~p.sinter - roots, branches, leaves

[Scientific American] Meditate on This: You Can Learn to Be More Compassionate

Like athletes or musicians, people who practice meditation can enhance their ability to concentrate—or even lower their blood pressure. They can also cultivate compassion, according to a new study. Specifically, concentrating on the loving kindness one feels toward one’s family (and expanding that to include strangers) physically affects brain regions that play a role in empathy…

Pangea Day [May 10th] website & Info

I’ll be watching the discussions on Current.TV personally. Maybe have a few friends over to ponder the nature of life on Earth… or something. There will also be simulcast high-resolution broadcasts on the web via MSN and the internet backbone weirdos AKAMAI. More Details about the telecasts can be seen here.

All of this is about Humanity as a single entity — an idea often sputtered about but rarely acted upon. This day will celebrate the idea on a grand scale, what it means to be a human and a part of life as a whole.

Heard via an email from Chris Anderson @ TED (whom is co-sponsoring the discussions with many other people) my favorite part of the message is below:

…Do you have one more minute? I’d like to just say something more about why Pangea Day is worth your time and effort.

I think we can agree our world is becoming ever smaller/flatter/more inter-connected. An important consequence of this is that all of the issues that matter — war, terrorism, poverty, disease, human rights, environment, climate change — can only be tackled now from a global perspective. And yet the people supposedly trying to solve them are almost all serving narrow mandates on behalf of their nation, religion or tribe. There’s a terrifying mismatch here between the nature of the problems and the means the world is deploying to tackle them. “The world” itself doesn’t even seem to have a seat at the table.

But there’s no reason this should be so. It is absolutely possible in the 21st century for us to begin a truly global conversation; to start nurturing that identity we share: one humanity. Some use the language of promoting global citizenship, or reducing cross-cultural suspicion, or expanding our circle of empathy, or eliminating the “us/them” mode of thinking. These goals are all linked, and any progress toward them is, I think, a very big deal.

I was brought up in an international boarding school in India with kids from more than 30 countries. We had a shared experience of each others’ lives. Differences in color and race gradually faded.

I’m convinced today’s media have the power to humanize “the other”. To help people make the mental switch from “them” to “us”. Telling stories through film is especially powerful in this regard. At the start of a film, you see someone strange-looking. At the end you feel kinship. There’s no moral effort involved here. It’s just a natural mental repositioning. Call me idealistic, but I really believe that that mental shift holds the key to our shared future.

Of course, May 10th won’t lead to an outbreak of world peace. But I do think it will reveal a sense of possibility: the possibility that there are incredible new ways of using technology as a force for good; that peoples’ minds are not locked in a dark place forever; that our global village can start the long journey from “us/them” to “we”.

As the Pangea Day website says: Films can’t change the world. But the people who watch them can.

Huge thanks from me, Jehane and Pangea Day’s executive director Delia Cohen to all who have helped make this project possible, including scores of TEDsters, the amazing Pangea Day and TED teams, TED patrons Shawn and Brook Byers, website-creators Avenue A/Razorfish and our visionary sponsor Nokia.

Please join us for this final, crucial chapter.