Tuesday, 31. January 2006, 11:45:47
One person who influenced my thinking on how to interpret the religion and spiritual literature with all their smorgasbord of symbols is Ananda Coomaraswamy.
Eric Gill, Catholic artisan, artist and author of distinguished reputation, wrote in his Autobiography about Ananda Coomaraswamy:
"...There was one person, to whom I think William Rothenstein introduced me, whom I might not have met otherwise and for whose influence I am deeply grateful. I mean the philosopher and theologian Ananda Coomaraswamy. Others have written the truth about life and religion and man's work. Others have written good clear English. Others have had the gift of witty expression. Others have understood the metaphysics of Hinduism and Buddhism. Others have understood the true significance of erotic drawings and sculptures. Others have seen the relationships of the good, the true and the beautiful. Others have had apparently unlimited learning. Others have loved; others have been kind and generous. But I know of no else in whom all these gifts and all these powers have been combined. I dare not confess myself his disciple; that would only embarass him. I can only say that no other living writer has written the truth in matters of art and life and religion and piety with such wisdom and understanding."
Ananda Coomaraswamy was born in 1877 in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), of a Tamil father - Sir Mutu Coomaraswamy - and an English mother - Elizabeth Clay Beeby. Sir Mutu was the first Asian and the first Hindu to be called to the bar in Britain, in 1863. In 1877, after two years in Ceylon, and the birth of her son, Lady Coomaraswamy, not yet thirty, returned to England for a visit. Sir Mutu was to follow but, tragically, died on the very day he was to have sailed from Colombo. So, the young Ananda was educated in England and obtained honours in botany and geology in 1900. Later, his university was to award him its doctorate in science (1906) for his work in the mineralogy of Ceylon; for between 1902 and 1906 the young scietist in the land of his birth, making the first mineralogical survey of the island. His identified mineral was named as serendibite.
Moving between England and Ceylon as he frequently did, Coomaraswamy had numerous oportunities for travel in India. He did so in 1901, again in 1906, and more extensively in 1910-1911. He began collecting extensively but discriminatingly in folk music, and especially in miniature paintings.
Coomaraswamy's motifs were to loop back in fractals as they represented his intuitions that were with him from the beginning, "but their eloquent articulation which was to characterise his later writing was not arrived at suddenly; he worked his way to this undoubted extended mastery.
TO BE CONTINUED.
Friday, 23. December 2005, 10:39:19
What can be apt for Christmas than a message of Jesus Christ that transcends all mindbarriers in its revelation of the fractaloholonic reality of mysticism. But,interestingly, to grasp that essence one needs to intrepet the words of Isho'a (Jesus) who spoke in Aramaic and that too in all its polyvalent nuances. Thats what Neil Douglas-Klotz has been doing through his beautiful writings on the Middle Eastern desert wisdom. I have chosen two pieces of Isho'a for this Christmas.
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/The Door Between The Worlds - Aramaic/
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/A translation of John 10:9 from the Peshitta version of the Gospels/
Isho'a said:
Ina(i)na thar'a.
(KJV): I am the door.
The ego,aware of its moment-by-moment existence,
coveys us between realities
Simple Presence shuttles us back and forth, from limitation
to freedom
The eye of diversity's vortex can turn us from one face of life
to another.
The depth of Identify is the gatekeeper for a vast variety of
possible and impossible experience.
The self conscious of its Self opens a passage between time and spaces.
The "I am" is the door between the worlds.
(NB): The Aramaic word 'thara', usually translated as 'door' also points to < everything that makes a transition from one form of reality to another, that turns us from one mode of being to another, that converts, distils, or infuses something in something else.
The more profound use of the ancient root of this word, THR, probably includes the Egyptian sacred name 'Ha-Thor', she who presides over death and rebirth, as well as the later word, 'darvesh' in Sufi tradition - the one who sits in the 'door way' between realities.
In the Aramaic word Jesus uses here - In(i)na, we have an intensification of the word for "I", literally the "I-I" or "the I of I". This is not an abstraction of the "I" but a distillation of its essence.
/Like Vine and Branches - Aramaic/
__________________________________
:A translation of John 15:1 from the Peshitta version of the Gospels:
_____________________________________________________________________
Isho'a said:
Inana gpetha wa aton shbishte.
(KJV): I am the vine and ye are the branches thereof.
The depth of identity gives life,
the depth of relationship receives it.
The self conscious of its Self generates a current of vitality;
the sense of "other" balances the circuit.
Simple Presence is the artery through which health pulses;
Simple Contact is the vein that restores universal
healing.
The ego hollowed by its own sense of mortality flows with
breadth;
sympathy with another receives the flow in harmony.
The eye of the whirlpool of subjectivity allows life to grow;
the "thou" of the waves of objectivity allows life
to age.
The center of individuality's circle sends out rays;
the space between any two of them forms "you".
The "I am" is the vine of interiority;
the "You are" is the branches of communion.
(NB): Inana, "I am" as a force of guidance to the right action at the right moment.
These are Isho'a's words intrepreted with the polyvalent nuances embedded within the semantis of the Aramaic language. Unless, one penetrates into the hidden meanings, we would not be able appreciate the true essence of Jesus Christ's blessings.
Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry (1992)in their 'the Universe Story' makes their point clear:
"To articulate anew our orientation in the universe requires the use language which does not yet exist, for each extant language harbors its own attitudes, its own assumptions, its own cosmology ... .Any cosmology whose language can be completely understood by using one of the standard dictionaries belongs to a former era.
"Among the greatest challenges linguistically is the change from our prsent efforts at an exclusively univocal, literal,scientific, objective language to a multivalent language much richer in its symbolic and poetic qualities. This is required because of the multivalent
aspects of each reality. Scientific language, however useful in scientific investigation, can be harmful to the total human process once it is accepted as the only way to speak about the true reality of things."
Though they have spoken within a scientific context, the same applies in other contexts too because we ultimately handle languages to articulate the inner meanings of our experience. So, any translation should accommodate the literal, metaphorical and mystical nuances of the expressions in its interpretaion as Neil Douglas-Klotz has been accomplishing through his reinterpretations.
Happy Christmas!
eoi.
Tuesday, 20. December 2005, 07:41:30
Sun was going down, and darkness was enveloping the village; little Waris will also be engulfed by it. For the five year old Waris, blissfully ignorant and innocent,this was a special day. Given a special dinner, she was excited and awaited her time for that 'mystery' unrealed to womenfolks beforehand.
Suddenly, it was time. Her mother took her to a bush and set on a flat rock. The gypsy woman arrived. Waris' mama positioned her on the rock, pulled her head against her chest, her legs straddling little Waris' body. "I circled my arms around her thighs," she remembered. A piece of root was placed between her teeth and was asked to bite on it.
When Waris peered through her legs, all she could see was the gypsy woman with dead-look eyes and long fingers with a broken razor blade. No sooner, Waris got frightened and she was blindfolded.
"The next thing I felt was my flesh being cut away. I heard the blade sawing back and forth through my skin. The feeling was indescribable. I didn't move, telling myself the more I did, the longer the torture would take. Unfortunately, my legs began to quiver and shake uncontrollably of their own accord and I prayed, 'Please, God, let it be over quickly'. Soon it was, because I passed out. When I woke up, I saw the gypsy woman had piled a stack of thorns from acacia three next to her," recollected Waris.
Her skin was punctured with the thorns to create holes and a strong white thread was poked through the holes "to sew me up". Her legs were entombed in strips of cloth that, in her words, "I was dying to relieve myself. ... my sister rolled me over on my side and scooped out a little hole in the sand. 'Go ahead', she said. The first drop stung as if my skin were being eaten by acid." After the gypsy sewed her up, the only opening left for urine - and later for menstrual blood - was a miniscule hole the diameter of a matchstick.
"Why? What was it all for?" haunted her since then. Waris Dirie was lucky. Many bled to death; some in shock, and due to infection or tetanus. Waris not only survived to tell her story; but, lived on to do her best to transform that 'brutal partiarchal rite of passage', in Somalia,her birthplace.
In the nomadic Somalia culture, the conventional wisdom is that "there are bad things between girls' legs; a woman is considered dirty, oversexed and unmarriagble unless those parts - the clitoris, labia minora and most of the labia majora - are removed.
A crude blade, or scissors, knives or even a sharp stone,under unhygienic conditions, is used to brutally maim the vulva - the external female genitalia. The vaginal and urethral openings of a woman are enclosed, when the thighs are in the ordinary position, by the two folds of tissue - the inner being the labia minora (lay'bee-uh minaw' ruh): Latin for "smaller lips"; and the outer folds of tissue - the labia majora (muh-jaw'ruh): Latin for "larger lips". The vaginal opening and labia (lips) enclosing it are the vulva (vul'vuh): Latin for "womb". At the anterior end of the vulva, between the two labia minora, is a small organ about an inch long (normally in an adult woman) richly supplied with nerve endings and very sensitive. It is the clitoris (kly' turis): Greek meaning "to enclose", perhaps because it is enclosed by the labia.
The most erotically sensitive organs, which play a critical role in sex and reproduction and a biosymbolic of female sexuality, are cut away and the wound is stichted shut, leaving only a small opening and a scar where the genitals had been - a practice called infibulation. Somalis consider the 'circumcision of the female genitalia' as a 'great investment' without which a daughter will not make it onto the marriage market. Originally, performed on girls who had attained puberty, the circumcision was being done on girls younger and younger and Waris was only one of many victims in Africa.
Now,Waris Dirie at 13 was to be betrothed to a 60-year old white-bearded spent-out hunter called Mr Galool. That evening, her mother - in Waris' words a woman with a face of a Modigliani sculpture and skin dark and smooth, as if perfectly chiselled from black marble - prompted her to escape. She poignantly blessed Waris:"You're going to be all right. Just be careful. Careful! And, Waris ... please, one thing, 'Don't forget me'". One is unable to imagine the feminine conviction and courage of Waris' mother.
Waris left behind her childhood freedom of joy of watching lions basking in the sun; running with giraffes, zebras and foxes; and chasing hyraxes - rabbit-sized animals - and escaped into cold desert and which became scorching after dawn. So, she made her way to Mogadishu. Weeks after weeks, she walked the desert, without food, nothing to sustain her but her faith in God. Finally, she reached her sister's house in Mogadishu. After a brief stay under her bossy sister, she knocked the doors of her aunt Sahru. She became a construction worker and did backbreaking labour. One day, Mohammad Chama Farah, the Somalian ambassador in London, arrived at aunt Sahru's doorstep. He is married to another of Waris' aunt. So, luck had it that she joined that Uncle and landed in London as a housemaid.There, at 16, she had to walk her Uncle's niece Sophie to school everyday. Dame Luck seemed to care for Waris. One day, while taking the little Sophie to school, she noticed a fortyish stranger observing her. This stranger, photographer Mike Goss, had been watching her daily. He gave her his visiting card. Waris was a bit afraid. Ironically, later her Uncle's ambassadorial mission had come to an end and he was packing for home - Somalia. But Waris insisted that she would stay back in London and her aunt Maruim consented. So, after their departure, Waris with a duffel bag slung on her shoulder, strolled into a store where she met a tall attractive Africa woman who spoke Somali. Through her, she took YMCA shelter, did domestic chores and learnt the ropes in life. One day she showed the African lady Halwu the visiting card. She encouraged Waris to pay a visit to him.
Waris Dirie at last met Mike Goss and was enchanted by the beautiful women posters in his studio. She was made-up and he took a profile shot of her and that changed her fotunes forever. She too looked beautiful and glamorous. Then, Terence Donovan, on seeing that profile shot, chose her for the Pirelli Calendar with just African women alone. She was on the covers! That's it. Waris Dirie's modelling career spiralled up and she worked in Paris, Milan and New York. She rubbed shoulders with Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer and Lauren Hutton. Elle, Glamour and Vogue splashed her beautiful features all over. So, Waris Dirie became a fashion model celebrity.
Despite fame and wealth, her past circumcision often blacked her out. She did not tell the doctors the truth and they prescribed birthcontrol pills. But her spells became acute, she met Dr Michael Macrae and confessed her past horror. He "did a fine job". Her delight is better expressed in her own words: "Within three weeks, I could sit on the toilet and whoosh! There is no way to explain what a freedom that was."
Waris Dirie never forgot her mother's parting words that in 1995, with the BBC Director Gary Pomeroy, she went back to Somalia to find her mother. How to find her ? "Well, my used to have a nickname for me - Avdohol," she revealed. Avdohol in Somali means 'small mouth'. But she was named Waris after that brilliant tenacious yellow-orange blooms of the desert; in short, Waris means 'desert flower'. She, at last, discovered her mother. Later, in New York, she fell in love with a shy drummer Dana Murray. And ... she gave birth to a "beautiful, silky black-haired, long-fingered" baby - Aleeke. Waris was 30!
She resolved to "speak out for the little girl with no voice" against the partiarchal wont of female genital mutilation (FGM) in African countries. She for the first time, divulged her personal FGM experience in an interview. No sooner, she was swamped with invitations to speak in varous fora around US and elsewhere. She began tentatively to speak on the feminine right to her intact sexuality. In 1997, the UN Population Fund invited her to join its fight to stop FGM around the globe.]
Female Genital Mutilation has been practised predominantly in Africa - 28 countries. More than 130 million girls and women have undergone this 'torture' around the globe. Atleast, two million girls have been at risk (as projected in 1997) each year of being the next victim - that is: 6,000 a day! The FGM was performed with knives, scissors, and even with sharp stones! No anaesthetic. The most minimal damage is cutting away the hood of the clitoris and the maximum is infibulation which 80% of Somalian women suffer.
So, this little 'desert flower' - Waris Dirie - truly blossomed not just into a model but as a voice to those hapless victims and she campaigned for the safe right of African womens' sexuality in Africa and in other places.
Hats off to this beautiful human being - Waris Dirie, her 'Avdohol' - small mouth - truly and effective spoke big words and sort large actions.
PS: This adaptive writing, from "Desert Flower" by Waris Dirie and Cathleen Miller, is done for increasing awareness.
eoi.
Friday, 16. December 2005, 09:32:00
Theodore Roosevelt in his speech in St Louis (1916) observed: "One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called 'weasel words'". Since then, the 'defect' seems to have got every English-speaking people in its thrall that we are weaseling our way out with words in life.
Weasel is a small slender active carnivorous mammal - genus Mustela of the family Mustelida _ the weasel family - that eats small birds and mammals and are mostly reddish brown with white or yellowish underparts.
A weasel reputedly has the habit of sucking out the contents of an egg while leaving the shell superficially intact. Hence, the weasel-word: a word used in order to evade or retreat from a direct or forthright statement or position.
Philologist Mario Pei says, "Weasel words are shifty, tricky, dishonest." Comparing them with 'fake ten-dollar bills' or 'clipped currency', he cites two classic examples of weasel words: liberal and democracy.
'Liberal' is debauched off its original meaning that today it refers to those who want to subject the individual to full Government control. Contrarily, those who still believe in individual freedom have been 'forced' to describe themselves as 'libertarians'. 'Democracy' as a word died 'when the Communists began to call their regimes "People's Democracies" on the plea that they represented government 'for the people' rather than 'by' the people. (But I wonder whether under any democracy, the 'by the people' has any consistent relevance at all except the vacuous elections that do not empower people in any real way.)
More weasels: 'transfer of population' equals deportation; 'rectification of frontiers' means annexation; and 'elimination of unreliable elements' is liquidation en masse.
Mario Pei, writing in 1969, hits the weasely bull's eye of the politicians thus:"We, too, have our weasel words, starting with 'Department of Defence', where we once had the more frank 'Department of War'. True, the present Department of Defense includes also the old Department of the Navy and the new and ebulliently agressive Air Force; but is it not a euphemism to speak of 'defense' when you are waging a war 10,000 miles from home ?" So, our politicians are able to easily 'weasel themselves out of charges of socio-political hypocrisy with "proactive" and "preemption".
It is one thing to feel against the foreign policy of the American government, and it is totally another thing to feel 'anti-American' about it. One of the best weasel words on record, in the sense, that the meaning has been "sucked right out of it" is 'un-American'. On the face of it, 'un-American', should mean 'not American', not 'anti-American', which is the sense in which it is ordinarily used. Any foreign country legitimately carries on 'un-American activities', which need not at all be directed against us," points out Mario Pei.
The term, born in 1844 in connection with Know-Nothing movement, also described itself as 'American'. As time passed with all sorts of connotations in the air, the Congressional Committee began to see it in the sense of 'radical', 'subversive' , and 'anti-national'. "Despite all expostulations, the connotation stuck and became generalized," writes Pei. Since then, witchhunters had toasttime with McCarthyism. Now, anti-Bushists are seen as 'anti-American' in the weasely sense of 'un-American'. They are not 'anti-American' because there is something positively 'American' about America which I reckon every sensible global citizen would not fail to appreciate and anti-Bushists too could not be blind and deaf to this historical fact. Politics maybe double-edged; but then only politicians can double-speak! Let us not -rpt- not mistake politicians as true representatives of the people.
Communist weasels were trapped long before; but somehow the carnivorous apparitions continue to haunt the 'die-hards'. They were still 'patriotic', that is 'pro-Communist'; they aspired for 'heroic acts', that was 'treasonable crimes';they were for 'mankind', meaning 'international Communism' and they would fight for 'democratic regime', meaning 'Communist colonialism'. Somehow still die-hard Communists seemed to be possessed and have not been exorcised yet. Their 'nightmare of America' has led some to psychiatrists. Now they also seem to be paranoidal about the 'extant KGB'. Obsessions have a weasely trait of sucking the reasoning faculty out of the minds.
The characters of Chairman Moa's wen-hwa ge-ming are "refined-influence (or change) remove-mandate" - transformation by good influence, but with a removal of the mandate to rule. But the weasely political hypocrisy led to "culturicide". But now, some lament that China is being McDonaldized in its bid, along with other nations, to become part of the McWorld.
Mario Pei, whose works I had come across back in the rear 1970s, has been brilliant through his more than a score of language books in analysing the history, social aspects and other dimensions of the languages of the world. I wish our English courses include authors of such scholarly repute to be part of our learning about languages, whether linguistics or otherwise.
eoi.
Monday, 12. December 2005, 07:39:52
Mahatma Gandhi would have loved her for her aspiration and would have her as an eco-symbol of selfreliance if he is alive today.
She is Sally Fox. A tall American, with a beautiful, but a determined, face haloed by rubus hair, plaited or knotted into a dishevelled pony tail, now ageing into goldishly straw-hued.
At 12 years old, she fell in love with the process of spinning with a spindle, and she created thread from an assortment of materials: from 'cotton in medicine bottles to her dog's hair'. We all wear cotton attires. Shirts, jeans, tops, pants, bedsheets and pillow covers, saris, jackets, screens and tablecovers, salwar kameezes and jibbas, bras and panties of all colours but only of dyes that are predominantly synthetic and pollutants in themselves. What if cotton comes out with natural colors?
In 1989, when Sally Fox introduced her own colored cotton to the world; she had done something that hardly anyone contemplated as possible: she created a naturally colored cotton that could be spun (made into thread) on a machine!
Until then,colored cotton had suffered from short, weak fibers, which made it mandatory to be spun by hand, a slow and expensive task. The only commercially viable cotton-bred and refined for long and strong fibres compatible for machines to work with was the white cotton. But the white cotton is not eco-friendly as a product. Before, the cotton morphs into our shirts, or sheets, it has to be bleached and then dyed. Consequently,there was an undue cop out between the bottonline and the ecoline. Both the processes of bleaching and dyeing generated a large amount of pollution.
But Sally Fox's Fox Fibre - the brand name of her cottons, required no bleaching and dyeing. Her first two colors - a celedon green and a warm reddish brown - were immediate sensations. No sooner than her cottons hit the market, the textile industry and the public realised what the 'environmentally friendly clothes' could mean.
Her 'cotton revolution' has a painstaking but an interesting history behind it. In high school, Sally Fox discovered a new passion: entomology - the study of insects. Elizabeth Wangari, a Kenyan entomologist, taught her a class on the subject and helped her get an internship at Zoecon - Carl Djerrasi's company - which wa developing natural ways to control insects. Wangari inspired Fox to join college; and she enrolled to study biology and entomology. Later her experience with the Peace Corps in The Gambia (West Africa), where she fought the rice- and peanut- affecting pests and diseases, made her wary of pesticides. "So, I'm sort of a fanatic against pesticides," she says.
Early, 1980s, Sally Fox jobbed as a pollinator for a cotton breeder searching for a pest-resistant plant. One day, she found a bag of seeds of a pest-resistant cotton but brown in color. "... I went through the seeds and handspun each single one. I decided which one were the easiest ones to spin and I planted those. That was the beginning", she reminisced. For next seven years, she tended her cotton plants and each year, when the cotton bolls opened up, she would carefully select seeds from the plants with the best fibres and the colors. She also crossbred her cotton with whitle cotton to produce a longer fibre, or staple.
"I was an entomologist, and I hadn't read all the plant books saying you couldn't breed for longer staple," she recollects. Sally Fox's cup was empty and her mind in the 'the zone', creativity bubbling up. Eventually, she had two colored cottons that was stable - they did not change when planted in the field - and were spinable. She applied for and won the PLant Variety Protection Certificates for them, the plant equivalent of patents. Now commercial doors opened. In 1989, she sold her first crop, 122 bushels of cotton to a Japanese mill. Levi began making 'natural' jeans and other clothes. LLBeans,LandEnd and Esprit also placed orders. Fox was running a 10 million dollar business.
But between 1990 and 1995, the complexion of spinning textile industry changed as most of the spinning mills in Japan and Europe and USA closed shops. 'What was going on was the beginnings of globlalization. Everything was moving to South East Asia and South America,'' she explained. The remaining mills "wouldn't or couldn't" process the relatively small quantities of cotton her farmers produced. She lost her customers. Despite the downturn in her fotunes, Fox continued to 'coax a usable variety of cotton' from an initial cross-bred seed and developed new colors.
"You get a color, and its not a great plant, and its not a fiber, but it's a color", she revealed her spunk and " ... you keep at it until you get a better plant. You work at it year after year." Now, she has a pink, deeper 'newgreen' and a chocolate toned 'Buffalo' to the FoxFibre line.
In her pursuit of machine-spinable, naturally colored cotton, Sally Fox trod in the footsteps of the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel - only now the genetics refined in the past 135 years.Each generation of these hand-selected plants had a combination of genes that better engendered the characteristics Fox was looking for: color, the length of the cotton fibre, the softness of the fibre, and the strength and resistance of plant.
In India, where businesspeople omnidirectionally pay lipservice to environmental care, it would be newsily glad to know whether anyone is working on "Foxian" line of eco-friendlily producing machine-spinable cotton with natural color tones.
PS: Source: Inventing Modern America: From the Microwave to the Mouse - David Brown - Lemelson MIT Program/2002.
eoi.
Monday, 5. December 2005, 07:13:14
The arch of The Garden Where The Task Is Found curved atop the big gate within which is the sprawling garden.
The Arabs called it _ Al Chimiya.
I decided to go in and pushed the gate to open. With a creak, it moved inward.
I stepped in.
The path was not discernible; being carpeted with dry brown-yellow leaves. Trees were bereft of foliage. Plants were withered. No sign of any vision-trapping blooms. Only a few bloomers managed to unfurl themselves and a few hardy herbs withstood the 'sands of time'. The wind was gusty, scooping the sunburnt leaves and swirled them afar. Dust rose off the ground in a mist of aridity. No! The garden was not a floricutural glory.
The earth underfeet breathed a parched fragrance of dessicance.
Thinly green, with weeds battling for terrestrial space, I was wondering what kind of task could one perform within this anhydrous milieu. One may say, "use pruning shears". Another may suggest that I remove the many rotting and wizened plants and roots. Perhaps, an European purist would rid the garden off all the exotic imports from South and East which he considered as 'alien'. Mayhap, a fourth may rake the pathways to bring back the garden's contours.
But all these propositions did not strike me as the 'core o the matter'. So, I decided to sit quietly for a while in the garden clearing, spared with a few dandelions, lady's-smock, and all our familiar spring flowers and herbs.
I thought of listening to the whispers of wild flowers and the scraggly bushes. Perhaps, I imagined they would tell me the task that was to be found in the garden. In such a garden, mayhap, we have to only hearken; soon they will begin to speak, softly open out their teasing secrets.
First comes the secret of the seed from which they all spring. The seed was like a parched grain, seem so utterly dead; but from within a full life miraculously develops.
Alchemy devotes much attention to the secret of the seed: The earth in which we plant it contributes its solid nutrients, the water with which we sprinkle it bestows its virtue, even from air the seed draws subtle nourishment, while from sun, it partakes fiery energy. Thus all the elements combine to confer their blessings on it. Here we have the wonder of >germinatio< that plays so prominent a role in all alchemy.
The seedling develops, and we look with astonishment upon the >formatio< of its organs, its growth obeying definite laws that are innate in every plant.
The comes that tantalizing moment when the bud burgeons, when the blossoms burst open, the plant has reached its prime, the hour of its sacred nuptials. The blossoms are fertilized by grains of pollen borne on the wind: this is the >coniunctio< of which alchemy speaks.
But now we enter an apparent inconsistency - a reciprocal complementarity.
These flowers,which just debudded; these flowers whose creation seemed to be the whole purpose of the plant, now begin to wither and fade after its transient grandeur.
The whole process would seem to have been in vain. This fading of the flower, this seeming fiasco of the whole process, is also known to alchemy, which calls it the >negredo<, the blackening.
Everything appears to be lost!
The lovely petals, drenched in colors, have shrunken; they are withered, dry, brown. But under the blossom, the fruit grows and matures turning from green to yellow to red. This reddening is also known to alchemy; it is the >rubedo<, the yearned for stage leading up to the "great work" which alchemy projects.
At last, the fruit is ripe. The process seems to be ended, but this is not quiet so. The plant is torn up, parched seeds and all.
Where a moment past we beheld hopeful burgeoning and ripening, we now see a withered brown wilderness. But the seed is gathered and sown again in new earth.
This is >proiectio< of alchemy.
And now the garden reveals one its greatest mysteries: this seed, which is sown again, will begin the cycle anew. Here we have the phenomenon of >rotatio<, the cycle, another typically alchemical concept. This cycle is the seed and the true image of alchemy.
There is one figure from the old Komorios alchemical manuscripts of Egypt, scantily illustrated as they are, and that is the >Uroboros< - the serpent with a head like a dragon and a scaly body, biting its tail, that comes to my mind.
This whole metamorphosis, this growth and passing, this eternal cycle, is the first great lesson we find in our garden.
PS: This is a recreatively written/paraphrased parable after Professor Rudolf Bernoulli, Curator of Graphics Collection, Federal Polytechnic Institute, who made Swiss art internationally known and lectured at the Eranos conferences of 1934 and 1935.
The Garden Where The Task Is Found is one of the important alchemical manuscripts preserved in the Vienna Staatsbibliothek.
eoi.
Thursday, 1. December 2005, 06:59:44
The imagery of a Calabi-Yau shape of one kind is an efflorenscence of a six-dimensional energetic pattern - an hyperspatial gewgaw.
Even as we live within the 3-D spatial dimensions, the hidden dimensions escape our attention because they are nestled in the domain of hyperreality. The equations of string theory actually determine more than just the number of spatial dimensions: ergo, they determine the kinds of shapes the extra dimensions can morph into.
String matrix picks out "a significantly more complicated class of six-dimensional shapes" known as Calabi-Yau shapes, or Calabi-Yau spaces. Calabi-Yau is named after two mathematicians - Eugenio Calabi and Shin-Tung Yau - who discovered them mathematically long before their relevance to string theory was 'realized'. It a particular Calabi-Yau shape constituted the extra 6-dimensions in string theory, on ultramicroscopic scales space would have these Calabi-Yau shapes tacked on to every point in the normal three-dimensions. So that in Superstring theorist Brian Greene's words, "You and I and everyone else would right now be surrounded by and filled with these little shapes". So, we literally navigate the nine dimensions everytime we move ourselves. "If these ideas are right, the ultrmicroscopic fabric of cosmos is embroidered with the richest of textures", suggests Brian Greene.
The beauty of general relativity is that the physics of gravity is controlled by the geometry of space.
A string that's constrained to vibrate only on the 2-dimensional surface will execute a variety of vibrational patterns but only those involving motion in the left/right and back/forth directions as permissible orientations within the 2-D matrix. At the third dimension, the motion in the up/down direction is accessible with all its variety consistent within the 3-D matrix. So, with every additional dimension, the string will vibrate in newer patterns. This is an important realization, underscores Brian Greene, because there is an equation in string theory that demands that the number of independent vibrational patterns meet a very precise constraint.
If the constraint is violated, the mathematics of string theory disintegrates and its equaitons are bereft of sense. Under successive dimensions from two till eight dimensions in the universe (also within the mathematical universe), the number of vibrational patterns continue to be smaller than necessity that the constraint is met. But with nine dimensions, the constraint on the number of vibrational patterns is satisfied perfectly. Thus, the string theory determines the number of space dimensions. But what we should not forget is that all the hypermathematical equations are only approximate at best.
Now the intimate tango of geometry of space and physics come into play. What bamboozles physicists is that fact that there were far too many massless string vibrational patterns and their properties did not necessarily match those of the known matter and force particles. So, mathematical accounting for extra dimensions alone was not enough; the
shapes of these extra dimenions are capable of morphing into matter. Hence, pops up the
Calabi-Yau shapes to meet this need.
Strings are so tiny resonances that they continue to vibrate in all nine space dimenions even if 'crumpled' into a Calabi-Yau shape.
Either shape or size change of the extra dimenions affect the precise properties of each possible vibrational pattern of a string. Since a string vibrational pattern determines its mass and charge, "the precise size and shape of the extra dimenions has a profound inpact on string vibrational patterns", affirms Brian Greene, "and hence on particle properties".
Calabi-Yau is just a probable/possible shape of a particular morphic resonance of an energy pattern, or a panoply of energetic patterns. This aggravates the mathematical choice for one Calabi-Yau shape or another; though each Calabi-Yau shape is valid as any other. Yet, Calabi-Yau shape yields string vibrational patterns that closely approximate the known particles.
Calabi-yau shapes have been found that give rise to string vibrational pattern in "agreement with the three families of fundamental particles and their masses (in multiples of the proton mass)." In the mid-1980s, Philip Candelas, Gary Horovitz, ANdrew Strominger and Edward Witten (who realized the relevance of Calabi-Yau shapes for string theory) discovered that each hole -defined precisely in mathematical sense- contained within a Calabi-Yau shape gives rise to a >family< of lowest-energy string vibration patterns. A Calabi-Yau shape with three holes would therefore provide an explanation for the repetitive structure of three families of elementary particles. Indeed, a unumber of such three holed Calabi-Yau shapes have been found. Among these preferred Calabi-Yau shapes are one that also give just the right number of messenger particles as well as just the right electric charges and nuclear force properties to match the particles.
But then, Physics/Mathematics has not gained an extraordinary understanding and means to calculate infinitesimal deviations of particles with Masses that deviate from the lowest=energy string vibrations - zero times the Planck mass - by less than one part in a million billion.
Somewhere down the line, the strings and Higgs ocean may conjugally mate into a reciprocal version of complementarity; but the climax is not the Climax with a capital C.
eoi.
Thursday, 1. December 2005, 06:14:15
Ever since I learnt physics, there was one nagging thought that persisted: What is Space ?
Newton was absolute; Einstein was relative; and Hawkings was too singular. Big Bang/Singularity bore a default error; an error born within the axiomatics of Physics. Mathematical logic suffered an axiological misconception. Classical ether harboured a conceptual flaw; but vacuum as an idea was/is vacuous.
Space, as envisaged in Physics contained within its bosom all the galaxies, solar systems, planets, earth, mountains, rivers, forests, organisms, matter, atoms ... .But within limits of human intellect, humankind was able to conceive space as a container of all things in Nature/Universe. Commonsensically, a container with objects inside it can be emptied. Similarly, it was visualized and experimented that a limited domain of space within Earth can be sucked off of its matter which creates a vacuum. But, if a container is emptied, the container remains. So, if space is vacuumed, what becomes of the space? By commensensical logic, space should still remain.
While in my involutionary experience within the domains of Yogaanusasanam, Purana yoga and Tibetan mysticism, it dawned on me that Space as an independent concept, either absolute or relative, is an illusion. Space is an indefinite matrix of energies. Unfortunately, scientists refused to see Space per se either as one form of energy, or multiple forms of of one type of energy(ies), or a multiplicity of energies. So, they just dismissed the elementary idea of Ether - however inadequate it might be in its exponible powers. Yet, ether came back as an haunting ghost from the abyss of deep-space in the form of Higgs ocean - a far more sophisticated rendition of the ethereal space consistent with the quantum matrix of the times.
All fields respond to temperature like matter Higgs ocean does.The higher the temperature, the greater is the value of a field will undulate. At deepspace temperature (2.7 degrees above absolute zero, or 2.7 Kelvin), or even warmer temperatures here on earth, field undulations are minuscule.But the temperature just after the big bang was so enormous - at 10 to the power of minus 43 seconds after the bang, the temperature is believed to have been about 10 to the power of 32 Kelvin - that all fields violently see-sawed.
As the universe expanded and cooled, the initially huge density of matter and radiation steadily fell, the vast expanse of the universe became ever emptier, and field undulations became ever more subdued. For most fields, the sublimated undulations meant that their values, on average, inched to zero. But, at some moment in time, the value of a particular field might "jitter" slightly over zero (a peak) and a moment later it might "dip" slightly below zero (a trough), but, on average the valve of most fields closed in on zero - "the value we intuitively associate with absence or emptiness", in superstring theorist Brian Greene's words.
Here Higgs field makes its entry on the stage of the cosmic drama. This Higgs field has properties similar to other fields at the scorchingly high temperatures just after the big bang: it fluctuated wildly up and down. But researchers believe that when the temperature of the universe dropped sufficiently, the Higgs field condensed into a particular >nonzero< value throughout all space!
Physicists refer to this as the formation of a >nonzero Higgls field vacuum expectation value< which Brian Greene refers to as Higgs ocean. They may call the emptiest space as the vacuum, yet that vacuum "may actually be permeated by a uniform Higgs field", observes Brian Greene.
The process of a Higgs field assumes a zero value throughout space - forming a Higgs ocean - is spontaneous symmetry breaking - a milestone idea in the 20th century of Physics.
Our mathematics is becoming more sohisticated by every hour; and without thinking there can be no mathematics. But what physicists have ignored is the nature of thoughts: its dimension, texture, shape, geometry, properties and functions. What is a thought? What if we loop back the thoughts into the configured space? We easily think of the abstraction of the spacetime continuum. But, is spacetime continuum as understood within the matrix of Mathematical Physics only a convenient abstraction, or a reality, or given the dynamics of the Higgs ocean only a premature misconception? Can't Space be a synergiometry of energies?
If thought is conceived as a >nonlinear resonance< in the hypermathematics of fuzzy logic; what is it resonance of? How far or near it is to Pantanjali's vrittis?
Physics has to cross the threshold between itself and the cognitive science to get a crack at the thought, though the finale is not within that intersectional cusp and philosopher Daniel Dennett has had only a partial - quiet a slim partial it is - glimpse of Consciousness in his Mind's I. Higgs ocean is only a small beginning and ... another time, another blogrite up.
eoi.
Wednesday, 30. November 2005, 10:02:09
Tsunami hit the Indian coastal waters in the twilight hours ... leaving behind in its wake ... death ... and ... horror. Yet, a tsunami in its cathedral dimensions has a single-pointed origin of beauty in a solitary wave: solition.
Tsunamis are formed when a strong seismic shock occurs on the ocean floor. The wave, only a few inches or feet of a topological dwarf, can travel without breaking up across the ocean for many thousands of miles. Tsunami's solition has a very has a very long wavelength, and it may take an hour or so for a complete wave to cross a particular point.
As tsunami enters the continental shelf, non-linear effects at our seabed prunes the wavelength but boosts its height. The outcome is awesome and majestic.
What was born as a soliton of a few inches/feet high, the tsunami looms into a "100-foot mountain of water" crashing into coasts. Hardly anytime for us to peer into the synergistic feedback loops of the >soliton< in its fractal ballet of sine waves.
A sine wave is the simplest form a wave or oscillation can take. Each sine wave is a hieroglyph per se characterized by its frequency or its number of vibrations each second. When sine waves add/pile up, they generate a complex shape. In water, waves of different frequencies travel at different speeds. Since, there is nothing to hold (rein in) these different frequencies together, the lump (morphic configuration) of the complex wave changes shape; its crestr peaks and overtakes the main body. The breaking up of waves into smaller disturbances and finally into >chaos< is known as disperson.
Waves suffer dispersion because in a linear world, individual sine waves are independent of each other.But waves that don't break-up owe its stability to non-linear interactions binding the individual sine waves together.
Instead of smoothly oscillating,water becoming increasingly fragmented, at a critical value, the sine waves gets coupled. As one sine wave tried to speed up and escape from the clutch of the solition, its interactions with the others hold it back.
A soliton wave, mile after mile, remain coupled by feedback. No sooner than one tries to pull away, the others push in and the group stays intact.
A soliton is born 'on the edge' - wherein the energy involution builds up in which the holomoving energy evolutes into a tsunami. If too much energy is involved in the initial interaction, the wave fragments into turbulence. If too little energy, then the wave dissipates. On the complementary side, non-linear interactions at critical values don't produce chaos; they produce spontaneous >self-organizing forms<.
When two soliton waves of different contours cross, there is no separation of one wave from
the other, yet two waves emerge intact, but, as the mind-dazzling scenario unfolds, the combined soliton separates so that the faster, higher wave travels on at its original rate of motion, leaving the other wave behind!
One befuddling question is: Could this indicate that there is a kind of memory in the non-linear couplings where the waves remember their former order?
Where do you look for the memory, if any?
Henry Yuen and Bruce Lake of TRW Defence and Space Systems Group observe that the surface of the ocean is >highly modulated< so that 'it actually contains a remembrance of all its structures'.
Ergo: Tsunamis are not 'fortutious accidents' but a >self-focussing or surfacing of the ocean's memory in the form of a soliton<. Tsunamis are horribly majestic with its own clues on the intricacy of Nature's interconnectedness.
eoi.
eoi.
Friday, 18. November 2005, 07:03:08
Manivakkam, the native of my paternal grandpa, is in the hilly regions of St.Thomas Mount off Madras.
My grandpa, recollected an amazing experience to which, he claimed, he was an eyewitness: anencounter that myrmecologists will scientifically denounce but still I have no reason to suspect my grandpa's claim.
One his his elder Uncles - a myrmecophilous gentleman - had cultivated the habit of feeding the small black ants - known in Tamil as 'swami erummbu' or 'Pillaiyaar erummbu' - God's ants/divine ants or Ants of Lord Ganesh in the Hindu tradition - in and around his house in Manivakkam. He used to take a cottonbag filled with pounded ricegrains, nuts, and sugary edibles and trek around the hilly terrain tracking the network of ant colonies.
Everyday, almost without fail, he fed these ants for several decades till Yama - the Lord of Death in Hindu mythology - booked a ticket for him.
On that fateful day, he breathed his last before feeding his ants.
Performing the basic rites, family members shrouded his body in white cloth and placed it for whoever interested in paying their respects to that departed soul. The atmosphere was naturally gloomy as the entire neighbourhood had gathered to pay homage to that gentleman who was considered to be generous not only to neighbours but also other creatures that looked upto him: stray animals and birds.
Yet, in those mournful moments, no one noticed the small black ants that were entering the house in long files, marching onto the body lying in state. Slowly, as more and more ants climbed atop the white cloth, the mourners not only noticed but got panicked at this rare 'invasive' sight.
"Their first instinct was to swipe the ants off. But I instructed them not to do so and asked them to wait and see what unfolded," recalled my grandpa. His voice, then and now, till he breathed his last, carried unquestioned weight in our large joint family.
In no time, the white shroud morphed into a black velvety drape of almost 1 to 2 inches thick. Every space of the shrouded dead body was covered with these tiny crawlers of Lord Ganesha!
All the visitors ensured, after my grandpa's instruction, that the marching ants were not disturbed. My grandpa, the sentinel-in-watch of this amazing spectacle, reminded how those humble ants were, perhaps, paying their last homage to this myrmecophilous gentleman in a thanksgiving who fed them for decades day-in and day-out.
No one could believe their eyes; but it was a reality that, in the words of my grandpa, "gave us a glimpse of the mysterious ways in which Nature functioned putting in place our egoistic claim to be the only six-sensed being on Earth".
After an hour, all the ants backed out of the house. It took almost two hours for all the ants to march out and my grandpa ensured that not a single ant was trapped inside the folds of the shroud.
The body was cremated later and the ashes dispersed but the spectacle remained etched in my grandpa's mind as a memoriam of the subtlety of the consciousness of Nature per se.
He had told this 'real story' quiet a few number of times, invariably when Lord Ganesha was feted during Vinaya Chaturththi.
Are ants capable of such behaviour ? I am curious to know the views of myrmecologists like Edward Wilson on the issue. My grandpa always claimed he was a witness to the event, and I have no reason to suspect his claim given his education and anglophilic tastes combined with the Hindu traditionality.
Now, I recollect this in the context of computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter's concept of sphexishness and antisphexishness. If the episode is true, the antisphexishness is total in ants only as good as humans in the of context of thanksgiving!
Anyhow, I have not corroborated the veracity of the historical occurrence of the event with any other living Manivakkam neighbours or with their memories yet. In fact, my grandpa's claim was backed up by his wife - my grandma.
I leave it at that till I take up one day the scientific nuance of consciousness per se.
eom.
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