my mind on books

A donkey doesn’t so much accept its cruel fate as bears it, lets it pass over them. They’re the most philosophical of all animals, much more philosophical about their fate than human beings. And it’s an instinctive philosophy, a stoic acceptance, a kind of beautiful strength, passive rather than aggressive, not an ugly violent power. Needless to say, their philosophy isn’t academic, isn’t read in books or taught in a privileged classroom: it’s everyday, a simple disposition that’s lived out and practised, in an open field. We might say, if we used philosophical-speak, that a donkey’s philosophy is ontological, that it’s all about Being, the philosophy of permanent reverie, of daydreaming in the open air.

That’s a snippet from a longish book excerpt included in The Times article on The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World by Andy Merrifield (Walker and Co., 2008).

See also “Donkeys and wisdom” at hermit’s thatch.

While I was working on my taxes the last few days, there was a big “Seeds of Compassion” Conference in Seattle (April 11-15, 2008) which fortunately has a great webcast of the event, that I’ve just been watching. The Dalai Lama was there, and the opening session is a discussion of “The Scientific Basis for Compassion,” similar to the Mind and Life Institute events. The focus appears to be on compassion in child development.

There is an associated wiki with a reading list and some interesting mind-map style sketches from the conference.

Some of the participants also contributed to the 2001 book Visions of Compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature, one of the Mind and Life Institute books.

I also saw that the Dalai Lama is at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, today (April 16) for Mind and Life XVI, Investigating the Mind-Body Connection: The Science and Clinical Applications of Meditation, which is also supposed to have a webcast, but I wasn’t able to connect to that one today.

“The Lotus and the Synapse” by Sharon Begley (Lab Notes, Newsweek, 3/25/08) discusses neuroplasticity and compassion meditation, in particular research recently published in PLoS ONE: “Regulation of the neural circuitry of emotion by compassion meditation”.
Begley is the author of Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves.

The website New Brain-New World covers some of the same territory as Jeff Warren’s The ‘Head Trip’:

“New Brain-New World presents cutting edge brain research regarding Altered States of Consciousness, the awakened brain, and neurofeedback training for the transformation of consciousness.”

Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics by Richard Shusterman, Cambridge University Press, 2008. (“Search Inside the Book” available from Amazon).

From the book description:

Contemporary culture increasingly suffers from problems of attention, over-stimulation, and stress, and a variety of personal and social discontents generated by deceptive body images. This book argues that improved body consciousness can relieve these problems and enhance one’s knowledge, performance, and pleasure. The body is our basic medium of perception and action, but focused attention to its feelings and movements has long been criticized as a damaging distraction that also ethically corrupts through self-absorption. In Body Consciousness, Richard Shusterman refutes such charges by engaging the most influential twentieth-century somatic philosophers and incorporating insights from both Western and Asian disciplines of body-mind awareness.

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(My New Year’s Resolution is to post something every day, which so far has meant lots of short posts! )