Meditation - A lesson Learned Early best Taught To Children at School

When we speak of Meditation there are a number of meanings associated with that phrase. Some see it as being contemplation which it can be. Others who practise the ancient art add an additional layer. Meditation leads us to mindfulness so when we meditate we clear our minds of thought bringing a silence to the brain so often lacking. Being mindful helps us to awaken to reality. To achieve mindfulness, to become Buddha-like, we need to stop our thoughts. The very word Buddha means literally to be awake. Buddha is a Sanskrit word which means "The Enlightened one" or 'the awakened one.  A human being who has woken up, who is mindful, who meditates can see the true way the world works. 

"There are many things in life that are beyond our control. However, it is possible to take responsibility for our own states of mind – and to change them for the better. According to Buddhism, this is the most important thing we can do, and Buddhism teaches that it is the only real antidote to our own personal sorrows, and to the anxieties, fears, hatreds, and general confusions that beset the human condition."

"Meditation is a means of transforming the mind. Buddhist meditation practices are techniques that encourage and develop concentration, clarity, emotional positivity, and a calm seeing of the true nature of things. By engaging with a particular meditation practice you learn the patterns and habits of your mind, and the practice offers a means to cultivate new, more positive ways of being. With regular work and patience, these nourishing, focused states of mind can deepen into profoundly peaceful and energised states of mind. Such experiences can have a transformative effect and can lead to a new understanding of life."

Knowing all is one and one is all, that the word god is merely a man-made word as is the word deity, that god is simply the eternal, the vast unknown, the great unknowable, then when you meditate you commune with that which is greater than us yet of which we are part. No magic, no mysticism, nothing supernatural just the silencing of the mind and listening.

What Is Consciousness? - Ekhart Tolle

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Death and Rebirth - Jiddu Krishnamurti in conversation with Alan W. Anderson

Aliens, God, Tao and Everything part two

When examining a living human body you discover that a great deal of heat is emitted.  All humankind's body temperature is 98.6F/37C. When the body dies it feels cold to the touch. In fact, it isn't. In reality, it drops to room temperature. The human body is made up of molecules, molecules that generate energy. The heat generated comes from digested food. It is the fuel which drives the human body. The ancient Chinese called this Chi. Chi is but a word yet whatever it is called that energy is what drives life. All life.

When we see images of extraterrestrials that we are led to believe are either living on or visiting planet Earth, you can be certain they are biologically like us. The same natural law would also apply to them. They too would have to comply with the laws of biology. For them to co-exist or just visiting they must have evolved from a planet very much like ours. To breathe our atmosphere they would need lungs, a heart that pumps blood, a liver, spleen and all the other organs that make what is effectively an advanced primate species. 

Would they have to be a form of primates? I guess not. I suppose it is possible they may have evolved from another species of biped - maybe kangaroo's or lizards. Birds too are bipedal. One argument against this would be brain size. Birds and lizards, even kangaroo's, do not possess large brains. In this world, bipedal's rule. That shape offers great mobility.  It enables us to hunt, fish, swim, run, walk etc; It makes perfect sense that the supreme species on Earth not only has the biggest brain but also a body that allows for great diversity of movement.

The aliens portrayed in the many images seen on the internet look remarkably like hominids. Same bipedal shape with arms, legs and an even larger head to fit an even larger brain. Maybe we homo sapiens didn't evolve here. Maybe we were brought here via an armada of spacecraft that arrived here having first located a planet best suited to support living creatures born on a water-based world, a world so like ours that ours is a virtual facsimile. This, of course, is not only speculation but also runs in the face of science. Now, you either believe in television, telephones, satellite dishes, computers, mobile phones, stereo players, videos, hearing aids, the control of diabetes, winning the battle against cancer, space labs, rockets to the moon, submarines, aeroplanes, hovercraft, heart surgery, WiFi, the cure for smallpox, in other words, science as it is has gifted us all these things and many more and even though science is merely a tool by which we understand ourselves and our place within the eternal, it still is a powerful friend when we need it . You cannot cherry pick. You either trust science, when it supports the life you lead or you don't.

If there are aliens constantly travelling from their homeworld to ours, and I am agnostic on that subject, then they have to be related to us. This is pure logic. The physical similarities between aliens and humans are strikingly remarkable given the so-called evidence supplied. However, we cannot proselytise the possibility that one species has mutated or even evolved from another without discounting DNA. Now Deoxyribonucleic acid is a molecule. It carries genetic instructions used in the growth, development, functioning and reproduction of all known living organisms, but also a great many viruses. There is a combination of acids, proteins and lipids mixed with some complicated carbohydrates that form the four major types of macromolecules that are vital for all known forms of life. This fact is empirical, unassailable. This suggests that aliens and humans, related for sure, have not originated from a single source unless that source is Earth for human life is linked via DNA to the planet Earth, Which can only mean that aliens are human or that somewhere in deepest space is a planet exactly, or very nearly exactly, the same as our mother world.

If this is the case then the reason for the visits cannot be aggressive. What would be the point? They want to enslave us? Why? For what purpose? It cannot be their desire to mate with us. Millions of years ago we humans could have reproduced with Chimpanzee's or what was the forerunner of the chimpanzee. We couldn't now. Is it being suggested that aliens like a bit of bestiality? That is exactly what a man having sex with a chimp would be. Or could it not be that the aliens, recognising our kinship, simply want to observe and to study a species so alike their own yet woefully less technological, far more primitive, to monitor the growth of humankind? This sounds far more likely. 

Aliens, God, Tao and Everything

This from an old Zen saying...

“Heaven and earth and I are of the same root, 

the ten-thousand things and I are of one substance.”

The ten thousand things is a reference to the universe, to all life, all existence as being of one creation. Historically, Monotheists would have disparaged such a claim suggesting God made everything but the word God is a man-made thing. Once you give something a name it no longer is the thing it was. God is a word as is deity. It is possible to know God without recognizing God the deity. Another word that could easily replace God is Tao. Again, Tao is but a word, another man-made word. 

When you meditate or even when mindful, that which some call God is with you. The eternal and the external are fused as one. You and the nameless, that which is greater than you yet of which you are a part of, a child of the universe, breathe as one, become as one for that is how life is - one.

Life exists within and without us. It exists in a myriad of amazing forms yet, when you look deep into any organism, breaking it down to fundamentals, all existence is made up of the same stuff. Hydrogen, the most plentiful substance in the world, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen and many other elements. Earth and its lifeforms all contain these linked parts. If there was life on Mars many eons ago then that too would have comprised the same basic elements. If  there is a planet or planets out there, and mathematics suggests the likelihood high, then whatever life lives on those planets, be they newly evolved or thousands of years older than ourselves, then they too are part of  the ten thousand things.

Science is nothing more than a tool by which we understand ourselves, our planet, the galaxies where our planet and others spin. The connection once proclaimed by Eastern philosophies is now accepted by Western science, by science in general. All life is linked. Nothing that lives exists without those elements we know of. If there are Aliens visiting our homeworld then they too are part of the ten thousand things.

Humankind likes its labels. As a species, we think in linear terms, we apply convenient names and tags to everything. Life though isn't like that. Life is not linear but rather resembles a Rorschach - a great big splodge. Humankind separates sexual drives. They would have us believe in Heterosexuals, Homosexuals, Asexuals, and a variety of other sexuals. All there is are people with different tastes. Humankind breeds division. Racial, sexual, class, religious, political, national and of course, Extra-Terrestrial. Division is the cause of much hurt, much harm. Wars have been fought over territory, over borders. Borders, like time, are a man-made construct, they don't exist. Simply ask fish or birds or contagions or the tide that rides the humble oceans who lap at our shores.

This planet, this Earth, is not our planet. We are of this planet. This Earth is of the universe therefore so are we, so are Aliens.

The word Alien defines a being, not of this planet, not of this earth but from some far off other-world therefore not like 'us'. As we have learned all life is connected. Aliens are in reality nothing more than another variety of life brought into being by the same energy, the same Chi as the Chinese would suggest, the same force as were we.  There are no aliens only other beings like us, like cetaceans, like millipedes, like crustaceans, like mammals, like grass. 

“Heaven and earth and I are of the same root, 

the ten-thousand things and I and Aliens are of one substance.”

Reality, Consciousness, Zen, Tao, Buddhism, Dharma and Quantum Physics

Jesus Never Died on the Cross

Was Jesus a Buddhist?

"Rather than continuing to seek the truth, simply let go of your views."

The Fourteen Teachings of the Buddha