"Contemporary biological sciences, from planetary ecology to botany, zoology, and neuroscience, have documented that we are all in dependent co-arising, (sic.) that we are all part of systems and relationships, that each of us is not so much an individual but a node on a network, a plural being whose body is made up of billions of microorganisms as well as what we call human. There's a wonderful new field of biology called processual biology that looks at the world as made up of processes rather than objects, as phenomena forever flowing and changing and thereby exchanging with each other and changing into each other. It proposes that it is more useful and accurate to think of ourselves and most of what we call things as events.
After all you yourself in this very moment live by taking gulps of the sky into your lungs and could not last long without taking in that most gloriously fluctuating of all things, water, and devouring other forms of life, and other things come out of you, be they poems or babies or political contributions. Buddhism gives us Indra's net, a vision of an infinite net whose every nexus contains a jewel reflecting every other jewel; science gives us another version of that world of systems, connections, and relations.
For the survival of our democracy and our planet, understanding that interconnectedness, that capacity to relate and the abundance, joy, love that spring from it, are no longer abstract topics but an urgent political matter.
By Rebecca Solnit on the first anniversary of her "Meditations in an Emergency"
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Reminder to check the UN Declaration of Human Rights (on my other blog)
And please go read on Substack, my friend Robertson Work on the United Nations today.
This organization of multiple countries has many different goals. Do they have a format in which to move forward with our world needs today?
I commented on Rob's Substack about the UN...and he answered. I'm including these to let you know that we CAN come up with better solutions to those that had worked in the past but no longer are effective.
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What better idea do you have?
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Here is a bit of my collection of the Buddhist Monks on the Walk for Peace. Sorry about duplication of those I've already published.
Thank you, Barbara, I so appreciate your way of thinking! Yes, the Human Rights Declaration is essential. There is much wisdom in our constitutional democracy but it has been bought by the wealthy and must be renewed. Yes, love and wisdom as the foundation for new systems. Doughnut Economics has much to offer. Integral thinking, social artistry, group facilitation, mindfulness practices also. Also, creating islands of sanity and care at the local level.
. . . Let's keep this dialogue going!