Medley

Ananya Sri Ram – USA

What would you do if you had only five more minutes to live? October 2016 marked the thirtieth anniversary of a heartfelt sermon by Rabbi Kenneth Berger called “Five Minutes to Live” given during Yom Kippur in 1986. The Jewish holiday honors death while affirming life. The sermon was spurred by the tragedy of the Challenger space shuttle that took place ten months earlier. At the time of the explosion, it was believed that all seven astronauts died immediately. Later, evidence showed that it was likely that the crew was alive until the capsule plummeted to the sea. Rabbi Berger (as well as the whole nation) was deeply affected by this. In his sermon he states “For perhaps as much as five minutes, the astronauts were alive and conscious and yet knew that death was certain. The thought terrorizes me. Can you imagine knowing that in a few moments death was imminent? What would you think of?”

Tim Wyatt – England

The author has many questions ....

Was the Covid-19 pandemic an evil act of bio-terrorism? Was the virus unleashed deliberately and cynically by some party or other? If so, why? Was it part of a wider sinister plan by shadowy elites and demonic dark forces to enslave humanity and exert draconian mass control via fear, manipulation and authoritarian government action? Was it a dress rehearsal for something even worse to come? Was it a random event?

I’m not in a position to offer definitive answers. Nor are most other people. It’s all too easy to get sucked into conspiracy-infested wormholes which make rational thought and decisive action impossible. Conspiracies, of course, do exist. (As a long-standing journalist I’ve uncovered quite a few of them in my time.) However, I’m not convinced as some are that absolutely everything that happens in the world is a conspiracy.

Sonal Murali – India

The author 

With the arrival of Coronavirus over15 months ago now, everything has changed. Just a few weeks ago, all of us were living our usual busy lives. And then we slowly watched our world go off its axis – slowly but determinedly. The scale of change that Coronavirus has endangered is of mammoth proportions. Initially it was a mere health crisis and now it has impacted every sphere of human activity, affecting us socially, psychologically and economically, calling for an imminent restructuring of the global economic order. We do not know what its far-reaching impact would be. The suffering and personal losses of different kinds have been tremendous. The imperative now is to safeguard our lives and our livelihoods. However lessons will have to be learnt and priorities will have to be re-drawn for us collectively.

After long search across many cluster systems we came upon a beautiful blue spheroid accented with green and baize. Most amazing was this atmospherically sealed world was teaming with intelligent, free moving life; colorful beings gliding through the air, teaming civilizations under the surface of vast bodies of water that actually dominate the planet.  Various groups of four legged creatures walking the earth on every body of land, and the smallest of all the insects and bugs as you call them are virtually infinite in number.  Then there are you humans, the keepers of it all, at once the most intelligent and yet the crudest of all the groups, threatening the earth’s vary existence.

Demystifying traditional Chinese medicine for conservationists could be the key to better protecting endangered species like pangolins, tigers and rhino, according to University of Queensland-led researchers.

UQ PhD candidate Hubert Cheung said efforts to shift entrenched values and beliefs about Chinese medicine are not achieving conservation gains in the short term.

Dreams take us to what feels like a different reality. They also happen while we're fast asleep. So, you might not expect that a person in the midst of a vivid dream would be able to perceive questions and provide answers to them. But a new study reported in the journal Current Biology on February 18 shows that, in fact, they can.

Tim Wyatt – England

The author

Seven steps to banish panic and enhance well-being

Had my grandmother still been alive she would have probably sourly observed, ‘The world’s going to hell on a handcart.’ Although she wasn’t the most optimistic soul who’s ever been in incarnation, had she been alive in 2020 (unlikely since she’d be 146) she would certainly have had a point. Living through two world wars and the great depression as well as having had ten children hadn’t left her with the cheeriest of natures. And she was a martyr to her arthritis. But let’s not defame the dead.

What she would never have appreciated – and nor do the majority of people today – is that as this pandemic casts its grisly shadow across the world like the plot of an all too familiar Hollywood plague movie, human adaptability kicks in. And creativity. A crisis can suddenly become transformed into an opportunity. The problem is that so many people are gripped by varying degrees of stress, panic, depression, isolation and fear that they don’t notice this.