Law in Contemporary Society

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MeditationAsMind-Exercise 6 - 22 Jan 2008 - Main.EbenMoglen
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Our discussion on 'vegging-out' vs. meditation today reminded me of a google talk I watched recently on meditation and happiness.
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-- StephenClarke - 22 Jan 2008

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  • But the monks don't claim a mystery: they think it's just as simple as you do, Stephen, and they're giving the same explanation. It's only that they have a slightly different view of what's being acclimatized. They don't see the mind/body distinction as you do, after all, because they're not culturally required to make that separation. But to the extent they do make it, they think it's the mind being acclimatized. At the biological level, after all, the science would say they're right: natural selection works to improve adaptation to cold climates all the time, but not within the lifetime of an organism. The genetic predisposition of Ashkenazic Jews to high blood sugar, which currently presents clinically as a heightened risk of diabetes, seems to have begun as a relatively sudden adaptation to Northern Europe climate in the last 1900 years, protective against hypothermia; Sephardi communities don't show the same trait. The pathogenic character of the adaptation is a sign of its recency--glucose in the blood is a long-term dangerous form of antifreeze. Yet finding even such a jury-rig adaptation that takes place within a short span of generations, however, is good hunting for the physical anthropologist. But training will inure a person to the effects of cold within weeks or months. That's not, if you want to insist on the distinction, primarily physiological.
    -- EbenMoglen - 22 Jan 2008
 
 
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