The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23531?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+nybooks+(The+New+York+Review+of+Books)&utm_content=Google+Reader

Did you ever hear the one about the salesman who was in a car accident and suffered brain damage to his right frontal lobe. This is the lobe that controls our sense of being in our body and integration and all that — anyway, he was injured and ever after he lost the sense that his arm was his own — he would see and it think it was someone else’s. Eventually, the invasion the salesmen felt at looking at pieces of his body that he knew belonged to someone else drove him insane —

His wife came home and found that he had cut off his own hand. When she found him, bleeding his life out on the kitchen table, he was smiling.

“What evolution teaches us is that it is all about procreation — that is our purpose.”

No, brother, there is no purpose to evolution, there is only pattern, and though the pattern of variation, life, and death has created a mirrored pattern of organisms good at and interested in procreation, it is not a purpose, only a pattern.

This desire for the continuation of our species, then, is not our essence, only a contingent accident (though this contingent accident may have been inevitable). What is our essence — only to continue living, and to avoid pain.

The short answer seems to be no.

http://www.clal.org/e15.html

Talmudic Judaism seems to accord non-Jews (non-parties to the Divine-Human Covenant) a lower moral status than Jews (human parties to the Covenant).

While Talmudic and textual rulings on this issue are not dispositive to understanding the current structure of a religion, as a Jew (which I am, of course, Secret Readers), I do think it is important and necessary to identify this one more poison at the heart of our culture and do everything in our power to root it out.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/Afghanistan/article6969122.ece

“But as Sergeant Josh Brown, 22, briefed his successor when a detachment of men from Golf Company was swapped for an incoming contingent from Fox Company, he warned of the strange atmosphere and inexplicable phenomena that plagued OP Rock. “The local people say this is a cursed place,” he said. “You will definitely see weird-ass lights up here at night.” “

Sages. Great Minds in soft bodies, looking inward to look out, pressed against the limits of understanding. Laying on the ground, seeing the units of a cube — how many golf-balls does it take to fill a school bus — now seeing more — calling the world the Middle Enclosure, fencing out Dark Shadow Wind-Spirits and the Great Bright Ancestor-Spirits — now calling the world something else — the Growing of Man — the Place of the Growing of Man — the place where we find ourselves // where we find ourselves changing —

We sit crosslegged, faces exposed to the storm of time, even as in single twinkle of hypothetical god’s eye, mountains are hills, now dust —

The Dawn Star, brightest of angels, heralds the sun. The being signals the becoming.

We extend beyond ourselves. Where does this extension come from? Is it merely a result of the sad pattern of living and dying that has given us eyes and ears and arms? Or is it a happy accident of that other pattern, now seized by the mind that knows its self, now directed towards some new end?

While life was blind, we danced to random drumbeats. Now, we go where we will.

The question is not how or why.

Where.