Yoda Sutras: Concourse No.18

Series 1

II - 9: An Oceanic Feeling

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.

Human Evolution:

Homo Antecessor

Fossil finds in Spain have yielded the earliest known skeletal evidence of human ancestors in Europe. A fossil jaw and tooth from the same individual, found during excavations of a cave called Sima del Elefante in northern Spain's Atapuerca Mountains, date to between 1.2 million and 1.1 million years old. The investigators assign the new discoveries to the species Homo antecessor. A decade ago, they identified 800,000-year-old fossils from another Atapuerca site as H. antecessor. In the Spanish scientists' view, H. antecessor was an evolutionary precursor of European Neandertals and modern humans. Many scientists remain skeptical of that proposal and classify the Spanish fossils as the oldest examples of Homo heidelbergensis, a roughly 600,000-year-old species first found in Germany a century ago. The Atapuerca investigators suggest that Western Europe was settled between 2 million and 1 million years ago by a Homo species that trekked out of Africa, perhaps into central Asia, and then moved westward. That species then evolved into H. antecessor, in their view.

Think.

Genetics: Dangerous Legacy

Learn.

Growing evidence suggests that a father's age and his exposure to chemicals can leave a medical legacy that lasts generations. Animal studies demonstrate that drugs, alcohol, radiation, pesticides, solvents, and other chemicals can lead to effects that are handed from father to son. Human studies are less clear, but some show that fathers play a role in fetal development and the health of their children. Teenage dads face increased risk that their babies will be born prematurely, have low birth weight, or die at birth or shortly afterward. Babies of firefighters, painters, woodworkers, janitors, and men exposed to solvents and other chemicals in the workplace are more likely to be miscarried, stillborn, or to develop cancer later in life. Fathers who smoke or are exposed at work to chemicals called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons put their children at risk of developing brain tumors. And, older fathers are more likely to have children with autism, schizophrenia, and Down’s syndrome and to have daughters who go on to develop breast cancer.

Imagine.

Understand.

History:

Feedback Control

Feedback (self-correcting) control mechanisms were used in some of the earliest automatons and are still in use today. An example of feedback control is a watering trough that uses a float to sense the water level. When the water falls past a certain level, the float drops, opens a valve, and releases more water into the trough. As the water rises, so does the float. When the float reaches a certain height, the valve is closed and the water is shut off. The first true feedback controller was the Watt governor, invented in 1788 by the Scottish engineer James Watt. This device featured two metal balls connected to the drive shaft of a steam engine and also coupled to a valve that regulated the flow of steam. As the engine speed increased, the balls swung out due to centrifugal force, closing the valve. The flow of steam to the engine was decreased, thus regulating the speed. Feedback control, the development of specialized tools, and the division of work into smaller tasks that could be performed by either workers or machines were essential ingredients in the automation of factories in the 18th century.

Explore.

Investigate.

Experiment.

Brain : Moth Memories

Metamorphosis completely restructures a caterpillar's wormlike body and, one would think, its brain. New research shows that some of the brain cells of caterpillars, however, remain intact through the supposedly annihilative process. A research team put tobacco hornworm caterpillars (Manduca sexta) in the stalk of a Y-shaped tube with one arm that contained a smelly, ephemeral gas. The researchers gave the caterpillars a mild electric shock when they went down the arm with the gas. Some of the caterpillars had undergone their third molt and others had completed their fifth and final molt. When the creatures emerged as adult sphinx moths, 77 percent of those that were shocked following the fifth molt remembered their aversion to the smelly gas. Caterpillars shocked just after their third molt did not remember, suggesting that postmetamorphic memories are created in brain regions that develop later in metamorphosis. Solitary insects like caterpillars may have more use for memory than social insects like wasps or ants because there's no division of labor in the species.

Analyze.

Know.

Study.

Alternative Energy:

Thermoelectric Effect

The thermoelectric effect can produce small amounts of electricity from almost any source of heat, but its low efficiency has so far limited its uses. A team has now found a simple way to make one thermoelectric alloy more efficient. When two ends of a stick of a thermoelectric material are exposed to different temperatures, a voltage appears. The electrons in the stick act like the molecules in a gas: Just as gas expands when heated, the heated electrons move from the hotter side to the cooler side. The resulting voltage can create current. Since the 1950s, researchers have known that the alloy bismuth antimony telluride is a good thermoelectric material. Experiments were recently carried out at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to see if the effect could be made better. The alloy was ground up and recompressed. The grinding reduced the size of the alloy's crystalline grains by about a factor of a thousand. This change slightly improved the material's ability to conduct electricity but, most crucially, made it a worse heat conductor. That was good because heat conduction tends to equalize temperatures, counteracting the whole thermoelectric principle. The researchers made the alloy 15 to 30 percent more efficient without substantially increasing its cost. The material could have applications, including in solar panels.

Innovate.

Ponder.

Perceive.

Create.

Space Exploration: Titan’s Underground Ocean

Penetrate.

Before the Cassini spacecraft began observing Saturn's largest moon, Titan, researchers had suggested that a vast ocean of methane and ethane covered the hydrocarbon-shrouded body. But the craft's penetrating radar, along with a probe that descended to the moon's surface in 2005, revealed a different portrait. Icy Titan appears to contain small hydrocarbon lakes, not oceans. Now, Cassini researchers have evidence that Titan may have a global ocean after all — 100 kilometers below the surface and consisting of water and ammonia. If so, Titan would be the fourth known solar system object — after three of Jupiter's moons — with an internal ocean.

Wonder…

But Beware!

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

_________Transcend._________

Atha Yodanushasanam

Now begins the teaching of Yoda.

The world ending is not the real thing, God beginning is the real thing. The world ending is just disease ending; on the other side arises health.

Have a rest and be ordinary and be natural. Eat your food, have your sleep, move your bowels. The natural way Zen is.

This has to be remembered on the outside, and on the inside too: Cling to nothing.

Just think. Existence is meaningless. Watch it. There is no meaning in existence. Meaning is man-created. Enjoy this tremendous meaninglessness. No purpose there is.

Enlightenment happens really only in a single split moment. You may prepare for it for years but whenever it happens, in a single moment it happens.

Go on dropping from the outside into your inside, into your interiority.

Then no knower and the known there is, then no observer and the observed there is — then there is oneness, an oceanic feeling of oneness... You are everywhere. You permeate the whole.

When your consciousness is there without any content — to know this consciousness is to know the nature of reality.

Deep inside you the hole that you feel, the dark hole, is not dark. Luminous with light it is. Enter into it. And it is not nothing, it is the very secret of the whole life, the whole existence.

10.

That's what meditation is all about: befriending your nothingness. Enjoy it. Celebrate it. Dance it, sing it. Go again and again into it.

11.

Whenever a chance you have, whenever the opportunity you have, close your eyes, drop into your nothingness, disappear there.

12.

Meditation is a movement in tremendous aloneness. With the collective it has nothing to do.

Close your eyes, meditate.

May the force be with you.

A man needs to be very grounded. We are on the earth and we are of the earth and we are made of the earth. We need to be tremendously grounded. Very few people are really grounded; they have become like trees which are up-rooted. And, particularly, your so-called religions make you very up-rooted. You start living in the heaven, in the high sky, and you forget the earth. In fact, not only do you forget, you have been taught to be against it. You condemn it. How can you get grounded if you condemn the earth?

- Osho