Yoda Sutras: Concourse No.3

Series 1

I - 3: The Wondrous Light

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.

Cosmology:

Dark Matter

Although the nature of dark matter remains a mystery, it appears to account for about 82 percent of the matter in the universe. As a result, the evolution of structure in the universe has been driven by the gravitational interactions of dark matter. The ordinary matter that forms stars and planets has fallen into the "gravitational wells" created by clumps of dark matter, giving rise to galaxies in the centers of dark matter halos.

Think.

Brain: Vasopressin

Learn.

The hormone vasopressin affects several body systems, including cardiac and urinary function. In addition, scientists have long studied how vasopressin influences behavior in prairie voles. The mouselike animals, found in the grasslands of North America, are famous for social monogamy. Males tend to be family guys, sticking close to home and helping to raise the pups. Even related species such as meadow voles don’t bond for so much as a romantic weekend. Over years of study, scientists have concluded that prairie vole bonding has much to do with vasopressin activity in the brains of males. Through a series of studies that manipulated vasopressin levels in the vole brain, scientists have even made the animals more, or less, faithful. Vasopressin is not a love potion, though. Nerve cells also have to be equipped with specific receptor molecules that allow the hormone to bind to the cell and activate certain internal circuitry.

Imagine.

Understand.

Pollution:

Soot and Free Radicals

The daily exposure to free radicals from car exhaust, smokestacks and even your neighbors’ barbecue could be as harmful as smoking. Many combustion processes, such as those in a car engine, create tiny particles that may act as brewing pots and carriers for free radicals — chemicals believed to cause lung cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Noxious chemicals form on soot nanoparticles in the still-hot residue of combustion, for example inside a car’s exhaust pipe and catalytic converter. These chemicals are hydrocarbon-based free radicals. Similar chemicals usually degrade quickly if they float solo. But in this case, the chemicals stay attached to the nanoparticles, and they linger in the air for much longer than previously thought, surviving hours, days, or even indefinitely. The exact amount of risk the pollutants pose is hard to estimate. Air samples provided by the Electric Power Research Institute of Palo Alto, Calif., suggest that the risk could be equivalent to smoking as little as one cigarette a day or as much as more than two packs a day.

Explore.

Investigate.

Experiment.

Alternative Energy: Ethanol

The most widely used liquid biofuel in industrial countries is ethanol. In the United States in 2005, 3.9 billion gallons of ethanol were produced, mainly from corn. Most of that ethanol was blended with gasoline, accounting for 2.8 percent of total yearly gasoline sales. The European Union (EU) produced 718 million gallons of ethanol in 2005, mostly distilled from sugar beets and wheat grain. The EU has set goals that 5.75 percent ethanol, derived from wheat, beets, potatoes, or corn, be added to fossil fuels by 2010 and 10 percent by 2020. Brazil is the world’s largest producer of ethanol. About 15 percent of its liquid fuel is ethanol derived from sugarcane. Gasoline sold in Brazil is usually mixed with 25 percent ethanol. Many automobiles in the country have “flex-fuel” engines that can use either gasoline or pure ethanol.

Analyze.

Know.

Study.

Ocean:

Gulf Stream

Giant spinning eddies have a profound influence on marine life and on the world's climate. These massive swirling structures — the largest are known as gyres — can be thousands of kilometres across and can extend down as deep as 500 metres or more. One of the best known large-scale gyres in the world's oceans is that associated with the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic. This current pumps massive amounts of heat towards Europe, warming the atmosphere and giving the region a relatively mild climate: to see how important that is, one only has to compare France’s climate to that of Nova Scotia, in Canada, which has roughly the same latitude. After releasing heat to the atmosphere the waters re-circulate toward the equator, where they regain heat and rejoin the flow into the Gulf Stream. In this way the ocean's gyres play a fundamental role in pumping heat poleward, and cooler waters back to the tropics.

Innovate.

Ponder.

Perceive.

Create.

Consciousness: Magpies

Penetrate.

When placed in front of a mirror, magpies realize that they’re looking at themselves, raising the possibility that these songbirds have independently evolved the brain power to support a basic form of self-recognition. Magpies are the first non-mammal to demonstrate a rudimentary affinity for self-recognition. Members of the corvid family, which includes crows and ravens, magpies join apes, bottlenose dolphins and elephants as the only animals other than humans that have been observed to understand that a mirror image belongs to their own body. It remains to be determined whether magpies’ sophisticated social behavior, including intense competition to collect and store food in hidden caches, provides a foundation for mirror self-recognition. Interestingly, studies with chimps have found that mirror self-recognition appears frequently in young, healthy individuals and gradually declines as animals get older.

Wonder…

But Beware!

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

_________Transcend._________

Atha Yodanushasanam

Now begins the teaching of Yoda.

We are, but we don't know who we are.

Unless you become conscious of your consciousness, unless aware you become of your inner light, you go on living in illusions.

Arduous is discovering oneself, going on the greatest exploration it is.

Knowing "Who am l?" is the question. Real evolution starts from there — only from there and from nowhere else.

One who brings transformation to your being is the Master, who helps you to find out your own light.

Not holding back the holy man lives; whatsoever he is doing he goes totally into it.

To find God you need not go anywhere else; if you can find yourself, you have found God. He is hiding within you — your within he is.

To live halfheartedly is the most stupid thing in life, because gone forever is the moment that is gone.

If you are in a certain fix, the first thing is to find out how you got into it rather than trying to get out of it. Without asking the most fundamental and the primary question, much worse you will make things.

10.

So mechanically we live. An opportunity is each moment, but we go on losing it in our stupidity.

11.

If you become conscious you immediately know that you are not the body or the mind; pure consciousness you are, and that pure consciousness is the wondrous light.

12.

Whatsoever you do, whatsoever you have done, you cannot defile your innermost core.

Close your eyes, meditate.

May the force be with you.

Once you have tasted the bliss then all Jewishness disappears, all greed disappears, because it comes and fills you so much that there is no place for anything else — for greed, for jealousy, for competitiveness, for ambition, for future, for past. It fills all the nooks and comers of your being. It overfills you, it starts overflowing you.

- Osho