Transitioning…

I feel a transition coming on. After a few months of regular, ‘intense’ study of the Yi am feeling the tug of something else. The Yi and I will live the rest of my life together, no question about that, but in terms of writing I want to move on a little.

Meanwhile, two little snippets from my peripatetic readings today. One a youtube, one an old article.

The article: Toynbee and Buddhism. It’s about civilizations rising and falling in the context of a scholar in Japan comparing Toynbee’s magisterial contributions to Western scholarship and wisdom with the Buddha’s approach. A neat article.

And the second is a youtube which is an obscure documentary I know of because I used to live above the studio on W 46th St off Times Square where it was made. It’s called The Secret Life of Plants. I used to sleep above many of those plants so according to the film maker, I helped make it!!

But as I recall, somewhere in that film is a sequence that involves how the mustard plant attunes to one particular star in a faraway galaxy that has been discovered by modern instruments and just so happens to be the densest celestial body known. Why the mustard seed attunes to this particular planet’s emanations is not known.

However: in a small prehistoric cave somewhere in Africa is a painting on the ceiling much like the one you describe. Except it depicts a cluster of stars. And in one such cluster a small red mark which correctly identifies the location of this tiny, super-dense star which we can only see with electronic radar instruments, not visually. And yet those prehistoric people ‘saw’ it. (The film does not mention if mustard plants grow or grew in the areas near the cave!) (Around 1:07:00)

All of which to say that things are interconnected (in our continuum) in ways which materialist outlooks cannot even begin to explain and so usually deny as tosh, with scorn thrown in for good measure. The same thing on some level might be in play with Leibnitz and Newton. I gather something similar may have happened with the first nuclear bombs. It also might have happened with covid for that matter.

I shared both of these during a philosophical sidebar discussion on the Moon of Alabama website.