The wonder of mortality

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/17/mediocre-poison-eaters-and-the-imperfection-of-evolution/

This is what I wrote on Google Plus about the article inked to above:

"The author maintains in a fascinating article that evolution is successful if the results are good enough, not perfect. The nice argument may well be the case, but the example, an oak tree which has not evolved an immunity to a specific disease, ignores the wondrous fact that in death there is more creation (the animals that live on decayed oak trees) and in fact, faster new creation sometimes. "

I hesitated to point out more, considering the forum, but in fact the situation the article discusses, is a great example of people ignoring the obvious. First -- the oaks-- if they lived forever, they would push everything else off the planet. Death, an aspect of the destructive flow, in fact is crucial to life, to the greater good, and minimally, what Jan Cox called "D" flow, can be said to stabilize the machinery -- steady the Magnus Machina, as he titled one book. 

The binary intellect must consider that things are isolated. In fact "cause and effect,"  takes a new meaning if you try to see beyond the rational, this or that. You could say that the way things interact laterally is as important to understand, as pulling out one thread, and understanding one sequence. The fact is everything interacts with everything, and specifying a single strand as embodying cause and effect, as necessary as this artificiality is, becomes misleading, if the abstraction is taken as more than a temporary tool. 

Widening your vision beyond either/or not only reduces silly statements like oak trees are an imperfect evolution, it allows perhaps a thought about the way things fit together, and what that could mean. To expand your scope to include more "both / and" situations, allows more insight into reality, 

You might even glimpse the way people think. 

From the news, an olds subject

A scrap from the newspapers, on the web of course---

"Last year, the Queen made a cameo on television as part of the London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony, appearing as herself as part of a James Bond sketch before a stunt-double jumped out of a helicopter."

What this bit made me think was how we are all, mostly, (unless we are involved in physical labor, or practising the how, of self-observation, (a la Gurdjieff and Jan Cox)) in a movie script, appearing as ourselves, and using a stunt double, over and over and....

Using a stunt double, is that not a nice picture of how at the ordinary level of attention, we both have a dream scene in our heads and also -- are the audience for ourselves -- for some part of a story?

The limitations of words

Contemplate the limitations of words if you can. This is a quote from the Daily Beast today, May 12, 2013.

quote

Nancy Ruiz, the mother of kidnapping victim Gina DeJesus, called her reunion with her daughter "the best Mother's Day gift I could ever have" 

end quote.

and for the mothers

If we can glimpse that words are just the foam on the tide, then the following might make sense:

The Ten Commandments--- in an era when man was sparse, speaking speciesously ----- and his linguistic talents fresh --- it made sense to carve rules in stone and expect their --- gravity to be adored---, pondered and used as rules for living.

The specifics, are still guidelines. My point is not that we stop honoring our mother and father, or any other shalts, ballots,or shalt nots.

But that, keeping in mind the fallacious either/or nature of language---

we glimpse some new guidelines that are only superficially contradictory. 

Perhaps evil was once unambiguous,for good reasons, and say, abortion for instance, might even threaten the whole of mankind, if it became fashionable. 

But I wonder if the focus of what is evil, now, might not be shifting. And now, the unambiguous evil, might be more what threatens the whole planet. Like some pesticides. 

If I am correct, such unambiguity -- is there a better word --- will always be in a shifting state, but a shift which is imperceptible within one lifetime. And so there will come a time when planet threatening issues will change again. 

Jan Cox would have pointed out that Life is not going to let anything too drastic happen anyway. Probably.