A Scientist Goes to an Ashram for a Personal Retreat – Part 2

Part 1 of “A Scientist Goes to an Ashram for a Personal Retreat” can be found here:

(Note: I do not use the real names of people, nor do I identify the specific Ashram. I changed a few details. The purpose is to protect the privacy of the individuals. Readers who are familiar with this Ashram will probably recognize it.)

I Make Contact

My first few days at the Ashram were filled with a good deal of uncertainty. Where do I sit in the dining hall? Will I violate some standard of etiquette among people pursuing a serious religious practice? What if I say hello to someone who is spending time in silence? I know I'm going to get a stern look if I upset someone's spiritual practice. My predilection is to do nothing, say nothing, and hope I do not trip over my own feet with a monastic faux pas.

The first evening I walked up to the building that housed the dining hall to make sure I was there at the start of the dinner period. The building is like a visitor center, with a small shop selling books, CDs, DVDs, gifts, and items of religious significance. It also houses the media center. I looked in through the door to the dining area and into a large common area. It's very much like a multipurpose room in a small high school: auditorium, lecture stage, gym, and dining. There was a decent size commercial kitchen , off to one side. Tables were set up for a buffet service. Tables and chairs were arranged around the auditorium. There was a sound proof control room in a corner opposite the stage, and was part of the media center. I could see an access to a patio for eating outside. This is January, so we stay inside. I walked over to the food and toured around the two buffet tables. I was alone and didn't know if I should begin eating or not. I returned to the hall outside the dining area. There were a few people there but no one seemed to organizing themselves for dinner. I went back into the dining room and saw a lone gentleman filling up a plate. I started doing the same. Then it happened. I made my first breach of monastic etiquette. The gentleman politely told me I had to wait for the gong to be sounded, enter with the others, and wait again for a communal prayer to begin the mealtime. He had to be elsewhere and was taking a plate of food so he could make his other appointment.

OK, that wasn't too embarrassing. After a few more minutes about a dozen or two people gathered. An aproned cook opened the door, and sounded a small hand held gong. We filed in and stood together around the food. Someone started a Sanskrit prayer that was sung by everyone. The feeling they projected was communal, happy, relaxed. and enjoying their prayer as a prelude to eating. I was feeling more comfortable. With the end of the singing, the group recited a prayer, in English, the words being in a large framed poster on the wall. Eventually, I learned to follow and recite the prayer, along with a shout of “Ji!” in response to another incantation. It was like an affirmation, an “Amen” if you will, that ended the prayers and gave everyone permission to “dig in.” I was pleasantly surprised at the variety and presentation of the vegan food. In addition to recognizable salad items like greens, tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots, there were all sorts of middle eastern and Indian dishes. Of course there was lots of tofu cooked this way and that way. It all looked very good and it was great tasting, as well.

Not knowing where to sit, I went to a table further out from the food, facing back toward the food and the other diners, and started to enjoy my dinner. I was recognized for what I was, a brand new visitor who didn't know up from down. A woman monastic, Swami Learananda, came over and invited me to sit with her and several others. I met a couple of monastics and visitors like myself. The visitors tended to be friends of the Ashram who come periodically for the spiritual practice and experience. A few were newbies like myself who were referred by others. Swami Learananda said I looked familiar and that we met here before. I told her she looked familiar, and that I met her more than fifteen years before when visiting Giri and Yukteswar. “Of course,” she said. Learananda was wonderful to talk to and made me feel comfortable, relaxed, and very much at ease. She was raving about the homemade bread and organic homemade jam, so I had to try it. It was wonderful. For a few moments I was considering applying for life long study as a Swami-in-training just for daily access to that homemade bread and jam. Although I enjoyed every bit of the plentiful food, I was afraid I would be very hungry between meals. At home I'm frequently hungry between meals, and tend to nosh a lot. Never, not once, did I feel hungry between meals at the Ashram.

Read more »



The Bitter Taste of Life

Karela-thumb109408 By Aditya Dev Sood

The other evening, Behenji Bua invited us over for dinner, especially to try her new karela dish. It was sublime, setting off taste sensations all round the apperceptive palate. The slightest sweetness, a balanced coping of salt and sour, fullness and complexity, all built around the fundamental bitterness of bitter-gourd, as karela is unfortunately called in English. I’d never liked karela as a child, and adults around me seemed to understand that – it was especially prepared, I recall, for Behenji’s husband, and for other vegetarian connoisseurs in the family, and I don’t think any of us children were even especially encouraged to eat our share of it. It was not a delicacy, but an acquired, perhaps adult taste. Nowadays, I’m sure it is my favorite vegetable, and I’m sure my mindbody and aesthetic sensibility would be poorer for not consuming it at least twice a week.

What is it about bitterness, that allows it to become a part of one’s aesthetic appetite later in life, having been the opposite of pleasure in one’s youth? From when I was a child, I'd always loved raw mango, tamarind, every kind of chat, and even those spicy-salted prunes putatively from Afghanistan. But only recently have I begun to drink Campari-soda by choice, enjoy green vegetables of all kinds, including arugula, kale, colacasia, and seek out those super-hoppy beers that can sting my senses with a burst of pure firstness, as if I were seventeen again, experiencing sushi and wasabi for the first time, learning that warm sake can fumigate the nasal cavity just as wasabi can inflame it. My taste for bitterness is, perhaps, partly founded in the search for novelty, but there is also something else, a transformation of the body's biochemistry in early-middle age, to a new and shifted harmonics of taste.

Over a couple of Christoffels at Bangalore's only Jazz bar a few days ago, I asked my friend Gabriel to help me think about bitterness.

Read more »

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Under the Radar with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Owen Edwards in Smithsonian Magazine:

Unmanned-aerial-vehicle-Dragon-Eye-388 At the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum (NASM), a display of six unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) demonstrates what happens when the little airplanes of my childhood get serious. Take the five-pound, 45-inch wingspan AeroVironment RQ-14A “Dragon Eye.” Launched by hand, or with a bungee cord, the tiny scout plane is controlled by GPS coordinates entered into its guidance system with a standard laptop computer. Once aloft on its mission—to transmit video images of territory lying ahead of a marine infantry or transport unit—the little scout is completely autonomous.

“The video is received in special eyeglasses worn by one of the two marines who operate the plane,” says NASM curator Dik Daso. “Taking the pilot out of the plane [in reconnaissance missions] has been a concern for a long time,” says Daso, a former Air Force reconnaissance pilot. “All sorts of cosmic stuff can be done when the person is out of the vehicle. You can design things that are really stealthy.”

The pilotless Dragon Eye keeps marines from having to move into what may be hostile territory without knowing what's ahead. Two tiny video cameras in the nose cone—one positioned to look down, the other to look to the side—give an accurate view of what's on the ground, precise enough for mortar fire to be directed at perceived threats.

More here.

hornby on recommending

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It can happen anywhere: a dinner table, a pub, a bus queue, a classroom, a bookshop. You strike up a conversation with someone you don’t know, and you’re getting on OK, and then suddenly, without warning, you hear the five words that mean the relationship has no future beyond the time it takes to say them: “I think you’ll like it.” This phrase is presumptuous enough when used to refer to, say, a crisp flavour; if, however, you happen to be talking about books or films or music, then it is completely unforgivable, a social solecism on a par with bottom-pinching. You think I’ll like it, do you? Well, it has taken me more than 50 years to get anywhere near an understanding of what I think I might like, and even then I get it wrong half the time, so what chance have you got? Every now and again I meet someone who is able to make shrewd and thoughtful recommendations within the first five years of our acquaintance but for the most part the people that I listen to I’ve known for a couple of decades, a good chunk of which has been spent talking about the things we love and hate.

more from The Times Online here.

unbounded, infinite, eternal, immutable, immortal

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Up a steep, strange, snake of a street and sheer, straight steps is a set of concrete buildings clinging onto the side of the Hollywood Hills. In an attempt to penetrate the bunker (I have an appointment, after all) I mistakenly walk into an empty recording studio, where a state-of-the-art mixing table spans several metres and a blank cinema screen covers a wall in front of it. Beyond this, the place is all skylights and high slit windows – a bright but viewless series of rooms with severe angles and unpredictable shifts, blind corners around which are an empty kitchen or an empty meeting room with a single lightbulb drawn in chalk on a blackboard. Once inside, its geography is impossible to decipher. I have come to meet David Lynch, who lives, works and meditates here – the bunker includes offices, an outdoor painting studio and a home.

more from The Guardian here.

Why 88 Arab homes received eviction notices

Ilene R. Prusher in the Christian Science Monitor:

OSILWAN_P1 Israel plans to demolish 88 homes in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem, to make way for a new archaeological park, adding new fuel the slow-burning dispute over Jerusalem.

A variety of neighborhood activists, Muslim leaders in Jerusalem, and even figures from the Palestinian Authority (PA) held a press conference Wednesday, saying that Israel was trying to minimize the Arab presence in this city claimed by both Palestinians and Jews as their capital. They say such a move amounts to ethnic cleansing.

“They have made a decision to clear out 88 houses, and with about three families living in each of these houses, we're looking at the eviction of about 1,500 people. But people in Silwan are clinging to their land and will not leave, despite the eviction orders,” says Adnan Husseini, who is PA President Mahmoud Abbas's adviser on Jerusalem Affairs.

More here.

Sunday Poem

Some Final Words
Billy Collins

I cannot leave you without saying this:
the past is nothing.,
a nonmemory, a phantom,
a soundproof closet in which Johann Strauss
is composing another waltz no one can hear.

It is a fabrication, best forgotten,
a wellspring of sorrow
that waters a field of bitter vegetation.

Leave it behind.
Take your head out of your hands
and arise from the couch of melancholy
where the window-light falls against your face
and the sun rides across the autumn sky,
steely behind the bare trees,
glorious as the high stains of violins.

But forget Strauss.
And forget his younger brother,
the poor bastard who was killed in a fall
from a podium while conducting a symphony.

Forget the past,
forget the stunned audience on its feet,
the absurdity of their formal clothes
in the face of sudden death,
forget their collective gasp,
the murmur and huddle over the body,
the creaking of the lowered curtain.

Forget Strauss
with that encore look in his eye
and his tiresome industry:
more than five hundred finished compositions!
He even wrote a polka for his mother.
That alone is enough to make me flee the past,
evacuate its temples,
and walk alone under the stars
down these dark paths strewn with acorns,
feeling nothing but the crisp October air,
the swing of my arms
and the rhythm of my stepping—
a man of the present who has forgotten
every composer, every great battle,
just me,
a thin reed blowing in the night.

M.I.A. and the bogey of genocide in Sri Lanka

Muttukrishna Sarvananthan in Sri Lanka's Sunday Leader:

ScreenHunter_01 Mar. 01 14.46 Most of what M.I.A. said about the civil war in Sri Lanka during the course of the aforementioned interview was misinformation at best, blatant lies at worse, either due to ignorance or deceit. “It is ironic that I am the only Tamil, turned out to be the only voice for the Tamil people in the Western media” thundered M.I.A., a claim that smacks of self indulgence and echoes the claim of the LTTE that it is the sole representative of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka. A claim accepted by very few Tamils in Sri Lanka or in the diasporas.

“There is a genocide going on, systematic genocide since 1983, Tamils being 20 percent of the population getting wiped out. 350,000 stuck in the battle zone getting wiped out. There are 4,000 Tamil Tiger soldiers but the Sri Lankan government, a million soldiers big, wants to wipe out the whole Tamil population,” claims the self-appointed spokesperson and saviour of the Tamils in Sri Lanka.

I can forgive M.I.A. for her lack of understanding of the meaning of 'genocide' because she is not educated enough to understand such terms. I can refer her to an elaborate recent interview with Dr. Franklin Lamb by International Lawyers Without Borders. According to a statement issued by the United Nations on February 16, 2009, the LTTE is abusing Tamil civilians in the conflict zone as a human shield and shooting and killing civilians attempting to flee the conflict zone.

The UN also highlighted the fact that children under the age of 14 are forcibly recruited by the LTTE to fight this futile war. Is not the sacrifice of the Tamil children for a lost cause, a genocide of the next generation of the Tamil community?

More here.

A fine pickle

Salman Rushdie in The Guardian:

Slumdog460 Adaptation, the process by which one thing develops into another thing, by which one shape or form changes into a different form, is a commonplace artistic activity. Books are turned into plays and films all the time, plays are turned into movies and also sometimes into musicals, movies are turned into Broadway shows and even, by the ugly method known as “novelisation”, into books as well. We live in a world of such transformations and metamorphoses. Good movies – Lolita, The Pink Panther – are remade as bad movies; bad movies – The Incredible Hulk, Deep Throat – are remade as even worse movies; British TV comedy series are turned into American TV comedy series, so that The Office becomes a different The Office, and Ricky Gervais turns into Steve Carell, just as, long ago, the British working-class racist Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part turned into the American blue-collar bigot Archie Bunker in All In the Family. British reality programmes are adapted to suit American audiences as well; Pop Idol becomes American Idol when it crosses the Atlantic, Strictly Come Dancing becomes Dancing With the Stars – a programme which, it may interest you to know, invited me to appear on it last season, an invitation I declined.

More here.

Could Living in a Mentally Enriching Environment Change Your Genes?

From Scientific American:

Rat Giraffes’ long necks are perfectly suited to harvesting tender leaves beyond the reach of other herbivores. Pondering the genesis of this phenomenon, two giants of modern biology, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Charles Darwin, arrived at remarkably different hypotheses. Lamarck believed that constant stretching of the neck somehow stimulated its growth. The giraffe would then pass along this new trait to its offspring. In effect, this newer, longer neck was a direct result of a giraffe’s interaction with its environment. By contrast, Darwin’s theory posited that traits evolve as part of a random, gradual process. The giraffes that happened to have been born with longer necks thanks to a random genetic mutation were better fed and thus healthier than their shorter-necked counterparts, making them more likely to live long enough to breed and pass on this trait. Because this mutation conferred a specific advantage to long-necked giraffes that aided their survival, the trait was preserved in future generations.

Lamarckian theories about the influence of the environment were largely abandoned after scientists discovered that heritable traits are carried on the genes encoded by our DNA. A recent study, however, published by neuroscientists Junko A. Arai, Shaomin Li and colleagues at Tufts University, shows that not only does the environment an animal is reared in have marked effects on its ability to learn and remember, but also that these effects are inherited. The study suggests that we are not the mere sum of our genes: what we do can make a difference.

More here.

Saturday, February 28, 2009

x-phi

David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton in Prospect:

ScreenHunter_02 Feb. 28 23.40 The caricature of a philosopher is of an otherworldly professor sitting in a comfy armchair in an Oxbridge college, speculating on the nature of reality using only his or her intellect and a few books. This has some basis in reality. Chemistry requires test tubes, history needs documents. In recent years, the main tool of the philosopher has been grey matter. The subject’s evolution can be painfully slow, tiptoeing forward from footnote to footnote. But not always. Every so often a new movement overturns the orthodoxies of received opinion. We might just be entering one of those phases.

A dynamic new school of thought is emerging that wants to kick down the walls of recent philosophy and place experimentation back at its centre. It has a name to delight an advertising executive: x-phi. It has blogs and books devoted to it, and boasts an expanding body of researchers in elite universities. It even has an icon: an armchair in flames. If philosophy ever can be, x-phi is trendy. But, increasingly, it is also attracting hostility.

More here.

A more perfect union: Barack Obama’s Speech on Race

From The New York Times:

Barack-obama-2 “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk – to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign – to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.

More here.

Scientists Model Words As Entangled Quantum States In Our Minds

Words Lisa Zyga in physorg.com (via polymeme):

Research has shown that words are stored in our memories not as isolated entities but as part of a network of related words. This explains why seeing or hearing a word activates words related to it through prior experiences. In trying to understand these connections, scientists visualize a map of links among words called the mental lexicon that shows how words in a vocabulary are interconnected through other words.

However, it’s not clear just how this word association network works. For instance, does word association spread like a wave through a fixed network, weakening with conceptual distance, as suggested by the “Spreading Activation” model? Or does a word activate every other associated word simultaneously, as suggested in a model called “Spooky Activation at a Distance”?

Although these two explanations appear to be mutually exclusive, a recent study reveals a connection between the explanations by making one novel assumption: that words can become entangled in the human mental lexicon. In the study, researchers from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia and the University of South Florida in the US have investigated the quantum nature of word associations and presented a simplified quantum model of a mental lexicon.

Stephen Daldry’s The Reader

Alan Stone in the Boston Review:

The power of The Reader, however, is that it is psychologically believable. Schlink’s book is written in short chapters; each offers at least one telling psychological insight about dreams, about memory, about the disconnect between what I do and what I am. Schlink subtly raises the vexing and intriguing problem of responsibility and agency early in the novel. Michael says:

I think, I reach a conclusion, I turn the conclusion into a decision, and then I discover that acting on the decision is something else entirely, and that doing so may proceed from the decision, but then again it may not. Often enough in my life I have done things I had not decided to do.

One of the great virtues of literature is that it conveys a kind of truth about the human condition, and that truth is what Schlink gives us.

The line between the intention and the action is deeply problematic when we think about our own lives. Explaining radically evil behavior in others, we would like to believe the connection is clearer; the evil–doers are monstrous people. Hannah Arendt refuted that claim, inventing the phrase the “banality of evil” in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Adolf Eichmann, the man directly responsible for the destruction of European Jewry, was portrayed in Israel at his trial as a monster. But Arendt could find no connection between who he was and the evil he did. Her account might suggest Michel Foucault’s general thesis that evil has gone out of our world and sickness has come into it. But it should be noted that Arendt also concluded that Eichmann was not sick. She found nothing, not even madness, to connect the person and his heinous acts.

Afghan treasures give peek into history

From the Houston Chronicle:

260xStory Simultaneously inspiring and heartbreaking, “Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul,” opens Sunday at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Beautiful, priceless works of art illuminate a rich, historic mosaic of cultures, civilizations and trade along the fabled Silk Road of Central Asia — a far cry from the war-torn, Taliban-ravaged Afghanistan of today.

Many of the objects on view are literally “hidden treasures.” They were thought to have been lost, stolen or destroyed during the country’s recent years of strife and turmoil.

In 1988, as the 10-year Soviet occupation was ending and civil violence was escalating, museum staff were able to spirit away several boxes of the most valuable treasures, including the “Bactrian Hoard,” more than 20,000 mostly gold artifacts that few had ever seen. No one was sure how or even if the treasures had survived.

It was a joyous occasion when, in 2003, Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced that the treasures were intact and had been located.

Fredrik Hiebert, the National Geographic curator of the show, who is a specialist in ancient Silk Road sites, said he was invited to take part, several months later, in the opening of the boxes. “I gasped,” he said. “I knew exactly what they were, but I never thought I’d get to see them.”

More here.

…and a little more updike

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John Updike filled his 50 years of writing with probably seven or eight normal writing careers. He did so by fusing two artistic virtues that rarely meet in the same person: a frisky, easy, improvisational energy and a rigorous, workaday discipline. He was both the ant and the grasshopper, accountant and poet, Trollope and Rimbaud. His solution to the daily crisis of inspiration was simply not to have it: He wrote steadily, with very little angst, three pages a day, five days a week. Along the way, he mastered pretty much every genre humans have seen fit to invent, including such comparatively rare forms as the self-interview via a fictional alter ego, the book review in the style of the book under review, and the sonnet about one’s own feces (“a flawless coil, / unbroken, in the bowl”). The resulting body of work is so large and thoroughly lauded, the achievements by now so familiar—the casual erudition, the freakish powers of micro-observation, the pioneering description of once-neglected middle-class hobbies such as adultery and divorce—that it can be hard, today, to see any of it fresh. His productivity itself was intimidating: that never-ending series of series (Bech, Rabbit, Eastwick) and collection of collections. The prospect of dipping into his work sometimes feels like going for a day hike on Mount Everest.

more from NY Magazine here.