Yoda Sutras: Concourse No.25

Series 1

III - 7: Moving into Unmanifestation

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.

Artificial Intelligence:

Nature’s Neural Networks

How long does it take you to add 3,456,732 and 2,245,678? Ten seconds? Not bad—for a human. The average new PC can perform the calculation in 0.000000018 second. How about your memory? Can you remember a shopping list of 10 items? Maybe 20? Compare that with 125 million items for the PC. On the other hand, computers are stumped by faces, which people recognize instantly. Machines lack the creativity for novel ideas and have no feelings and no fond memories of their youth. But recent technological advances are narrowing the gap between human brains and circuitry. At Stanford University, bioengineers are replicating the complicated parallel processing of neural networks on microchips. Another development—a robot named Darwin VII—has a camera and a set of metal jaws so that it can interact with its environment and learn, the way juvenile animals do. Researchers at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, Calif., modeled Darwin's brain on rat and ape brains. The developments raise a natural question: If computer processing eventually apes nature's neural networks, will cold silicon ever be truly able to think? And how will we judge whether it does?

Think.

History: The Origins of a Scourge

Learn.

Leishmaniasis—a disease caused by microscopic parasites, like malaria, and transmitted by sand flies—results in painful skin sores and in its most vicious form causes at least 500,000 deaths worldwide every year. Endemic to northeastern Africa, it also afflicts South and Central America as well as the Middle East. The lethal form—visceral leishmaniasis, also known as kala azar, or black fever in the Hindi language of India, where the disease was first discovered by British doctors—is particularly prevalent in Sudan, and some authorities have claimed it originated there. Now researchers have tested the DNA of bone samples from 91 ancient Egyptian mummies and 70 from old Nubia—modern Sudan—to determine if they had suffered from leishmaniasis. In nine of the 70 Nubian mummies—taken from graves stretching as far back as A.D. 550—mitochondrial DNA of the parasite was discovered, proving the disease was endemic at least that far back. It likely has even more ancient roots; four of the Egyptian mummies carried the parasite's DNA, each dating from the Middle Kingdom period of 2050 to 1650 B.C. when trade ties with Nubia were strongest. Egyptian mummies from prior and later periods showed no sign of the disease. This research adds further weight to the theory that visceral leishmaniasis first developed in the region now known as Sudan. A better understanding of pathogen evolution can contribute to a more efficient treatment and control of infectious diseases.

Imagine.

Understand.

Quantum Physics:

Glass Micro Rings

Schemes based on quantum strangeness promise the eventual development of extremely powerful computers or encryption systems, once researchers figure out the best way to manipulate the fussy quantum states of matter and light. One approach is to construct a network that stores information in the long-lived states of atoms, which would serve as the nodes in the network, and manipulate that information by playing light between the nodes. The challenge for researchers, then, is to get atoms and light to talk to each other in a way that easily scales up to hundreds or thousands of nodes. A traditional method for linking an atom to a photon is to bounce light between two mirrored walls and drop an atom inside, but these microcavities are hard to improve on and to mass-produce. Now researchers have managed to control the flow of light through mass-producible toadstool-shaped pieces of glass by touching atoms to them, demonstrating that the devices could serve as nodes of a quantum network in which information is traded between atoms and light. Touching a cold atom to a glass ring changes the resonant frequency of the ring, influencing the flow of light through it and an adjacent optical fiber. Such toadstools may be just the thing for developing future technologies that harness quantum weirdness.

Explore.

Investigate.

Experiment.

Medical Research: Common Protein Mental Disorders

Globs of malformed protein are conspicuously present in many degenerative disorders of the brain and nervous system. A number of these possibly damaging proteins have been isolated and studied, but researchers have struggled to characterize certain protein deposits in the brains of people with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), the second most common type of dementia after Alzheimer's disease. Researchers have long known that in about half of FTD cases, brains are speckled with protein clumps containing tau, a protein implicated in Alzheimer's and other brain diseases. In the other fraction of FTD cases, the deposited protein was unknown. In people with FTD, the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain shrink and their behavior changes. They may become fixated on sex or engage in criminal behavior, and they eventually die from the disorder. Lou Gehrig's disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) — a debilitating neuromuscular disorder, would seem like a different beast, given that it causes degeneration in motor neurons. But in recent years neurologists have observed that people with one of the conditions tend to get the other. Scientists have now revealed the offending molecule in FTD and discovered that it also shows up in those with Lou Gehrig's disease, suggesting that the two conditions might have intersecting routes on the pathway to cell death. In a new study, a team of neurobiologists have identified an obscure protein, TDP-43, as being present in cases of FTD, ALS and Lou Gehrig’s. Researchers have begun to study how these TDP-43 deposits arise in and contribute to each of these diseases.

Analyze.

Know.

Study.

Alternative Fuel:

Cheaper Hydrogen

The fuel of the future could be hydrogen—if it can be made cheaply enough. Currently, electrolyzers (machines that split water into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen) need a catalyst, namely platinum, to run; ditto fuel cells to recombine that hydrogen with oxygen, which produces electricity. The problem is that the precious metal costs about $1,700 to $2,000 per ounce, which means that hydrogen would be an uneconomical fuel source unless a less costly catalyst can be found. But researchers report that they may have a cost-effective solution. A team from M.I.T. focused on one side of the equation: splitting water into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen molecules, discovering it could be accomplished by simply adding the metals cobalt and phosphate to water and running a current through it. In contrast to platinum, cobalt and phosphate cost roughly $2.25 an ounce and $.05 an ounce, respectively. Another team from Monash University in Australia focused on the other side of the equation: the fuel cells that combine hydrogen and oxygen back into water to harvest electricity, developing new electrodes for fuel cells made from a special conducting polymer, that costs around $57 per ounce. By reducing or eliminating platinum, the two studies help pave the way for a future hydrogen economy.

Innovate.

Ponder.

Perceive.

Create.

Global Warming: The Sun is not to Blame

Penetrate.

The evidence for human-induced global warming is neatly captured in a plot of the planet's reconstructed temperature over the last 1,000 years. The temperature takes a dramatic upswing starting 100 years ago, creating the so-called hockey stick graph. A reasonable question is whether natural changes such as solar activity could have caused or contributed to the upturned blade of that stick, perhaps because the sun's luminosity varies widely over centuries or more. The question is, were there times in the past when it was equally warm, and the answer turns out to be a no. A research team compared the average of a number of temperature reconstructions based on tree rings, ice cores and other data with models of Northern Hemisphere temperature that include different levels of solar variation, from little to a speculatively high amount. In all cases, the warming of the past 100 years has been shown to be greater than any in the last 1,000 years. The conclusion is that known variations in the sun's total energy output cannot explain recent global warming. The available evidence casts doubt on the claims of some global warming skeptics who have argued that long-term changes in solar output, or luminosity, might be driving the current climate pattern.

Wonder…

But Beware!

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

_________Transcend._________

Atha Yodanushasanam

Now begins the teaching of Yoda.

A warrior means one who has been trained — who has a trained hypnotic belief that he is going to win. The moment you think that you are going to be defeated, going to be defeated you are.

There is not a single man or woman in the galaxy who has not become poetic when she or he was in love. In fact the people who are called poets are people who are in love continuously…

Take a few steps beyond the boundary in which you have lived up to now.

This courage to enter into a new adventure will make you more alive. And happiness happens to people who are more alive.

You pass through happiness, you pass through misery, you pass through disease, you pass through health, you pass through success, you pass through failure — but none of these you are.

You are eternal, not immortal. 'Immortal' means you have no death — always life, always life. 'Eternity' means you don't have either. You are part of this totality that goes on and on…

Life is between birth and death. You are not life. You are eternity, you are timelessness. You will be here and now, always and always.

Life is an expression, a manifestation. Death is the energy again moving into unmanifestation. One act of the energy life is, death another, but the energy is beyond acts: it is being.

Non-doing, just witnessing.

10.

When you think about that which cannot be thought, by and by, slowly slowly, thinking becomes impossible.

11.

Find out about yourself, who you were before you were born, what you were before you were born. Think of that consciousness, go into it.

12.

All that I say to you is just to prepare you for a moment of eternal silence…

Close your eyes, meditate.

May the force be with you.

So the whole question is: What are you doing in the world? Are you a participant in it? or a watcher? If you are a participant you have become unreal and the world has become real. It is you who put your reality into the world, and then the world becomes real. It depends on you: you can take it back. Once you take it back, you become aware, the world starts becoming unreal. The reality of the world depends on how much you participate and how much you witness. Those rare moments of witnessing, and you will see Hindus are right when they say the world is maya —illusion.

- Osho