherited this presumption from the older sciences that preceded it — the assumption that we could objectively analyze the interactions of various organisms and their earthly environment as though we ourselves were not participant in that same environment, as though our rational minds could somehow spring themselves free from our coevolved, carnal embedment in the thick of this ecology in order to observe it from a wholly detached and impartial perspective. In high school biology class, we gazed at a complex diagram of the local ecosystem drawn on the flat blackboard, but of course we did not include our own gaze within the system. Later, some of us learned to model particular ecosystems on the flat screens of our computers. Although I learned a fair amount from such exercises, the primary lesson I learned was that earthly nature is an objective, determinate phenomenon that can best be studied from outside, not an enveloping mystery in which I am wholly participant.
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
— Albert Einstein
“For 500 years, we all have been using a very simple model for thinking about living systems. Which is, if you want to understand something that’s complicated, you break it apart into its little pieces. And once you understand the little pieces and put it back together, you will understand the complex thing. And what ‘Chaos’ (book by James Gleick) (…) shows is… that’s how you fix clocks. That’s not how you fix behaviors. That’s not how you understand behaviors. Behavior is not like a clock. Behavior is like a cloud. And you don’t understand rainfall by breaking a cloud down into its component pieces and gluing them back together.”
— Robert Sapolsky
“In Aboriginal worldviews, nothing exists outside of a relationship to something else. There are no isolated variables—every element must be considered in relation to the other elements and the context. Areas of knowledge are integrated, not separated. The relationship between the knower and other knowers, places and senior knowledge-keepers is paramount. It facilitates shared memory and sustainable knowledge systems. An observer does not try to be objective, but is integrated within a sentient system that is observing itself.
— Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
— Henry David Thoreau
“Whatever the tasks, do them slowly and with ease, in mindfulness. Don’t do any task in order to get it over with. Resolve to do each job in a relaxed way, with all your attention. Enjoy and be one with your work.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness