Nature = Good

[Stosh]

Techno peeps run out of air , drop mics

Peeps deleted.

[Protector]

We need more techno peeps up in here

Oh! I know! How about Dalai Lama

http://2045.com/dialogue/29819.html

[Stosh]

.

 

I doubt most of those guys are as techno savvy as yourself,

Edited August 19, 2014 by Stosh

[Vanir Thunder Dojo Tan]

technology is limited, nature is infinite.

Evolution is inevitable, wether technologically adapted or not. Technology is merely one of the many and infinite elements of the nature of the universe, but is no greater or lesser than any other element except by contrasts of opinion, desire, and necessity.

Edited August 20, 2014 by Vanir Thunder Dojo Tan

[Protector]

I had no idea that Dalai Lama owns that much...

With the major lack of comments, I CLAIM THIS VICTORY!!!

 

I also clam it

[GrandmasterP]

The DL was a technology fan when he was a lad according to that '7 Years in Tibet' dude.

Most lads are at that age though.

Edited August 21, 2014 by GrandmasterP

[Silent Answers]

He's not saying that technology is the be all end all... Just that souls can reincarnate wherever the right interface is assembled.

 

Imagine all biological life died off, leaving the machines to inherit the Earth...Would we forget and do it all again? Would the "soft-skins" be revered? What a game, huh

[Wu Ming Jen]

Nature provides all the natural resources for survival. It would be impossible to build anything without the stuff to do it with. Men decide to use the resources to benefit or destroy. technology makes us reinvent the same stuff over and over again. Nature invented the wheel because round things roll. things we make work because of the underlying laws of nature that make it so.

 

Technology, are you dependent or independent is it an asset or liability that is up to you.

[Vanir Thunder Dojo Tan]

It is not always up to the individual as to how much of a negative or positive impact technology has on us.


Take, for example, the genetic modifications supposedly being done on food supposedly being distributed. I only hear and read about it on the internet and in newspapers, but i lack the personal exposure to evidence.


The tech involved is threefold:
1. media information (newspaper, TV, internet) insulates me from the facts.
2. how these genetic modifications are done is beyond me, and most commonfolk.
3. more often than not, nowasays, people process their food repeatedly and thoroughly with various tools in the kitchen.

We have control over technology element #3. but 1 and 2 are in our blind-spots. we dont really know much more about them than the hearsay we devour called "news".

But let's assume its true, in the event that we are being exposed to genetically altered organisms in our food, we only have 2 significant choices:

stop caring about what we eat and continue shopping
or
stop shopping and learn how to eat what grows wild and naturally.




The convenience dependency factor of the civilized human being plays strongly against our personal wellbeing.

(the needs of society outweigh the needs of the individual! Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country!)

[thelerner]

Take, for example, the genetic modifications supposedly being done on food supposedly being distributed. I only hear and read about it on the internet and in newspapers, but i lack the personal exposure to evidence.

 

The tech involved is threefold:

1. media information (newspaper, TV, internet) insulates me from the facts.

2. how these genetic modifications are done is beyond me, and most commonfolk.

The food that most of us have been eating since childhood has been heavily modified from how it originally formed from nature. We've been playing with our food for, in some cases, 1000's of years, certainly 100's. Even more so with cattle and fowl. I'm not talking GMO's. I'm saying humans have guided the growth of plants in a way to produce larger, sweeter, better crops.

 

Its basic intelligence and its served us well. Farmers have for centuries taken the best and let it reproduce, cherishing bigger, stronger, sweeter; at times just plain mutations, that are improvements. Its made our lived better, literally kept us from starvation.

 

How anti tech would you suggest we get? Would you abolish farms? Abolish machines? I'm not an Ayn Rand fan, but I remember her short sci fi book Anthem; where any progress, any improvement was illegal. She showed it as a nasty world, and I agree that it would be.

[Protector]

So, I'm hanging out around the internets and looking up tech stuffs and I start seeing this

The dude starts talking about this awesome nanobot tech stuff and I started getting exited about the stuff he's talking about, but then I noticed that he's actually angry and even though everything he says sounds awesome, he's using that tone

There's more of these types of video and that's kinda weird to me

It seems that da peeps are scared of technology when they don't understand it, like most stuff

The world is turning into a place where people who understand science are better off then these who don't

There seems to be a struggle to make the world into a place ruled by god instead of technology

A world for people who refuse to get an education

so annoying gaaaaaaaah

don't even want to type about it

[Vanir Thunder Dojo Tan]

i prefer natural selection over human discretion. 100% of the time.

A world of people preserved by nanobots is consequentally a world of people controlled by nanobots; anyone in control of the nanotech or capable of hacking it holds the lives of everyone affected in the palm of their hand.

I'm not saying we be anti-tech, but that we really heavily weigh the consequences of technology and find its every flaw and exploit BEFORE mass introduction.

bring people up to the bar of the technology itself before inflicting that bar upon people.

Consent is the absolute must. i cannot consent to a civilized world, but i am unable to find a tribal people, either, to divert myself to. So i find myself a victim of circumstances i cannot alter affect or control.

I am left with this ambiguous 'damned if i do, damned if i dont' set of choices to make... and at the end of the day, if i do, i am in part, no matter how small a fraction, responsible for the damning, whereas if i dont, no matter how damned i am, i can still say i didnt do it to myself, much less anyone else. i did not contribute to the damnation.


comfortably damned contributor to damning, or painfully damned nonpartison? despicable decisions.

[GrandmasterP]

Tribalism is very stunting.

Tutsis and Hutus , for one example and retired Brits resident in those all Brit urbanizations on the Spanish Costas for another.

Tribes may look cosy-nice from the outside but for someone stuck in a tribe who feels led to go against the flow... Look Out!

Edited August 25, 2014 by GrandmasterP

[Vanir Thunder Dojo Tan]

Tribe goes with the flow of nature.
Civility goes with the flow of artificiality.

WHO is going against WHAT flow here?

[Satya]

I haven't read all the previous posts, but here's my 2 cents on the benefits of nature (personal and global):

Natural Environment

Nature, re: trees/plants/wilderness, what many refer to as being "out in nature", forests, fields etc, one simple benefit here, from being in these areas seems to me to be OXYGEN, haha. More immediate oxygen and less pollution = good for our bodies, minds, cognition, physical processes, obviously good.

 

Also there's less physical distractions, less things to curb the mind away from now, re: billboards, posters, advertising imagery of all kinds.

Also, the noises from cars, lorries, sirens, all those things, even when we "get used to them", I still think they have an effect on us (I think there're other theorists/writings on this too, but I can't be bothered to research it right now). We've got thousands (millions if you include pre-species ancestors) of years of evolutionary wiring/predisposition that's geared towards setting off the fight or flight response, stress hormones/neurotransmitters, stress from VERY LOUD SCARY NOISES. These things set off these sometimes obvious, sometimes barely noticeable reactions, and even if it's minor amounts of stress hormones then they're still there and we're not using them to run or fight, so they stay in our system = stress. Being in nature takes that away and seeming as how stress is so bad for us, this is another reason why nature is good . (the only incidents in which there are scary loud noises in nature are generally when you SHOULD be running and these stress hormones get used up ).

Generally you're more alone out in nature/wilderness and this has many benefits.

Chemicals Vs Natural

Then if we're talking about what's natural, organic stuff, then, simply: we've evolved alongside what's natural. We know what does what. We've a decent test period with this natural stuff, our whole history.

However, when it comes to chemicals, we don't, so a lot of it is guess work and this guess work that in most other instances is done in controlled environments for decades before release on the publics is in fact being done to the population, with their exposure to all kinds of chemicals and compounds that in terms of the history of the planet are all quite relatively new, and we don't know what they'll do. Chemicals in house cleaning products, self cleaning products, poisonous chemicals sprayed on food, materials in the toys we give to our kids, toys that they are ever so found of putting in their mouths.

For a drug to get cleared for mass use it has to go through a fair few stages of trials. I don't think that these protocols are being applied to many synthetic substances that have unknown effects that are being released into society. Even plastic cups.

If something is synthesised, or chemically concentrated then we have not evolved to adapt/to be able to handle it (OR at the very LEAST we have NO idea what the effect of these chemicals on organic things will be). Chemicals are useful in many ways for many things, but, I think it's a no brainer to just completely avoid them when it comes to combining them with natural organic beings/material (that means us/our inner and outer bodies, our fields, our soil, our plants, animals, etc).

 

We SHOULD without a doubt be restricting ALL chemicals to sealed laboratory or factory settings and preventing any environmental/organic contamination by these, as of yet, relatively unknown chemicals.

 

This comes from The Lancet, a peer-reviewed journal:

 

"We postulate that even more neurotoxicants remain undiscovered. To control the pandemic of developmental neurotoxicity, we propose a global prevention strategy. Untested chemicals should not be presumed to be safe to brain development, and chemicals in existing use and all new chemicals must therefore be tested for developmental neurotoxicity."

 

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laneur/article/PIIS1474-4422(13)70278-3/fulltext#article_upsell

I've got nothing against chemicals in a lab or factory setting. It is only introducing them to organic living things, especially when it's A: not necessary, and B: when repercussions are unknown.

Technology

 

Double edged sword here + cyclical, as with many things. Tech has made physical life better, less disease, quicker recovery, quicker transportation. It enabled us to do more quicker, but then also provided a million distractions to take us away from what we'd otherwise be doing. Those who are content, at peace have no desire to have a smaller phone, get from A to B quicker (or ultimately have or do anything). If you're always happy/present now, then why would you want to rush from there to there, you're always NOW throughout the journey?

Who wants these things? Who's building parts of our world? What are there minds like? Generally, not the completely content individuals.

This tech society sort of compounds and begets itself so it moves exponentially in the direction of more outer outer outer outer solutions, etc. It has the potential (and sometimes achieves this potential) of bringing greatness and Truth around the world much faster than would previously have been possible. No walking in the mud barefoot for 3 weeks to meet this mystical master, you can just buy their book online or watch a talk online. Though, is it worth it for all of the other stuff?

Balance is key, I think.

We've reached a point on earth of amazing technological advance, however the current global issues facing us cannot be solved exclusively, or even mainly, by tech/external/modern. What is required, in my opinion, is more inner work, more of an internal revolution, rather than more and more and more technological solutions to this and that and that. It's like medication for side effects and then medicating the side effects for that side effect medication and so on. We have the resources to resolve most all world problems, it's just power structures and people doing not great things standing in the way of them being resolved.

We have all the resources we need, we just need to manage them more effectively. Meditate, less hate, less greed, work with and use what we need, not what we want. Pleasures are obviously important, but over excess has led to a discrete malaise, apathy has come from too much focus on material/tech based pleasures.

Conclusion

Both useful, but we're at an interesting stage in history here. A good degree of balance is required. It's slowly appearing, but more needs to be done I think.

[GrandmasterP]

+1 Satya.

We live in a quiet(ish) deeply rural place.

Mrs GMP is in London right now at a wedding and enjoying the company whilst hating the environment.

She 'phoned me this morning from Clapham Common.

The constant background noise is incredible, traffic, sirens, people shouting and that's from a 'green space' in South London.

Her hosts, who live in London simply do not register the clamour as it is a constant soundtrack to their lives.

It must, however; affect them.

When we get visitors staying here it is unusual for people not to say how quiet it is.

Some find that disturbing, others say how much better they sleep out here in the country.

Edited August 26, 2014 by GrandmasterP

[Protector]

[Anoesjka]

I grew up in a rural area and loved to hang around and help out on the farms there. Farmers had at most twenty cows and a small tractor, some didn't even have that, but they had old fashioned horsepower. It was marvelous, the pace of living was slow and that generated a natural kind of mindfulness

 

Then I went to live in the city for years, but I always wanted to go back to the countryside. So, this year finally, we bought an old farmhouse in the boondocks. And I soon found out it wasn't like in my youth anymore. Farmers have 800 hectares of land, own huge machines that make lots of noise, and spray lots of toxins. Cows, the thousand or so in one stable, never see the light of day. Pigs are kept in huge pig apartments, which are more like factories.

 

And still, we, humans and our culture, can't be separated from nature.

[GrandmasterP]

What is it with farmers and massive tractors?

Time was an old Massey Ferguson or Fordson tractor not much bigger than a small car and one step up to get into the seat did everything and then some on every farm.

Nowadays tractors are huge great things with a ladder needed to climb up into the cab.

Farms are no bigger in the main, we've very little 'prairie style' mega fields compared to USA.

I can see huge fields needing big kit but round here farms are still quite small but all with giant tractors.

Edited August 28, 2014 by GrandmasterP

[Protector]

Farms are getting bigger, farmers are getting older, and no one wants to work there

Check this guy out

[Vanir Thunder Dojo Tan]

factory farming should be globally illegal and abnned outright.


Back to the land, no (or minimal) machines!

[Protector]

ROBOTS IN EVERY HOME AND WORKPLACE

ABANDON YOUR FLESH

UPGRADE TO THE NEW LEVEL OF EXISTENCE

[Satya]

factory farming should be globally illegal and abnned outright.

 

 

Back to the land, no (or minimal) machines!

In all cases, yes. Especially for animal farming. Terrible practices.

 

Huge problem for the developed world = Too much excess, bad diet, no exercise, obesity, and its consequences. Pollution and all that comes with that.

 

Huge problem for the poorest countries = Stark lack of resources, starvation, dehydration, malnutrition. Pollution and all that comes with that.

 

Horribly ironic.

 

If we got people back to the fields for their own food here in comfortable-developed-land country, that might = exercise (tackling pretty much ALL chronic AND acute physical and mental health issues); less pollution in the air we breathe, the land on which we walk and the water we drink; people appreciating their food more, wasting less, and being able to give more to those without; getting hands and feet into the earth, grounding. I'm sure there's more but it seems like a win win on paper. Would gyms even need to exist when you're ploughing a field all day or lifting sacks of grain?

 

Why are these things as they are? (rhetorical) It defies belief. It's just like the whole 'people driving to work everyday when it's only 9 miles away AND THEN going to a bloody gym after work every night to ride the exercise bikes' thing.

Edited August 29, 2014 by Satya

[Vanir Thunder Dojo Tan]

horribly ironic It's inconcievable and yet so it is as such. all for the profits of a small sub-percent of the human population, at the expense of the vast majority. no jsutification, no right, just is. we allow it to be.

how do we disallow it? how?

[GrandmasterP]

A lot of folks would starve if they had to grow their own food.

It is jolly hard work.

Hard work's not so popular these days as once it was.

Edited August 29, 2014 by GrandmasterP