Yoda Sutras: Concourse No.20

Series 1

III - 2: Like Flowers Love Is

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.

Physics: Superatoms

Gold comes in many colors. Since ancient times, glass artists and alchemists alike have known how to grind the metal into fine particles that would take on hues such as red or mauve. At scales even smaller, clusters of just a few dozen atoms display even more outlandish behavior. Gold and certain other atoms often tend to aggregate in specific numbers and highly symmetrical geometries, and sometimes these clusters can mimic the chemistry of single atoms of a completely different element. They become, as some researchers say, superatoms. Recently researchers have reported successes in creating new superatoms and deciphering their structures. By assembling superatoms of elements such as gold, carbon or aluminum, researchers may soon be able to create entirely new materials. Such materials could store hydrogen fuel in solid form at room temperature, make more powerful rocket fuels or lead to computer chips with molecule-sized features. Designer materials made of superatoms could have combinations of physical properties that don’t exist in nature.

Think.

Medical Research: Tests on Human Cells

Learn.

Over the past few years, scientists have developed sophisticated ways to screen drugs and other compounds on lab-grown cells from various human organs. Coupled with the burgeoning knowledge of cells' inner workings that comes from genomics, proteomics, and other "-omics," these screening techniques offer a way to test compounds on human biology long before they're tested on actual humans. Pharmaceutical companies have tested compounds on human cells for decades, of course, but these tests have involved only simple cultures of one type of cell. Typically, the goal has been merely to check for blatant toxicity. Researchers expose the cells to a drug candidate and observe whether the cells continue growing or die. Such tests are far simpler than these new screening techniques, which attempt to extract much more information from the cultured cells than just a live-or-die response. To do so, scientists must grow cells in conditions that mimic life inside the body. Often, that entails growing several different types of cells from a tissue in a single dish so that the cell types can "socialize." Researchers also add hundreds of special chemical factors that are normally present in the tissue milieu, such as signaling molecules called cytokines.

Imagine.

Understand.

Human Evolution:

Humans in Americas

Footprints left in volcanic ash that fell in central Mexico’s Valsequillo Basin about 40,000 years ago are evidence that humans have inhabited the Americas far longer than previously confirmed. Analyses of three-dimensional laser scans of the imprints confirm their human origin. Previous finds of human remains elsewhere in the region couldn’t be precisely dated because they were found in layers of mixed gravels that probably incorporated materials of many different ages. However, a new analysis of the coarse-grained, print-ridden volcanic ash — which would have hardened quickly after it fell — strongly suggest the material fell around 40,000 years ago. Excavations at several sites have suggested that humans have inhabited the Western Hemisphere for at least 20,000 years, but results suggesting dates of occupation before 14,000 years ago typically haven’t been confirmed and remain controversial. Several recent findings, however, bolster the notion that people lived throughout the region about 40 millennia ago.

Explore.

Investigate.

Experiment.

Cosmology: Parallel Universes Revisited

Preposterous as parallel universes might seem, their existence may be an inevitable consequence of the physics behind the Big Bang birth of the universe. Cosmologists believe that shortly after our universe began, a brief period of rapid expansion, called “inflation,” enlarged it by many orders of magnitude, like blowing a tiny bubble of foam up to the size of a hot-air balloon. Most of inflation’s testable theoretical predictions have been confirmed. Inflation is becoming a key part of our current understanding of how our universe began and evolved. But the theory, proposed by MIT cosmologist Alan Guth in 1981, also implies that inflation didn’t just happen once, in our part of the cosmos, but rather keeps happening, inflating other patches of space like bubbles forming in a pint of beer. This “eternal inflation” creates other “bubble universes” that likely have different properties from our own universe in terms of cosmological quantities and even physical laws. In some bubbles, the electromagnetic force might be so weak that it can’t hold atoms together, or the expansion rate might be so fast that galaxies can’t form. The multiple universe consequence of inflation is hard even for scientists to wrap their minds around.

Analyze.

Know.

Study.

Biology:

Fertilizer out of Thin Air

Air is 78 percent nitrogen. Nitrogen wafts around in the air as paired atoms (N₂) locked together chemically with a robust triple bond. Despite a great need for the element, the bodies of living things complex enough to have cells with a nucleus — paramecia and potatoes and people alike — have no natural way to break that bond. However, a roster of "simple" life forms, such as cyanobacteria floating in water or the rhizobia group of bacteria lurking in soil, breaks that bond. This feat, called nitrogen fixation, turns N₂ into user-friendly ammonia. Since 1920, the Haber-Bosch industrial process has let people sunder nitrogen's triple bond as long as there's energy available to raise temperatures to 400° to 500° Celsius and pressures to 200 atmospheres. The pond scum though fixes nitrogen at room temperature and everyday atmospheric pressure. Certain plants have come up with a tidy solution. By themselves, soybeans, peas, alder trees and others can't fix nitrogen any better than a person could. Instead they lure immigrant microbes to move in, and do the job for them. The microbes and the plants exchange signals and test chemical bona fides until the immigrants settle down, often in specialized lumps or pockets within the plant, and start fixing nitrogen. With help from their new friends, those plants get fertilizer out of thin air.

Innovate.

Ponder.

Perceive.

Create.

Earth: Meteor Strike in Britain

Penetrate.

An unusual layer of rocks found along Britain's northwestern coast formed from debris thrown out of a crater during a meteorite strike more than 1 billion years ago. The Stac Fada stratum, long thought to be of volcanic origin, stretches for 50 kilometers along the Scottish coast and in some spots is more than 20 meters thick. There are no similar strata elsewhere in the region, nor have any likely sources of volcanic material been found that match the stratum's age. Recent chemical analyses, however, indicate that the layer contains iridium at concentrations approaching 20 times the average in Earth's crust. That anomaly, as well as the distinctive fractures that riddle the samples' quartz grains, is a hallmark of an extraterrestrial impact. The amount of material exposed in the Stac Fada suggests that the impact created a crater about 6 kilometers in diameter, the largest in Britain. That, in turn, suggests that the object that struck Earth was approximately 500 meters wide.

Wonder…

But Beware!

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

_________Transcend._________

Atha Yodanushasanam

Now begins the teaching of Yoda.

To understand seems to be a longer way. But no shortcuts there are. The spiritual growth comes the harder way, the longer way. With deep understanding one has to go into the mind.

This is one of the indications of a man of awareness: he can be happy alone. His happiness is as perfect alone as when he is together with somebody else.

The man of awareness loves — not because he needs love, but because he has so much that he has to give.

Like flowers love is — if you don't give it, it dies. Love is like flowers — in the morning they bloom, by the evening they are gone. Go on giving.

The wise man is not committed to any ideology, creed, dogma; he has none. He is committed to God, he is committed to consciousness, he is committed to existence itself.

Sex is our energy. We are born out of it… sexual and sensuous the whole existence is. If you miss understanding this energy called sex, you will miss understanding life itself.

Having children has nothing to do with knowing about sex. All kinds of creatures in the galaxy have children — they don't know anything about sex.

The energy called sex is still mysterious — we know more about electricity than about sexuality.

When you are in an utter let-go, things start happening. Not that you do — God does them, the whole does them. You simply allow.

10.

You are already that which you can become — there is no need for you to become anything else. You are already that which you are now trying to become.

11.

Of life beyond death you think — but the life that is before death you never live.

12.

Roaming all around the galaxy you are, all over the galaxy — to be this, to be that, to be there, to be somewhere else.... Except THIS place where you find yourself, everywhere else you want to be.

Close your eyes, meditate.

May the force be with you.

Remember, one very, very secret insight of yoga is that whenever all interest disappears naturally, is not repressed, when all interest in sex disappears naturally, that is the time you can become alert that you can be alive for only fourteen years more on this earth, not more than that. Sex becomes mature when you are fourteen. It takes fourteen years from birth to sex. And it is exactly the same at the other end. It takes fourteen years from sex to death.

- Osho