Tell-A-Vision = Why Not Try Love Again?
Freedom of expression and freedom of speech aren't really important unless they're heard...It's hard for me to stay silent when I keep hearing that peace is only attainable through war. And there's nothing more scary than watching ignorance in action. So I dedicated this Emmy to all the people who feel compelled to speak out and not afraid to speak to power and won't shut up and refuse to be silenced. - Tommy Smothers
Bodhisattva in the metro
by E. Britton, editor
The Sanskrit term Bodhisattva is the name given to anyone who, motivated by great compassion and wisdom, has generated bodhichitta, a spontaneous wish to attain Buddhahood for the benefit of all sentient beings. What makes someone a Bodhisattva is her or his spontaneous and limitless dedication to the ultimate welfare of others.
(May we suggest that you view this at least two times? Get comfortable.)
It’s not the destination, it’s the voyage.
Merci Christine. - http://worldstreets.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/bodhisattva-in-the-metro/
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Speaking in Tongues
a film by Marcia Jarmel and Ken SchneiderKen writes:
Hey Peeps,
In case you've wondered what I've been up to all this time....
Our new doc is screening in Los Angeles in a few weeks. It's a single screening--so save the date & time!
We'll be there (myself, Marcia, and our two boys) to intro the film and answer questions after.
If you can't make it, do tell your friends--especially those working in education, or on immigration issues, language issues, or just plain old folks interested in documentary. It's a family-friendly film, so bring the kids and the teens.
Hope to see you all there:
L.A. Premiere: SPEAKING IN TONGUES
Audience Award Winner, San Francisco International Film Festival
Sunday, September 12, 2010 @ 3 pm
Fundraiser for Californians Together
Aero Theatre
1328 Montana Avenue, Santa MonicaAt a time when 31 states have passed "English Only" laws, four pioneering families put their children in public schools where, from the first day of kindergarten, their teachers speak mostly Chinese or Spanish. Speaking in Tongues follows four diverse kids on a journey to become bilingual. Winner of the Audience Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival, this charming story will challenge you to rethink the skills that Americans need in the 21st century.
Special invited guests include the filmmakers, community leaders, policymakers, and advocates from organizations at the forefront of multilingual education.
Tickets can be purchased on-line here.
For each $12 ticket sold, $4 will be donated to benefit Californians Together's Seal of Biliteracy campaign.
(To learn more, check out: http://www.californianstogether.org/)
Californians Together is a statewide coalition, of parents, teachers, education advocates and civil rights groups, committed to securing equal access to quality education for all children.
To watch the trailer and learn more, visit the Speaking in Tongues website:
Psychedelic drugs return as potential treatments for mental illness
New research confirms that psychedelic drugs are promising treatments for depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and schizophrenia
by Moheb Costandi
Long before hippie poster boy Timothy Leary invited the world to "Turn on, tune in and drop out", a group of pioneering psychiatrists working in Canada began to treat alcoholics with lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and reported unprecedented recovery rates.
Far from being at the fringes of medical research, their work was fully supported and funded by the Canadian government, and became a promising new area of research that played a role in modernising the field of psychiatry. But despite the encouraging results, studies of LSD therapy ended abruptly in the late 1960s, and did not resume again until some 40 years later.
At the cutting edge of early psychedelic research was one Humphry Osmond (1917-2004), a British psychiatrist at the Weyburn Mental Hospital in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. It was Osmond who gave the novelist Aldous Huxley his first dose of mescaline in 1953, and coined the term "psychedelic" in 1957.
Between the years of 1954 and 1960, Osmond and his colleague Abram Hoffer treated some 2,000 chronic alcoholics with LSD. None of these patients had responded to other treatments, and yet, Osmond and Hoffer reported that up to 45% of those treated with a single large dose of the drug abstained from drinking for at least a year afterwards.
Other researchers in Canada, Britain, the United States and elsewhere began experimenting with LSD therapy, and by the time the drug hit the streets in the early 1960s, there were more than a thousand published research papers that described promising results in over 40,000 patients.
These studies took place alongside trials of newly developed compounds such as the antipsychotic chlorpromazine and the tricyclic antidepressant imipramine. This body of work effectively established the new field of psychopharmacology, which led psychiatrists to abandon the psychoanalytical approach they had been using since the turn of the century, and begin to consider alcoholism and mental illnesses in terms of disrupted brain chemistry.
Although the results of many of the early studies into LSD therapy were promising, investigations of the potential therapeutic benefits of the psychedelic drugs stopped towards the end of the decade, for two main reasons.
First, some began to question the methods used in the studies, arguing that they lacked scientific rigour, and few, if any, other researchers managed to replicate the high recovery rates reported by Osmond and Hoffer. Many therefore viewed the early studies as providing nothing more than anecdotal evidence for the therapeutic benefits of LSD.
Second, and more importantly, the cultural and political climate became less conducive to psychedelic research. LSD became a popular recreational drug towards the end of the 1960s, and came to be associated with the hippie counterculture, anti-authoritarianism and social disobedience. As a result, research funding quickly dried up, and the drug was eventually criminalised by the US and other governments in 1970.
The past decade has seen renewed interest in the potential therapeutic benefits of LSD and other psychedelic drugs, and the availability of sophisticated techniques such as functional neuroimaging is beginning to provide fresh insights into how they affect the brain.
The new research confirms that the psychedelic drugs do indeed have therapeutic value for a number of psychiatric conditions, including depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and schizophrenia. It also points to various brain mechanisms which may underly their beneficial effects.
We now know that the so-called classical hallucinogens (LSD, psilocybin and mescaline) activate 5-HT2A receptors – which normally bind the neurotransmitter serotonin – in the deep layers of the prefrontal cortex. This in turn alters nerve cell signalling mediated by the transmitters glutamate and dopamine, and may also lead to changes in the strength of connections between neurons in the cortex and other parts of the brain.
Serotonin and dopamine convey messages in the brain circuits involved in mood, and psychedelic drugs apparently alleviate the clinical symptoms of mood disorders by modulating the activity of the cells in these circuits and by modifying their connections.
The very latest research shows that ketamine, an anaesthetic with hallucinogenic properties, can reduce the symptoms of depression quickly and effectively, and that MDMA (popularly known as ecstasy) can be beneficial to sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder when used in combination with behavioural therapy.
By contrast, new research into the effects of the classical hallucinogens has progressed at a much slower pace, probably because these drugs are categorised as Class A in the UK (Schedule I in the US), and researchers who wish to obtain them therefore face numerous regulatory barriers.
Nevertheless, it now seems quite clear that psychedelic drugs have enormous potential for treating a wide variety of psychiatric conditions. Much still remains to be discovered about exactly how they affect the brain, however.
For example, optimising their clinical benefits will require a better understanding of how their molecular structures are related to their activity, and of how each drug can be combined with psychotherapeutic approaches to achieve the best results.
Furthermore, because most psychedelics can mimic the symptoms of naturally occurring psychoses – they can, for example, induce hallucinations and disorganised thought processes – future research may reveal some of the brain mechanisms underlying schizophrenia and related conditions.
The debate that occurred in the 1960s about the therapeutic use of LSD mirrors the one taking place today over the use of MDMA, so the history of LSD experimentation could provide valuable lessons about how to incorporate these controversial drugs into modern medicine.
Moheb Costandi is a molecular and developmental neurobiologist who writes the Neurophilosophy blog
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2010/sep/01/psychedelic-drugs-mental-illness
U.S. schools: grooming students for a surveillance state
August 28, 2010 by Dissent
Schools are increasingly invading student privacy both in school and outside of school. Are schools grooming youth to passively accept a surveillance state where they have no expectation of privacy anywhere? A PogoWasRight.org commentary.
The increasing use of student surveillance and intrusion of school districts into students' extra-curricular conduct should alarm us all. Whether it is a district surveilling students in their bedrooms via webcam, conducting random drug or locker searches, strip-searching students, lowering the standard for searching students to "reasonable suspicion" from "probable cause," disciplining students for conduct outside of school hours, searching - their cellphones and text - messages, or allegedly forcing them to undergo pregnancy testing, student privacy is under increasing threat.
The other day I mentioned a Connecticut school district that wanted to require students to carry an ID card with an RFID chip so that they could track their location. The surveillance capability included locating the student if they were off school premises and in town. Today, I came across another news story from earlier this month that also involves tracking students. KTVU in California reported that the Contra Costa County School District began introducing a tracking system for preschool students that would alert staff when a student leaves school premises. In order to accomplish that, students will reportedly be required to wear a jersey that contains the RFID tag that uses Wi-Fi to send signals to sensors located throughout the school.
I realize that some might argue that these are just little pre-schoolers and of course, we want to protect their safety, etc., but keep in mind that one of the major justifications for the program is to save staff time in terms of having to manually record attendance, etc. In exchange for that time and cost-saving, what price do we pay psychologically as a society? It strikes me that schools are grooming our youth to simply accept being tracked and monitored wherever they go and that anything they do, anywhere, can be used against them in school or elsewhere.
Is this really how we want to raise our children? To be sheep who accept being tracked and who have little sense of privacy or entitlement to privacy?
A study released last year by Fordham Law's Center on Law and Information Privacy found that the education sector was not doing enough to protect the privacy of student information. It did not, however, look at the question of whether schools were actually invading student privacy and systematically eroding student privacy rights and autonomy. It's time for a national dialogue about student privacy, while there are still some remnants of it left.
Source: http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=13175
California School Uses RFID Tags To Track Location Of Preschoolers
By Michael Klurfeld on August 26th, 2010
A school in California has received a $50,000 grant that it's spending in a pretty odd way. It's using the money to put tracking devices on preschoolers.
The Contra Costa County School District has put RFID tags into basketball jerseys which the students will wear while at school. The bulk of the grant went towards setting up sensors around the school to read the tags and computer systems to actually monitor where each student is.
The point is to make it easier to make sure all students are accounted for. As anyone who has spent time with small children knows, they really like to run around. If you are responsible for a child and he gets lost, you want to find him as soon as possible. So while the idea of attaching tracking devices to kids seems a little odd, the usage and reasoning seem sound.
Part of why I'm not going to freak out about this is because it in no way encroaches on anyone's reasonable expectation of privacy. If the school district were, for example, using some grant money to read all text messages sent and received by high schoolers; the school would need a warrant as that would constitute a wiretap (though that might not even be the case any longer). But your location at a public school isn't exactly private information. And again, this facilitates grownups to watch kids and make sure they're not doing dangerous things with scissors.
Michael Klurfeld is a Chicago-based musician and technologist specializing in legal happenings and public policy. [photos on-site]
[Ed Note: The above two links were provided by Rick Davis ... and while we are on the subject of children and what RFID (above) really looks like, here is a depressing WAKE-UP call (science (sic) faction) one might want to be aware of. - dahbud]
Zen and the art of protecting the planet
In a rare interview, zen buddhist master Thich Nhat Hahn warns of the threat to civilisation from climate change and the spiritual revival that is needed to avert catastrophe
by Jo Confino, guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 August 2010 18.16 BST
It is not exactly a traditional Sunday stroll in the English countryside as 84-year-old Vietnamese zen master Thich Nhat Hanh leads nearly a thousand people through the rolling Nottinghamshire hills in walking meditation.
The silent procession takes on the shape of a snake as it wends its way extremely slowly through a forest glade and an apple orchard. The assembled throng are asked to deeply experience each step they take on the earth in order to be mindful in the present moment.
Thay, as he is known, steps off the path into a field of tall grass and sits quietly in meditation. He exudes a sense of serenity, born of his 68 years' practice as a monk.
Despite having hundreds of thousands of followers around the world and being viewed with the same reverence as the Dalai Lama, Thay is little known to the general public. He has chosen to shun the limelight and avoid the shimmer of celebrity endorsement in order to focus on building communities around the world that can demonstrate his ethical approach to life. There are monasteries in France, America and Germany as well as groups of supporters that meet all over the world, including more than 20 "sanghas" across the UK.
He is seeking to create a spiritual revival that replaces our consumption-based lives with a return to a simpler, kinder world based on deep respect for each other and the environment.
He rarely gives interviews but recognises that the enormous challenges facing the world, combined with his own increasing age and frailty, means it is important to use what time and energy he has left to contribute what he can to re-energising society and protecting the planet.
For a man of his age, Thay keeps to a punishing schedule. After having lectured to thousands at London's Hammersmith Apollo, Thay has come to Nottingham for a five day retreat, then goes on to a three month tour of Asia, before returning for a winter retreat at his Plum Village community in France, where he has lived in exile for more than 40 years.
Thay, a prolific author with more than 85 titles under his belt, has taken a particular interest in climate change and recently published the best-selling book 'The World We Have – A Buddhist approach to peace and ecology.'
Tranquilising ourselves with over-consumption
In it, he writes: "The situation the Earth is in today has been created by unmindful production and unmindful consumption. We consume to forget our worries and our anxieties. Tranquilising ourselves with over-consumption is not the way."
In his only interview in the UK, Thay calls on journalists to play their part in preventing the destruction of our civilisation and calls on corporations to move away from their focus on profits to the wellbeing of society.
He says that it is an ill-conceived idea that the solution to global warming lies in technological advances. While science is important, even more so is dealing with the root cause of our destructive behaviour: "The spiritual crisis of the West is the cause for the many sufferings we encounter. Because of our dualistic thinking that god and the kingdom of god is outside of us and in the future - we don't know that god's true nature is in every one of us. So we need to put god back into the right place, within ourselves. It is like when the wave knows that water is not outside of her.
"Everything we touch in our daily lives, including our body, is a miracle. By putting the kingdom of god in the right place, it shows us it is possible to live happily right here, right now. If we wake up to this, we do not have to run after the things we believe are crucial to our happiness like fame, power and sex. If we stop creating despair and anger, we make the atmosphere healthy again.
"Maybe we have enough technology to save the planet but it is not enough because the people are not ready. This is why we need to focus on the other side of the problem, the pollution of the environment not in terms of carbon dioxide but the toxic atmosphere in which we live; so many people getting sick, many children facing violence and despair and committing suicide.
Spiritual pollution
"We should speak more of spiritual pollution. When we sit together and listen to the sound of the [meditation] bell at this retreat, we calm our body and mind. We produce a very powerful and peaceful energy that can penetrate in every one of us. So, conversely, the same thing is true with the collective energy of fear, anger and despair. We create an atmosphere and environment that is destructive to all of us. We don't think enough about that, we only think about the physical environment.
"Our way of life, our style of living, is the cause of it. We are looking for happiness and running after it in such a way that creates anger, fear and discrimination. So when you attend a retreat you have a chance to look at the deep roots of this pollution of the collective energy that is unwholesome.
"How can we change the atmosphere to get the energy of healing and transformation for us and our children? When the children come to the retreat, they can relax because the adults are relaxed. Here together we create a good environment and that is a collective energy."
Capitalism as a disease
Thay talks about capitalism as a disease that has now spread throughout the world, carried on the winds of globalisation: "We have constructed a system we cannot control. It imposes itself on us, and we become its slaves and victims."
He sees those countries that are home to Buddhism, such as India, China, Thailand and Vietnam, seeking to go even beyond the consumerism of the West: "There is an attractiveness around science and technology so they have abandoned their values that have been the foundation of their spiritual life in the past," he says. "Because they follow western countries, they have already begun to suffer the same kind of suffering. The whole world crisis increases and globalisation is the seed of everything. They too have lost their non-dualistic view. There are Buddhists who think that Buddha is outside of them and available to them only after they die.
"In the past there were people who were not rich but contented with their living style, laughing and happy all day. But when the new rich people appear, people look at them and ask why don't I have a life like that too, a beautiful house, car and garden and they abandon their values."
While Thay believes that change is possible, he has also come to accept the possibility that this civilisation may collapse. He refers to the spiritual principle that by truly letting go of the 'need' to save the planet from climate change, it can paradoxically help do just that.
The catastrophe to come
"Without collective awakening the catastrophe will come," he warns. "Civilisations have been destroyed many times and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different.
"If you meditate on that, you will not go crazy. You accept that this civilisation could be abolished and life will begin later on after a few thousand years because that is something that has happened in the history of this planet. When you have peace in yourself and accept, then you are calm enough to do something, but if you are carried by despair there is no hope.
"It's like the person who is struck with cancer or Aids and they learn they have been given one year or six months to live. They suffer very much and fight. But if they come to accept that they will die and they prepare to live every day peacefully and they enjoy every moment, the situation may change and the illness may go away. That has happened to many people."
Thay says that the communities his Order of Interbeing is building around the world are intended to show that it is possible to "live simply and happily, having the time to love and help other people. That is why we believe that if there are communities of people like that in the world, we will demonstrate to the people and bring about an awakening so that people will abandon their course of comforts. If we can produce a collective awakening we can solve the problem of global warming. Together we have to provoke that type of awakening."
'One Buddha is not enough'
He stops for a moment and goes quiet: "One Buddha is not enough, we need to have many Buddhas."
Thay has lived an extraordinary life. During the Vietnam War he was nearly killed several times helping villagers suffering from the effects of bombing. When visiting America, he persuaded Martin Luther King to oppose the war publicly, and so helped to galvanize the peace movement. In fact King nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968.
In the following decade Thay spent months on the South China Sea seeking to save Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees from overcrowded boats and, in more recent years, he led members of the US Congress through a two-day retreat and continues to hold reconciliation retreats for Israelis and Palestinians at Plum Village.
His whole philosophy is based on watching the breath and walking meditation to stay in the present moment rather than dwelling on the past or worrying about the future.
He says that within every person are the seeds of love, compassion and understanding as well as the seeds of anger, hatred and discrimination. Our experience of life depends on which seeds we choose to water.
To help the creation of a new global ethic and sustain those positive seeds, Thay's Order of Interbeing has distilled the Buddha's teachings on the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path into five core principles.
The Five Mindfulness Trainings, updated in the last year to make them relevant to our fast changing world, are not a set of rules but a direction to head in. Beyond calling for mindful consumption, they encourage an end to sexual misconduct as well as a determination "not to gamble, or to use alcohol, drugs or any other products which contain toxins, such as certain websites, electronic games, TV programmes, films, magazines, books and conversations."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainability/environment-zen-buddhism-sustainability
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Bottom cartoon: FOR FUN! FOR THRIFT! FOR WORK! IT'S WISE TO GO WHIZZER !! - Complete with all necessary attachments $109.97
Oh, I hope that I see you again I never even caught your name As you looked through my window pane -- So I'm writing this message today I'm thinking that you'll have a way Of hearing the notes in my tune -- Where are you going? Where have you been? I can imagine other worlds you have seen -- Beautiful faces and music so serene -- So I do hope I see you again My universal citizen You went as quickly as you came -- You know the power Your love is right You have good reason To stay out of sight -- But break our illusions and help us Be the light -- Message by Michael Pinder
Without love in the dream, it will never come true. - J. Garcia/R. Hunter
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