“Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.”

— Dr Benjamin Spock, born this day in 1903, helped a generation of American parents and their children to feel good about themselves.

All the time in the world

A billion years ago, when you implanted the first nuclear membrane in the first eukaryotic cell, laying the foundation for multicellular life, impatience was nowhere in your process.

So what if it takes another thousand years to establish utopian peace and universal human empathy?
— Josh Mitteldorf

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
— Søren Kierkegaard, born this day in 1813

The best is yet to be

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith “A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!”

– Robert Browning, born this day in 1812

Is happiness what is left over after we trim away the pursuit of despondence? 

— read more at ehard’s blog

Hidden Gems

We know not what lies in us, till we seek.
    Men dive for pearls—they are not found on shore;
The hillsides, most unpromising and bleak,
    Do sometimes hide the ore.
Go, dive in the vast ocean of thy mind,
    O man! far down below the noisy waves,
Down in the depths and silence thou mayst find
    Rare pearls and coral caves.
Sink thou a shaft into a mine of thought;
    Be patient, like the seekers after gold,
Under the rocks and rubbish lieth what
    May bring thee wealth untold.
Reflected from the vasty Infinite,
    However dulled by earth, each human mind
Holds somewhere gems of beauty and of light
    Which, seeking, thou shalt find.

Helen Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919)

Voodoo

Late one night in a small Alabama cemetery, Vance Vanders had a run-in with the local witch doctor, who wafted a bottle of unpleasant-smelling liquid in front of his face, and told him he was about to die and that no one could save him.

Back home, Vanders took to his bed and began to deteriorate. Some weeks later, emaciated and near death, he was admitted to the local hospital, where doctors were unable to find a cause for his symptoms or slow his decline. Only then did his wife tell one of the doctors, Drayton Doherty, of the hex.

Doherty thought long and hard. The next morning, he called Vanders’s family to his bedside. He told them that the previous night he had lured the witch doctor back to the cemetery, where he had choked him against a tree until he explained how the curse worked. The medicine man had, he said, rubbed lizard eggs into Vanders’s stomach, which had hatched inside his body. One reptile remained, which was eating Vanders from the inside out.
Great ceremony

Doherty then summoned a nurse who had, by prior arrangement, filled a large syringe with a powerful emetic. With great ceremony, he inspected the instrument and injected its contents into Vanders’s arm. A few minutes later, Vanders began to gag and vomit uncontrollably. In the midst of it all, unnoticed by everyone in the room, Doherty produced his pièce de résistance - a green lizard he had stashed in his black bag. “Look what has come out of you Vance,” he cried. “The voodoo curse is lifted.”

Vanders did a double take, lurched backwards to the head of the bed, then drifted into a deep sleep. When he woke next day he was alert and ravenous. He quickly regained his strength and was discharged a week later.

— Article by Helen Pilcher, New Scientist

Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.

- Lin Yutang (1895-1976)

How many mothers does it take?

Sarah Hrdy argues that human cooperation is rooted not in war making, as sociobiologists have believed, but in baby making and baby-sitting. Hrdy’s conception of early human society is far different from the classic sociobiological view of a primeval nuclear family, with dad off hunting big game and mom tending the cave and the kids. Instead, Hrdy paints a picture of a cooperative breeding culture in which parenting duties were spread out across a network of friends and relatives. The effect on our development was profound. 

— Julia Wallace, Salon.com book review

Raising children in nuclear families has done enough damage.  It is time for communal living to become the norm.  Maybe the coming economic slump will help.

Praise What Comes

surprising as unplanned kisses, all you haven’t deserved
of days and solitude, your body’s immoderate good health
that lets you work in many kinds of weather.  Praise

talk with just about anyone.  And quiet intervals, books
that are your food and your hunger; nightfall and walks
before sleep.  Praising these for practice, perhaps

you will come at last to praise grief and the wrongs
you never intended.  At the end there may be no answers
and only a few very simple questions: did I love,

finish my task in the world?  Learn at least one
of the many names of God?  At the intersections,
the boundaries where one life began and another

ended, the jumping-off places between fear and
possibility, at the ragged edges of pain,
did I catch the smallest glimpse of the holy?

— Jeanne Lohmann, from The Light of Invisible Bodies

From love junkie to universal love

There is a path from the tortured clinging of Western romantic love to the selfless expansion envisioned by Kierkegaard and Gandhi.  Lester Levenson charted that path after his doctors gave him up for dead, and gave to us the emotional clearing techniques known as the Sedona Method.

I sensed that the closest thing related to happiness was love. So I began reviewing and reliving my past love affairs, looking at the points where the little happiness that I had were. I began to pull up and dissect all my high moments of loving.

Suddenly, I got an inkling that it was when I was loving that I had the highest feeling!

I remembered one evening, a beautiful balmy evening, in the mountains when I was camping with Virginia. We were both lying on the grass, both looking up at the sky, and I had my arm around her. The nirvana, the perfection of the height of happiness was right there. I was feeling how great is love for Virginia! How wonderful is knowing all this nature! How perfect a setting!

Then I saw that it was my loving her that was the cause of this happiness! Not the beauty of the setting, or being with Virginia....

Then I immediately turned to the other side. Boy it was great when she loved me! I remembered the moment when publicly this beautiful, charming girl told the world that she approved of Lester, she loved Lester—and I could feel that nice feeling of approval. But I sensed that it was not as great as what I had just discovered. It was not a lasting feeling. It was just for the moment. In order for me to have that feeling continuously, she had to continue saying that.

So, this momentary ego approval was not as great as the feeling of loving her! As long as I was loving her, I felt so happy. But when she loved me, there were only moments of happiness when she gave me approval...

This insight on love, seeing that happiness was determined by my capacity to love, was a tremendous insight. It began to free me, and any bit of freedom when you’re plagued feels so good. I knew that I was going in the right direction. I had gotten hold of a link of the chain of happiness and was determined not to let go until I had the entire chain.

— Lester Levenson

Bacteria have a communal life

Bacteria are the simplest living organisms.  We’re used to thinking of bacteria as single cells, living on their own, but many bacteria have a double life.  They can form into communities with many mutually-adapted species, each performing its unique function to create an environment conducive to all.  Species that cannot tolerate oxygen, for example, will live shielded by species that gobble up oxygen.  Waste from one species will be nourishment for another. 

These are biofilms, and they are ubiquitous — on shower tiles and in pond scum, in the hot pools of Yellowstone and on frozen Antarctic glaciers.

The biofilm is held together by an extracellular matrix.  Bacteria do their part to excrete the adhesives that keep the film where it belongs, and the structural web that gives it strength.

These are tight ecosystems.  The remarkable thing is how well simple bacteria are adapted to communal living. 

How does the community defend itself from invasion by other bacteria that might mooch on the sheltered environment, suck up the nutrients, but not contribute to building or upkeep?

How did so many species, each of which is capable of living independently, acquire the adaptations that make them so supportive of each other in the biofilm environment?

We might extrapolate and guess that macroscopic ecosystems are even more mutually adapted, exquisitely crafted for the stability of the ecosystem as a whole in a grand process of co-evolution.

So, this is God...

As a reader and a seeker, I always get frustrated at this moment in somebody else’s spiritual memoirs — that moment in which the soul excuses itself from time and space and merges with the infinite. From the Buddha to Saint Teresa to the Sufi mystics to my own Guru — so many great souls over the centuries have tried to express in so many words what it feels like to become one with the divine, but I’m never quite satisfied by these descriptions. Often you will see the maddening adjective indescribable used to describe the event. But even the most eloquent reporters of the devotional experience — like Rumi, who wrote about having abandoned all effort and tied himself to God’s sleeve, or Hafiz, who said that he and God had become like two fat men living in a small boat—‘we keep bumping into each other and laughing’ — even those poets leave me behind. I don’t want to read about it; I want to feel it, too. Sri Ramana Maharshi, a beloved Indian Guru, used to give long talks on the transcendental experience to his pupils and then always wrap it up with this instruction: ‘Now go find out.’

So now I have found out. And I don’t want to say that what I experienced that Thursday afternoon in India was indescribable, even though it was. I’ll try to explain anyway. Simply put, I got pulled through the wormhole of the Absolute, and in that rush I suddenly understood the workings of the universe completely. I left my body, I left the room, I left the planet, I stepped through time and I entered the void. I was inside the void, but I also was the void and I was looking at the void, all at the same time. The void was a place of limitless peace and wisdom. The void was conscious and it was intelligent. The void was God, which means that I was inside God. But not in a gross, physical way — not like I was Liz Gilbert stuck inside a chuck of God’s thigh muscle. I just was part of God. In addition to being God. I was both a tiny piece of the universe and exactly the same size as the universe. (‘All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop,’ wrote the sage Kabir — and I can personally attest now that this is true.)

It wasn’t hallucinogenic, what I was feeling. It was the most basic of events. It was heaven, yes. It was the deepest love I’d ever experienced, beyond anything I could have previously imagined, but it wasn’t euphoric. It wasn’t exciting. There wasn’t enough ego or passion left in me to create euphoria or excitement. It was just obvious. Like when you’ve been looking at an optical illusion for a long time, straining your eyes to decode the trick, and suddenly your cognizance shifts and there — now you can clearly see it! — the vase is actually two faces. And once you’ve seen through the optical illusion, you can never not see it again.

‘So this is God,’ I thought. ‘Congratulations to meet you.’*

The place in which I was standing can’t be described like an earthly location. It was neither dark nor light, neither big nor small. Nor was it a place, nor was I technically standing there, nor was I exactly ‘I’ anymore. I still had my thoughts, but they were so modest, quiet and observatory. Not only did I feel unhesitating compassion and unity with everything and everybody, it was vaguely and amusingly strange for me to wonder how anybody could feel anything but that. I also felt mildly charmed by all my old ideas about who I am and what I’m like. I’m a woman, I come from America, I’m talkative, I’m a writer — all this felt so cute and obsolete. Imagine cramming yourself into such a puny box of identity when you could experience your infinitude instead.

I wondered, ‘Why have I been chasing happiness my whole life when bliss was here the entire time?’

— from Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

* In the book, Gilbert is greeted this way by people she meets in India. 

Grow your own

Elysia chlorotica is a sea slug that does the same trick as green plants, turning sunlight into food for itself.  Part of the way it does this trick is that it eats algae, then processes the algae cells selectively.  The part of each cell that performs photosynthesis is an organelle called a chloroplast.  Elysia can digest the algae, but retain the chloroplast intact.  The chloroplasts are hosted in her/his* own intestinal cells, where they grow and reproduce and do the job of growing food for the slug.

But stealing the chloroplasts was the easy part.  Maintaining and growing them requires a whole suite of chemical supports that plants have and animals generally don’t.  Elysia has the instructions for these chemicals in her/his DNA.  Since they are identical to the corresponding genes in plants, it is considered unlikely that sea slugs evolved them independently.  Instead, the slugs copied the genes, probably from the algae they eat, at some point in their past and permanently incorporated the genes into their own DNA.  This is horizontal gene transfer, and it greatly expands the concept of ‘evolution by descent’ that has been the standard assumption of evolutionary biologists since Darwin.

And how does horizontal gene transfer work?  How is it that one can permanently acquire new genes that were not present in either of one’s parents?  This is, in part, an open question.  It must be a rare event, or it would wreak havoc with biology.  Only very occasionally are genes acquired from a distant species expected to be useful.  One theory is that viruses pick up genes from one species and can insert them into the genome of another.

More on horizontal gene transfer.
Short movie with different kinds of colorful sea slugs
More on Elysia from U of Maine

*Sea slugs are hermaphroditic, with both male and female sex organs.