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June 2009You may need to
click "load images"
or something similar to see the photos Welcome This
month I spent more time at home, but I did have a national council
meeting of the Theosophical Society in Auckland. I am also travelling
to and from between Invercargill a few time doing assessments for
possible participants on my up coming programme for July there.I took this photo from the plane coming home from Auckland of the sunset over heavy cloud. The bulge on the far left is Mt Aspiring. I gave a short talk to the Dunedin Spiritualist Church on "How do I know I'm real?", which you can read.   We
had a day of heavy snow. It must be heavy to reach my house at sea
level, but there was a good cover. I went to work, but came home at
11.00am in case I couldn't get home later. Pictured is my flatmate's
car and little lawn
by my garden.Best of the Net Google
Wave is
a preview on where we are headed in internet applications. It links
email, texting, collaborative editing, blogging and more into one
seamless wave. The video clip is a bit long, but interesting.I found an audio review of a paper written by Sam Bowles from the Santa Fe Insititute talking on how warfare in early human groups promoted the development of altruism that then became useful for other tasks. Sam Bowles argues that the gains of altruism were more than the losses of warfare. A second paper by Adam Powell et al is also reviewed. It appears that in Southern Africa some cultural adaptations evolved around 90,000 years ago, but it disappeared again to reappear in Eurasia 45,000 years ago. It talks about population densities needed to bring such cultural evolution into existence and the drop in population densities that might lead to the loss of the culural deveopment. Books I read this month - continuedThe Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an invented Past won't Give Women an Future by Cynthia EllerFollowing having "The Fall" given to me to read - again from someone reading my draft, I thought I would have a look at the otherside of the picture of matriarchal prehistory. Cynthia Eller looks at the widely accepted idea that before the male dominated societies came into prominence around 2-4,000BC, peaceful, egalitarian, matriarchal, goddess based societies existed all around the world. Marija Gimbutas, in particular presented these ideas to the world, and was followed by others like Riane Eisler. While it presents a prehistory that is very appealing, from Eller's perspective this idea is more ideologically driven than based on facts. Eller, an archaeologist, looks at the archaeology, mythology, linguistics, anthropological evidence and much more and finds that we really know very little about Paleolithic and Neolithic life. One possible explanation is the matriarchal story, but there is at least as much evidence that patriarchal dominance has been here since the beginnning. It is not such an appealing history, but there is still no reason why we cannot change to create a better world for all of us. Eller says that facing the facts as they are is better than a living a dream however appealing. Websites on the topic A critical assessment of Gimbutas' work A criticism of Eller's book The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle This is a book I have looked at a number of times and thought it didn't say anything I hadn't read many times before. Then in the group I was working with at work some of the people had read it and found it really helpful, so I borrowed the book and read it. While it is true that there is really nothing new in it, I was pleasantly surprised at what was written. He talks alot about how we develop a pain body by getting stuck in the past or the future and that focusing on the present moment can be a pathway beyond the suffering of life. |
Subscribe to this newsletterIf you would like to receive this newsletter as a monthly email just send me an email. You may choose to email me to Unsubscribe. Previous NewslettersNewsletter archiveOld "Recent News" ISSS Conference I will
be attending the 53rd
Meeting of The International Society for the Systems Sciences
at the
University of Queensland, Brisbane, next month and presents a
paper on the development of a systems theory based spiritual philosophy.
Books I read this monthHuman Instinct: How our primaeval Impulses Shape our Modern Lives by Robert Winston. I enjoyed this book by popular science writer Robert Winston, who is a British doctor who works a lot with the BBC to make television programmes. This is the book of a television series. It was a good easy read to give a background to a subject that is much researched and debated. At the end, he had a quite a religious approach. While I generally agreed, I wasn't sure really how it fitted with the rest of the sceince. I felt in part perhaps that Winston was writing an answer to Richard Dawkins fundamentalist atheistic approach to science. The Human Brain: A guided Tour by Susan Greenfield This small book was recommended by someone who read the draft of my book. It is a very easy to read overview of the brain and how it works. It emphasises the brain as a structure of systems within systems, which of course appeals to me. |
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Victor's webpage Victor's complexity website Subscribe Email Victor Victor's first book |
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