Dimensionally Barrett

(Getty Images) “Just because we’ve temporarily gone over 1.5 degrees doesn’t mean we’ve breached the Paris Agreement limit,” cautioned Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus program. For that to happen the globe needs to exceed that threshold for a much longer time period , such as a couple of decades instead of a couple of weeks. From The Associated Press: “June temperatures briefly passed key climate threshold. Scientists expect more such spikes” With all due respect to Burgess, I sense hedging here. From another climatologist, there’s this: Rob Jackson, a Stanford University climate scientist who like Rahmstorf wasn’t involved in collecting the Copernicus data, said its significance is still unclear. “But sometime in the next few years we will shatter global temperature records,” he said. “It’s the coming El Nino, yes. But it isn’t just El Nino. We’ve loaded the climate system. No one should be surprised when we set extended global records. 1.5 C is coming fast; it ...

Of late, a number of the great Tibetan older guard of teachers has passed, among whom are a couple I’ve had the honor of meeting and studying under/attending their teachings. These passings are reminders of the impermanence of phenomena and at the same time, the lessons of non-self/anatman/annata/བདག་མེད་, in a couple of ways.  One is that all phenomena is composite, each phenomenon the result of patternings of causes and conditions. No substantial self obtains from the impermanent, ever-shifting and metamorphosing of conditioned existence. Every Buddhist teacher I know - Tibetan and otherwise - stresses the transient,་insubstantial nature of the self. That said, and this is a doctrine that falls under scrutiny for reasons of suggesting otherwise, there is posited and particularly emphasized in Tibetan Mahayana, persistently existing mindstreams. Now, any good madhyamika is going to say that even that mindstream is subject to impermanence and therefore, the positing of such is a ...