Bertrand Russell / Bear Country

"The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight
to moralists--that is why they invented hell", ---Bertrand Russell


THIS IS BEAR COUNTRY

I live on the Rensselaer Plateau, the biggest unknown
natural area in the Capital District area of NY State. This
is Bear Country, Mister, so watch your bird feeders;
bears lov'em. We just sustained a raid from two of our
bruins; at least from the footprints there seemed to be
two.

And, if you'll pardon my frankness, they had two differ-
ent kinds of scat (animal poop). The one was all seeds:
corn, sunflower, and assorted others. The other was all
black rounded formations. It seems they must have been
feeding separately and decided to tackle our feeders to-
gether, perhaps as a choice dessert?

Bears are one of the glories of the Rensselaer Plateau.
Bears around the world have been thought of as sacred
animals and they are so with me. I have a bear skull on
my altar, probably a two-year-old just separated from its
momma who didn't make it, poor thing.

As long as there are bears running around free, this area
can still be called wild. That's why i love being here.

WIDER DRUG WAR THREATENS COLOMBIA INDIANS

In the deep rainforests of western Colombia, S.America,
criminal armies are terrorizing the Embera Indians and
other Native groups over control of the cocaine trade.
The Embera are just bystanders in the violent clashes
of these illegal paramilitary fighters but at least two
armies are involving them via beatings, rapes, abduc-
tions, and murder.

Currently Colombia has about three million internal
refugees, the majority of them Indian peoples lacking
clean water and sufficient nourishment. The Colom-
bian government has sent some soldiers to the area
but evidently not enough to control the situation. The
Embera people fear that this emergency will last for
months or years.

Arhuacos, Awa, and Nasa peoples have also been drawn
in by the fighting. In fact, at least 27 Indigenous groups
are currently in danger of being eliminated.

NY Times, 4 -22 - 09

THE SECRET OF LIFE

Some decades ago, the psychoanalyst and philosopher Carl
Jung opined that the spiritual ways of the East were so eso-
teric that Westerners would never be able to understand
them. These secret scriptures were to be hidden away so
they wouldn't be defiled by the profane. Funny thing
about that : these days the secrets are out and in plain view;
in fact they've even been on the best-seller lists. I'm refer-
ing to a book called PRACTICING THE POWER OF NOW,
by Eckhart Tolle (New World Library, Novata CA, 1999),
preceded by his book THE POWER OF NOW, which i hav-
en't read. (But the dust jacket on PRACTICING says that
it consists of excerpts from THE POWER.)

I don't know what Tolle's background is, but what he says
i say also. It's pretty straightforward: 'Be Here Now' is a
neoVedantist (Hindu) way to put it, AKA 'Mindfulness' in
Buddhism and (perhaps) 'The Still Point' in meditative
Christianity. But this practice does not belong to any par-
ticular religion, faith, or ethnicity and is neither theology,
nor ideology, nor creed. It is nothing more than simple
consciousness---although sometimes understanding what
consciousness really means is not so simple.

I usually use the word 'consciousness' in two different
senses. In the first sense i mean 'understanding' or 'aware-
ness', as in "She is conscious of the need to conserve re-
sources". (In this case the term 'conscious' will generally
be followed by the words 'of' or 'that'.) What i mean in the
second sense of the word will take a little more explana-
tion.

'Conscious' in its simplest and most basic form means 'a-
wake'. One is either conscious or unconscious. But there
is a second meaning to the word 'awake' which is a bit more
subtle--or radical, if one finds the concept too demanding
or uncongenial. The concept here is that of 'waking sleep',
a state of mind that differs significantly from ordinary sleep.

WAKING SLEEP IS IN FACT A DESCRIPTION OF HOW
WE SPEND MOST OF OUR PRESUMABLY AWAKE TIME.

Did you ever wonder what the secret of life is? Well, this
can be it, at least for our day. What has become Homo sap-
iens has sometimes evolved in quantum leaps: about 2 1/2
million years ago our ancestors invented stone tools'; hun-
dreds of thousands of years ago they learned to control fire;
less than 30,000 years ago, they started to create beautiful
works of art; 9,000 years ago they learned to control crops;
5,000 years ago they began building towns and cities.

Today our fundamental task can be to learn to become
permanently awake. Why? Because the awake will be
much better able to see and understand what needs to be
done.

Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, the historical Buddha, had
such an aura about him that he was asked, "Are you a god?"
"No", he replied. "Are you a holy man?" "No." "Well, what
are you then?" "I am awake."