Heather Smart, Junior World Haggis Hurling Champion. Gregor Grierson. World Haggis Hurling Championship 2018, at Ellisland Farm, Dumfries and Galloway.
3.We need contrast in life.
We need our little adventures.
The picnic tastes better after the long hike up and down the mountain.
...
Seeing trees and flowers can improve our mood.
Being creative - painting, gardening, music - can improve our mood
Have a hot bath.
..
4. Find pleasure in cheering other people up.
Give someone a hug.
...
5. Get plenty of exercise in order to beat stress.
Slow rythmic breathing calms the mind.
....
6. Tell yourself that you are exhilarated and facing a useful challenge, when you encounter a potentially stressful situation.
...
If your car breaks down, it may mean that your 'guardian angel' wants you to do more walking, or get your car checked before you go on a long journey.
We need challenges.
7. Eat garlic, leeks and other such Prebiotics, which are good for your guts.
Jordi Pujol, the father of the Catalan independence, was involved in Corruption scandals.
"Billionaire gangster politician Jordi Pujol ... has been implicated in massive financial scandals with off-shore accounts and a litany of public service corruption.
"Pujol is a close collaborator of Catalonia’s powerful Jewish community.
"He apparently sent four of his children to an Israeli Kibbutz.
"In recent years Catalonia has become somewhat of an Eldorado for wealthy Jews...
"If Catalonia succeeds in breaking from Spain, more micro-states will emerge and they are all likely to be characterised by a zealous devotion to the Jewish State.
"One only has to read the separatist literature in France's Brittany, where Israel is constantly invoked as a model society."
All the various religions and philosophies are like the curate's egg - good in parts.
Zen Buddhism is like the curate's egg.
"Buddha's first step toward enlightenment was his abandonment of his wife and child, and Buddhism (like Catholicism) still exalts male monasticism as the epitome of spirituality."
It was the custom in India for young men to leave home to seek enlightenment.
Buddha came back to his family after enlightenment.
Zen Buddhism is an attempt to make life better.
"There is actually immense suffering within ourselves, and we can start to ease that, and when we do, we then now have a model for applying that to others. To one other person, to a thousand, or to the world."
In the United States it is almost 21 percent. In some areas of the U.S. the child poverty rate is 40 percent.
U.S. workers trail their counterparts in Finland on basic competence and workplace skills.
A recent UN report ranked Finland the second happiest country in the world, behind Denmark, based on wealth, political freedom, strong social networks and an absence of corruption.
In 2013, Finland's former spy Seppo Tiitinen revealed that the CIA has had great influence in Finland.
In 1958 and 1960, children from Finland attended summer camps in Norway and Austria.
At these summer camps, the CIA carried out MK ULTRA mind control experiments on the children.
Matthieu Ricard is a French genetecist and the son of the late Jean-François Revel (born Ricard), a French philosopher.
Matthieu has become a Buddhist monk.
Matthieu has been in New York for a week, staying at a Manhattan townhouse belonging to the daughter of billionaire investor George Soros.
Matthieu says that when he looks at the expensively decorated mansion he does not regret his life living in a simple room in a monastery.
He says: "Every time I look at these things, I feel, wow, imagine the responsibility of taking care of this place.
"My teacher used to say if you have a horse, you have the suffering of having a horse. If you have a house, you have the suffering of having a house. So much trouble to fix the tap, the electricity..."
Richard Davidson wired up Matthiu's skull with 256 sensors.
The scans showed that when meditating on compassion, there was excessive activity in Matthiu's brain's left prefrontal cortex compared to its right counterpart, giving him an abnormally large capacity for happiness and a reduced propensity towards negativity, researchers believe.
Matthieu believes that a culture greater altruism and compassion can improve the world.
He says: "individuals change culture, culture changes the individuals..." – and the next generation will change it again,’ he says.
He says: "I sometimes feel sad when sadness is the appropriate response, for a disaster in Nepal or a massacre – how can you not feel sad?
"But sadness is not mutually exclusive with a genuine sense of flourishing, because it gives rise to compassion; it gives rise to the determination to do something."
Voltaire, like Buddha, could see that there is suffering in this world.
"Imagine the situation of a Pope's daughter aged fifteen, who in three months had undergone poverty and slavery, had been raped nearly every day, had seen her mother cut into four pieces, had undergone hunger and war, and was now dying of the plague in Algiers." (Voltaire, Candide, Chapter 12)
"Do you believe," said Candide, "that men have always massacred each other as they do to-day, that they have always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites, and fools?"
"Do you believe," said Martin, "that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they have found them?"
Voltaire appears to be pessimistic about human nature; he might suggest that there will always be spooks and generals carrying out atrocities.
Indonesia was Buddhist for longer than it has been Moslem.
But, if hawks may not be capable of fast change, what about humans?
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961) said in Memories, Dreams, Reflections:
"Natural history tells us of a haphazard and casual transformation of species over hundreds of millions of years of devouring and being devoured...
"But the history of the mind offers a different picture.
"Here the miracle of reflecting consciousness intervenes."
Physicist David Bohm believes that life and consciousness are present in varying degrees in all matter, including supposedly inanimate matter such as electrons or plasmas.
He suggests that evolutionary developments do not emerge in a random fashion.
Happiness is about forgetting your own happiness and being part of a happy team?
Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram believes in the holographic nature of reality.
Every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.
In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter reality.
What we see as reality is a canvas where we can draw any picture we want.
Some people manage to be happy in spite of poverty. The Buddhists believe that what we are thinking now, is what we will become. Research has suggested that Buddhists are able to get their brains to feel happiness.
According to Owen Flanagan, professor of philosophy at Duke University in North Carolina, Buddhists appear to be able to stimulate a part of their brain which produces positive emotions and a feeling of well being.
Writing in New Scientist, Professor Flanagan referred to findings of a study by Richard Davidson, of the University of Wisconsin, who used scanners to analyse regions of a Buddhist's brain.
Parts of Buddhists brains, linked to happiness, appear to "light up" consistently.
"The most reasonable hypothesis is there is something about conscientious Buddhist practice that results in the kind of happiness we all seek," Davidson writes.
1. Learn how to save yourself by using direct and personal experience.
2. There is continual change, a continual cycle involving birth and death.
Consciousness is continuous.
It is forever looking for new kinds of self-expression.
Life is a continous flow.
If you know there is a tsunami coming, don't stay on the beach guarding your possessions.
If you cling on to things, you will suffer, because you are resisting the flow.
3. There is only one 'ultimate reality'.
It does not change.
It is beyond our understanding.
We are all linked to it.
We are all part of the one team.
4. What we are now is the result of our past thoughts.
We are the creator of our circumstances.
By right thought and right action we can gradually purify ourselves and eventually reach enlightenment and Nirvana and beyond.
5. We are happiest as a happy team.
We are all inter-linked and should feel compassion for everything from trees to Thais and from jaguars to Jews.
Compassion is the "Law of laws".
6. Imagine we have an urge to win at golf by cheating.
Imagine we have an urge to be the hero of the football match, by monopolising the ball.
Suffering is caused by such wrong urges.
...
7. To end suffering, we should have
(1) Right Views,
(2) Right Aims or Motives,
(3) Right Speech,
(4) Right Acts,
(5) Right Livelihood,
(6) Right Effort,
(7) Right Concentration or mind-development,
(8) "Cease to do evil, learn to do good, cleanse your own heart: this is the Teaching of the Buddhas".
8. Nirvana, the extinction of the limitations of selfhood, is attainable on earth.
"Look within; thou art Buddha".
9. Follow the path between the opposites, avoiding all extremes.
10. Meditation helps us to refrain from mental and emotional attachment to "the passing show".
11. The Buddha said: "Work out your own salvation" using your intuition.
Each man suffers the consequences of his own acts, and learns thereby, while helping his fellow man to the same deliverance.
12. Buddhism does not deny the existence of God or soul, though it places its own meaning on these terms. Buddhism has no dogmas, and points to man alone as the creator of his present life and sole designer of his destiny.
Jordi Pujol, right, fan of Israel.
