Thursday 12 June 2014

Slowness and Mindfulness 2

Simple and sublime truths or keys to existence are rooted in most mundane daily acts of yesteryear. This morning saw one little girl going to school with her Grandpa. As the came out of their building they both did a surya namaskar (greeting the Sun).

Man is fast moving away fast from his umbilical ties with Mother Earth.

So called progresses in science, technology, aerospace, healthcare, etc are nothing but a double-edged sword: which no doubt gives us all the are best quality of life through longer healthier life, hi tech living, better food. But all this comes at a heavy cost in terms carbon emissions, climate change which is intensifying and compounding each year and at the cost of the balanced Eco system which coexisted for thousands of years. Plus the so called progresses are enjoyed by a elite class of privileged people who have the means.

Today man with his sophisticated weapons of doom and love for live sport wields infinite powers on the animal kingdom. Most of them are perishing and becoming extinct which does not bore well for the balanced future of the planet.

Man wages bitter wars against his fellow less privileged beings for the control of scarce and finite natural resources. The objective is to set up a super race which will become most powerful, richest, fastest, biggest, etc till hubris catches up.

Indeed it's a Faustian dilemma in which man will eventually loose his precious soul and peace. Again the longer lasting benefits of life from slowness and mindfulness are relegated to the background since they not so hip and exciting.

Wednesday 11 June 2014

Slowness and Mindfulness - I

Today's world is characterised a frenetic activity all round in search of so called parameters of excellence mainly in the corporate world. The corporate world is fixated upon forever improving their quarterly performance so that the stock market prices are showing continuously higher prices. Corporates after a while have to resort to various forms of  corporate skulduggery to keep up with the competitors. This mad quest for reaching the top by hook or by crook by bringing out the fastest, highest, best products.

But all these advances in technology and innovation have no doubt brought us the best mindblowing products like Apple, Bose, etc. then countries are racing against each other to possess the most deadly defence weapons of mass destruction.

With all this hyper completion,  the youth are gradually getting premature white hair, ulcers, blood pressure, during their thirties. Every ten years the forties become the new thirties and so on. Corporates too are leveraging to much to keep up with their peers.

All this is taking a heavy toll on the health of the corporates and the young employees.

Plus all this is also leading to huge debts by economies, corporates and individuals.

As Alice would say everything is getting curriousser and curriouser.

This all has been having irreversible changes of climate and Mother Earth. This meaningless race is hurtling us all to the Edge.

If only some sense prevails. There needs to be a drastic reversal in man's conditioned goals. There is an urgent need to embrace slowness and mindfulness as a conscious strategy to save human civilisation from a certain annihilation through accelerating climate change. It's now or never. More of the solution in the coming blogs.






Tuesday 10 June 2014

Internet and Humarobs....

Cisco has projected that by 2018 internet traffic will reach 1.6 trillion GBs, a 13 fold increase in ten years. 79% of this traffic will be video. No of average devices per person will increase from 1.7 to 2.7. About 52% of humanity ie 4 bn will be on the web. During 2013-18, these will a 3x increase in usage. Tablets and smartphones will register highest increase from 5.7% to 30.3%.

Humankind will undergo profound changes in this short futueshockean telescoping of time period. Indeed an inflexion point in human history. Little toddlers have become adept at handing smart devices. Increasingly applications in the cloud will take most our decisions and there will be a radical shift in the working patterns with many job redundancies.

Most of humanity will be glued to touch screens all the time both for work and pleasure. Increasing reliance on computers. Only a few creative functions may be done by those elite intelligent giants. Robots will be taking over a preponderance of repetitive human activity with orders from the cloud.

Indeed the dehumanisation of the human race will be fairly complete. Both humans and robots will start becoming closer to each other. Finally in the age of singularity there will be a morphing of the two. 

Swami Sarvapriyanda

https://youtu.be/Fi-XTOIxSPo