con(sciousness —knowing(with another

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Plants don’t get enough credit.

They move. You know this. Your houseplant salutes the sun each morning. At night, it returns to centre. You probably don’t think much of it. This is simply what plants do: Get light. Photosynthesize. Make food. Live.

But what about all the signs of plant intelligence that have been observed.

Under poor soil conditions, the pea seems to be able to assess risk. The sensitive plant can make memories and learn to stop recoiling if you mess with it enough. The Venus fly trap appears to count when insects trigger its trap. And plants can communicate with one another and with caterpillars.

Now, a study published recently in Annals of Botany has shown that plants can be frozen in place with a range of anesthetics, including the types that are used when you undergo surgery. Insights gleaned from the study may help doctors better understand the variety of anesthetics used in surgeries. But the research also highlights that plants are complex organisms, perhaps less different from animals than is often assumed.

The researchers trapped pea plants in glass chambers with ether, soaked roots of the sensitive plant and seedlings of garden cress in lidocaine and even measured the electrical activity of a Venus fly trap’s cells. An hour or so later the plants became unresponsive. The seedlings stayed dormant. And the Venus fly trap didn’t react to a stimulus similar to a bug crawling across its maw. Its cells stopped firing.

When the dope wore off, the plants returned to life, as if something had hit pause — almost like they were regaining consciousness, something we typically don’t think they possess. It’s all so animal-like.

“How organisms are perceiving the environment or responding or adapting are based on some very similar principles,” Dr. Baluska said.

Researchers already knew that anesthetics with different chemical structures or elements all seem to halt pain, consciousness or activity in plants and animals — even bacteria. But how they render us unconscious or how so many different kinds physically act on the human nervous system still elude us after more than a century of use. Some bind to receptors to turn off activity. But this can’t explain them all.

Under anesthetics, the physical properties of cell membranes change, becoming more flexible. Apply pressure to the cells, this effect is reversed and the anesthetic wears off. This suggests that something simple, like what is physically happening to a cell’s membrane, may be the common denominator explaining anesthetics’ effects across the plant and animal kingdoms, Dr. Baluska and colleagues suggest.

In some plant root cells under anesthesia, Dr. Baluska and his colleagues found that membranes were having trouble doing what they normally do, recycling bits of cellular material by transporting it in and out of cells.

Dr. Baluska can’t say what was altering membrane function in the plants, but membranes are important for transferring messages via electricity from one cell to another, messages that would lead to action or movement.

The electrical activity that moves across neurons is thought by some scientists to contribute to human consciousness. If electrical activity is being disrupted by anesthetic in plants, too, causing them to “lose consciousness,” does that mean, in some way, that they are conscious?

“No one can answer this because you cannot ask them,” said Dr. Baluska.

Even so, perhaps we’re more alike, us and plants, than we think.


—JoAnna Klein

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nytimes.com

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this is what I believe

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This is what I believe: That I am I.

That my soul is a dark forest.

That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.

That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.

That I must have the courage to let them come and go.


—D. H. Lawrence

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I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness,

will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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Someone put
You on a slave block
And the unreal bought
You. Now I keep coming to your owner
Saying
"This one is mine."

You often overhear us talking
And this can make your heart leap
With excitement.
Don't worry,
I will not let sadness
Possess you.

I will gladly borrow all the gold
I need
To get you
Back.


—Hafiz

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Photo Beth Moon,

Ancient Trees: Portraits Of Time 

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consolation

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The tiny particles which form the vast universe are not tiny at all.
Neither is the vast universe vast.

These are notions of the mind, which is like a knife,
always chipping away at the Tao,
trying to render it graspable and manageable.

But that which is beyond form is ungraspable, and
that which is beyond knowing is unmanageable.

There is, however, this consolation:
She who lets go of the knife will find the Tao at her
fingertips.


—Lao Tzu
Hua Hu Ching

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the wings

Fumihiko Hirai

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we are occasional like that

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We are not one with this world. We are not
the complexity our body is, nor the summer air
idling in the big maple without purpose.
We are a shape the wind makes in these leaves
as it passes through. We are not the wood
any more than the fire, but the heat which is a marriage
between the two. We are certainly not the lake
nor the fish in it, but the something that is
pleased by them. We are the stillness when
a mighty Mediterranean noon subtracts even the voices of
insects by the broken farmhouse. We are evident
when the orchestra plays, and yet are not part
of the strings or brass. Like the song that exists
only in the singing, and is not the singer.
God does not live among the church bells
but is briefly resident there. We are occasional
like that. A lifetime of easy happiness mixed
with pain and loss, trying always to name and hold
on to the enterprise under way in our chest.
Reality is not what we marry as a feeling. It is what
walks up the dirt path, through the excessive heat
and giant sky, the sea stretching away.
He continues past the nunnery to the old villa
where he will sit on the terrace with her, their sides
touching. In the quiet that is the music of that place,
which is the difference between silence and windlessness.


—Jack Gilbert
Music Is In The Piano Only When It Is Played

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whisper to your(self 

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listen

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Listen for presences inside poems, let them take you where they will

Follow these private hints and never leave the premises

—Rumi

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fons vitae

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in praise of mortality, excerpt

  

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Bless the spirit that makes connections,
for truly we live in what we imagine.
Clocks move along side our real life
with steps that are ever the same.

Though we do not know our exact location,
we are held in place by what links us.
Across trackless distances
antennas sense each other.

Pure attention, the essence of the powers!
Distracted by each day's doing,
how can we hear the signals?

Even as the farmer labors
there where the seed turns into summer,
it is not his work. It is Earth who gives.

—Rainer Maria Rilke 
Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, XII
Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy version

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where two or more are gathered

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Those doing soul work, who want the searing truth more than solace or applause, know each other right away.

Those who want something else turn and take a seat in another room.

Soul-makers find each other’s company.


—Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

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The consciousness in you and the consciousness in me,
apparently two, really one, seeks unity and that is love.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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wonder(ful

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Once the realization is accepted that
even between the closest human beings infinite
distances continue to exist, a wonderful living
side by side can grow up,

if they succeed in loving the
distance between them which makes it
possible for each to see the other
whole against the sky.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

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please bring your heart near me

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I know the way you can get
If you have not had a drink from Love's
Hands.

That is why all the Great Ones speak of
The vital need
To keep remembering the Beloved,
So you will come to know and see Him
As being so Playful
And Wanting,
Just Wanting to help.

That is why Hafiz says:
Bring your cup near me,
For I am a Sweet Old Vagabond
With an Infinite Leaking Barrel
Of Light and Laughter and Truth
that the Beloved has tied to my back.

Dear one,
Indeed, please bring your heart near me.
For all I care about
Is quenching your thirst for freedom!

All a Sane man can ever care about
Is giving Love.



—Hafiz

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Run, my dear,
from anything that may not strengthen
your precious budding wings,

Run like hell, my dear,
from anyone likely to put a sharp knife
into the sacred, tender vision
of your beautiful heart.

We have a duty to befriend
those aspects of obedience
that stand outside of our house
and shout to our reason
"oh please, oh please
come out and play!"

For we have not come here to take prisoners,
or to confine our wondrous spirits,
But to experience ever and ever more deeply
our divine courage, freedom,
and Light.


—Hafiz

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question

 

  

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Why is the physical world experienced as external and the mental world experienced as internal?

[...] The physical world is res extensa, body with extension, and therefore subject to division. In other words, the physical world is distinguished by the division of micro and macro, the latter being conglomerates of the micro.

In the physical world, we do not have direct conscious access to the micro. We see the micro only with the amplifying help of the macro, the measuring-aid apparatuses. But there is a reward. Once the measurement is made and a particular pointer reading of the measurement apparatus has been chosen out of the myriad macro possibilities, the pointer does not run away, jumping on the train of quantum uncertainty. Its possibility waves are very sluggish, almost to the point of certainty, a certainty that can be shared by many observers. As a result, physical objects are experienced as parts of a shared reality, an external reality in awareness.

But the mind, res cogitans, is without extension, it is one thing. It is like the infinite medium of the physicist in which there can be waves, and thoughts are such waves. 

However there is no micro/macro distinction in the mental world. So we experience thoughts directly without the intermediary of amplifying apparatuses, but we pay a price. One price is that one person's experiencing a thought object effects the thought object due to the uncertainty principal, so that it is impossible (normally) for another person to experience the same thought object in an identical manner. Thoughts are private, thus experienced in awareness as internal.

The other price for the lack of micro/macro distinction in the realm of thought is that it is impossible to develop a tangled-heirarchical quantum-measurement apparatus. So mind can exist independent of the brain, but its movements can be registered and experienced in consciousness only when correlated with a physical brain.


—Amit Goswami
Quantum Doctor

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The Mouth of Krishna

Albarran Cabrera

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return with the bliss

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All being, it seemed, was built on opposites, on division. Man or woman, vagabond or citizen, lover or thinker — no breath could both be in and out, none could be man and wife, free and yet orderly, knowing the urge of life and the joy of intellect. Always the one paid for the other, though each was equally precious and essential.


—Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)
Narcissus and Goldmund

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just so the world

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The mind is at every stage a theater of simultaneous possibilities. 

Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention.

The highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler material, and so on. The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone.

In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest. Just so the world of each of us, how so ever different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently.

We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply removing portions of the given stuff.

Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! Your world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttlefish, or crab!


—William James
The Principles of Psychology

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pi

 

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The admirable number pi:

three point one four one.

All the following digits are also initial,

five nine two because it never ends.

It can’t be comprehended six five three five at a glance,

eight nine by calculation,

seven nine or imagination,

not even three two three eight by wit, that is, by comparison

four six to anything else

two six four three in the world.

The longest snake on earth calls it quits at about forty feet.

Likewise, snakes of myth and legend, though they may hold out a bit longer.

The pageant of digits comprising the number pi

doesn’t stop at the page’s edge.

It goes on across the table, through the air,

over a wall, a leaf, a bird’s nest, clouds, straight into the sky,

through all the bottomless, bloated heavens.

Oh how brief — a mouse tail, a pigtail — is the tail of a comet!

How feeble the star’s ray, bent by bumping up against space!

While here we have two three fifteen three hundred nineteen

my phone number your shirt size the year

nineteen hundred and seventy-three the sixth floor

the number of inhabitants sixty-five cents

hip measurement two fingers a charade, a code,

in which we find hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert

alongside ladies and gentlemen, no cause for alarm,

as well as heaven and earth shall pass away,

but not the number pi, oh no, nothing doing,

it keeps right on with its rather remarkable five,

its uncommonly fine eight,

its far from final seven,

nudging, always nudging a sluggish eternity

to continue.


—Wisława Szymborska

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hummingbird nest image

 

 

The definition of prayer is paying careful and concentrated attention to something other than your own constructions. —W. H. Auden

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A man may go into the field and say his prayer and be aware of God, or, he may be in Church and be aware of God; but, if he is more aware of Him because he is in a quiet place, that is his own deficiency and not due to God, Who is alike present in all things and places, and is willing to give Himself everywhere so far as lies in Him.

He knows God rightly who knows Him everywhere.


—Meister Eckhart

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Sit and be still

until in the time

of no rain you hear

beneath the dry wind's

commotion in the trees

the sound of flowing

water among the rocks,

a stream unheard before,

and you are where

breathing is prayer.


—Wendell Berry

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an embarrassment

 

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“Do you want to ask the blessing?”

“No. If you do, go ahead.”

He went ahead: his prayer dressed up

in Sunday clothes rose a few feet

and dropped with a soft thump.

If a lonely soul did ever cry out

in company its true outcry to God,

it would be as though at a sedate party

a man suddenly removed his clothes

and took his wife passionately into his arms.


—Wendell Berry

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pray(er

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Four times a day—on rising, at noon, late afternoon, and before going to bed—Agnes and Father Damien became that one person who addressed the unknown. The priest stopped what he was doing, cast himself down, made himself transparent, broke himself open. That is, prayed.

He prayed that the seething factions merge and dissolve their hatred. He prayed, uneasily, for the conversion of Nanapush, then prayed for his own enlightenment in case converting Nanapush was a mistake. Agnes asked for a cheerful spirit and that her dangerous longings cease. She asked for answers, and for the spirit of the language to enter her heart. 

Agnes’s struggle with the Ojibwe language, the influence of it, had an effect on her prayers. For she preferred the Ojibwe word for praying, anama’ay, with its sense of a great motion upward. She began to address the trinity as four and to include the spirit of each direction—those who sat at the four corners of the earth. Wherever she prayed, she made of herself a temporary center of those directions. There, she allowed herself to fall apart.

Disintegrated into pieces of creation, which God might pick up and turn curiously this way and that to catch the light. What a relief it was, for those moments, to be nothing, a smashed thing, and to have no thought or expectation. Whether God picked up the fragments and stuck them back together, or casually swept them aside was of no consequence either to Agnes or Father Damien.  

She rose, once she was finished, rubbed her eyes like a child, went on in Father Damien’s skin. Her loneliness sometimes seemed a thing not of this world, but a loneliness only that mysterious being, solitary and unique, could understand.


—Louise Erdrich
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

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We have weaved our past into the present, a rhythmic pattern of long cotton strings pressing in and pulling out across the loom. It thunders through our existence like wild horses run across the desert. No matter how far we go, what kind of car we drive, how much money we make, how many degrees we pile up behind our name, we are still here. 

We are here, a tiny piece of woven stories, like pixels in a photo or molecules of mist in a rainbow. We are here, together on the same earth. It is important to notice one another smile, hug, dance, and sing together while our piece of thread is being woven into a bigger picture of a peaceful future.


—Tu Bears

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the only true statement

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'I do not know’ is the only true statement the mind can make.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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as light pours like rain

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Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?

Who finds us here circling, bewitched, like atoms?

—Rumi

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God
pours light
into every cup,
quenching darkness.

The proudly pious
stuff their cups with parchment
and critique the taste of ink
while God pours light

and the trees lift their limbs
without worry of redemption,
every blossom a chalice.

Hafiz, seduce those withered souls
with words that wet their parched lips

as light
pours like rain
into every empty cup
set adrift on the Infinite Ocean.


—Hafiz

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please bring your heart near me

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We have subtle subconscious faculties we are not using. Beyond the limited analytic intellect is a vast realm of mind that includes psychic and extrasensory abilities; intuition; wisdom; a sense of unity; aesthetic, qualitative and creative faculties; and image-forming and symbolic capacities.

Though these faculties are many, we give them a single name with some justification for they are working best when they are in concert. They comprise a mind, moreover, in spontaneous connection to the cosmic mind.

This total mind we call ‘heart.‘


—Kabir Helminski

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I know the way you can get
When you have not had a drink of Love:
Your face hardens,
Your sweet muscles cramp.

Children become concerned
About a strange look that appears in your eyes
Which even begins to worry your own mirror
And nose.

Squirrels and birds sense your sadness
And call an important conference in a tall tree.
They decide which secret code to chant
To help your mind and soul.

Even angels fear that brand of madness
That arrays itself against the world
And throws sharp stones and spears into
The innocent
And into one's self.

O I know the way you can get
If you have not been drinking Love:

You might rip apart
Every sentence your friends and teachers say,
looking for hidden clauses.

You might weigh every word on a scale
Like a dead fish.
You might pull out a ruler to measure
From every angle in your darkness
The beautiful dimensions of a heart you once
Trusted.

I know the way you can get
If you have not had a drink from Love's
Hands.

That is why all the Great Ones speak of
The vital need
To keep remembering the Beloved,
So you will come to know and see Him
As being so Playful
And Wanting,
Just Wanting to help.

That is why Hafiz says:
Bring your cup near me,
For I am a Sweet Old Vagabond
With an Infinite Leaking Barrel
Of Light and Laughter and truth
that the Beloved has tied to my back.

Dear one,
Indeed, please bring your heart near me.
For all I care about
Is quenching your thirst for freedom!

All a Sane man can ever care about
Is giving Love.


—Hafiz

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