Get Blogged @ Cybergate9.Net

Connected-ness appears to be the theme of the month…
Well, for I and Me anyway :)

The blog title, by the way, is straight rip from Beatles anthology

The whole thing meddled (or was that muddled) together over the past week. And it’s kind of a follow-on to my previous posts but it came full circle this morning when a good friend of mine said “what a wise man … this is the kind of thing to watch over and over as it is so full of wisdom”… This blog post had been sitting in a draft notes form until that point…

She was referring to a talk by Bob Thurman @ TED where he (in 12 minutes) wanders through Buddha’s themes on empathy, compassion, inside and outside - the self and other, oh and refers to the Beatles song I, Me, Me, Mine… Watch the video and I’ll restrict myself to two quotes from Bob..

“knowing your inter-connectedness with other beings… you can experience yourself as the other beings… when you see through the delusion of being separated from them… and when you do that you are forced to feel what they feel”

“realise that your pains and pleasures are too smaller theatre for your intelligence”

This then naturally leads (me, anyway) to “non-zero sum games” by Richard Wright @ TED.

So the question might be… why are we all so dis-connected?

To re-connect, or at least see how somebody else is connected, watch Jane Goodall’s presentation @ TED. I have seen Jane quite a bit on both TV and the net recently and, personally, I find her astonishing.

Of course, themes such as connected-ness, compassion, and empathy are all viewed from ones own perspective. So then logically if you change the perspective then everything else changes. One of the best examples of this, for me, comes from Jane’s speech where she describes the first time she observed chimps making tools. At the time this was thought to be a skill exclusively available to ‘man’ and Louis Leakey (her mentor and supervisor at the time) said to her as a result of this finding..

“we must now re-define man, re-define tool, or accept chimpanzees as human”

It’s all connected and all a matter of perspective.