“Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”

— Mohandes K Gandhi, born this day in 1869

Confluence of St Francis Day of the Animals with Yom Kippur and Eid Al-Adha
HuffPo article

In the Islamic tradition, Abraham was not asked to sacrifice his son Isaac, but his first son, Ishmael. Today’s celebration is about submission to God’s will.
All well, but how are we to know God’s will?

from Kaballah: Our world, the world of confusion, pain, hunger and sufferings is a world of physical illusion. The essence of life reaches us from the upper world, the true world, the metaphysical world of bliss and abundance. The Ari explains that when we behave in a spiritual way, in joy, unconditional love and altruism, the abundance flows with no interruption into our lives in this physical world.

The Lord told me that we should be poor and crazy in this world and may that one and no other be the path through which He takes us. May God confuse your wisdom and science and make you return to your primitive vocation even if it is against your will and if you find it defective.       —St Francis

Listen to the 4 Small Prayers of St Francis set for men’s choir by Francis Poulenc, sung by Tenebrae

Three billion years before you were born…

Carl Woese was one of the most original thinkers in 20th Century biology. In this Scientific American article, Woese responds to the question, “How old is eukaryotic life?” His answer:

“So the eukaryotic lineage appears to be very ancient, about as ancient as the two prokaryotic lineages.”

This is really curious. Bacterial cells are really simple, lacking a cell nucleus and many of the structures of eukaryotic cells. Similarly, archaeic cells. Margulis and Woese and others helped establish a story of how the first eukaryotic cells were created out of unions of an archaeic cell, invaded by several kinds of bacteria that gradually became domesticated, turned from hostile parasites to friendly symbionts to obligate components of the eukaryotic metabolism. Typical eukaryotic cells today are a million times larger than bacteria.

Punch line: the traditional view is that this process of creating the first eukaryotic cell out of much simpler components required at least a billion years.

If, in fact, eukaryotic cells appeared in the fossil history concurrently with bacteria and archaea, shortly after the earth congealed from molten rock, then this is powerful evidence for an extra-terrestrial origin of life.

Panspermia: The theory that life pervades the cosmos, and had its origin long before the earth, and life arrived on earth as hardy spores riding on a meteor.

The idea has venerable support from Anaxagoras, Lord Kelvin, Svante Arrhenius, Fred Hoyle, Carl Sagan, Francis Crick, and many modern scientists.

O May I Join the Choir Invisible!

O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
Of miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge men’s minds
To vaster issues.

So to live is heaven:
To make undying music in the world,
Breathing a beauteous order that controls
With growing sway the growing life of man.
So we inherit that sweet purity
For which we struggled, failed and agonized
With widening retrospect that bred despair.
Rebellious flesh that would not be subdued,
A vicious parent shaming still its child,
Poor, anxious penitence is quick dissolved;
Its discords, quenched by meeting harmonies,
Die in the large and charitable air;
And all our rarer, better, truer self,
That sobbed religiously in yearning song,
That watched to ease the burden of the world,
Laboriously tracing what must be,
And what may yet be better—saw rather
A worthier image for the sanctuary
And shaped it forth before the multitude,
Divinely human, raising worship so
To higher reverence more mixed with love—
That better self shall live till human Time
Shall fold its eyelids, and the human sky
Be gathered like a scroll within the tomb
Unread forever.

This is life to come,
Which martyred men have made more glorious
For us who strive to follow.

May I reach
That purest heaven—be to other souls
The cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense!
So shall I join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world.

— George Eliot

“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?  In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world.  Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.  Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt, born this day in 1874

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”

I Will Wade Out

i will wade out
          till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers
I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
          Alive
                    with closed eyes
to dash against darkness
          in the sleeping curves of my body
Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery
with chasteness of sea-girls
                    Will i complete the mystery
                    of my flesh
I will rise
          After a thousand years
lipping
flowers
          And set my teeth in the silver of the moon

— e e cummings is 120 years old today

“Happiness hates the timid. So does science.”

— Eugene O’Neill, born this day in 1888

Grdjieff’s Advice to his Daughter

1. Ground your attention on yourself. Be conscious at every moment of what you are thinking, sensing, feeling, desiring and doing.

4. Develop your generosity, but secretly.

9. Stop defining yourself.

16. If you lack faith, pretend that you have it.

18. Do not regard anyone or anything as your possession.

35. Admit that someone else may be superior to you.

39. Conquer your aversions and come closer to those who inspire rejection in you.

61. Do not adorn yourself with exotic ideas.

68. When you are ill, regard your illness as a teacher, not as something to be hated.

77. Live on money you have earned.

82. If you are meditating and the devil appears, make the devil meditate too.

— Read all 82
    with video

“The greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant; in other words how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to feel one’s true identity in both”

— Ursula Leguin is 85 years old today

What if Age is Nothing but a Mind Set?

This is a sensationalist headline from the NYTimes magazine. Still, there’s a good deal of truth in it. We have considerable control over our autonomic metabolism, and if we practice and develop that control, then we have potential for much more. Social factors account for about 5 years of life expectancy.

The article profiles the work of Ellen Langer.

If people could learn to be mindful and always perceive the choices available to them, Langer says, they would fulfill their potential and improve their health. Langer’s technique of achieving a state of mindfulness is different from the one often utilized in Eastern “mindfulness meditation”—nonjudgmental awareness of the thoughts and feelings drifting through your mind—that is everywhere today. Her emphasis is on noticing moment-to-moment changes around you, from the differences in the face of your spouse across the breakfast table to the variability of your asthma symptoms. When we are “actively making new distinctions, rather than relying on habitual” categorizations, we’re alive; and when we’re alive, we can improve.  Indeed, “well-being and enhanced performance” were Langer’s goals from the beginning of her career.

How is consciousness related to physical reality? A promising, coherent view from a prominent physicist.

Physical theories therefore are contradicted by the vivid inner sensory, emotional, mental, and spiritual life experienced by each human being. According to physics there is absolutely no reason why a person should be conscious at all. A human being should just behave as he does without being conscious, just like zombies. In other words, within physical theory there is absolutely no necessity for consciousness to exist, nor is there any obvious reason why consciousness should be desirable in a world where only outer reality exists. Yet it is there! And its existence is not predicted, and not even predictable by the current theories.

The typical objection of scientists to the above position is to argue that consciousness does not have an independent existence because it obviously ceases to exist at the moment of the physical death of the body, or during anesthesia, or deep sleep. Consciousness, they say, is simply an emergent property of the brain that can only exist as long as the brain is completely functional. Ergo, the first-person extraordinary experience of a transcendent reality which is the hallmark of spirituality is just an illusion produced entirely within the brain of the experiencer. And likewise is the I-am experience that was earlier used to argue the incompleteness of physical theory.

An alternative explanation is to assume that awareness and matter are two irreducible and interdependent aspects of the primordial energy that do not need to be manifested simultaneously. This concept would require consciousness to exist only in consciousness-space (C-space), and the physical space (P-space) containing all material structures, to be an emanation from C-space. Here C-space is a space other than physical space, the same non-physical space were the energy of the Big Bang came from. In this view, the material forms exist also in C-space but only in the form of patterns that can manifest within P-space in accordance with certain laws.

The way to think about this possibility is that the evolving self-knowing achieved by consciousness provides the templates, so to speak, for the manifestation of the physical universe in P-space, where the material forms represent the self-knowing that has been consolidated up to that stage of co-evolution. At the frontiers of self-knowing are provisional structures where the interaction between consciousness and material forms produces the novel self-knowing and the corresponding novel material structures. The most advanced living structures represent such a frontier. The earth ecosystem exists at such frontier.

To explain within this new conceptual framework why consciousness appears to cease in deep sleep or with anesthesia, it is sufficient to assume that the consciousness interacting with the body will pay attention only to information coming from the sensory-brain system of the body. Therefore, when the sensory-brain system is not active — in deep sleep for example – there is no conscious awareness. But this doesn’t mean that consciousness ceases to exist; it is simply not stimulated, therefore nothing happens to be conscious about.

With the death of the body, consciousness will also be without physical stimulation, temporarily ‘losing consciousness’ so to speak. However, after some time that no stimulation is forthcoming from the accustomed sensory-brain system channels, consciousness will begin to pay attention to other information channels that it had long ignored, due to its identification with the body. At which point it awakes into its true reality.

— read more from Federico Faggin

L’espère

«Quand on espère quelque chose de très grand, on puise dans la beauté du but le courage de braver les obstacles; si les chances d’y atteindre diminuent, le désir s’accroît en proportion.  Plus l’idéal est éloigné de la réalité, plus il est désirable, et comme le désir même est la force suprême, il a à son service le maximum de forces.»

“When we hope for something grand, we draw from the beauty of the goal the courage to brave all obstacles; if the chance of reaching it diminishes, the desire grows proportionally.  The farther from reality lies the goal, the more desirable it is, and since desire is the supreme force it has the greatest amount of force at its service.”

Les biens trop vulgaires de la vie sont si peu de chose, qu’en comparaison l’idéal concu doit paraitre immense; toutes nos petites jouissances s’anéantissent devant celle de réaliser une pensée elevée.  Cette pensee dut-elle n’être presque rien dans le domaine de la nature et même de la science, elle peut être réellement tout par rapport a nous: c’est l’obole du pauvre.  Chercher la verite, cette action n’offre plus rien de conditionnel, de douteux, de fragile. On tient quelque chose, non pas sans doute la verite même (qui la tiendra jamais?), mais du moins l’esprit qui la fait decouvrir. Quand on s’arrete obstinement a quelque doctrine toujours trop etroite, c’est une chimere qui fuit dans vos mains; mais aller toujours, chercher toujours, esperer toujours, cela seul n’est pas une chimere. La verite est dans le mouvement, dans l’esperance, et ce n’est pas sans raison qu’on a propose comme complement de la morale positive une philosophie de l’esperance’.

The vulgar goods of life are so small a thing that in comparison the ideal conceived must appear immense: all of our petty joys are shattered before that of realizing an elevated idea. This idea, even if it amounts to almost nothing in the realm of nature and even of science can, in relation to us, be everything: it’s the offering of the poor. To seek the truth: this act offers nothing of the conditional, the doubtful, the fragile.  We have something in our hands, not the truth perhaps (who will ever hold it?), but at least the spirit that wants to discover it. When you stubbornly halt before some too narrow doctrine, it’s a chimera that flees from your fingers; but carry on, keep seeking, keep hoping: this alone is not a chimera.  The truth is found in movement, in hope, and it is with reason that we have proposed as a complement to positive morality a “philosophy of hope.” 

Un enfant vit un papillon bleu pose sur un brin d’herbe; le papillon était engourdi par le vent du nord. L’enfant cueillit le brin d’herbe, et la fleur vivante qui était au bout, toujours engourdie, ne s’en détacha pas. Il s’en revint…

A child saw a butterfly poised on a blade of grass; the butterfly had been made numb by the north wind.  The child plucked the blade of grass, and the living flower that was at its tip, still numb, remained attached.  He returned home, holding his find in his hand.  A ray of sunlight broke through, striking the butterfly’s wing, and suddenly, revived and light, the living flower flew away into the glare. 

All of us, scholars and workers, we are like the butterfly: our strength is made of a ray of light.  Not even: of the hope of a ray.  One must thus know how to hope; hope is what carries us higher and farther.  “But it’s an illusion!”  What do you know of this?  Should we not take a step for fear that one day the earth will slide away from under our feet?  Looking far into the past or the future is not the only thing; one must look into oneself.  One must see there the living forces that demand to be expended, and we must act.

— Jean-Marie Guyaut, born this day in 1857

The Quest

FOR years I sought the Many in the One,
I thought to find lost waves and broken rays,
The rainbow’s faded colours in the sun—
The dawns and twilights of forgotten days.

But now I seek the One in every form,
Scorning no vision that a dewdrop holds,
The gentle Light that shines behind the storm,
The Dream that many a twilight hour enfolds.

— Eva Gore-Booth, Suffragist artist and poet (1870-1917)