Chinese/Japanese & Korean characters for mindfulness
This term I am attending a mindfulness course run by the Oxford University Mindfulness Centre, in order to develop a practice of mindfulness that I’ve found myself unable to really get going, get integrated into my life, on my own. The teacher for the course is solid, though he can be just a little bit too dreamy-happy-sounding at times for my taste. I’ve written before that I think that such a practice may be the answer to a lot of the problems in my life, since they’re all about being stuck in my head, and that is what mindfulness is all about working away from.
What is most reassuring is how the course is slotting together ideas that I’ve got from a variety of sources now into one framework, which helps me to realise that this is a very, very old philosophy that does work for people. By “variety of sources” I’m talking my late philosophy tutor Bob, an existential psychotherapist, some Buddhist monks at a temple I once stayed at, some religious and non-religious texts. The teacher on my course will come out with a phrase, and I will instantly be taken back to some idea of Bob’s or whatever. Seeing all these connections make me wonder why this stuff isn’t more mainstream than it is. I guess it is in the East.
This reassurance is very important when it comes to some of the apparent contradictions that ignorant Westerners like me come across very quickly when looking into this sort of stuff. I want to discuss the apparent contradiction that comes up first, for most of us, in connection with the Western mindfulness movement’s claim to be completely secular.
I learnt this week that I will very likely have to make a choice about which areas of philosophy I want to specialise in rather sooner than I had hoped. continue reading this entry
Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens | Glenn Greenwald
The primary theory embraced by the Bush administration to justify its War on Terror policies was that the “battlefield” is no longer confined to identifiable geographical areas, but instead, the entire globe is now one big, unlimited “battlefield”. That theory is both radical and dangerous because a president’s powers are basically omnipotent on a “battlefield”. There, state power is shielded from law, from courts, from constitutional guarantees, from all forms of accountability: anyone on a battlefield can be killed or imprisoned without charges. Thus, to posit the world as a battlefield is, by definition, to create an imperial, omnipotent presidency. That is the radical theory that unleashed all the rest of the controversial and lawless Bush/Cheney policies.
Why I’ve joined the bad guys | Gowers’s Weblog
I attended a talk in Oxford recently from Christine Borgman about the current state of Open Access for the humanities. Seems the UK government’s version that is coming into force soon is about as wrong a way to do it as can be.
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Three and a half years ago a friend and I started watching our way through the original Japanese version (with subtitles) of Cardcaptor Sakura, comparing it along the way with our memories of CardCaptors, which was a heavily edited version, in English, which we’d both watched at school. We didn’t get very far and recently I picked up the series again, and I’ve now reached the end.
The Japanese version combines all the cute elementary school crushes stuff with the adventure of saving the world (or at least, the local area) which is the only thing you get in the American version. I think part of this is that American children’s TV audiences probably couldn’t have coped with the various homosexual relationships/infatuations and one of the supporting character’s infatuation with her teacher. Also, the American version cuts out a lot of references to Japanese culture; it might as well be set somewhere in the West. I don’t really know why they did this.
This week my Korean language exchange partner wanted to introduce me to the Chinese characters associated with the days of the week (the Korean words for which I already knew); here is an excerpt from the notes she wrote:
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The Philosophers International Trailer
I have no idea what this is trying to do.