Yoda Sutras: Concourse No.17

Series 1

II - 8: Primal Innocence

Mind is a tangled web.

Use it to catch the world.

Try to comprehend the infinite complexity of it all…

…elegantly embedded in the fabric of space and time.

Open your eyes in amazement.

Be Aware.

See.

Brain: A-beta

A protein that forms plaques in people with Alzheimer's disease takes part in the normal process of forgetting and remembering. Scientists have long wondered why neurons make beta-amyloid, also called A-beta. This sticky protein forms the characteristic, neuron-smothering plaques of Alzheimer's disease. A-beta forms when enzymes snip a large protein called amyloid precursor protein (APP) into smaller pieces. A-beta then sticks to intact APPs, stimulating enzymes called caspases to clip APPs again. A new study of human brain tissue suggests that the process is needed for deleting unnecessary memories to clear space on the brain's hard drive for new information. Brains of Alzheimer's patients had four times more caspase cleavage of APP than brains of healthy older people. But surprisingly, researchers found that healthy young people had 10 times more cleavage than people with Alzheimer's disease. It is surmised that young brains make and dissolve memories at race car speeds, but older brains gradually get slower at both remembering and forgetting. People with Alzheimer's "get stuck in reverse," dissolving memories faster than they make them.

Think.

Biology: Finch Concerts

Learn.

Songbirds are among the few animals known to learn their communication skills. So studying birds could offer insights into human communication and learning. A new research looks at directed communication, in which the sender of the message focuses on a particular audience. People talking to babies typically fall into an exaggerated lilt, and studies show that babies pay more attention to the more melodious version. Male canaries tend to add special syllables to their courtship songs when strutting in front of a female, and females prefer the embellished songs. Zebra finch males go into concert mode too, mostly speeding up the song and keeping the pitch under tight control. To see if female finches reacted to differences barely perceptible to humans, the concert version was broadcast through one speaker and the singing-in-the-shower version through a different speaker for five song pairs. Females between the speakers sidled back and forth and then typically perched beside the concert version. The response was strongest when a female heard her mate's concert song. Females without a mate also preferred the concert version, even when they had never encountered the singer.

Imagine.

Understand.

Astronomy:

Organic Molecules Afar

One team, using the Hubble Space Telescope, has for the first time detected an organic molecule in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star. Although the orb can't support life, the discovery bodes well for finding organic material on more habitable exoplanets. To learn more about the composition of an alien planet, Mark Swain of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and his colleagues set their sights on a Jupiter-like body tightly orbiting the star HD 189733, which is 63 light-years from Earth. The planet, along with some 35 of the more than 270 exoplanets now known, has a special feature: As seen from Earth, it periodically passes in front of its parent star. During each of these mini-eclipses, some of the starlight filters through the planet's atmosphere and is absorbed by its atoms and molecules. The amount of starlight and the specific wavelengths absorbed reveal the composition of the planet's atmosphere. Swain and his colleagues confirm previous suggestions that water vapor exists in the planet's atmosphere and also identify methane — the first time any carbon-bearing compound has been detected in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. Methane is a compound that may have played a role in getting life started on the early Earth.

Explore.

Investigate.

Experiment.

History: The Original Eureka Moment

Sudden bursts of insight that, with no warning, provide unexpected, novel solutions to thorny problems are the stuff of legend. Consider Archimedes, the great ancient Greek mathematician and scientist. The story goes that Archimedes was stumped by a request to determine whether the king's new crown, shaped like a laurel leaf, contained solid gold or a mix of gold and silver added by a dishonest goldsmith. Archimedes couldn't follow normal procedures by melting the crown down and measuring its density as a cube. What to do? While taking a bath one day, the scholar noticed the level of water rise as he immersed himself. A thought flashed through his mind: This effect could determine the crown's volume and after he weighed it, its density. Then, he could determine whether the crown included cheaper, less-dense metals than gold. Excited, Archimedes ran through the streets naked, shouting "Eureka!"—Greek for "I have found it!" Pedestrians who glimpsed euphoric Archimedes in his birthday suit probably thought he had lost it.

Analyze.

Know.

Study.

Evolution:

Hydatella and Angiosperms

Imagine discovering a mammal without mammary glands or an insect with eight legs (all insects have six). Aquatic herbs in the genus Hydatella pose a similar paradox — they lack a defining developmental feature of flowering plants. Evolutionary biologists group together organisms that share unique traits, such as mammary glands or fur, which presumably emerged in a common ancestor. In the flowering plants — the angiosperms — these features include bearing true flowers and key events that occur during fertilization and development. One such event is double fertilization. The plants' pollen grain yields two sperm cells each containing genetic material. One partakes in normal fertilization by joining with the egg cell to make an embryo. The other sperm fuses with two of mom's nuclei to make a starchy tissue called endosperm that, like a placenta, nourishes the developing plant. This second fertilization and its timing are hallmarks of angiosperm evolution. But new research finds that Hydatella doesn't make proper endosperm — it provides nutritive tissue made only from mom's cells. And this starchy plant food starts developing before fertilization has even taken place. The unusually primitive embryological development in this tiny aquatic plant raises new questions about the evolutionary path of the earliest flowering plants and their rampant speciation during the past 135 million years.

Innovate.

Ponder.

Perceive.

Create.

Genetics: Slim Tomatoes

Penetrate.

One gene may mark the difference in shape between round supermarket tomatoes and some of the $5-a-pound heirlooms that grace farmers markets each August. A team of botanists has pinpointed the mutation that endows varieties like Howard German, spitz, and Opalka with their elongated shapes. Most tomatoes — including the puny wild breed from which all others descend — have just one copy of a gene called SUN. However, some heirlooms have an extra copy of SUN lurking on chromosome 7. Adding this second copy to wild plants makes their fruit grow long and odd-shaped, while shutting off the gene rounds out oval-shaped fruit. Researchers are currently working out how the SUN gene slims down tomatoes. The gene might control auxin, a hormone linked to fruit growth.

Wonder…

But Beware!

Don't get caught in the mighty maze of your own mind.

_________Transcend._________

Atha Yodanushasanam

Now begins the teaching of Yoda.

Unless you drop the mind you can never be in tune with existence, pulsate with the pulse of the universe you cannot.

If you don't drop the mind you go on living in a private world of your own creation. You don't live in the real world, idiotic you remain.

When the mind has been put aside, intelligence arises. Mind is blocking the fountain of intelligence like a rock.

Intelligence is not the quality of the mind at all. The search for this intelligence all meditation is — how to drop learning, how to drop knowledge, how to drop all your accumulated past.

A man who lives in no-mind lives without death because he dies every moment. He never collects, he never looks back, he never looks ahead — he is just here.

Mind may be useful in the world but is not useful as far as the ultimate is concerned. With the trivia mind may be useful but with the ultimate it is useless.

The ultimate cannot be thought because below and beyond thought it is. You are that ultimate, think it how can you?

The moment a child is born he is just pure awareness, just a freshness, a clean slate, nothing written on it. No name he has and no idea who he is. Primal innocence that is.

Our ultimate being is before thought and after thought. Not that it disappears when thought is there, but clouded it becomes.

10.

When thought is there it is very difficult to know who we are, what exactly this consciousness is. A distraction thought is, a disturbance.

11.

If one really goes on thinking to the very end, a state of non-thinking happens automatically. Finally and naturally comes this end of the thinking.

12.

When thinking stops and knowing happens, when thoughts disappear and clarity comes and you can see truth is not something to be thought about, truth has to be seen....

Close your eyes, meditate.

May the force be with you.

Satori is getting in harmony within yourself, that is the first step; samadhi is getting in harmony with the total, that is the last step. In satori your conflict disappears; in SAMADHI you also disappear. Attain to this joy that comes with a non-conflict inside you and attain to this bliss that comes by falling in tune with the universal pulse when you dance with the stars and you grow with the trees and you flower with the plants and you sing with the birds and you roar with the sea and you are in the sand and you are everywhere, spread all over, you are everywhere and now here — this is the only goal. And this goal has a beauty.

- Osho