Tag: The Buddha

Aeon

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Now feels like a good time to plug a favourite website of mine. Aeon is all about ideas and when you read though the titles of the different articles they publish, the mind illuminates with excitement. They generally publish essays and short videos. The essays are usually three to four thousand words and of a high enough level not to be considered light reading. For this reason I can get a bit lazy as I know it will involve a certain amount of mind effort to read one. It is things like this that allow me to realise that my use of the internet doesn’t go much further than looking at football, politics, buying things and generally killing time and shutting off my brain. The internet is the greatest invention and has the potential to revolutionise society on scale not obvious since the printing press and I use it to kill time and shut my brain off. I know I’m not alone in this. Humans are ridiculous.

Aeon then involves a little effort, if you’re me, but it is well worth it. They used to also publish Ideas that were usually around the one thousand word mark which my short attention span was more suited to but they unfortunately seem to have done away with them recently. They publish essays on philosophy, science, history, psychology, law, nature, education and every sub category within.

For example this is an article on Ashoka Maurya who was an Indian Emperor over two thousand years ago. Seeing first hand the horror of warfare he creating ‘an infrastructure of goodness’ which also included the spread of the teachings of Siddhattha Gotama – the Buddha – and changed the face of the Indian continent in the process.

This is an article on the spread of pathogens throughout history, from The Black Death to polio, and how they’re generally spread silently by the seemingly healthy.

This article discusses free will and determinism, using our understanding of the sometime random actions of molecules to give some answers to this age old argument.

This is an essay on the concept of ‘hysterical women’, how women’s pain is often medically overlooked and undertreated but that ‘believing all women’ is not necessarily the answer and oversimplifies the issue.

This discusses how not only is privatising public services bad economics but also how it undermines our social and political bonds as a community.

And finally this is an article about how fish are nothing at all like us but that they are sentient beings and that they finally deserve a real place in our moral community.

Ultimately these are just a few examples of articles they publish and even then they’re only the ones I’m drawn to. There’s a little of everything for everyone. I mention Aeon because they’re not a massive publishing or news company, they don’t have adverts all over their website and they produce really interesting work. It’s online magazines like this that people need to be made aware of in these times of sensationalism and factual inaccuracy.

Just because I can I’m attaching a video of sea life in the Ningaloo Canyons off Western Australia. The video is on YouTube but is from Aeon, or at least that’s were I found it. There is also a video on the creation of the police force by Robert Peel in 1829 and what that has meant for society up to the present day. Enjoy the fish for now though.

Knut Hamsun The Nazi

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I questioned a few days ago about whether there is credibility in someones words despite them not being able to live by them themselves. This was in relation to Heidegger the career driven Nazi compared to someone like The Buddha. Yesterday I talked about how hard it can be to find sources of information and opinion that are contrary to yours but are credible, well researched and not based upon bias. In the end I decided against buying the book on Nietzsche and his take on contemporary society, not because of the topic but because I don’t know if I can trust the author not to waste my time. I haven’t given up on it and I may still one day but instead I stumped for Knut Hamsun’s Growth Of The Soil. I have only read one of his books before and that is Hunger, which is about the struggles of an impoverished writer trying to survive in late nineteenth century Oslo, Norway. It is a psychological journey through the irrational mind of someone enduring existence and I suspect there are certain autobiographical elements to it. It is an incredible story and I enjoyed it so much I decided not to rush into another of his books, instead spread them out and enjoy them as I felt right. Knut Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920 and from that one book alone I can see why.

Knut Hamsun though is an incredibly divisive figure. At the turn of the century influenced by what he saw as British aggression and Imperialism he developed a strong support for Germany and Germanic culture, supporting them in both the First and Second World Wars. Despite being eighty years old at the outbreak of the Second World War he managed to get an audience with Hitler and thoroughly pissed him off through his obstinate old man behaviour, and in attempting to get him to release imprisoned Norwegians. He did through write a eulogy for Hitler after his death and was going to be tried for treason after the war but it was decided his behaviour had been down to the mentally debilitating affects of age. Understandably he has been a divisive figure in Norway ever since and I directly quote from a Norwegian biographer on Wikipedia; “We can’t help loving him, though we have hated him all these years … That’s our Hamsun trauma. He’s a ghost that won’t stay in the grave”. This then is the next level of the dilemma, to read and love an author despite him being a total Nazi. Well seeing as I bought his book this morning it’s pretty clear how I feel about it. Sometimes it’s all about the literature. When it suits me at least.

Is There As Much Value In The Dream As The Achievement?

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I was reading an article about death and how if we accept it’s inevitability we’re more likely to lead fulfilling and ultimately happier lives. It is with acceptance on this inevitable that will apparently help us to do more, fear less and live closer to whatever our true desires for a full life are. It highlights the differing approach between western and eastern philosophy and is an interesting piece all told. I want to discuss an idea that came into my mind while reading it more than the actual article itself.

The author highlights the example of Heidegger, who “lamented that too many people wasted their lives running with the ‘herd’ rather than being true to themselves”, but who later went on to join the Nazi party in the hope it would advance his career, amongst other reasons. Now then Heidegger was a great philosopher and influenced many in his lifetime and subsequently but he was in this example unable to live by his own ideals. This is opposite to another person the author discusses, The Buddha, who managed to live by his beliefs until the end. Do we then need to give more credibility to the ideals of someone who manages to live by what they say than someone who is unable to. Does their inability to follow their own beliefs discredit them as fanciful or unachievable or do we take them as things to one day achieve. If we only ever professed what we were capable of would we as a species have evolved our thinking at a far slower rate because we never made any so called implausible leaps.

It is important to understand where ideas come from. We are undoubtedly inspired by those around us of course, our peers and family, by modern culture, and what we observe in our daily life. There is ourselves too though. Who do we get to spend more time with, experience the deepest thoughts of and understandings than ourselves. I know without an argument I don’t live up to all my protestations and ideals but if I did I would probably be enlightened like The Buddha or I would potentially be leading a very simple life.

Some of what I believe is what I know I am lacking in my own life. I’ve observed something in myself and see how a life with or without it would be ‘better’ were I capable of living or thinking like that. I understand it because I aspire to it and see it’s value through the lack of it in my own life. Does my inability to follow through devalue the idea. Evidently I’m arguing no and as such think we would be wise not to be too dismissive of such failures in follow through. We shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss ideas because they seem incomprehensible and unachievable. Everything is unachievable until it is achieved and there are no time limits from the inception of an idea to it’s completion as common thought. Heidegger’s ideas, like our own fanciful ones, are no less credible just because he wasn’t able to master them himself. The ability of others later who could proves this. Perhaps there’s some value in our wildest dreams after all.