I've realised that I'm hardly using Gaia anymore,
in fact I hardly write blogs of any kind now.
 But I hope my posts have inspired or interested people and
have shown what I like to think about...
Dom

If you're reading about something and then you find out that he wrote on someone you like reading about.
I just like to see these cool connections and you realise that your interests and the things that you like connect to other things you like(this is vague!) it's just incredible!

When I find musicians who work with musicians from the other genres I'm into, there was this phrase used to describe things that are connected to certain topics: you draw one bubble and see how that fits with another bubble and then how it works into other things it really gives you an organised idea of how you can work with a certain topic!

Mr. Aristotle says: Do what you're best at.(paraphrased)
Dominic says: People do what they're doing to make a living, people only do what they do to make a living and do what they like doing as a hobby.

Mr. Aristotle says: Humanity's purpose is to use what it is best at, that being a rational mind(ability to use reason).
Dominic says: Humans are good at reasoning and good at doing things very irrationally but doesn't the ability to reason come out of man's creativity which increases the box for rational decision?

Mr. Aristotle and his teacher Mr. Plato set ideals, ideals which look and sound good but we can only do so much it seems.

Can one look at these ideals and be realistic as well?

In this global world where people are intermarrying and learning more and more about eachother's cultures the specific ethnic boundaries that have so defined us are becoming blurred(slowly but it will increase) people in places like USA and Australia people are finding it more difficult to stick with traditional ethnicities, we now have 'Americans' and 'Australians', yes these people tend to be of European ancestry but their ethnic identities blur the lines of several ethnicities. Hence, people will have taken attributes of these numerous identities to help form the person they are today(even unknowingly - a family meal with unique origins).

As a Creole I know that I am the sum of my Indian, European and African ancestries and these elements have melded to become a natural part of me.
I do not mean to propose that this specific melting pot will dominate Australia or USA but as we progress by incorporating different cultures our identities will shift until we can no longer say that we are very English or Dutch, etc.

Being a Creole means something to me and for other reasons nothing at all....
I cannot say I specifically am any ethnicity nor I am not related to any specific ethnicity, of course Creole can become specific, one idolised culture can attempt to dominate(French, modern 'black' culture, etc.). The same thing happens in the Western countries which I have previously stated. But it's this fundamental shift in redefining our identities(ethnic and otherwise) which will have a great affect on how humans 100-200 years from now will see themselves.

Postmodern identity is defining our world today and yet it has defined my culture for the past hundred, I don't think I could say that any ethnicity is 100% completely unique but today culture is definitely something it wasn't 200 years ago, cultural influences easily become global and are hardly limited to their surrounds.

Here's a definition of Creole: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole
this is a small but relevant article: http://www.momo-berlin.de/Bexte_Iconoclash.html

Time is the source of our worries,
yesterday we lost a friend,
tomorrow we will not see what could have been,
life is difficult to grasp
without seeing how it began
and how it will end.

My gifts to the world may be small,
they may not be what I ask them to be,
only you my friend can judge me
but only I, only I
can take and then give only so much more
free from the ability to gain, I seem nothing
free from the ability of creating wonder, naught
seems great.
I'd like to offer you one thing
and this thing I offer you
I offer nobody else
this gift is a gift,
a gift of joy which only simple words could bring

I'm heading overseas to the island of Mauritius very soon, so
I won't be blogging for several months!
Mauritius is an island in the Indian Ocean which has been
 continuously inhabited since 1710s, it has been successively colonised by French, British (and Dutch and Portuguese but they left).
It has over 1.3 million people and is inhabited by people of Indian, Chinese, French and Creole(mixed and Afro) descent.
The economy has been mainly based on the sugar industry and has recently diversified to include textiles and presently info tech.
It recently achieved independence in 1968.

Here's the Wikipedia article for in depth info.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauritius.

Here's a photo of Port Louis, the capital:

I've recently been thinking about the mind of the criminal, it's not something I'm well read on but definitely interested by.

Firstly, let's consider the most important thing relating to the criminal:  The Crime
The criminal commits the crime and is known by it.

Next, it's the jail experience: he has committed the crime and is due to serve his sentence, the experience which has been created by the act(the crime) of which he is culpable(it's response).
Now, the criminal can either:
                               (a) regret his actions and pity himself for it                                
                               (b) seek to hit back at those that prosecuted him in his anger at being caught(let's consider he was guilty).
                               (c) try to focus on future positive actions(acknowledging he will face difficulties in employment, etc.)
Of course these are just a few basic, encompassing possibilities which are not totally constant with each other but acknowledge what can be going through his/her mind.
Criminality is something that bears an imprint on someone for the rest of their lives of course(ongoing response to the act).

Criminality brings someone to the question of ultimate good or ultimate evil, a criminal can be scarred by his act and condemned to be someone inherently evil (moderate crimes not petty crimes, returning after maybe 5-6 years in jail) 
By condemning others as inherently evil(not in these specific terms), aren't we contributing to the ultimate ongoing consequences for the criminal's life.
I find it really important that even criminals can and will find a respectable place back in society, something which yet does incorporate both the act and it's ongoing response.

Do we condemn others for their actions for the rest of their lives?

Does our negative response to those of the 'negative' aspect of society condemn them to further injustice?

Are criminals in a twisted state of mind and does that make them incapable of achieving 'good'?

I'd like to finish by noting a Taoist proverb(Chuang Tzu - paraphrased) :
A businessman and a criminal meet in the street,
both talk and discuss their livelihoods and both realised that they were no longer
living in the original nature they had as a child.

I've been reading a book by Sankara Saranam called 'God Without Religion', Sankara goes through the negative aspects found in organised religion and raises an important point that, and I paraphrase, if one is no longer having faith in the mainstream religion's ideologies one still attends because of the sense of social group friendships that have developed and grown, something very true even with my own relationship to Catholicism. 
The book goes into a slightly Krishnamurti Buddha tone with Sankara asking each person to disassociate oneself from other beliefs and that they should be able to test the experiences that they've had in the imaginal realm or their visions so that they know what is real to the infinite self. The infinite self to Sankara is the self unbound a self that can gain real knowledge which comes through as one's true 'intuition'. Sankara exposes his breathing techniques(pranayama) as methods to gain entry to intuitive knowledge. The people who are there testing this knowledge he has referred to as intuitive scientists without the traditional form of objectivity but people who are willing to test knowledge gained in the 'infinite self' for knowledge about the universe.
Sankara Saranam feels that we should gather in groups known as 'colloquiums' where we can come to discuss our gained knowledge and to interact with eachother on a post-organised religion sense of understanding. In an interview he had taken these were compared to Theosophical Lodges, places where people could come and discuss various issues in terms of this understanding.
Sankara sees that these breathing techniques were key to early Hebrew and Vedic sages gaining knowledge to the imaginal realm and sources of mystical understanding. Sankara has moderate faith (he critiques it and doesn't totally accept it) in the Kriya Yoga definition of the Ages of Man: four ages(yugas - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugas) which all added up to 12,000 years and two of them nearly add up to the precession of the equinoxes(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession_of_equinoxes) of nearly 26,000 years.
So, to him, much that was done in religions over the period of Kali Yuga(ascending phase) thus much of yoga(hatha the asanas, etc.) were incomparable developments in comparison to pranayama, which he claims was the ideal for the others to live up to.

He also denies the need for ascetism,  one should have a balanced approach to sex, food and other aspects of life, a regulation of these with an understanding of the need for fasting and periodic celibacy as important values for one's spiritual development and of course to gain a positive relationship with these values and one's mentality.

Why is ethnicity a sacred myth?
Firstly, a myth embodies the ideals and beliefs of a group of people,
in every myth you have your heroes who might be individuals or whole groups of people(generally the earlier though) who hold an important part in the myth.

Ethnic groups are bound by key moments, whether it be the French Revolution or even tragedies from which they will struggle forward from(Hero's Journey)
Ethnic groups have key features which define them(cultural stereotypes and ideals, i.e. Mosaic Laws, liberty, egality, fraternity' in France) and the hero would have his own which would be his dress, his fatal flaw(Achilles Heel)  and also Moses receiving the sacred laws.

Ethnicities are also generally bound by their struggle over a common(or diverse) enemy(Greek independence from Ottoman Turks, independence from colonial empires) while the hero would have: David defeating Goliath, St George over the dangerous dragon.
This idea of battling against a common enemy is also integral to the ethnicity defining itself through the collective experience it has had and we can see Hercules  '13 Tasks' as a relation to this.

This is also very intricately tied in to Zygmunt Bauman's 'Us and Them' where ethnicities define themselves in relation to this 'Other', the ethnic group wants to clearly define themselves and thus it possesses certain characteristics which are not found in the 'Other' whether it be another ethnic group or the ethical virtues that some may deviate from (compare the English Gentleman and Ned Kelly - an Australian rebel)

India.
I'm just so obsessed with the spirituality of the place, I know about the problems(poverty, etc.) but their teachings mean so much to me once I started reading Indian philosophy it just stuck on me...vasudeva katumbakum, world is one family, aham brahmaasmi, I am Brahman...
a few other places would be Madagascar, New Zealand, Indonesia, Egypt(pyramids of course!), Lebanon, maybe Taiwan(because of the strong element of Taoism that survived there)
also Brazil, France, Thailand ,Guatemala, Portland, USA, Quebec, Canada...and a lot of  other countries.