Conscientious objection in Israel

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/02/25/teenage-war-resister-israel

Very inspiring article, pretty accurate, as far as I know. Usually what happens, or what has happened in the past, is that young COs who won’t budge from their objection, eventually get released on medical/psychological grounds, sometimes following prison. I know at least two like that.

The army tries to discourage objections but to keep this low key – they certainly aren’t interested in the world know about them or potentially start a mass movement. But the fact is, they don’t really need a universal conscription. Many young people get out among the poor, among the rich and, of course, the ultra-orthodox religious.

Two things learned from a Buddhist monk

Two things I learned from a Thai Buddhist monk we met up with three years ago in Ladakh: First, always carry a cloth for sitting: then you always have a place to sit down, wherever you go. Mine’s a little more sophisticated than his – a light microfiber yoga towel from Target, that I can lay out for some yoga practice or fold for sitting.

Second, always carry a shoulder bag to put stuff in. Mine’s a cotton messenger bag that I picked up for €10 from a street seller in Rome.

There’s a third thing I’m sometimes tempted to implement. It seems that standard equipment for Thai Buddhist monks of his order included a Samson tablet. He used it as computer, phone, camera and e-reader – one device for everything. But I don’t think I could get any work done on that!

Jami

This messaging program Jami has an interesting name. Its website claims that the name comes from the Swahili word for “community”. Though of course Swahili is related to Arabic and in Arabic Jamia جامعة means a gathering, and by extension a mosque, as well as a university. Friday in Arabic is Yum al-Jumaa – the day of the mosque. As such, the Arabic word has a close parallel to similar words in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Sanskrit. The Hebrew word for synagogue ( which itself is Greek for a “place of assembly” is Beit Knesset בית כנסת- also a “house of assembly”. The Knesset is also Israel’s parliament, and a Kenes means a conference.

The words for church in several European languages come from the Greek Ecclesia ἐκκλησία which was originally the [principal assembly of the democracy of ancient Athens] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesia). (The Hebrew word for church is Knissia.)

In Sanskrit (and later Pali), a group or gathering is a Sangha (संघ ). This also means an assembly. A satsangha – an “assembly of the wise” is often used to mean a time for chanting, reading from holy books, etc. Sangha – as the gathering of students of the Buddha, is one of the important three refuges of Buddhism: Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.

Sangha, which can also be spelt samgha, originally means “to come together as one” and originated in the proto-Indo-European root Sem. which means “as one”; like the English word “same” and the same word in Sanskrit which also means “same” or “equal”. Consider the German word zusammen (together), which became in old English tosamne.

There’s another important use of the name Jami: he’s the medieval mystic Sufi poet who hailed from the city of Jam, in the province of Khorasan, in present day Afghanistan. I would love to read more about this Jami and his works. He lived much of his life in the city of Herat, for which I have a certain nostalgia. He was a scholar in a school of Ibn Arabi. If there is one area of shameful lack of modern English translation, it is of the Persian poets. In a future lifetime I will learn Parsi.

The Mithraism of Ancient Rome

In Rome’s museums I was fascinated by the way in which Romans incorporated into their culture beliefs from Egypt, the Middle East and Persia. Christianity was the one we think of today, but another important one was the cult of Mithras. Wikipedia has a very long article about him. He was originally a Persian or Indian god, associated with Zarathustra and probably with the Mitra of the Rig Veda. He was believed to have sprung from a rock and was usually worshiped in underground temples. The content of their rituals or beliefs is not very well known. However, during the fourth century the cult of Mithraism became prominent and spread across the Roman empire and signs of the cult have been found everywhere from North Africa to Northern Europe. Perhaps, if the adherents of Mithra had not been so cruelly persecuted by the Christians, we would still be under the sway of Mithraism today.

Simplification

Ghostwriter’s full-screen distraction free interface does actually create the closest experience to writing with pen on paper. I wasn’t thinking of this as a need when looking at plain text processors. Writing is useful to me as a process for developing thoughts and ideas, for self-questioning, for looking at what’s important. Not every developed flow of thought constitutes something that is eventually meaningful, or is necessarily a call to action. Sometimes, one can write down something that seems completely true and self-evident, and the process helps one to discover the fallacy of it. Just as if one would go to a psychologist and s/he might allow one to flow with a certain fantasy in order to then look at it critically and discover that this thing is not what one really wants… is that something that psychologists do? I’ve no idea. But they might. Following a thought process to a logical conclusion is sometimes better than nursing it while thinking one shouldn’t.

The journey towards simplicity is sometimes a circuitous route. One of my early heroes was Swami Sivananda, who gave up a fairly well-to-do life and went to live in Rishikesh, at a time when it was mainly just a pilgrim stop and dharamshala on the way up to Gangotri. Gandhi describes the place as a fairly squalid collection of tin roofed huts, or something similar. Sivananda used to string together bits of scrap paper in order to create notebooks, where he would write spiritual instructions to himself. One of these injunctions of his that I have always liked most is “Simplify your life, purify your heart.”

It is often difficult through external means to actually simplify even when the desire is there. I’m sure that Maria Konto’s students ditch the majority of their possessions eventually only to reacquire them. People who are natural managers or leaders may head off for the caves, in order to leave behind their business empires but eventually will turn these into large ashrams, carry their ambitions with them into a new sphere of interest, and end up building an empire of a different kind. In such a way, Mira Alfassa ended up buying most of the property in Pondicherry, while the French authorities looked on in a growing alarm, and then she went on to begin a new project in Auroville, which aimed to be a community of 50,000.

With the majority of us, these tendencies do not go so far, but do end up stymieing our simple ambition to simplify life. I see it in myself, but do occasionally have some successes.

Plain Text

I’m thinking that the best organization of any written material, from simple notes, to journals, to emails, to blogs and articles, is individual files in plain text or markdown format, stored locally and in the cloud. Databases and systems complicate things. For example, for notes I use Cherrytree, which is really excellent but, by keeping it in Nextcloud, I end up with conflicting versions for my desktop and laptop computer. Individual files would solve this problem. With email systems, the formats that do not rely on a single file, as does Thunderbird, are less corruptible. CMS systems also create a layer between oneself and the individual articles.

For browsing files there is a whole slew of software, and I can take my pick. Nextcloud’s browser lets me view and edit individual files. When they are in Markdown format, I can view the code and the presentation side by side in the browser. In the terminal, Midnight Commander lets one scroll through a directory and see the files simultaneously, without having to click to open them. I need to check the optimal solution for searching. A long time ago I hit on the perfect file name format for myself, which is the ISO date followed by the file name, as in 2019-04-25-file-name-like-so.md . At the office I do the same but sometimes add an abbreviation for a department, as in 2019-04-25-PS-file-name-like-so.md . This system helps to keep the files in order, on sorting them by name.

I’m thinking that a variation on this might be the best solution for writing fediverse posts too – retaining the original copy then pasting into Hubzilla, for example.

Shadow and Claw

These days I seem to nibble at books more than read them, so I’m not sure how far I’ll travel with this Gene Wolfe, but the prose is unexpectedly rich. You can tell a good writer.