Amazon Synod Press Briefing: The spiritual dynamic of the Synod – Vatican News

Posted on by

At the Synod for the Amazon on Wednesday, participants continued their discussions in small groups, as the assembly reached its halfway point.

By Vatican News

Following the morning session, they daily Synod press briefing focused on the unique spiritual dimension of the gathering, and its significance for the whole world, with speakers addressing topics such as our common responsibility in caring for the earth; the need for an integral human ecology; vocations; and the role of the laity.

The Prefect of the Dicastery for Communication, Dr Paolo Ruffini, summarized some the main topics at the centre of discernment for the synod, including: the Amazon region as a paradigm for the earth as our common home; a calling to ecological conversion; interculturation; access to the sacraments and education; ministries; migration; rural and urban life; international and multilateral engagement for human rights. He said participants at the Synod felt strongly the need to focus on an overall, unified vision, guided by the Holy Spirit, rather than getting caught up too much in details.

Fr Giacomo Costa emphasized once again that the Synodal path is very different from worldly gatherings. It is an experience marked not by discussions or debates, like a secular parliament, but rather has a spiritual dynamic, marked especially by fraternity. He spoke too about the abundance of joy, trust, faith that so far have characterized the assembly.

The first guest speaker, Ms Yesica Patiachi Tayori, an indigenous woman from Peru, spoke about the role of native peoples as guardians of the forest, while noting that caring for our common home is the responsibility of everyone. She said that her people are facing a real threat of extinction, and already have the experience of being discriminated against.

Bishop Ambrogio Spreafico spoke about the synod as an ecclesial event, with repercussions not only for the Pan-Amazon region, but for the whole world. He mentioned the importance of and integral, human ecology, especially in light of Pope Francis teaching in Laudato s, which he said has not been well understood.

The fraternal environment at the Synod was also mentioned as a highlight by Bishop Wellington Tadeu de Queiroz Vieira. He also spoke about the crisis of vocations, not only in Amazonia but around the world; and said that the question of vocations should not be primarily about celibacy, but about holiness.

Finally, Bishop Pedro Jos Conti spoke about the role of the laity. He said they were not merely helpers of the clergy and religious, but had their own lay vocation, which he called an antidote to clericalism. Bishop Conti noted the importance of finding a balance in producing goods from the land, and emphasized the necessity of drawing from the ancient wisdom of the native people.

Dr Ruffini, asked about the small circles, said that the Press Office expects to be able to publish the reports of the groups on Friday afternoon.

One reporter asked about the symbolic significance of a statue that was used in the ceremony for the consecration of the Synod to St Francis, which took place in the Vatican Gardens.The representatives of the Holy See Press Office said they would find out more information about the statue and the artist who created it. They noted that the ceremony was organized by REPAM. Speaking in a personal capacity, Dr Ruffini said the statue represented life.

Ms Tayori fielded a question about her own native people, and recounted how they were exploited by those seeking rubber. She also spoke about a Dominican missionary who ministered among her people, and who fought for and with the Harakbut people. She said that but for that missionary, she would likely not be present to tell her story.

Responding to a question about what was most moving at the Synod, Bishop Conti said what struck him most was the opportunity to hear from the indigenous peoples, and the freedom with which they spoke about their own experiences. He said it is the children who will save the environment, and particularly the children of the indigenous people.

He said we must be united with one another, and grow in fraternity and solidarity with others, and said it was a beautiful time for communion within the Church.

Bishop de Queiroz Vieira said one of the most significant moments in the synod is the availability to live diversity in unity. That, he said, is based on brotherhood, which is led by and modelled by Pope Francis.

Following along the same lines, Bishop Spreafico also praised the humility of Pope Francis as a model. He said the way in which we listen to pain; this is a time in which we listen to pain, and share it.

Bishop de Quieroz Vieria, in response to a question about the role of women, said that the presence of women is essential in the Church. He highlighted their role in missionary work, catechesis, liturgy, in caring for the poor and in caring for children. He said the Church and the world must recognize the value of women, noting there are places where women are discriminated against.

He said that with regard to the question of opening the diaconate to women, Bishop de Quieroz Vieria said that question was already the subject of study, and that in the meantime, the value of women should be recognized.

Bishop Spreafico noted that many pastoral projects in his own diocese are led by women, and spoke of the important role women play in the Church.

Bishop Conti said the Brazilian Bishops Conference was moving in this direction, and reiterated the words of his brother Bishops that is essential to enhance the role of women.

Another reporter asked Bishop Conti what he envisions as possibilities for a Church not only with an Amazonian face, but with a lay face. The Bishop said that the path to fuller participation on the part of the laity is a process which is going forward. He emphasized the need for formation for lay people in their own special callings.

Bishop de Queiroz Vieria emphasized that the Church is made up not only of Bishops, but of all the baptized. He noted that the Synod was called precisely in order for the Bishops to make decisions in consultation with all.

Asked about whether Bishops were satisfied with the representation of women in the Synod, Bishop de Queiroz Vieria emphasized the unique composition and role of a Synod. He said it is not simply a matter of numerical representation, but that in this particular ecclesial context, the representation in the Synod is significant.

Bishop Conti insisted that we are experiencing a Synodal Church, and that little by little, the Church can be expected to open new paths. He suggested that more spaces will be opened to women in the future.

Visit link:

Amazon Synod Press Briefing: The spiritual dynamic of the Synod - Vatican News

Education, compensation, and spiritual outreach protect threatened whale sharks – Mongabay.com

Posted on by

In the 1980s and 1990s, whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) were being slaughtered by the hundreds in the waters off the coast of Gujarat, a state in western India famous for being the last refuge of the Asiatic Lion. While the lions were protected under the Indian Wildlife Protection Act (WPA), 1972, the whale sharks were not.

Demand for the sharks fins and meat in south-east Asia drove a roaring export trade. According to one study published in 2000 in the journal Current Science, over 1,700 whale sharks were killed between 1988 and 1998. A further 600 were killed between 1999 and 2000, according to another study by WWF-India published in 2001. A single whale shark could earn a fisherman anywhere from $2,500 to $7,000, depending on its size.

It was happening because of greed, Tulsibhai Gohel (bhai is an honorific that shows respect), the 42-year-old president of the Sagar Putra Foundation, a local fishermans association, told Mongabay. We were getting so much money, it was impossible not to kill them.

In 2000, a documentary by Mike Pandey called Shores of Silence, which included footage of men cutting off a whale sharks dorsal fin while the fish was still alive, drew widespread attention to the plight of these gentle giants. The government was lobbied and a year later the fish was added to Schedule 1 of the WPA, giving it the highest legal protection in India.

Awareness campaign

However, awareness of the sharks protected status remained limited in Gujarat. In order to spread the message, the Whale Shark Conservation Project (Gujarat) was founded in 2004 as a partnership between Tata Chemicals, a public company, the Wildlife Trust of India, an NGO, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, and the Gujarat Forest Department.

To lose a species that has been estimated to be as old as the dinosaurs, and about whom enough knowledge has not been gained, would be a big loss. This prompted Tata Chemicals Ltd. to partner with the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) to embark on the Whale Shark Conservation project, Alka Talwar, the head of sustainability and corporate social responsibility at Tata Chemicals, told Mongabay.

Tata Chemicals has provided about $700,000 in funding since the projects inception as part of its corporate social responsibility, WTI the scientific and conservation expertise, and the Gujarat Forest department legal sanction and economic support for the communities. The collaboration among a public company, an NGO, and the state is one of the projects two pillars; the other is the fishing community. The model has been so successful because we were able to convert the community from hunters to saviours, Farukhkha Husenkha, WTIs assistant manager, sociology for the project, told Mongabay.

Husenkha joined the project in 2012 and operates out of Veraval, a fishing town that is the field base of the project. The project extends for roughly 160 kilometers (110 miles), and includes four other major fishing villages: Mangrol and Porbandar to the northwest of Veraval, and Sutrapada and Dhamlej to the southeast. The fishing seasons runs from September to June and can be quite lucrative, with fishermen earning up to $45,000 in a good year.

In addition to the ban on killing the sharks, the fishing communities have been taught to rescue the shark if it gets entangled in their nets. The nets are 20 meters (66 feet) wide and 5 meters (16 feet) deep. As many 100 nets can be cast into the sea and left overnight, creating a wall over a mile long.

Husenkha is one of three WTI employees in the region. He is joined by biologist Charan Kumar Paidi and field officer Prakash Doriya, a former fisherman who has been trained to help rescue and tag the sharks. My role is to make sure that the fishermens motivation [to protect the shark] is maintained, Husenkha said.

The project has documented 710 whale shark rescues as of March 2019. Eight sharks have also been tagged for research purposes, while five whale shark pups have been logged by the local fishing community. According to BC Choudhury, the lead investigator of the project, the pups prove that whale sharks breed in the Arabian Sea off the western coast of India.

A spiritual approach

To win the hearts of the fishing communities, Morari Bapu a spiritual leader who has a large following in Gujarat was appointed the brand ambassador for the campaign. He would prove to be the perfect messenger.

The best thing that worked in the whale shark initiative was the involvement of Morari Bapu, Anju Baroth, a scientist with the Wildlife Institute of India, told Mongabay. If a scientist had gone and given a lecture about conservation, nothing would have gone into their heads. An approach which is close to their heart was required.

Since whale sharks are a migratory species, Bapu told the community a simple story: The whale shark, which he named Vhali, or dear one, was like a relative coming home to give birth. The community would not harm such a relative but protect and care for her and her child. In the same way, they must protect and care for the shark, which, despite its size, is a gentle creature that causes no harm. He also appealed to the communitys sense of Dharma. Killing the shark was a sin, he told them, while saving it would bring them good karma. To drive the message home, actors performed a skit based on this theme.

Though it took a few years to convince all the fishermen to get on board, today, there is a total ban [on whale shark hunting]. The mind-set has changed, Gohel said.

The project reinforces Bapus message every year with two community events. Since 2015, the project has celebrated international Whale Shark Day on August 30th. In addition, a culturally significant day in the Gujarati calendar has been designated Gujarat Whale Shark Day by the Forest Department. On that particular day, the fishers will not go out to sea. It is an important day to spend with their families, Husenkha said.

Follow the leader

The projects other important activity in building community support was getting the community heads, known as Patels, on its side. Such is their tradition that the writ of these heads is the law in their communities. Tulsibhai Gohel is the Patel in Veraval and heads an association that counts 2,100 fishing boat owners as members. Those who do not follow their Patels instructions are blackballed.

Once the community leader has decided not to hunt, if someone offers even $10,000 for a shark, we wont kill it, said Patel Jivabhai Bariya, former head of the Sutrapada Koli Fishermans Association. Jivabhai has personally helped rescue around 50 whale sharks. There is a sense of pride that has come with being part of the project too. The world knows that we have been protecting the whale shark and we are proud to be part of the project, Jivabhai said.

Monetary compensation

In late 2005, the Gujarat Forest Department agreed to compensate the fishermen for the nets that were ruined when they cut the shark free. When the hunting stopped, the whale shark population increased and more were getting stuck in the nets, Ratilal Hardas Bariya, Patel from Dhamlej, said. It was causing the fishermen a lot of trouble.

The department has paid out around $130,000 in compensation up to 2018, the latest year for which data are available. In 2010, the department also agreed to let fishermen document the rescues themselves using plastic film cameras provided by the project. This significantly cut down on the time taken to rescue the shark, and thereby reduced the stress on the fish. This year, the project has launched the Vhali app, so the fishermen can take photos or video on their smart phones.

The institutionalisation of the process for providing monetary relief to fishermen for net damages incurred during whale shark rescue operations has also contributed to the project success, Tatas Talwar said.

A holistic model

In 2005, Tata Chemicals was awarded the Green Governance Award for the project, and in 2014, the Gujarat Forest Department received a Biodiversity award from the UNDP and the Ministry of Environment. The Project has just started a similar project in Kerala in Indias far south.

The Whale Shark Conservation Project has been successful because each partner brought something different to the table. All these blocks were put together and the puzzle was solved, Baroth said. Companies have the money and traditionally the research community is always in the need of money.

For Talwar, it also provides evidence that companies can play a big role in conservation, with or without the CSR act. The need is for environmental organizations, which have knowledge about ecosystem and biodiversity, to raise the issues and rope in different companies depending upon their areas of influence.

FEEDBACK: Use this form to send a message to the editor of this post. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page.

Read more:

Education, compensation, and spiritual outreach protect threatened whale sharks - Mongabay.com

"A Spiritual Experience": The Artist Behind a Rediscovered Last Supper Talks About Its Creation – Washingtonian

Posted on by

Akili Ron Anderson is a Howard University professor now, but in the early 1980s he was the first chairperson of the visual arts department at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts when a coworker approached him about making an altarpiece at his church, New Home Baptist, on Holmead Place, Northwest. Anderson grew up around the corner on Meridian Place and loved the idea of making a piece of art that his mother could see. So he began working in the church whenever it was not in use, between choir practices and services, eventually installing a Last Supper bas relief that was covered with drywall when the building was sold and remained hidden for years until construction workers discovered it recently. Most of the time I was in there by myself, he says. It actually got to be something of a spiritual experience for me.

Anderson envisioned his artwork forming a picture that would be completed by the presence of a preacher and a choir. It was done to permanently be on that wall, he says. He built it using wire mesh that was anchored into the cinderblock walls, then built up the relief using concrete and Structo-Lite, a coarse type of plaster thats frequently used for restoration. You put it on sculpture and you chisel into the plaster, Anderson says. Then you put the white coat on top of that to smooth it out. Removing the altarpiece would require some expertise and not a little money: Youd have to cut out in sections with the cinderblock thats behind it, Anderson says. That could be done but its expensive.

At the time he made the sculpture, Anderson was inspired in part by the Black Arts Movement of the 60s and 70s, which in part saw black art as a corrective to centuries of oppression. Anderson, who attended a year of art school at the Corcoran before transferring to Howard, describes the Black Arts Movement as a personal and collective cultural discovery and sense of black pride. It wasnt for me, at least, anything other than that. Many African American churches had artwork that portrayed Jesus as a blue-eyed white man, but Anderson says his work wasnt intended to change any historical point: Jesus is a black hero, frankly.It was a matter of claiming what we call that the Jesus of history. It was totally legitimate for people praying or working to make their heroes look more like them. Its no problem, but when youre placing the image of one culture above another, that says, We are more important than you.'

He modeled his sculpture of Jesus and the disciples on congregants and people he saw around Columbia Heights. It was just people walking up and down the streets, he says. It was the people I grew up with.I took not only features but expressions: how people emote, how a leader looks, how a follower looks. All of those kind of things went in to the faces. The bodies are not where the action is on this sculpture. You want it to be alive, get an alive feeling from the piece, Anderson says. You want it to come off the page or come off the surface as having a life. Thats what I tried to do.

Over the next decades, Anderson created art for a number of churches, mostly around the 14th Street corridor, including John Wesley AME Zion Church and St. Augustine Catholic Church.I think its important for black children sitting in churches all over this country on Sunday morning to look up at the windows, look up at images and see themselves and believe that they can ascend to heaven, too, he told the Washington Post in 1994. He often worked in stained glass. You can see his large work Sankofa at the entrances to the Columbia Heights Metro Station; hes also got stained glass works at Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel at Howard and in the Prince Georges County Courthouse.

Anderson was delighted to learn the sculpture had survived all these years; hed long assumed the buildings next owner, theChurch of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had removed it. He and Joy Zinoman, the Studio Theatre founder who is turning the former church into the new home forStudio Acting Conservatory and whose crew found the artwork, have been in touch, and he hopes to get over to Holmead Place soon with his students to see the sculpture again. Let them just see the life of an artist and see what happens with the work, he says. To see what their questions are. I might walk by my old house.

Join the conversation!

Go here to see the original:

"A Spiritual Experience": The Artist Behind a Rediscovered Last Supper Talks About Its Creation - Washingtonian

500 SoCal Spiritualists, Marianne Williamson, and UCSD’s PC Princess || PC Princess – The UCSD Guardian Online

Posted on by

As I sat in my Lyft taking a 30 minute drive to the Seaside Center for Spiritual Living listening to the October Democratic Debate on the radio, I did not know what to expect upon entering Marianne Williamsons Encinitas rally. Williamson is quite an outlier on the political scene Vox writer Zack Beauchamp called her campaign scary, while Washington Post writer Jonathan Capehart said that its a pity that we likely will not be graced with her presence on a debate stage ever again.

Neither of these sentiments rang true as I entered the auditorium, being greeted by an aura of enlightened energy, the aroma of incense and oils, and a sea of rally signs portraying Williamsons likeness.

The infamous candidate has been polling at 0 percent in numerous polls for the past several weeks however, it was clear that the hundreds of supporters, many who have been following Williamson for decades, were in it for the long haul. Several of the followers that I spoke to echoed this notion. One woman who practiced the spiritual exercise of light reading told me that she had been following Williamson since the 1970s. It appeared to me that Williamsons core base was an audience that is aft overlooked by many a presidential candidate one of those who practice spiritual awakening and self-discovery.

The crowd cheered as Williamson took the stage around 8:10 p.m. Many supporters wiped away tears of joy at seeing a lighthouse beaconing them to enlightenment in a sea of moral darkness. Williamson took her place in front of the crowd and began speaking in her iconic coastal accent.

Theres nothing holy about complacency, and theres nothing negative about yelling fire if everything is burning, Williamson asserted to the crowd.

But the main focus of the night was not on spirituality. Rather, Williamson honed in on the intersection of spiritual enlightenment and political involvement.

We have allowed ourselves the chronic convenience of political disengagement, Williamson continued. This isnt the time to say: What is going on? This is the time to say: Come on, we need some courage. We can do this.

Her 45 minute speech ended in a verbose uproar from her supporters. However, the night was just getting started. She gave the audience two options a question and answer session about her candidacy, or the opportunity for a brief group meditation and reflection session. While I abstained from voting, the room unanimously chose the latter.

I did not know what to expect going into this. However, after closing our eyes and clearing our minds, Williamson encouraged us to find our deepest desire for the country, and to shout it out loud by finishing the phrase I imagine an America in which The room came to life for the next 15 minutes, with folks sharing their desires ranging from an America in which there are no more school shootings to an America in which the bees are saved. I found this exercise heartwarming the people in the room genuinely cared about the nations moral compass.

As the night came to a close, and I sat in the backseat of a Lyft home, I couldnt help but reflect on the Marianne 2020 campaign as a whole. My experience with Williamsons campaign was not scary. However, I also dont find it a pity that she will likely not return to the debate stage; her personal brand of political morality seems to not be a winning ideology. That being said, Marianne Williamson serves as a voice for a niche community in the nation a joy to watch for those who consider themselves an outsider to the spirituality community. Will I be casting my vote for Williamson come March? No, but will I be cheering her on from the cosmic sidelines of the universe? You bet your spiritual ass I will.

Excerpt from:

500 SoCal Spiritualists, Marianne Williamson, and UCSD's PC Princess || PC Princess - The UCSD Guardian Online

Why Gitanjali JB wants to put the soul and spirituality back in Indian education – EdexLive

Posted on by

We all know who Sonam Wangchuk is, thanks to3 Idiots. This thought leader and education reformist has done a lot for Ladakh and its citizens. Perhaps one of his most significant contributions has been as the Founding Member of Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, Ladakh (HIAL).

Another lesser-known face, albeit a formidable one, isGitanjaliJB.Born in Balasore to a mother who used to say that girls should be brought up like boys, she went on to study at Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar and encompassing all her learning from the coastal state, she worked in the corporate sector for six years, she established a publishing house Helios Books, transformed AUM Hospitals in Puducherry and of course, became the CEO of HIAL.

How she bumped into innovator Wangchuk is a very interesting story. The 46-year-old reached out to him, they met and by the end of that meeting, We were finishing each others sentences, she shares. Today, HIAL, her dream project, is an institute to reckon with and will be her focus for the next 10-15 years. After that, who knows? A book is underway and in between brushing up her karate skills (she is a black belt, by the way) and dropping by Bhubaneswar for Odissi practice, she plans to read - and then some. Recently, she took to the stage at TEDx Hyderabad 2019 and blew us all away with her wise words. So we asked her about what makes her proud of HIAL, about ballet (yes, she is a trained ballerina too!) and her latest initiative Peaceful Warriors. Excerpts from an inspirational chat:

While you give your parents the credit for giving you their trust and freedom, how would you say you were influenced by your experience of living in Balasore and your time spent at XIMB? What lasting impressions have they left on you?I could become what I am today because of the trust and freedom with which my parents brought me up. My mother used to say in the early 70s when I was growing up that girls should be brought up like boys. So I was amongst the first girls in Balasore to ride a bicycle during that time. I was allowed to explore everything and decide for myself which career I wanted to pursue, which city I wanted to live in, which philosophy to follow and who to marry. They had the humility to accept that they do not know what is right for me and allow me to choose that for myself. They always had full confidence in me and my decisions that I would choose the best option necessary for my progress.A small-town upbringing, like the one I had in Balasore, Odisha, in a joint family instills in you important values like living together and putting others first. You grow up trusting the world around you because it is a safe place to live in where almost everybody knows everybody else. There is a sense of belonging to the community of which you are a part and that stays with you for the entire life! At XIMB, I was deeply influenced by two of my professors, DP Dash who taught Systems Thinking and Indranil Chakraborty who taught Organisation Theory. They went beyond commerce and profits and spoke about interdependence and inter-relatedness of systems and phenomenon!

How was your experience of meeting Sonam Wangchuk in 2017? When was it that you realised that your goals align when it comes to HIAL? Take us through how your association began...It was a WhatsApp message 'The next learning revolution forwarded by a friend of mine that first introduced me to Sonam Wangchuks idea of the university that he was envisioning. I got in touch with him as he and I were traveling to Mumbai from Leh and Chennai respectively on the same dates and we decided to meet. A meeting that was supposed to be for an hour extended much beyond that, even to the next day! There was a lot of alignment in our thoughts about education like learning by doing, relevant curriculum and so on that we were finishing each others sentences! He invited me to visit Ladakh to see the project.HIAL is my dream project because it is a canvas that connects all the dots of my personality: that of an educator, researcher, entrepreneur, administrator and also a performing and martial artist. As the Founding CEO, I raise funds, design curriculum, supervise the design and construction of the buildings, initiate setting up live labs or enterprises where students work and learn. I also teach karate to the students at SECMOL under my initiate Peaceful Warriors which aims to make any girl in India a black belt.

Tell us about how it is to work with someone like Wangchuk towards a goal so wholesome.It is interesting to work with Sonam Wangchuk because, like me, he also believes that anything is possible, anything is doable, he has a new idea every day which he wants to implement. And this childlike curiosity and wanting to do things resonates very much with my personality as well because all my life, I have attempted and done new, different and impossible things.HIAL for me is that experiment that has the potential to change the way higher education is happening not only in India, but the whole world.

Do you think this institute's model is replicable in other parts of the country? Are their plans to expand? Because there is a need for more such institutes... The four principles of HIAL are a curriculum that is contextual, a pedagogy that is applied and experiential, an approach that is inter-disciplinary and a problem-solving methodology that blends indigenous wisdom with modern technology! And yes, this can be made replicable everywhere. But we do not believe in scaling up into chains of schools and universities, instead, we believe in growing organically. Most of the Ivy Leagues are single institutions and not chains. But we believe in the exchange of ideas, students and faculty so that we can learn from one another and do things in the contexts that we understand. We would like many educators from India and abroad to visit us, learn from our experience and we learn from theirs and contextualise the learnings to our environments.

You have been a part of this education system for so long now, what do you think is its need of the hour?Our education system, unfortunately, suffers from two main problems. First is that worldwide, it is a remnant of the industrial age where classrooms of students are treated as batches of raw materials to be processed in the same way. It is not focused on what the student needs to flower, but transacts an objective curriculum written by a third party without any relevance to the needs and context of the child.Secondly, in India, the education system suffers from a post-colonial hangover where we have lost our vernacular and indigenous wisdom and hence, our sense of self-respect has been eroded!The need of the hour, therefore, is two-fold. First is to make education child-centric, contextual and applied. Secondly, it is to rediscover Indias uniqueness and culture and make it a part of everyday living because it was naturally sustainable and in harmony with nature. Also, the purpose of education is the discovery of ones soul, but spirituality is not part of todays narrative in education.

As the theme for TEDx this time was 'Limitless'. What is it that makes you feel limitless? Also, our education system is limited in some ways, doing away with which limitations do you think can free it up so that it can reach its full potential?Human potential is limitless. Humans are designed to outgrow the limited egoistic consciousness steeped into suffering, disease and death into becoming universal beings. The purpose of life is to be enlightened like Buddha or Mahavira or Vivekananda! That is the limitless human potential that is never exploited, but is wasted during ones existence on Earth! Once we recognise this and believe in this, we are given limitless opportunities to grow and impact the world.The education system is limited in many ways. The curriculum is outdated and is not dynamic. It is designed neither by the teacher nor the student, but by a third person. The manner of teaching is limited in classrooms, there is very little experiential and immersive teaching-learning that happens, it is limited by the life skills that it imparts to the learners, it does not help the development of the whole person and is only limited to mental education. The biggest limitation is that it is copied from the western paradigm of education which does not talk about spirituality in any way. The very purpose of education in the Indian paradigm is the discovery of ones soul, but this is not even talked about in modern education. Words like soul and spirituality are absent!

When education is designed to proceed from the near to the far, from local to global, from contextual to universal and is taught in a manner that is applied and experiential, it will reach its full potential. Finally, we have to bring in the narrative of spiritual education into the mainstream. Spirituality is what India has stood for and even today, the whole world is looking at India for answers to the problems that it has created using linear and reductionist approaches to problem-solving.

You've explored more sectors than most of us put together corporate, entrepreneurship, education, ballet, karate, publishing and so much more. Which sector was the most difficult for you?Every one of them was challenging in their own ways and that is what I enjoy. I am a start-up person. I thrive in chaos. I love a blank drawing board or a blank canvas to paint the vision of something. When these projects grow to a size that systems work and are in place, I like to hand it over to competent people and like to move to the next chaos. So, HIAL is technically my fourth start-up or the fourth chaos and I am loving it. The most difficult one, however, was the hospitals project because of my lack of domain knowledge, which is medicine, limited my ability to make a change there. I believe that one can move into any sector and learn it which is what I did with my engineering and publishing businesses, but the hospital was a different ball game.

What can we expect from you next? Which field are you going to venture into?HIAL will be my focus area for some time at least for the next 10-15 years. Every new skill that I add to myself will be towards that. For instance, I am learning the Ladakhi language now. I hope to be fluent by the end of the year. I am writing a book Education for Tomorrow: An Integral Approach and plan to have it published it by next year. I plan to delve deep into the Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita and the Works of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo and also study all the educationists in depth.

When the duo researched, they found out that HIAL is the worlds first in several ways:- HIAL is the worlds first Doers University that follows the pedagogy of learning by doing and immersive teaching-learning practices.- It will be the first Mountain University in the world that will focus on all the issues and problems faced by the mountain world like climate change impacting glaciers melting at an alarming rate, flashfloods, valley greening in the high altitude desert terrain of Ladakh, urban migration of youth leaving the villages empty, menace of waste generated through irresponsible tourism to name a few.- The students will be working not on staged projects but real-life and real-time problems mentioned above and working towards solutions as a part of their course and learning.- For this HIAL is setting up live labs that generate resources to run the university while the students get free education, thereby making the education free as was the case in ancient India, students pay with their hard work, sweat and creativity!

Two recent projects from HIAL that they are proud of are:- Their fellowship project started with the planting of a 600 m2 of forest using indigenous plants and indigenous techniques of soil preparation and plantation techniques. If this pilot succeeds, then this will be scaled up to 20,000 m2 next year as the ambitious vision of HIAL is to have 70 per cent of its 200-acre campus green with forests and plantations!- Their entire campus is off-grid, solar passive housing structures and they started the fellowship this year when they had just one such structure that would triple up as a classroom for fellows during the week, office space during the hours in between and living quarters for some of them who live on campus. They are proud of the fact that we manage to live on the desert land in the middle of nowhere with limited basic resources like water, yet initiate the fellowship, conduct the education confluence and work amidst these challenging circumstances to give shape to the project.

For more on her. check outin.linkedin.com/in/gitanjalijb

See the original post:

Why Gitanjali JB wants to put the soul and spirituality back in Indian education - EdexLive

A man walked into a wild corner of Hatcher Pass last year on a spiritual quest. He never came out. – Anchorage Daily News

Posted on by

Last August, a solitary man walked 14 miles into a lonely valley on the western side of Hatcher Pass.

He carried almost nothing: A backpack, 5 pounds of oatmeal. No rifle or bear spray.

Vladimir Kostenko planned to stay at a tiny dry cabin for months. He was seeking no less than the meaning of life.

An image capturing the last time Vladimir Kostenko was seen. Dmitry Kudryn flew over the cabin on Nov. 3, 2018 and saw Kostenko on the porch gesturing something about walking out. (Dmitry Kudryn photo)

For most of his 42 years, Kostenko had been on a spiritual quest to understand his place in the universe. An immigrant from Russia living in a small town in Washington state, he had pursued an almost monk-life existence, fasting regularly, meditating for hours and reading widely on religion.

Hes just not like anybody Ive ever met, said his sister, Alla Kostenko.

Vladimir had traveled the world looking for his purpose on Earth. The bearded, soft-spoken mechanic had lived in a Russian hippie commune and spent time following a charismatic evangelical preacher in Ukraine.

But the cabin deep in the Purches Creek valley would prove to be his deepest, riskiest journey yet.

Vladimir Kostenko as a child in his home city of Zelenokumsk, Russia. The family moved to the United States in 1999. (Courtesy Alla Kostenko)

Vladimir was born in the town of Zelenokumsk, in the North Caucasus region of southern Russia.

He grew up in a large, conservative Baptist family at a time when Christians were persecuted for their beliefs under the Soviet system, Alla said.

Among the 13 siblings in the Kostenko family, Vladimir was always the quiet one, said Alla, who lives on a coffee farm in Hawaii. He wouldnt initiate anything. Wed be the ones to say, Lets go here, lets play this game. He would follow and be quiet.

In 1999, the Kostenko family moved to the United States through a program that allowed Christians fleeing religious persecution in Russia to immigrate.

They settled in the small town of Walla Walla, Washington, a college and wine country town of about 30,000 people in the rural southeast corner of the state.

Moving to the United States was a dream for us, Alla said. We were all just amazed.

But some family members had an easier time adapting to American life than others. Alla, one of the youngest, was 15. She quickly learned English at her public high school.

Vladimir was 22 and out of school.

I blended in a lot better, Alla said. For my older siblings, they took some ESL classes, but they still kind of lived and communicated in Russian.

Vladimir Kostenko on a hiking trip with friends in 2005. (Courtesy Alla Kostenko.)

As they grew older, Vladimir and some of the younger siblings in the family stopped attending the conservative church theyd been raised in.

We all went on a personal search for answers, Alla said. For understanding what spirituality is, what God is, individually.

None pursued it quite like Vladimir.

In 2011, he went to live in a Russian hippie community near Moscow to see if he could find meaning to the spiritual gifts he was given, Alla said.

He returned to Walla Walla, and several years later traveled to Ukraine. There he became interested in the teachings of a controversial charismatic Ukrainian evangelist named Vladimir Muntyan.

Vladimir was unusually earnest about his quest to understand the mysteries of God, she said.

He was also a bit of a loner. As he grew older his family wondered whether he wanted a wife or children.

He always said, Id absolutely love to do that, Alla said. But if I have not figured out what Im here for and what this is all about, I cannot bring another person into this.

Vladimir Kostenko on a family visit to Russia in 2003. (Courtesy Alla Kostenko)

In recent years, Vladimir had been living quietly on the property of a family friend in Walla Walla, fixing up old cars. He was an uncommonly talented mechanic, Alla said. Money meant little to him and hed often tell people to pay him whatever they wanted to pay. God would provide, he figured.

He was always talking about how he wants to be useful, Alla said.

Suddenly, an opportunity to come to Alaska arrived.

Truly in the middle of nowhere

Dmitry Kudryn, a family friend and successful entrepreneur in Wasilla, needed someone to drive a truck full of merchandise from the Lower 48 to Alaska.

Kudryn is a charming self-made millionaire and aspiring YouTube star who has dabbled in cellphone repair stores and who now owns Crave, a business that manufactures phone accessories, as well as a construction company.

Kudryn is the oldest of 12, from a Ukrainian family that also came to the United States as refugees fleeing both religious and political persecution. The decor of his office, in a new construction building just off the Parks Highway, features a framed copy of the U.S. Constitution and an American flag.

The Kudryn and Kostenko families crossed paths in Walla Walla before Kudryn moved to Wasilla in 1999. They shared the experience of being large, Russian-speaking immigrant families in a small town in the rural Pacific Northwest, and theyd stayed in touch over the years.

While Kudryn had not been particularly close with Vladimir himself, he was happy to welcome him to Alaska.

Locator of cabin

Vladimir knew Kudryn owned a dry cabin in the Purches Creek valley, on the western side of Hatcher Pass near Willow. Getting to the 12-by-20-foot cabin requires a 14-mile hike from Hatcher Pass Road, over mountain passes.

Its truly in the middle of nowhere, Kudryn said. Its so quiet, no phones, nothing.

People mostly use the area for snowmachining in the winter, plus some mining, hunting, trapping and a little hiking in the summer, said Rudy Wittshirk, a longtime Willow resident who has extensively explored the area.

But it is an especially remote corner of Hatcher Pass where few venture.

Its a cliche, so I hate to say it, but that is a pretty rugged area, Wittshirk said.

Kudryn was open to letting his friend use the cabin. But a few things worried him.

First, Vladimir only wanted to bring 5 pounds of oatmeal and no other food. Though the cabin was well-stocked with canned foods, Kudryn worried that the already-thin Vladimir 61 and 145 pounds might not have enough to eat. Why not bring a few vegetables, he wondered.

Vladimir also wouldnt take a gun or even bear spray.

That bothered me a little bit, Ive lived here for 20 years so I kind of know what you probably should and shouldnt do in the wilderness, Kudryn said.

But Vladimir was an adult, Kudryn figured.

And he seemed to really want to go to the cabin.

On Aug. 18, Vladimir took a taxi from Kudryns office in Wasilla to Hatcher Pass Road, to set out for the long hike.

He wasnt completely cut off: Vladimir carried an iPhone and external power bank with solar recharging function. At first, he stayed in touch by climbing high enough on a peak near the cabin to send text messages and photos.

The first message Kudryn received showed Vladimir on the hike in, taking a timer self-portrait on the late-August tundra.

Vladimir Kostenko texted a photo taken with a self-timer to his friend Dmitry Kudryn on the 14 mile hike in to the Purches Creek cabin on Aug. 18, 2018. (Vladimir Kostenko photo)

Ascended the first mountain, Vladimir wrote in Russian.

He sent another: Crossed the creek.

Purches Creek threaded the narrow valley, the mountain walls already turning gold and green. The cabin was barely visible, a dot.

In late August and early September, Kudryn would receive intermittent text messages from the cabin, detailing Vladimirs travails with a marauding ground squirrel that he eventually killed.

Vladimir seemed to love being there.

This place is amazing, especially without the squirrel, he texted.

Kostenko texted a photo of the Purches Creek valley to his friend Dmitry Kudryn. The cabin where he planned to stay a few months is visible near the creek. (Vladimir Kostenko photo)

Kudryn asked if he had enough food.

There is enough food for three years, Vladimir replied. Im on day six of fasting.

In September, some hunter friends stopped at the cabin. They left Vladimir with fresh provisions: olives, apples, honey, smoked salmon and fresh-baked bread and kvass, a Russian fermented drink.

Some hunters stopped by the cabin in October, leaving some food with Kostenko: Apples, bread, smoked salmon, honey, olives and a Russian fermented drink called kvass. Kostenko texted a photo of the spread to his friend Dmitry Kudryn. (Vladimir Kostenko photo)

In text messages, Vladimir spoke of the cranberries and blueberries he was picking. He had boiled some down into jam.

In one of his last communications from the cabin, Kostenko texted a photo of the cranberries and blueberries he was picking. He planned to boil them down into jam. (Vladimir Kostenko photo)

I have no plans to leave, he wrote.

October came. Then November. No more text messages arrived from Vladimir.

Kudryn began to worry about the cold, and Vladimirs food supply. On Nov. 3, he and his brother, both pilots, decided to fly out to check on him.

Kudryn decided to affix cameras to his plane and make a video for his YouTube channel Crave Life, which features Alaska outdoor adventures as well as Kudryns life as a traveling businessman.

The video chronicles Kudryn shopping for and packing Home Depot buckets of carrots and bread for Vladimir. He called it Alaska Rescue Mission by Air.

Ive got a friend who went to a very remote cabin ... on foot ... literally in the middle of nowhere in the mountains, Kudryn said, narrating the video in YouTuber-style high drama. Im really, really concerned for him."

The Purches Creek valley was dusted with snow. The brothers flew low enough to see Vladimir emerge from the cabin. His arms are at his hips, standing on the porch. He looks like hes wearing black sweatpants and a light jacket.

Kudryn and his brother dropped the two buckets of food. From the porch, Vladimir gestured at them. He seemed to be saying that he was going to be heading out soon, Kudryn thought.

After that, Kudryn traveled to Asia for business. Still no Vladimir. When he got back, a 7.1 earthquake rocked Southcentral Alaska. He heard nothing from the cabin.

Worry mounting, Kudryn and his brother decided to fly out again on Dec. 23. They knew Vladimir had no experience with Alaska winter. There was only six hours of daylight now, the pink low-horizon solstice light barely creeping over the high mountain walls.

It was cold in Wasilla, in the single digits. It was even more frigid in Hatcher Pass. Kudryn filmed again for another video.

The valley was frosted in snow, the creek partly iced over. They looked for smoke from the cabins wood stove, any sign that Vladimir was inside.

Theres snow on the smokestack, Kudryn said as they flew over. That should be melted, if he was having a fire.

Dmitry Kudryn flew over his cabin in the Purches Creek Valley on Dec. 23, 2018 to see whether Vladimir Kostenko was still there. The cabin appeared to be locked. (Dmitry Kudryn photo)

The porch was clean. There were tracks all around the house but it wasnt clear whether they were from a human or an animal. This time, no one emerged from the cabin. The place looked locked up.

Maybe Vladimir was trying to walk out. They dropped more supply buckets, just in case.

Afterward, Kudryns bravado fell away. He seemed shaken.

My next phone call is going to be to the Alaska State Troopers, he said at the end of the video.

A few days later, on Dec. 26, Kudryn decided he needed to go back to the cabin to see for himself if Vladimir was inside.

He chartered a helicopter, landed and found the cabin had been meticulously sealed shut with a sheet of brown metal nailed over the door.

He pried the nails off and entered, not knowing what hed find inside. The cabin was in perfect order: Spices neatly stacked on the shelf. Plenty of firewood, a water container, bunk beds covered in blankets. Canned food. Hunting coats, outdoor gear. Empty buckets. A propane tank.

Vladimir left no notes just a Russian phrase written on a piece of wood. Alla thinks it says something like frankincense aroma do not burn." Maybe he was using it as the old preachers did, to ward off bad spirits, she said.

When Dmitry Kudryn and his brother returned to the cabin via a chartered helicopter, they found it had been neatly closed up. Inside they found plenty of food, blankets and warm clothing. (Dmitry Kudryn photo)

There was no sign of Vladimir.

Kudryn tromped through the snow and spotted one of the orange buckets he had dropped by air days earlier. MERRY CHRISTMAS, he had written on the side. Now Christmas had come and gone. It sat in the snow untouched.

The tracks seen from the air on the last flight turned out to be from a moose.

It seemed Vladimir had made a planned departure. But how long ago? And where was he now?

Kudryn asked the helicopter pilot to fly the trail Vladimir would have taken to get back to the Hatcher Pass Road. From the air, it was a thin ribbon of white in a monochrome expanse of winter spruce trees and snow. It twisted and turned. It would be easy to get lost.

Kudryn went back once more, this time with two Alaska State Troopers, by snowmachine. Again he filmed the expedition for his YouTube channel.

They found a trap line and snowmachine trails. They posted MISSING signs on spruce trees. They found no trace of Vladimir.

Kostenko was quietly listed as missing by the Alaska State Troopers, his wild-eyed photo added to a grid of more than 100 people who have disappeared in Alaska over decades.

Troopers launched no large-scale organized search for Vladimir.

In cases where a person or persons has been reported overdue from, say, a hike, troopers normally have a timeline and direction of travel to follow up on, said Ken Marsh, a spokesman for the Alaska State Troopers. Scope of the search may depend upon how long the individual has been overdue; what trail, river, or general route of travel that person is likely to have taken; geography of the location, and weather conditions.

In Vladimirs case, weeks had gone by since hed last been seen, Marsh said. Snow had fallen, obscuring tracks or other clues.

View original post here:

A man walked into a wild corner of Hatcher Pass last year on a spiritual quest. He never came out. - Anchorage Daily News

The Spiritual Need for the Arts – Juneau Empire

Posted on by

There is, obviously, an increasing awareness that out of control commercialism is threatening life on our planet. Less obvious is the damage that commercialism has done to the arts. When I sound the alarm that art has been pushed out of daily life and the marketplace, I draw a blank not always, but often.

When I try to say it matters that art and artists are less visible, or invisible, many people do not care. What does it matter if real artists cannot make a living, starve, cannot produce the work of quality that comes from long practice and support?

Countless artists, writers and thinkers have bemoaned the degradation of art. Here is Matthew Fox in Original Blessing: The loss of cosmos in religion has been hastened by the loss of those who birth cosmos, namely the artists in our midst. With this loss, neurosis has increased in society.

Matthew Fox writes elsewhere in this creative book, If we considered artists as workers, we would put 15% of the population to work today making our lives more erotic for us by music, by clowning, by storytelling, by tumbling and juggling in our midst.

When I taught art in the alternative high school here in Juneau, I found that a high percentage of the troubled students were artistic. Their gifts are not valued. But society needs people who are right-brained and creative.

Commercialism is a serious problem in all the arts, but it is worse in visual art. Consider just two careers that have sustained artists and now have been taken from them, sign painting and graphic design. I did both of them and cannot imagine having survived without them. Most computer technicians are not artists. The ads they produce are annoying and unlovely, just one example of the consequences of non-artists doing artistic work.

It appears to be easy to pretend to be a visual artist. In New York and other big-time art centers, there is a shocking lack of quality in much of the art. The art is commercial, gimmicky, and will never stand the test of time. Real artists have been banished from the cities to the outskirts because they cant pay the rent, so thriving bohemian centers (like potentially Juneau!) are few and far between.

The real artist is spiritual. Real artists know their gifts come from God and relay through their art some kind of message, even if only love of the beauty of nature. Love of the beauty of nature and humanity is what we need to save our planet. People talk about this, but no one can express it better than an artist. To save our planet, we need our artists.

I am going to quote from Don McLeans immortal song about Van Gogh: Now I understand What you tried to say to me And how you suffered for your sanity And how you tried to set them free They would not listen, they did not know how Perhaps they will listen now.

I am going to quote from an art manifesto I wrote in 1980: The arts are the international language of the spirit. If the governments of the world do not listen to the prophetic voice of the artist, the earth as we know it is doomed. The artist is sensitive to the voice of nature. We hear her loud and clear. She is in torment. She is angry. We intend to alert the world to the cry of nature.

Common wisdom throughout the ages says that artists have a different vision. The spiritual vision of artists is needed for the good of the community, but it is squelched by commercialism which rewards and promotes non-artists without vision.

The Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer mentions artists: Be ever present with your servants who seek through art and music to perfect the praises offered by your people on earth; and grant to them ever more glimpses of your beauty

Artists since the dawn of civilization have espoused simple, life-sustaining virtues such as beauty and love. Commercialism has worked to silence artists. We are in mortal danger now. We need to wake up.

Perhaps they will listen now.

Page Bridges is a member of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church. Living Growing is a weekly column written by different authors and submitted by local clergy and spiritual leaders.

See the original post here:

The Spiritual Need for the Arts - Juneau Empire

Pharrell on Evolving Masculinity, "Blurred Lines," and "Spiritual Warfare" – GQ

Posted on by

Welcome to GQ's New Masculinity issue, an exploration of the ways that traditional notions of masculinity are being challenged, overturned, and evolved. Read more about the issue from GQ editor-in-chief Will Welch here.

The instant I join Pharrell Williams and his wife, Helen, in the lobby of the Hotel Georges V in Paris, my day becomes suddenly frictionless. The hotel door whooshes open. We step out and into an idling black Mercedes Sprinter van. It glides off. We slide out at the Guimet National Museum of Asian Arts, pausing briefly at the top of the museum stairs for Pharrell to bow to a young girl, maybe four or five years old.

Pharrell Williams covers the November issue of GQ. Click here to subscribe to GQ.

Inside the museum they are waiting for us. Pharrell has come to Paris to launch an anime-inspired collaborative installation with Mr., a Japanese artist associated with Takashi Murakami's Kaikai Kiki Co. The museum people greet us at the door; the exhibition space has been cleared so we can hang out and talk.

After a while we drift over to Market, a Jean-Georges restaurant. They are waiting for us. Delicious, healthful food arrives at the table. Pharrell and Helen close their eyes in prayer. We eat and talk and slip out. If a bill comes, I do not see it.

At Chanel they are waiting for us. In 2015, Pharrell starred in a campaign for the vaunted French fashion housenever mind that it isn't in the menswear business. Earlier this year, at the behest of the late Karl Lagerfeld, he became the first celebrity (of any gender) to collaborate on a capsule collection with the maison. It's called Chanel Pharrell. A fitting is going on in the atelier. We all wave hellos; Pharrell bows. We float up the mirrored staircase to Coco Chanel's apartment. A staff historian is waiting for us. She regales me with stories of Coco and her fabulous hideout. The metalwork of her decadent smoky-and-rose-quartz chandelier has the maison's famous double C's worked into it. When we have heard enough history, our guide evaporates so we can keep talking. There's a lot to discuss.

Pharrell has been an agent of change his whole career. When he broke into the public consciousness, about 20 years ago, as a producer and then as the frontman of N.E.R.D., he looked different from everyone else in hip-hop, wearing slimmer jeans, more fitted skate tees, and mesh trucker hats. That might not sound earth-shattering now, but a whole generation of young African American misfits will tell you that Pharrell Williams was the first time they saw themselves in pop culture. A weirdo called Skateboard P who stood confidently apart from rap's monolithic archetype. A nerd who made being different feel cool.

As he created hit after hit, Pharrell's wardrobe continued to morph. He special-ordered a custom-made Herms Birkin bag in inky purple crocodile and, in 2007, began wearing it everywhere. He started wearing Chanel clothes and jewelry, as well as designs by cultish Cline creative director Phoebe Philo.

Pharrell's wardrobe inspired subtle shifts in the culture around himand reflected shifts going on inside him too. This deep connection between his evolving fashion sensibility and his evolving sense of selfand the never-ending stream of miraculous pop music he created all the whilehas made him an icon to those of us here at GQ who believe style is about more than just clothes.

Pharrell, now 46 years old, has a brain that seems to run algorithms that project and simulate the future. He talks easily about masculinity, working through thorny ideas about the patriarchy, about the politics of gender and sexual identity in 2019 and beyond, about past missteps and his personal evolution. (As you'll see, I don't have to bring up the Blurred Lines controversy from 2013the one where the lyrics of the song he cowrote and produced for Robin Thicke were deemed rapeybecause he does.) He speaks with energy, range, and humility. Occasionally he slows down to choose his words carefully, but there is never a shadow of hesitation or fear. He thinks about this stuff constantly. He has a lot to say.

More:

Pharrell on Evolving Masculinity, "Blurred Lines," and "Spiritual Warfare" - GQ

Exeter Cathedral to host ‘spiritual’ underwater video game service inspired by Jonah and the Whale – The Telegraph

Posted on by

The video game expert emphasised the importance of choosing an appropriate game for a service. He has previously chosen a video game called Flower to completement church services in which gamers control a flower petal with a single button press and tilt of the controller.

By the end of these sessions, we hadnt only completed the traditional Church of England service, sang hymns, received communion and shared the peace, but also journeyed together in virtual space as well.

Together we had traversed the landscape of the game and created a stream of flower petals that brought an old oak tree back to life with budding leaves.

A post on the cathedral website advertising the event invites visitors to take each others hands and explore a new world in the ancient Cathedral that encourages us to meditate, support each other and journey together.

Cruicially, it adds that the event is open to all, with no gaming experience necessary.

"Simply touch the screen and partake in a different kind of banquet for the soul.

See original here:

Exeter Cathedral to host 'spiritual' underwater video game service inspired by Jonah and the Whale - The Telegraph

Education & Health Experts fear new Quebec legislation will further erode religion in schools October 16 – Grandin Media

Posted on by

Many experts fear the Quebec governments legislation on education will further dismiss religion and spirituality from the provinces schools.

Among the changes announced in a billtabled Oct. 1, the government plans to abolish the Ministry of Educations religious affairs advisory committee and to remove all references to spirituality from the Education Act.

The legislation, Bill 40, coincides with ongoing debates about the place of religious beliefs in schools, especially after the adoption in June of a secularism bill that prohibits teachers from wearing religious symbols during work hours.

At a time when Bill 21 on secularism in the school system is being applied, when the future of the ethics and religious culture course is being questioned, the government is abolishing the committee that is able to give notices on these issues, said Jean-Philippe Perreault, a professor at Laval Universitys Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies.

A specialist in ethics and religious culture, Perreault is a member of the Religious Affairs Committee.

In 2000, in the wake of the deconfessionalization of the Quebec school system,a Catholic anda Protestant committee of the Ministry of Education were replaced by the Religious Affairs Committee, whose role became only advisory.

When asked to explain why the current Quebec government intends to abolish the committee, Esther Chouinard, communications officer for the Quebecs Ministry of Education and Higher Education, replied: The committees opinion has not been sought since 2007.

The last chair of the committee, Marie-Andree Roy of the Department of Science and Religion at the University of Quebec at Montreal, who stepped down in 2013, does not think the government is making the right decision.

The committee made a significant contribution to the establishment of the Ethics and Religious Culture program. It has produced various very relevant studies on issues related to religion in schools, but was generally met with radio silence from the ministers, she said, stressing that the committee still exists by law, even though the government has been ignoring it for a few years.

The first chair of the committee, Jean-Marc Charron, a specialist in the psychology of religion at the University of Montreal, had even advocated unsuccessfully for the creation of an equivalent committee for all departments.

Religious issues are regularly in the news, and the misunderstanding of political leaders in this field amply justifies the existence of a forum for advice for the entire government apparatus, he said.

If Bill 40 is adopted as it stands by the QuebecNational Assembly, the section that states that a student is entitled to complementary services of spiritual animation and community engagement will be repealed from the Education Act, as will the section that states that the school must facilitate the students spiritual development in order to foster his or her development.

This worries spiritual life and community engagement leaders, who replaced pastoral agents in schools two decades ago. Some said they fear it will open the door to the elimination of their jobs.

But Chouinard said amendments to the legislation would have no impact on maintaining the function or on student services.

She also confirmed that the additional service of spiritual animation and community engagement is one of the 12 complementary services officially provided in the province and would remain so if the bill is adopted.

-Vaillancourt is editor of Presence info. Contributing to this story was Francois Gloutnay, a reporter for the agency,in Montreal.

Original post:

Education & Health Experts fear new Quebec legislation will further erode religion in schools October 16 - Grandin Media

Spiritual Reflections: Even for a Midwesterner, work and play can be balanced – SW News Media

Posted on by

You would think it would be an easy choice between working or having fun, right? Not for me!

I was born and raised in Minnesota, a typical Midwesterner by most standards. I am also of German and Norwegian ancestry. Im telling you this because I, like many of us, grew up with a strong work ethic. In fact, in my family work always came before fun. As many of you already know, the work is never done, which means the fun times are few and far between.

An even bigger stretch was the idea that work and fun could go together and it was not an either/or; both could actually happen at the same time. Who knew?

It was hard to move from making work the only priority to incorporating fun into the things I did, even though I knew how important it was. Just as I had learned growing up, work was still first priority. I knew that is not what I wanted and I would have to find a way to make another choice. Given this work ethic hardwired into my brain, I clearly had something to work on.

Thats when I heard about a workshop focusing on adding fun into your life. A friend of mine was going, and although I was still skeptical, I thought I would give it a try.

I enjoyed the workshop, brought home a chart to help me intentionally add fun things and laid it on my desk not quite ready to dive into it. Every now and then I picked it up and thought maybe I could add some fun to my life. I started small, but the more I did, the more I liked it. Before I realized it, searching out things that were new and different had actually became part of my life.

One of the things I searched out was how to paint the beautiful mandala stones that you see on social media. It took quite a while to find a teacher so I could learn how to paint them, but when I did, I had so much fun that I decided that others might enjoy this, too. That led me in a direction I had not expected: I now teach others how to paint the beautiful stones.

I know for a fact that if I had not taken that workshop on fun, I probably would have continued to fit fun in when I could rather than making an intentional effort to seek it. This helped me to change my belief that work is the only important attribute to have, and it was easier than I thought to make this a daily intention even for me.

I dont believe that at our essence we are meant to struggle to be who we are. I think all too often we forget that our loving and gracious God has given us the capacity to for joy and fun, which sometimes gets lost in daily life. I would challenge you today to begin to think about how you can add fun into even the hardest parts if your life.

Sandy Thibault is a life coach, author, speaker and owner of Safari of the Spirit Life Coaching in Savage. She is the author of Selmas Spirit A Journey of Peace and Forgiveness and her new book, Change Your Perspective, Change Your Life 52 Ways To Inspire You to Action. For more information go to her website, safariofthespirit.com.

Link:

Spiritual Reflections: Even for a Midwesterner, work and play can be balanced - SW News Media

Opinion | Graham Rockingham: A year of living spiritually without religion – TheSpec.com

Posted on by

She danced with witches, built a new age altar, went 40-days alcohol free for Lent (even tried a couple of AA meetings), visited Thoreau's Walden Pond and drove to Lily Dale, N.Y, North America's oldest spiritual community. She hugged a tree, even spoke to it, practised yoga with goats, immersed herself in a float tank, learned to interpret Tarot cards, explored past-life regression, hosted a "death dinner," donned a pink hat for the Women's March in Washington, chowed down on a megadose of magic mushrooms (her first and only time), tidied her house ala Marie Kondo ... and got a tattoo, a little one, of a bird, on her shoulder.

There was other stuff, too, but you'll have to read the book to find out what.

It's called "My Year of Living Spiritually," 254 pages published by Douglas and McIntyre, and it's coming to your local book store on Oct. 26. You can attend the book launch on that day from 7 to 9 p.m. at the First Unitarian Church of Hamilton, a place of worship as liberal as the Canadian Reformed Church is conservative. Bokma is also speaking Tuesday, Oct. 15, at 9 a.m. at the Royal Botanical Gardens, presented by A Different Drummer Books.

Bokma approached her spiritual encounters with both an open mind and a journalist's skepticism. While some therapies failed to provide the promised spiritual boost, Bokma never questioned the sincerity of the people pushing them. Most came to her through trusted recommendations.

Some required travel and money (she budgeted $300 on items for the new age altar), but many were found close to home and for free.

Perhaps the most moving chapter is "Finding My Voice," in which Bokma finds spiritual solace through the shared voices of a community choir. At one point the choir visits a palliative care unit. Bokma is brought to tears by how a simple song can raise the spirit of those facing their final breath. The narrative is poignant and compelling.

Although it wasn't Bokma's original intention, the book became more of a personal memoir than a work of journalism. Her path kept returning to her broken relationship with her family, in particular her mother, a woman she had always admired.

The new age altar didn't survive the year, but Bokma has cut back on her alcohol consumption, pulled the plug on the TV and learned to accept her life with gratitude. Her house is a much tidier place, due to Marie Kondo, and, after more than 30 years of marriage, she has rethought her relationship with her husband.

Perhaps most importantly, her year-long journey has brought some reconciliation with her mother, helping to mend a rift that opened more than 35 years ago.

"She read the book. I had to show it to her, she's in it so much," Bokma says. "I thought maybe that would be the end, that we would never speak again. I had no idea how she would react.

"The next morning she called me at 8 a.m. She had stayed up all night and read it. She didn't hate it. She didn't like it, or love it. She corrected a couple of things.

"And said 'I do love you.' That was the first time I had heard that in a long time.'"

What: Book launch for "My Year of Living Spiritually," by Anne Bokma. A reading by Bokma plus a conversation with Tom Wilson, author of the bestselling memoir "Beautiful Scars." Musical performances by Lyla Miklos, Darcy Mitchison and J.P. Morrison

When: Saturday, Oct. 26, 7 p.m.

Where: First Unitarian Church of Hamilton, 170, Dundurn St. S.

grockingham@thespec.com

905-526-3331 | @RockatTheSpec

grockingham@thespec.com

905-526-3331 | @RockatTheSpec

Read the rest here:

Opinion | Graham Rockingham: A year of living spiritually without religion - TheSpec.com

Quantum Paradox Experiment Puts Einstein to the Test May Lead to More Accurate Clocks and Sensors – SciTechDaily

Posted on by

A clock moving in superposition of different speeds would measure a superposition of different elapsing times in a quantum version of the famous twin paradox of special relativity. Credit: Magdalena Zych

More accurate clocks and sensors may result from a recently proposed experiment, linking an Einstein-devised paradox to quantum mechanics.

University of Queensland physicist Dr. Magdalena Zych said the international collaboration aimed to test Einsteins twin paradox using quantum particles in a superposition state.

The twin paradox is one of the most counterintuitive predictions of relativity theory, Dr. Zych said. It says that time can pass at different speeds for people at different distances to an enormous mass or traveling with different velocities.

For example, relative to a reference clock far from any massive object, a clock closer to a mass or moving at high speed will tick slower. This creates a twin paradox, where one of a pair of twins departs on a fast-speed journey while the other stays behind. When the twins reunite, the traveling twin would be much younger, as different amounts of time have passed for each of them.

Its a mind-blowing effect featured in popular movies like Interstellar but its also been verified by real world experiments, and is even taken into consideration in order for everyday GPS technology to work.

The team included researchers from the University of Ulm and Leibniz University Hannover and found how one could use advanced laser technology to realize a quantum version of Einsteins twin paradox.

In the quantum version, rather than twins there will be only one particle traveling in a quantum superposition.

A quantum superposition means the particle is in two locations at the same time, in each of them with some probability, and yet this is different to placing the particle in one or the other location randomly, Dr. Zych said.

Its another way for an object to exist, only allowed by the laws of quantum physics.

The idea is to put one particle in superposition on two trajectories with different speeds, and see if a different amount of time passes for each of them, as in the twin paradox. If our understanding of quantum theory and relativity is right, when the superposed trajectories meet, the quantum traveler will be in superposition of being older and younger than itself.

This would leave an unmistakable signature in the results of the experiment, and thats what we hope will be found when the experiment is realized in the future.

It could lead to advanced technologies that will allow physicists to build more precise sensors and clocks potentially, a key part of future navigation systems, autonomous vehicles and earthquake early-warning networks.

The experiment itself will also answer some open questions in modern physics.

A key example is, can time display quantum behavior or is it fundamentally classical? Dr. Zych said. This question is likely crucial for the holy grail of theoretical physics: finding a joint theory of quantum and gravitational phenomena. Were looking forward to helping answer this question, and tackling many more.

For more on this study, read Physicists Put Einstein to the Test With a Quantum-Mechanical Twin Paradox.

Reference: Interference of clocks: A quantum twin paradox by Sina Loriani, Alexander Friedrich, Christian Ufrecht, Fabio Di Pumpo, Stephan Kleinert, Sven Abend, Naceur Gaaloul, Christian Meiners, Christian Schubert, Dorothee Tell, tienne Wodey, Magdalena Zych, Wolfgang Ertmer, Albert Roura, Dennis Schlippert, Wolfgang P. Schleich, Ernst M. Rasel and Enno Giese, 4 October 2019, Science Advances.DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aax8966

Read this article:

Quantum Paradox Experiment Puts Einstein to the Test May Lead to More Accurate Clocks and Sensors - SciTechDaily

A Newly Seen Quantum Symmetry Can Lead To Insights To The Workings Of The Universe – Forbes

Posted on by

If you work up from first principles, much of what we understand about the Universe and how it works is through symmetries. If a transformation is symmetric, the properties of a system can be retained if the system is transformed. A research team from the University of Washington has shown for one of the first times a new type of symmetry in quantum systems. This experiment may lead to further advancements in physics, especially in the realm of quantum computing.

There are various ways that a system can be symmetric. P, or parity, symmetry means that the orientation can be swapped. Such a symmetry is what we see in our bodies. Our right hand is a mirror image of our left hand. C, or charge, symmetry means that each particle is swapped with its own anti-particle, effectively changing its charge. Finally, T, or time, symmetry is time, meaning that the system follows the same laws of physics whether the system runs forwards or backwards in time.

Your hands illustrate P, or parity symmetry - one hand is the mirror image of the other.

Understanding symmetries within the Universe allows us to construct various laws of physics, from the conservation of energy or the conservation of momentum.

Symmetries are often broken, especially when looking at one of these properties at a time. However, the Standard Model predicts that together, these symmetries should hold. This is called CPT symmetry.

The research, from the lab of Dr. Kater Murch at Washington University in St. Louis and led by Dr. Mahdi Naghiloo shows for one of the first times PT (or parity-time) symmetry being held in a quantum system.

The group used a qubit - or a superconducting circuit - to make a three-state quantum system. This system has three excited states. The first typically decays to the ground state, while the other two are coupled. The team was able to select only instances where the qubit did not decay into the ground state which led to the effective PT symmetry.

Exploration of PT symmetry - both when it holds and when it is broken - can lead to deeper understandings of the world of quantum physics.

See the article here:

A Newly Seen Quantum Symmetry Can Lead To Insights To The Workings Of The Universe - Forbes

UWMadison physicist awarded Packard Fellowship – University of Wisconsin-Madison

Posted on by

Shimon Kolkowitz, a University of WisconsinMadison assistant professor of physics, has been selected as one of 22 members of the 2019 class of Packard Fellows for Science and Engineering.

The fellowship, awarded to early-career scientists from across the U.S., provides $875,000 of funding over five years. Kolkowitz will use the funds to develop his research program in ultra-precise atomic clocks, which he will use to investigate such fundamental aspects of physics as the relationship between quantum mechanics and gravity and the nature of dark matter.

Shimon Kolkowitz is the third UWMadison physics professor to be named a Packard Fellow in the 32 years of the award. Photo: Steven Burrows / JILA

These clocks are the most precise instruments that humankind has ever built, Kolkowitz says. Im interested in asking, How does that precision give us access to new physics?

One of the first research areas Kolkowitz plans to explore is a new test of Einsteins general theory of relativity. When first developing the theory, Einstein suggested that people in a closed elevator could not tell the difference between the elevator on Earth under the influence of gravity and the elevator accelerating through space in zero gravity.

Thats called the Einstein equivalence principle, and it is at the heart of general relativity. The predictions of general relativity have been tested in a number of different ways and have always been confirmed, Kolkowitz explains. But the basic question of, Can I tell the difference between acceleration and gravity? has not been directly tested. And I think it will be a lot of fun and really cool to directly realize that thought experiment in my lab.

Atomic clocks keep time by measuring the differences between energy levels of the electrons in atoms. The clocks timekeeping precision is affected by many factors, such as the surrounding environment, the temperature of the atoms, and the type of atom used. The atomic clocks constructed in Kolkowitzs lab are made of strontium atoms that have both been gathered into a small sphere and cooled to just above absolute zero the coldest temperature that can exist by lasers.

Kolkowitzs ultra-precise atomic clock, an ultra-high vacuum containing strontium atoms that are trapped and cooled to 1/1000th of a degree above absolute zero by lasers, will test Einsteins general theory of relativity. Photo: Shimon Kolkowitz

The general theory of relativity says that gravity affects the passage of time, so two atomic clocks at different heights, which experience slight differences in the strength of gravity, will tick at different rates. Currently, that time difference has been observed between two atomic clocks that are about a foot apart in height. A unique feature of Kolkowitzs clock design is that it allows two clocks to exist in the same environment. As a result, in the first set of experiments he plans to conduct, he expects they will be able to measure differences in time due to gravity at centimeter or millimeter height differences.

Next, he wants to measure differences in time between two accelerating clocks that are separated by the same distance this time horizontally instead of vertically to take the effects of gravity out of the equation.

According to the equivalence principle, we should see the same disagreement between the two clocks from the acceleration as from gravity, Kolkowitz says. And thats an effect that has never been observed before.

The Packard Fellowship gives me the freedom to explore research avenues that might not have obvious or immediate applications, but that can inspire the imagination, and that will hopefully lead in unexpected directions.

Shimon Kolkowitz

Kolkowitz admits he is not entirely sure what the implications of these experiments may be. One possibility he is exploring with theoretical physics colleagues is whether related experiments with these quantum-physics-based clocks can complement or improve upon high energy particle physics experiments in the search for new physics, such as the nature of dark matter or dark energy.

These experiments are kind of out there, Kolkowitz says. The Packard Fellowship gives me the freedom to explore research avenues that might not have obvious or immediate applications, but that can inspire the imagination, and that will hopefully lead in unexpected directions.

Professor Kolkowitzs innovative research onprecision metrology with quantum systems is original and highly relevant for quantum information science, says Sridhara Dasu, professor and chair of the physics department at UWMadison. We look forward to his continued success in establishing a flourishing research program in the department.

Kolkowitz is the third UWMadison physics professor to be named a Packard Fellow in the 32 years of the award, after Thad Walker (1992) and Cary Forest (1998). Previously named Packard Fellows include Kolkowitzs former advisor as well as two Nobel laureates.

I feel that Im following in the footsteps of some very impressive people, and thats a real honor for me, Kolkowitz says.

Share via Facebook

Share via Twitter

Share via Linked In

Share via Email

Original post:

UWMadison physicist awarded Packard Fellowship - University of Wisconsin-Madison

University’s new supercomputer, Traverse, to aid plasma physics and fusion research – The Daily Princetonian

Posted on by

Photo Courtesy of Denise Applewhite / Office of Communications

The Universitys High-Performance Computing Research Center (HPCRC) has acquired a new supercomputer, named Traverse, which will aid research at the Universitys Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), as well as other University programs.

The addition joins six other computing clusters: Tiger, Dell, and Perseus, which are the largest and reserved primarily for faculty, as well as Nobel, Adroit, and Tigressdata, which are available to students. All the clusters are housed in a building on the Forrestal campus, about three miles from the main campus.

Supercomputers require high amounts of energy, and HPCRC typically uses 1.8 megawatts of electricity and is equipped with backup generators. The clusters can also overheat, which requires ventilating them with cooled air. The facility is efficient enough to have earned a LEED Gold rating.

Thanos Panagiotopoulos, the chair of the chemical and biological engineering department, said that Traverse will allow Princetons Chemistry in Solution and at Interfaces (CSI) lab to model the interactions of a few hundred molecules at a time.

We do problems involving very large-scale calculations that connect quantum mechanics with the collective properties of water and aqueous solutions, Panagiotopoulos said. The simulations usually last only on the order of a few picoseconds but can help CSI understand the atomistic dynamics of various materials.

Roberto Car, director of CSI and the Ralph W. *31 Dornte Professor in Chemistry at the University, said that his group of researchers now uses a new, more efficient mathematical construction, called a deep neural network, which uses machine learning to compute the classical mechanics forces in any number of arrangements that share the same statistical probability. Researchers derive the interaction potentials from density functional theory, which considers the quantum mechanics of the atoms in their ground states.

Having access to that kind of machine at Princeton will allow us to do this work on our code and experiment with the capabilities offered by this architecture, Car said.

Traverse has a similar architectural structure to Summit, the most powerful supercomputer in the world, housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Traverse is a 1.4-petaflop system, making it capable of 1.4 million billion floating-point calculations per second. It is on the TOP500 list, a ranking of the 500 most powerful supercomputers based on standard tests.

Panagiotopoulos and Car noted that Traverse will soon be overtaken by more powerful supercomputers. Car predicted that exascale systems, which would be capable of a billion billion calculations per second and function 1,000 times faster than petascale ones, will be built in the next few years. He noted that PPPL will likely be able to use technology developed at Oak Ridge.

What sets Traverse apart from the previous HPCRC clusters is its architecture described by Car as a hybrid architecture that consists of CPU [central processing unit] and GPUs [graphics processing units]. The clusters were built by IBM, and the GPUs were supplied by Nvidia, which sells GPUs for many personal computers and gaming systems.

Car said the first exascale supercomputers will share a similar architecture to Traverse, meaning that the work required to adapt the researchers current algorithms to Traverse will remain useful.

Traverse will help PPPL model the movement of plasma in its tokamak NSTX-U, the largest of its kind in the world, to better understand how to control the plasma on a millisecond timescale. PPPL was founded in 1951 and has been working, among other projects, to create a viable fusion reactor potentially capable of generating virtually unlimited energy.

Traverse was financed by the University, and it will be used by graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty at the University, as well as PPPL, which is managed by the Department of Energy.

Original post:

University's new supercomputer, Traverse, to aid plasma physics and fusion research - The Daily Princetonian

Quantum weirdness could allow a person-sized wormhole to last forever – New Scientist News

Posted on by

By Chelsea Whyte

L. CALCADA / EUROPEAN SOUTHERN OBSERVATORY / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Fancy a trip down a wormhole? We have never been quite sure whether these portals through space-time could exist long enough for anything to travel through. Now calculations suggest they could stick around for a while perhaps as long as the universe itself.

Wormholes are essentially two black holes connected together. Two types could theoretically exist. A non-traversable wormhole is like a room with two doors that can only be used from the outside the doors are black holes through which things could enter, but never escape. These are not very interesting, as any astronaut who is brave enough to venture in wont be able to make it back to tell the story, says Diandian Wang at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Traversable wormholes are also possible, but up until now we didnt know whether they could exist for long enough for anything to pass through in practice.

Advertisement

For such a wormhole to form, space-time needs to change shape from being like a flat sheet to having holes in it. In classical physics, this cant happen. But the rules of quantum mechanics seem to allow for space-time to spontaneously change shape, although this is likely to only be for very short periods.

Wang has now worked on a scenario involving string theory, in which the fundamental ingredient of reality are tiny strings. If one of these strings breaks, it can create a traversable wormhole. It contains energy, and when it breaks, that energy becomes two black holes at each end of the string, says Wang.

Researchers had shown this was a possibility before, but it seemed the energy would force the two black holes to zoom apart from each other, snapping the wormhole.

Now, Wang and his team have calculated that the curvature of space-time could counteract this acceleration, keeping the black holes static and allowing the throat of the wormhole to remain open.This scenario is extremely unlikely, and becomes even more unlikely the longer the wormhole is and the larger the two black holes are.

This means that a wormhole big enough for a person to travel through is much less likely than one through which light could be sent. Thanks to quantum mechanics, though, the probability of either happening isnt zero.

Wangs team also calculated that, once a traversable wormhole exists, it could remain stable for at least as long as the universe has existed and maybe forever.

Our previous work showed that wormholes can be traversable, says Aron Wall at the University of Cambridge. But we did not describe a process to create the wormhole. He says Wangs calculations show how one could be created from scratch.

Wall points out, however, that Wangs wormholes couldnt be used to time travel or move faster than the speed of light. Were you to travel through one, he says, you would still be confined to moving slower than the speed of light.

Journal reference: Classical and Quantum Gravity, DOI: 10.1088/1361-6382/ab436f

More on these topics:

Go here to see the original:

Quantum weirdness could allow a person-sized wormhole to last forever - New Scientist News

Has human evolution reached its peak for cognitive understanding? – The Independent

Posted on by

Despite huge advances in science over the past century, our understanding of nature is still far from complete. Not only have scientists failed to find the holy grail of physics unifying the very large (general relativity) with the very small (quantum mechanics) they still dont know what the vast majority of the universe is made up of. The sought-after theory of everything continues to elude us. And there are other outstanding puzzles, too, such as how consciousness arises from mere matter.

Will science ever be able to provide all the answers? Human brains are the product of blind and unguided evolution. They were designed to solve practical problems impinging on our survival and reproductionnot to unravel the fabric of the universe. This realisation has led some philosophers to embrace a curious form of pessimism, arguing thatthere are bound to be things we will never understand. Human science will therefore one day hit a hard limit and may already have done so.

Some questions may be doomed to remain what the American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky called mysteries. If you think that humans alone have unlimited cognitive powers setting us apart from all other animals you have not fully digested Darwins insight that Homo sapiens is very much part of the natural world.

From 15p 0.18 $0.18 USD 0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.

But does this argument really hold up? Consider that human brains did not evolve to discover their own origins either. And yet somehow we managed to do just that. Perhaps the pessimists are missing something.

Mysterian arguments

Mysterian thinkers give a prominent role to biological arguments and analogies. In his 1983 landmark bookThe Modularity of Mind,the late philosopher Jerry Fodor claimed that there are bound to be thoughts that we are unequipped to think.

Similarly, philosopher Colin McGinn has argued in a series of books and articles that all minds suffer from cognitive closure with respect to certain problems. Just as dogs or cats will never understand prime numbers, human brains must be closed off from some of the worlds wonders. McGinn suspects that the reason why philosophical conundrums such as the mind-body problem how physical processes in our brain give rise to consciousness prove to be intractable is that their true solutions are simply inaccessible to the human mind.

If McGinn is right that our brains are simply not equipped to solve certain problems, there is no point in even trying, as they will continue to baffle and bewilder us. McGinn himself is convinced that there is, in fact, a perfectly natural solution to the mind-body problem, but that human brains will never find it.

Even the psychologist Steven Pinker, someone who is often accused of scientific hubris himself, is sympathetic to the argument of the mysterians. If our ancestors had no need to understand the wider cosmos in order to spread their genes, he argues, why would natural selection have given us the brainpower to do so?

Mind-boggling theories

Mysterians typically present the question of cognitive limits in stark, black-or-white terms: either we can solve a problem, or it will forever defy us. Either we have cognitive access or we suffer from closure. At some point, human inquiry will suddenly slam into a metaphorical brick wall, after which we will be forever condemned to stare in blank incomprehension.

Another possibility, however, which mysterians often overlook, is one of slowly diminishing returns. Reaching the limits of inquiry might feel less like hitting a wall than getting bogged down in a quagmire. We keep slowing down, even as we exert more and more effort, and yet there is no discrete point beyond which any further progress at all becomes impossible.

Only the best news in your inbox

There is another ambiguity in the thesis of the mysterians, which my colleague Michael Vlerick and I have pointed out in an academic paper. Are the mysterians claiming that we will never find the true scientific theory of some aspect of reality, or alternatively, that we may well find this theory but will never truly comprehend it?

In the science fiction series The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy, an alien civilisation builds a massive supercomputer to calculate the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. When the computer finally announces that the answer is 42, no one has a clue what this means (in fact, they go on to construct an even bigger supercomputer to figure out precisely this).

Is a question still a mystery if you have arrived at the correct answer, but you have no idea what it means or cannot wrap your head around it? Mysterians often conflate those two possibilities.

In some places, McGinn suggests that the mindbody problem is inaccessible to human science, presumably meaning that we will never find the true scientific theory describing the mindbody nexus. At other moments, however, he writes that the problem will always remain numbingly difficult to make sense of for human beings, and that the head spins in theoretical disarray when we try to think about it.

This suggests that we may well arrive at the true scientific theorybut it will have a 42-like quality to it. But, then again, some people would argue that this is already true of a theory like quantum mechanics. Even the quantum physicist Richard Feynman admitted, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

Would the mysterians say that we humans are cognitively closed to the quantum world? According to quantum mechanics, particles can be in two places at onceor randomly pop out of empty space. While this is extremely hard to make sense of, quantum theory leads to incredibly accurate predictions. The phenomena of quantum weirdness has been confirmed by several experimental tests, and scientists are now also creating applications based on the theory.

Mysterians also tend to forget how mind-boggling some earlier scientific theories and concepts were when initially proposed. Nothing in our cognitive make-up prepared us for relativity theory, evolutionary biology or heliocentrism.

As the philosopher Robert McCauley writes: When first advanced, the suggestions that the Earth moves, that microscopic organisms can kill human beings, and that solid objects are mostly empty space were no less contrary to intuition and common sense than the most counterintuitive consequences of quantum mechanics have proved for us in the 20th century.McCauleys astute observation provides reason for optimismnot pessimism.

Mind extensions

But can our puny brains really answer all conceivable questions and understand all problems? This depends on whether we are talking about bare, unaided brain poweror not. Theres a lot of things you cant do with your naked brain. But Homo sapiens is a tool-making species, and this includes a range of cognitive tools.

For example, our unaided sense organs cannot detect UVlight, ultrasound waves, X-rays or gravitational waves. But if youre equipped with some fancy technology you can detect all those things. To overcome our perceptual limitations, scientists have developed a suite of tools and techniques: microscopes, X-ray film, Geiger counters, radio satellites detectors and so forth.

All these devices extend the reach of our minds by translating physical processes into some format that our sense organs can digest. So are we perceptually closed to UV light? In one sense, yes. But not if you take into account all our technological equipment and measuring devices.

Through Einsteins Theory of Relativity we can understand that gravity causes shifts in the fabric of space-time (iStock)

In a similar way, we use physical objects (such as paper and pencil) to vastly increase the memory capacity of our naked brains. According to the British philosopher Andy Clark, our minds quite literally extend beyond our skins and skulls, in the form of notebooks, computers screens, maps and file drawers.

Mathematics is another fantastic mind-extension technology, which enables us to represent concepts that we couldnt think of with our bare brains. For instance, no scientist could hope to form a mental representation of all the complex interlocking processes that make up our climate system. Thats exactly why we have constructed mathematical models and computers to do the heavy lifting for us.

Cumulative knowledge

Most importantly, we can extend our own minds to those of our fellow human beings. What makes our species unique is that we are capable of culture, in particular cumulative cultural knowledge. A population of human brains is much smarter than any individual brain in isolation.

And the collaborative enterprise par excellence is science. It goes without saying that a single scientist would not be capable of unravelling the mysteries of the cosmos on her own. But collectively, they do. As Isaac Newton wrote, he could see further by standing on the shoulders of giants. By collaborating with their peers, scientists can extend the scope of their understanding, achieving much more than any of them would be capable of individually.

Today, fewer and fewer people understand what is going on at the cutting edge of theoretical physics even physicists. The unification of quantum mechanics and relativity theory will undoubtedly be exceptionally daunting, or else scientists would have nailed it long ago already.

The same is true for our understanding of how the human brain gives rise to consciousness, meaning and intentionality. But is there any good reason to suppose that these problems will forever remain out of reach? Or that our sense of bafflement when thinking of them will never diminish?

It was only through Einsteins breakthrough that other scientists could make further progress in the field of quantum mechanics (Getty)

In a public debate I moderated a few years ago, the philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out a very simple objection to the mysterians analogies with the minds of other animals: other animals cannot even understand the questions. Not only will a dog never figure out if theres a largest prime, but it will never even understand the question. By contrast, human beings can pose questions to each other and to themselves, reflect on these questions, and in doing so come up with ever better and more refined versions.

Mysterians are inviting us to imagine the existence of a class of questions that are themselves perfectly comprehensible to humansbut the answers to which will forever remain out of reach. Is this notion really plausible (or even coherent)?

Alien anthropologists

To see how these arguments come together, lets do a thought experiment. Imagine that some extraterrestrial anthropologists had visited our planet around 40,000 years ago to prepare a scientific report about the cognitive potential of our species. Would this strange, naked ape ever find out about the structure of its solar system, the curvature of space-time or even its own evolutionary origins?

At that moment in time, when our ancestors were living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, such an outcome may have seemed quite unlikely. Although humans possessed quite extensive knowledge about the animals and plants in their immediate environment, and knew enough about the physics of everyday objects to know their way around and come up with some clever tools, there was nothing resembling scientific activity.

There was no writing, no mathematics, no artificial devices for extending the range of our sense organs. As a consequence, almost all of the beliefs held by these peopleabout the broader structure of the world were completely wrong. Human beings didnt have a clue about the true causes of natural disaster, disease, heavenly bodies, the turn of the seasons or almost any other natural phenomenon.

Alien anthropologists might overlook the fact that our cognitive abilities have superseded our physical ones (iStock)

Our extraterrestrial anthropologist might have reported the following:

Evolution has equipped this upright, walking ape with primitive sense-organs to pick up some information that is locally relevant to them, such as vibrations in the air (caused by nearby objects and persons) and electromagnetic waves within the 400-700 nanometer range, as well as certain larger molecules dispersed in their atmosphere.

However, these creatures are completely oblivious to anything that falls outside their narrow perceptual range. Moreover, they cant even see most of the single-cell life forms in their own environmentbecause these are simply too small for their eyes to detect. Likewise, their brains have evolved to think about the behaviour of medium-sized objects (mostly solid) under conditions of low gravity.

None of these earthlings has ever escaped the gravitational field of their planet to experience weightlessness, or been artificially accelerated so as to experience stronger gravitational forces. They cant even conceive of space-time curvature, since evolution has hard-wired zero-curvature geometry of space into their puny brains.

In conclusion, were sorry to report that most of the cosmos is simply beyond their ken.

But those extraterrestrials would have been dead wrong. Biologically, we are no different than we were 40,000 years ago but now we know about bacteria and viruses, DNA and molecules, supernovas and black holes, the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum and a wide array of other strange things.

We also know about non-Euclidean geometry and space-time curvature, courtesy of Einsteins general theory of relativity. Our minds have reached out to objects millions of light years away from our planet, and also to extremely tiny objects far below the perceptual limits of our sense organs. By using various tricks and tools, humans have vastly extended their grasp on the world.

The verdict: biology is not destiny

The thought experiment above should be a counsel against pessimism about human knowledge. Who knows what other mind-extending devices we will hit upon to overcome our biological limitations? Biology is not destiny. If you look at what we have already accomplished in the span of a few centuries, any rash pronouncements about cognitive closure seem highly premature.

Mysterians often pay lip service to the values of humility and modestybut, on closer examination, their position is far less restrained than it appears. Take McGinns confident pronouncement that the mindbody problem is an ultimate mystery that we will never unravel. In making such a claim, McGinn assumes knowledge of three things: the nature of the mindbody problem itself, the structure of the human mind, and the reason why never the twain shall meet. But McGinn offers only a superficial overview of the science of human cognitionand pays little or no attention to the various devices for mind extension.

I think its time to turn the tables on the mysterians. If you claim that some problems will forever elude human understanding, you have to show in some detail why no possible combination of mind-extension devices will bring us any closer to a solution. That is a taller order than most mysterians have acknowledged.

Moreover, by spelling out exactly why some problems will remain mysterious, mysterians risk being hoisted by their own petard. As Dennett wrote in his latest book: As soon as you frame a question that you claim we will never be able to answer, you set in motion the very process that might well prove you wrong: you raise a topic of investigation.

In one of his infamous memorandum notes on Iraq, former US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeldmakes a distinction between two forms of ignorance: the known unknowns and unknown unknowns. In the first category belong things that we know we dont know. We can frame the right questions but we havent found the answers yet. And then there are the things that we dont know we dont know. For these unknown unknownswe cant even frame the questions yet.

It is quite true that we can never rule out the possibility that there are such unknown unknowns and that some of them will forever remain unknown, because for some (unknown) reason human intelligence is not up to the task.

But the important thing to note about these unknown unknowns is that nothing can be said about them. To presume, from the outset, that some unknown unknownswill always remain unknown, as mysterians do, is not modesty its arrogance.

Maarten Boudry is a postdoctoral researcher of the philosophy of science at Ghent University. This article first appeared on The Conversation

Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events

View original post here:

Has human evolution reached its peak for cognitive understanding? - The Independent

New Quantum-Mechanical Dissipation Mechanism Observed for the First Time – SciTechDaily

Posted on by

The gold tip is moved across the surface of the topological insulator and experiences energy loss only at discrete, quantized energies. This is related to the image potential states that are formed over the conducting surface of the topological insulator. Credit: University of Basel, Departement of Physics

Topological insulators are innovative materials that conduct electricity on the surface, but act as insulators on the inside. Physicists at the University of Basel and the Istanbul Technical University have begun investigating how they react to friction. Their experiment shows that the heat generated through friction is significantly lower than in conventional materials. This is due to a new quantum mechanism, the researchers report in the scientific journal Nature Materials.

Thanks to their unique electrical properties, topological insulators promise many innovations in the electronics and computer industries, as well as in the development of quantum computers. The thin surface layer can conduct electricity almost without resistance, resulting in less heat than traditional materials. This makes them of particular interest for electronic components.

Our measurements clearly show that at certain voltages there is virtually no heat generation caused by electronic friction. Dr. Dilek Yildiz

Furthermore, in topological insulators, the electronic friction i.e. the electron-mediated conversion of electrical energy into heat can be reduced and controlled. Researchers of the University of Basel, the Swiss Nanoscience Institute (SNI) and the Istanbul Technical University have now been able to experimentally verify and demonstrate exactly how the transition from energy to heat through friction behaves a process known as dissipation.

The team headed by Professor Ernst Meyer at the Department of Physics of the University of Basel investigated the effects of friction on the surface of a bismuth telluride topological insulator. The scientists used an atomic force microscope in pendulum mode. Here, the conductive microscope tip made of gold oscillates back and forth just above the two-dimensional surface of the topological insulator. When a voltage is applied to the microscope tip, the movement of the pendulum induces a small electrical current on the surface.

In conventional materials, some of this electrical energy is converted into heat through friction. The result on the conductive surface of the topological insulator looks very different: the loss of energy through the conversion to heat is significantly reduced.

Our measurements clearly show that at certain voltages there is virtually no heat generation caused by electronic friction, explains Dr. Dilek Yildiz, who carried out this work within the SNI Ph.D. School.

The researchers were also able to observe for the first time a new quantum-mechanical dissipation mechanism that occurs only at certain voltages. Under these conditions, the electrons migrate from the tip through an intermediate state into the material similar to the tunneling effect in scanning tunneling microscopes. By regulating the voltage, the scientists were able to influence the dissipation. These measurements confirm the great potential of topological insulators, since electronic friction can be controlled in a targeted manner, adds Meyer.

Reference: Mechanical dissipation via image potential states on a topological insulator surface by D. Yildiz, M. Kisiel, U. Gysin, O. Grl and E. Meyer, 14 October 2019, Nature Materials.DOI: 10.1038/s41563-019-0492-3

Read more:

New Quantum-Mechanical Dissipation Mechanism Observed for the First Time - SciTechDaily

Physicists have found quasiparticles that mimic hypothetical dark matter axions – Science News

Posted on by

An elusive hypothetical particle comesin imitation form.

Lurking within a solid crystal is aphenomenon that is mathematically similar to proposed subatomic particlescalled axions, physicist JohannesGooth and colleagues report online October 7 in Nature.

If axions exist as fundamentalparticles, they could constitute a hidden form of matter in the cosmos, darkmatter. Scientists know dark matter exists thanks to its gravitational pull,but they have yet to identify what it is. Axions are one possibility, but no one has found the particles yet (SN: 4/9/18).

Enter the imitators. The axions analogswithin the crystal are a type of quasiparticle, a disturbance in a material thatcan mimic fundamental particles like axions. Quasiparticles result from thecoordinated jostling of electrons within a solid material. Its a bit like how birdsin a flock seem to take on new forms by syncing up their movements.

Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered Tuesdays and Thursdays

Axions were first proposed in thecontext of quantum chromodynamics the theory that explains the behaviors of quarks,tiny particles that are contained, for example, inside protons. Axions andtheir new doppelgngers are mathematically similar but physically totallyunrelated, says theoretical physicist Helen Quinn of SLAC National AcceleratorLaboratory in Menlo Park, Calif., one of the scientists who formulated thetheory behind axions. That means scientists are no closer to solving their darkmatter woes.

Still, the new study reveals for thefirst time that the phenomenon has a life beyond mere equations, inquasiparticle form. Its actually amazing, says Gooth, of the Max Planck Institutefor Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden, Germany. The idea of axions is avery mathematical concept, in a sense, but it still exists in reality.

In the new study, the researchersstarted with a material that hosts a type of quasiparticle known as a Weyl fermion,which behaves as if massless (SN: 7/16/15).When the material is cooled, Weyl fermions become locked into place, forming acrystal. That results in the density of electrons varying in a regular patternacross the material, like a stationary wave of electric charge, with peaks inthe wave corresponding to more electrons and dips corresponding to fewerelectrons.

Applying parallel electric and magneticfields to the crystal caused the wave to slosh back and forth. That sloshing isthe mathematical equivalent of an axion, the researchers say.

To confirm that the sloshing wasoccurring, the team measured the electric current through the crystal. Thatcurrent grew quickly as the researchers ramped up the electric fields strength,in a way that is a fingerprint of axion quasiparticles.

If the scientists changed the directionof the magnetic field so that it no longer aligned with the electric field, theenhanced growth of the electric current was lost, indicating that the axionquasiparticles went away. This material behaves exactly as you would expect,Gooth says.

Excerpt from:

Physicists have found quasiparticles that mimic hypothetical dark matter axions - Science News