Monday, December 15, 2014

"My job description is to enlighten minds, open hearts and create world peace."

". . .  his actual title is "Jolly Good Fellow."
Chade-Meng Tan: Which nobody can deny.
Anderson Cooper: So, what does a Jolly Good Fellow do?
Chade-Meng Tan: My job description is to enlighten minds, open hearts and create world peace."
(Chade-Mend Tan works at Google.)

This is from an Anderson Cooper segment on 60 Minutes on Mindfulness.  There are several points in this report where Cooper asks someone things like
"I can imagine some people rolling their eyes and saying, "Oh, come on  , , "    
or
"To some people though this may sound like kind of New Age gobbledygook?"
When he does, the person he's talking to cites research that documents the positive benefits of meditation and mindfulness.

"Judson Brewer: This is just the next generation of exercise. We've got the physical, you know, exercise components down. And now it's about working out how can we actually train our minds."
The Western world has mastered a way of knowing the world called science, which enables humans to manipulate the natural world in many powerful ways, that often have negative side effects for human beings.  Such as the stress that causes people and, according to this report, many corporations, to turn to mindfulness.   Meanwhile the Eastern world has worked on mastering oneself, focusing on one's own body and learning to control it.

To me, there is something wrong when humans work to find technologies to create more efficient and effective ways to literally kill other human beings as well as technology that slowly kills what it means to be human.  

You can see the whole video (and text) here.
At the film festival, I had to remind myself to enjoy the movie I was watching and not worry about the ones I was missing.

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