Achieving by trying. Naturally. Life after death
Snow on a Friday is trying and natural, and chilly. All here in this miscellany.
Trying and not trying
From my LinkedIn
Gandhi overthrew an imperial power on a subcontinent that is now the 7th largest country in the world, and then included Bangladesh and Pakistan as well. He won hearts, he won minds, and he won the eternal respect of the British, whom he overthrew.
He never once raised a finger in an act of revenge or violence.
He achieved it because he could. How, I don’t know. Maybe by trying.
“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those that trespass against us.” It means: grant us forgiveness to the extent that we grant it to others.
“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” It means: remind us if we forget what we mean by “as we forgive those that trespass against us,” and help us if others forget what it means as well.
How? Again, I do not know. Maybe by trying.
He died 30 January 1948, commemorated as Martyrs’ Day in India.
He was great enough to overthrow an empire; by trying.
Human enough to be murdered; for trying.
Immortal enough to be remembered for ever, without trying.
It’s not a sermon. Simply an example: a way to achieve justice.
Nathuram Godse was tried. For the murder, he was sentenced on 8 and executed on 15 November 1949. The day is not commemorated.
By Elliott & Fry - https://lnkd.in/dnYmXjQF, Public Domain, https://lnkd.in/d9c5ib4T
Naturally
From my LinkedIn
I stared at him in disbelief. “Fifty per cent sucrose, 50% glucose,” he repeated. “And the vitamins?” I asked. “Negligible.”
My lodger is a health freak. Or something like that. And few things, he says, are worse for your health than orange juice. Oranges are fine, but orange juice — no, no, no. (Er, do wash your oranges before consumption.)
It seems he may, for reasons he’s unaware of, be right. One particular brand of orange juice contains, so says a class action filed in New York, NY, unacceptably high levels of toxic PFAS. It’s marketed as all natural, but PFAS, as you may well be aware, are anything but natural.
Besides the high sugar content in orange juice, therefore, one more reason to eschew it. But, is this not a storm in a glass of orange juice? After all, the law lays down no limits for PFAS in the US. The lawsuit avers that it was precipitated by the claim all natural. Because, if there are PFAS in the juice, then, being synthetic, they’re not natural, and therefore the contents are not all natural.
Nit-picking? “A company [here, The Cola-Cola Company] that aggressively markets its pureness needs to be held to a higher standard,” says Tom Neltner, chemicals policy director with the Environmental Defense Fund.
Needless to say, to follow up the story: no purchase required.
The Guardian’s article is here.
Chills
From chills.substack.com
The Chills Substack recently posted a feature (I am Jewish. I say that because I’m scared, by Lauren Wolfe), in which a correspondent offered the following comment:
My family are Chan Buddhist philosophers (non-religious). When we pass and reincarnate into a new life, we could be reborn as any skin color, any gender, in any family and country. Therefore, to care for all people (and living beings) is what I believe in.
Here, my answer:
This is a philosophy worthy of attention: that life continues after death. My brother, a non-practising Christian, like me, talks of this life as “passing through”. Aside from a uterus, he doesn’t dwell on how he entered it, to do this passing through. Nor does he contemplate, nor do many us particularly, the means by which he shall pass out of it.
Whilst passing through, however, our conduct is guided, or trammelled, according to taste, by precepts that start with the Bible’s “Love others as you love yourself” or “Do unto others as you would be done by” and go all the way to the prospect of judgment before the Lord, followed by either acceptance into the Kingdom of Heaven or damnation to Hell, a cute illustration of which can be found in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. On the way, we have proverbs such as “chickens coming home to roost” and the “boot on the other foot”.
Your philosophy sounds, at first blush, twee; but, I suspect, proffers an admonition greater than all of these: the prospect that you shall reincarnate but with no guarantee of as who. Nonetheless, and this is why I believe it worthy of attention: the unknowing (interim) destiny that awaits believers such as yourself could have as its portent the possibility of a good person returning to existence as an evil one, and not necessarily as a good one; and do the evil return as evil ones, or are they given a lease of life as a good person?
Without levelling any judgment, simple observation tells me that this philosophy is in fact true in practice: when the USSR invaded Afghanistan, the West armed the Mujahadeen, who then, after repulsing the USSR, became a thorn in the side for the West; South Africa, egged on to repel apartheid, was freed and now will be performing military manoeuvres with China and Russia — just practising, I suppose. And, those who struggle in poverty and finally get a big break to become rich and powerful occasionally forget the penury from which they started out.
Your philosophy is at its most attractive when, adopted by all, it ensures that evil is expunged from existence, at which point it doesn’t matter a whit what anyone is reincarnated as, because the equality that obtained in one life is not impinged on when one returns in the next. As an ideal, therefore, it is most attractive. Has it ever been realised, however?
Under Man’s law, those who do wrong will be punished — if they’re caught. Under God’s law, those who do wrong will be punished — guaranteed. Under Chan Buddhism, those who do wrong may do wrong again, or may do right; and those who do right, likewise. It cannot be that simple, so attention is what I shall be giving it.