Evocative description of the Buddha

Quoted from an Aeon article :

An important text in the collection is the Muni Sutta (‘Discourse on the Silent Sage’), almost certainly known to the Indian emperor Aśoka (who reigned c268-232 BCE) as the Muni-gāthā (‘Verses on the Silent Sage’), and so in its extant form dating to the 4th century BCE, not very long after Alexander the Great’s Indian campaign (c326 BCE). In this text, the Buddha describes the sage as a radical outsider:

Danger is born from intimacy, dust arises from the home. Without home, without acquaintance: just this is the vision of a sage.

Avoiding the enveloping ‘dust’ of society, the sage remains aloof from worldly values, ‘not trembling amid blame or praise, like a lion not shaking at sounds … like a lotus not smeared by water’. Focusing his attention instead on the quest to cultivate deep states of meditation in the forest, the sage is likened to a swiftly flying swan, whereas a householder is imagined as a blue-crested peacock, beautiful but slow.

 Shadows illuminate the sun

It's a time of the signs

 

        

Indonesian man becomes an instant millionaire as meteorite worth £1.4m crashes through his roof  Nov 17th 2020, 17:57 Josua Hutagalung, 33, was working on a coffin next to his house when the meteorite smashed through the veranda at the edge of his living room in Kolang, North Sumatra.

And-- 

Thai fisherman finds 'the world's biggest' blob of whale vomit - that could be worth £2.4MILLION Dec 1st 2020, 00:05 Naris Suwannasang, 60, saw the Ambergris -while he was walking by the sea in Nakhon Si Thammarat, southern Thailand.

Consistently bizarre

 

How bizarre is it that the word--- bizarre--- has a disputed etymology?

...."Obviously, if a word appears from nowhere and has no ascertainable native roots, it may be a borrowing. And here I must turn to the language of the Goths, which I mention with great regularity in this blog, because Gothic is the oldest Germanic language that has come down to us (if we disregard runic inscriptions from medieval Scandinavia): significant parts of the New Testament, translated by Bishop Wulfila in the fourth century from Greek into Gothic, are extant. Two Gothic kingdoms flourished in the past: one in Italy (with its capital in Ravenna, where tourists can still see Ostrogoth King Theodoric’s Mausoleum) and one in Spain, with the capital in Tolosa. The eastern kingdom existed only from 453 to 555, but this period was the time of the efflorescence of Gothic culture, its Golden Age. The Visigoth kingdom had a much longer span of life: from the early fifth century to 711, when it was destroyed by the Arabs. As could be expected, Modern Italian and Modern Spanish have preserved relics of many Gothic words, some of which did not turn up in Wulfila’s translation. Such words were reconstructed from the dialects spoken today: thoroughly assimilated inserts of Old Germanic in the speech of modern people. Hence the idea that bizarre may be one of such relics, a continuation of an old borrowing from Gothic....

Picture poppies

Tomorrow's Headlines

 

Or maybe next month's:

DELTA HITS THE DELTA AND DESTROYS GULF DEAD ZONE

(an area in the Gulf of Mexico, the size of Massachusetts, with little oxygen.) This will be called ironic, but is nothing like that.

Anybody who got a real glimpse of what Jan Cox was about

 

Anybody who got a real glimpse of what Jan Cox was about will appreciate that Jacques Derrida was a tasty cookie--- store bought goods, but edible. A review of a new biography of the French philosopher at the link.

Everything

Everything works for the progress of Life

(paraphrase of Jan Cox) 

Dark Matter a Dark Horse

 

citation -- https://phys.org/news/2020-08-dark-destruction-extra-galaxy-center.html?

Study rules out dark matter destruction as origin of extra radiation in galaxy center

...

"We looked at all of the different modeling that goes on in the Galactic Center, including molecular gas, stellar emissions and high-energy electrons that scatter low-energy photons," said co-author Oscar Macias, a postdoctoral scholar in physics and astronomy at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo whose visit to UCI in 2017 initiated this project. "We took over three years to pull all of these new, better models together and examine the emissions, finding that there is little room left for dark matter."

.....

The group tested all classes of models used in the Galactic Center region for excess emission analyses, and its conclusions remained unchanged. "One would have to craft a diffuse emission model that leaves a big 'hole' in them to relax our constraints, and science doesn't work that way," Macias said.

Kaplinghat noted that physicists have predicted that radiation from dark matter annihilation would be represented in a neat spherical or elliptical shape emanating from the Galactic Center, but the gamma ray excess detected by the Fermi space telescope after its June 2008 deployment shows up as a triaxial, bar-like structure.

"If you peer at the Galactic Center, you see that the stars are distributed in a boxy way," he said. "There's a disk of stars, and right in the center, there's a bulge that's about 10 degrees on the sky, and it's actually a very specific shape—sort of an asymmetric box—and this shape leaves very little room for additional dark matter."

Does this research rule out the existence of dark matter in the galaxy? "No," Kaplinghat said. "Our study constrains the kind of particle that dark matter could be. The multiple lines of evidence for dark matter in the galaxy are robust and unaffected by our work."

Far from considering the team's findings to be discouraging, Abazajian said they should encourage physicists to focus on concepts other than the most popular ones.

"There are a lot of alternative dark matter candidates out there," he said. "The search is going to be more like a fishing expedition where you don't already know where the fish are."

The difference between stars and planets

One way to look at a real teacher, a person like Jan Cox, is that such figures are stars, in the galactic sense, and those who can hear them, those who typically lack the purpose to become more than followers, are like planets. Here is the text which prompted this picture:

From a recent article: 

Quote

...
In 1835, the French philosopher Auguste Comte wrote of the unknowable nature of stars:

On the subject of stars, all investigations which are not ultimately reducible to simple visual observations are … necessarily denied to us. While we can conceive of the possibility of determining their shapes, their sizes, and their motions, we shall never be able by any means to study their chemical composition or their mineralogical structure … Our knowledge concerning their gaseous envelopes is necessarily limited to their existence, size … and refractive power, we shall not at all be able to determine their chemical composition or even their density…

He was, famously, wrong.

He couldn’t have envisioned the range of tools available to modern astronomers. It’s a beautiful thing that, nowadays, astronomers can not only learn about the compositions of stars via their studies of their spectra, but also probe the deeper mysteries, going all the way to the births of these colossal, self-luminous balls in space.

End quote.

Self-luminous balls.

Such a appropriate description of the rare Real Teacher.

And about the authors of this article, an interesting way they reveal their own "planetary" nature, is by their unspoken presumption that they are more advanced than Comte. The actuality is that man's knowledge is always partial. So partial as to preclude any presumptions of superiority.

In a Conchshell

The attempt to summarize the significance of Jan Cox led me to recall his stress on the new, on attending to the edge of consciousness, as methods, to strengthen one's talent to remain alert. This peculiar alertness is blunted by words.

His was an ancient quest, a quest which when successful, raised for the modern westerner, a perhaps separate issue: how to remain, how to return, to a perspective bordered by quiet.

The quest starts and ends, with the physical. Probably.

We're talking a long time ago

The Headline

this beautiful Bronze Age cup.

 this "dazzling cup" is about 3500 years old.

."...[T]he dazzling Ringlemere Cup....was discovered on 4 November 2001. This golden vessel was made between 1700–1500 BC, and was found by metal-detectorist Cliff Bradshaw in the fields of Ringlemere Farm in the south of England...."

End quote. 

Now, what jumps to mind is: what kind of cup has a conical bottom? That means if you set it down, the liquid is spilled.

And then I realized: these people didn't SIT DOWN. Because they didn't sit down, there was no need to set down a cup.

Their center of gravity, to refer to the maps of Jan Cox, was the physical, roughly, their pelvis. (This incidentally, reflects the fact their minds were MORE active than our own: they were smarter than we are, to generalize. But that is a different topic, and or, set of encyclopedias, and not our current topic.).

They were walking, running, riding, MOVING. Or by being still enough to invent, discover, astronomy, physics, useful gods, commas. None of this required the necessity of putting aside small amounts of liquid to be later recovered. Living in the present means consuming in the present. 

Exterminating the idea of invasive species

There is no such thing as

An invasive species

Anywhere on this planet

Borrowing quotes about borrowed thoughts

"Borrowed thoughts, like borrowed money, only show the poverty of the borrower."

This is attributed to:

"Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington (née Power; 1 September 1789 – 4 June 1849), was an Irish novelist, journalist, and literary hostess. She became acquainted with Lord Byron in Genoa and wrote a book about him."

And I quote Wikipedia, which can only mean one thing: I am quite ignorant on the topic--that is the only thing that can be deduced about someone, anyone, who quotes Wikipedia, as if that source has some citational vigor.

Let Them Eat Kale

Some of us, who heard and try to remember, might remember near the top, "don't explain, don't complain." One of the few unoriginal things Jan ever shared. A direction to follow regarding others, and ourselves.

And I almost have persuaded myself not to mention,
the people who torture animals,
and treat their workers, like animals,
and now, are oinking about needing a bailout.

Almost.

Earth Day is Sky Day

What if, there ARE no WHY questions, just HOW questions.

Then, we could ask, how is it few recognise this situation?

And fewer appreciate the challenges to remembering, remembering, what we do not know.

Pundemic thoughts

How do you know your tears are REALLY for another?

Obvious Questions

Excerpted from the New York Times (February 24, 2020)

"....
Why are conspiracy theories gaining traction? We’ve reported on the belief in unfounded claims about the origins of the virus: Some say it came from a lab in Wuhan, while Russian actors have spread a theory alleging the U.S. is behind the outbreak.

Conspiracies are the first thing some people go to when they face something new and scary. This happened with Zika; people rejected the truth that the virus caused microcephaly and blamed pesticides or genetically modified mosquitoes. But in medical school they teach you: If you hear footsteps, assume it’s horses, not zebras. That is, try the obvious diagnosis first.
...."


The obvious question here is why are there equines walking around in hospital corridors.