Yoda Sutras: Concourse No.24

Series 1

III - 6: The Phenomenon of Your Misery

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.

Nanotechnology:

DNA Computing

A simple computer made of DNA strands in test tubes can now play a complete game of tic-tac-toe—and will beat or draw you every time. The result demonstrates a new level of complexity in DNA computing, which might be useful for constructing better biomedical detectors or drugs that react only to certain pathogens or cells. Researchers are developing custom DNA molecules to mimic the logical operations carried out in silicon-based computers as a way to improve biomedical technologies or aid in assembling nano-size building blocks into new materials. In one approach, a series of wells is filled with hairpin-shaped strands of DNA, called gates, which respond to inputs in ways chosen by the designers. A group had already shown that such a system, called a molecular array of YES and AND gates, or MAYA, can play a game of tic-tac-toe restricted to certain moves. The second version MAYA-II required 128 different DNA gates spread among the wells and 32 input molecules. The goal is to simplify detection schemes for viruses or cancer, so that a sample only elicits a signal if it contains the right combinations of DNA sequences.

Think.

Space Exploration: Water Prospects on Moon

Learn.

Long journeys require human explorers to carry plenty of water. Astronauts need an average of 1.6 kilograms (0.4 gallon) of water to sustain each of them every day, as well as an additional 27 kilograms (7.2 gallons) for other purposes, according to NASA, and boosting even one of these kilograms into orbit costs $25,000. Given plans to send manned missions to the moon and, eventually, establish a base, it would clearly be far simpler if future explorers could fulfill their water needs there. Fortunately, early radar data hinted that water ice might exist in the permanent shadows of craters at the lunar poles, and the neutron spectrometer on board the Lunar Prospector in 1998 detected the telltale signature of hydrogen within the moon's surface. If that hydrogen is locked up in the form of H₂O, then as much as 26 billion gallons of water could be frozen there. The simple fact that hydrogen—and oxygen—in some form are on the moon makes a lunar base a simpler proposition. Even if it is not in water form, NASA would still be interested in determining if that form can be used.

Imagine.

Understand.

Alternative Fuel:

Ethanol from Grass

Farmers in Nebraska and the Dakotas brought the U.S. closer to becoming a biofuel economy, planting huge tracts of land for the first time with switchgrass—a native North American perennial grass (Panicum virgatum) that often grows on the borders of cropland naturally—and proving that it can deliver more than five times more energy than it takes to grow it. Working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the farmers tracked the seed used to establish the plant, fertilizer used to boost its growth, fuel used to farm it, overall rainfall and the amount of grass ultimately harvested for five years on fields ranging from seven to 23 acres in size (three to nine hectares). The yields from a grass that only needs to be planted once would deliver an average of 13.1 megajoules of energy as ethanol for every megajoule of petroleum consumed—in the form of nitrogen fertilizers or diesel for tractors—growing them. This means that switchgrass ethanol delivers 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, compared with just roughly 25 percent more energy returned by corn-based ethanol.

Explore.

Investigate.

Experiment.

Earth: Earth’s Tilt and Species Survival

Mammal species do not seem to last very long in the grand scheme of things, persisting for an average of 2.5 million years, according to the fossil record. By studying the fossilized teeth of rodents over a span of 22 million years, a team of scientists confirmed this cycle of rodent species rise and fall. But they also found that it closely matched variations in Earth's orbit—and may have definitively linked the two. The birth and death of these species closely overlapped in time and clustered around specific cycles at one million and 2.4 million years. These cycles of origination and extinction correlate closely with known astronomical cycles: a 2.37-million-year cycle between an elliptical and circular orbit and a 970,000-year change in the tilt of Earth's axis. The two combine to create periods in which our planet did not tilt very much as it revolved around the sun, thereby eliminating seasons and resulting in less climatic variability. The lack of warm high-latitude summers—normally associated with extreme eccentricity and obliquity—results in ice expansion on Antarctica, and later the high northern latitudes as well, which will affect the rest of the world's climate resulting in cooling and changes in precipitation patterns. These climate changes may destroy the habitat of rodents or give new rodent forms a chance. The researchers plan to expand their search into other animal groups to look for the same patterns.

Analyze.

Know.

Study.

Quantum Physics

Teleportation Between Light and Matter

Quantum computers or cryptography networks would take advantage of entanglement, in which two distant particles share a complementary quantum state. In some conceptions of these devices, quantum states that act as units of information would have to be transferred from one group of atoms to another in the form of light. Because measuring any quantum state destroys it, that information cannot simply be measured and copied. Researchers have long known that this obstacle can be finessed by a process called teleportation, but they had only demonstrated this method between light beams or between atoms. In taking the next step, scientists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen shined a strong laser beam onto a cloud of room-temperature cesium atoms whose spins were all pointing in the same direction and fluctuating according to their given quantum state. The laser became entangled with the collective spin of the cloud, meaning that the quantum states of laser and gas shared the same amplitude but had opposite phases. The goal was to transfer, or teleport, the quantum state of a second light beam onto the cloud. Finally the researchers were successful in teleporting the information stored in a beam of light into a cloud of atoms, which is about as close to getting beamed up by Scotty as we're likely to come in the foreseeable future. More practically, the demonstration is key to eventually harnessing quantum effects for hyperpowerful computing or ultrasecure encryption systems.

Innovate.

Ponder.

Perceive.

Create.

Biology: Suspended Animation in Mice

Penetrate.

Suspended animation might save lives or permit long-distance space travel. Yet, depriving human cells of oxygen for even a few minutes can cause severe consequences, including death if the supply of oxygen continues to be restricted. But some organisms, ranging from bacteria to hibernating mammals, can radically limit their own supply of oxygen and enter into a state of suspended animation, alive and waiting for the right conditions to reassert themselves. Recent research has shown that otherwise poisonous gases—such as hydrogen sulfide, a constituent of foul-smelling sewer gas—can rapidly induce similar states in mice by limiting their cells' access to oxygen without lowering blood pressure. Researchers have demonstrated that hydrogen sulfide—poisonous because it effectively replaces oxygen in the basic energy-generating processes at the cellular level—can induce suspended animation in mice for a few hours. After over six hours of radically decreased heart rate and breathing, the mice were revived without any ill effect. The finding raised hopes that similar procedures could be used to induce suspended animation in organs for human transplant or even humans themselves.

Wonder…

But Beware!

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

_________Transcend._________

Atha Yodanushasanam

Now begins the teaching of Yoda.

Mind disappears, all experience disappears. Suddenly reality is there — but you are no more separate from it to know it. You are it.

Life is dream, death is dream, God is dream. All is dream. Just one thing is not a dream — that is the consciousness upon which this dream happens, to which this dream happens.

Yes, you create your world, you create yourself too. Thoughts become things. Believed deeply, thoughts become things — a thing is nothing but a condensed thought.

Come naked, come nude, to reality. Come without clothes, and without theories and without philosophies.

When you are miserable, the ego is very much there. In happiness, the ego diffuses. People are ready to come out of their happiness more easily than they are ready to come out of their misery.

Never pay too much attention to your misery, because if you pay attention you are feeding it. Attention is food —

Happiness is not somewhere waiting for you. Happiness is just absence of misery, that's all — once you stop creating misery, you are happy. Happiness is man's nature.

You will have to see into the phenomenon of your misery, how you create it — how in the first place you became miserable, how you go on becoming miserable every day — what is your technique?

In misery you ARE — that's why you cling to misery. In happiness you disappear — that's why you are afraid of happiness.

10.

Listening to music sometimes, a window opens and you are happy. In that moment you are not —

11.

Nobody can be both happy and be. Happiness is, then you are not — you never meet happiness.

12.

Misery exists with your support, with your co-operation; it cannot exist alone. You exist with its support, it exists with your support.

Close your eyes, meditate.

May the force be with you.

This is what our whole life is. A dream of millions of forms, a dream of millions of names, a dream of millions of identities. We become this, we become that. We are born, we live, we love, we do a thousand and one things, and we die. And in fact, all was just forms. Empty forms, empty shadows. The real is the flame of life, the white flame of life. To know that white flame of life one has to drop all forms from the eyes. The eyes have to become utterly empty.

- Osho