“The art of Jeet Kune Do is simply to simplify. It is being oneself; it is reality in its ‘isness.’ Thus, isness is the meaning — having freedom in its primary sense, not limited by attachments, confinements, partialization, complexities….Jeet Kune Do is enlightenment. It is a way of life, a movement toward will power and control, though it ought to be enlightened by intuition.”
–Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Burbank, CA: Ohara Publications, 1975)
By Maria Popova (brainpickings.org)
One November night in the 1870s, legendary Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) discovered the meaning of life in a dream — or, at least, the protagonist in his final short story did. The piece, which first appeared in the altogether revelatory A Writer’s Diary (public library) under the title “The Dream of a Queer Fellow” and was later published separately as The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, explores themes similar to those in Dostoyevsky’s 1864 novel Notes from the Underground, considered the first true existential novel. True to Stephen King’s assertion that “good fiction is the truth inside the lie,”the story sheds light on Dostoyevsky’s personal spiritual and philosophical bents with extraordinary clarity — perhaps more so than any of his other published works. The contemplation at its heart falls somewhere between Tolstoy’s tussle with the meaning of life and Philip K. Dick’s hallucinatory exegesis.
Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1871
The story begins with the narrator wandering the streets of St. Petersburg on “a gloomy night, the gloomiest night you can conceive,” dwelling on how others have ridiculed him all his life and slipping into nihilism with the “terrible anguish” of believing that nothing matters. He peers into the glum sky, gazes at a lone little star, and contemplates suicide; two months earlier, despite his destitution, he had bought an “excellent revolver” with the same intention, but the gun had remained in his drawer since. Suddenly, as he is staring at the star, a little girl of about eight, wearing ragged clothes and clearly in distress, grabs him by the arm and inarticulately begs his help. But the protagonist, disenchanted with life, shoos her away and returns to the squalid room he shares with a drunken old captain, furnished with “a sofa covered in American cloth, a table with some books, two chairs and an easy-chair, old, incredibly old, but still an easy-chair.”
As he sinks into the easy-chair to think about ending his life, he finds himself haunted by the image of the little girl, leading him to question his nihilistic disposition. Dostoyevsky writes:
I knew for certain that I would shoot myself that night, but how long I would sit by the table — that I did not know. I should certainly have shot myself, but for that little girl.
You see: though it was all the same to me, I felt pain, for instance. If any one were to strike me, I should feel pain. Exactly the same in the moral sense: if anything very pitiful happened, I would feel pity, just as I did before everything in life became all the same to me. I had felt pity just before: surely, I would have helped a child without fail. Why did I not help the little girl, then? It was because of an idea that came into my mind then. When she was pulling at me and calling to me, suddenly a question arose before me, which I could not answer. The question was an idle one; but it made me angry. I was angry because of my conclusion, that if I had already made up my mind that I would put an end to myself to-night, then now more than ever before everything in the world should be all the same to me. Why was it that I felt it was not all the same to me, and pitied the little girl? I remember I pitied her very much: so much that I felt a pain that was even strange and incredible in my situation…
It seemed clear that if I was a man and not a cipher yet, and until I was changed into a cipher, then I was alive and therefore could suffer, be angry and feel shame for my actions. Very well. But if I were to kill myself, for instance, in two hours from now, what is the girl to me, and what have I to do with shame or with anything on earth? I am going to be a cipher, an absolute zero. Could my consciousness that I would soon absolutely cease to exist, and that therefore nothing would exist, have not the least influence on my feeling of pity for the girl or on my sense of shame for the vileness I had committed?
From the moral, he veers into the existential:
Beholding “these new, thronging questions,” he plunges into a contemplation of what free will really means. In a passage that calls to mind John Cage’s famous aphorism on the meaning of life — “No why. Just here.” — and George Lucas’s assertion that “life is beyond reason,” Dostoyevsky suggests through his protagonist that what gives meaning to life is life itself:
Just as he ponders this, the protagonist slips into sleep in the easy-chair, but it’s a sleep that has the quality of wakeful dreaming. In one of many wonderful semi-asides, Dostoyevsky peers at the eternal question of why we have dreams:
In this strange state, the protagonist dreams that he takes his revolver and points it at his heart — not his head, where he had originally intended to shoot himself. After waiting a second or two, his dream-self pulls the trigger quickly. Then something remarkable happens:
Now I am being buried in the earth. Every one leaves me and I am alone, quite alone. I do not stir… I lay there and — strange to say — I expected nothing, accepting without question that a dead man has nothing to expect. But it was damp. I do not know how long passed — an hour, a few days, or many days. Suddenly, on my left eye which was closed, a drop of water fell, which had leaked through the top of the grave. In a minute fell another, then a third, and so on, every minute. Suddenly, deep indignation kindled in my heart and suddenly in my heart I felt physical pain. ‘It’s my wound,’ I thought. ‘It’s where I shot myself. The bullet is there.’ And all the while the water dripped straight on to my closed eye. Suddenly, I cried out, not with a voice, for I was motionless, but with all my being, to the arbiter of all that was being done to me.
“Whosoever thou art, if thou art, and if there exists a purpose more intelligent than the things which are now taking place, let it be present here also. But if thou dost take vengeance upon me for my foolish suicide, then know, by the indecency and absurdity of further existence, that no torture whatever that may befall me, can ever be compared to the contempt which I will silently feel, even through millions of years of martyrdom.”
I cried out and was silent. Deep silence lasted a whole minute. One more drop even fell. But I knew and believed, infinitely and steadfastly, that in a moment everything would infallibly change. Suddenly, my grave opened. I do not know whether it had been uncovered and opened, but I was taken by some dark being unknown to me, and we found ourselves in space. Suddenly, I saw. It was deep night; never, never had such darkness been! We were borne through space and were already far from the earth. I asked nothing of him who led me. I was proud and waited. I assured myself that I was not afraid, and my heart melted with rapture at the thought that I was not afraid. I do not remember how long we rushed through space, and I cannot imagine it. It happened as always in a dream when you leap over space and time and the laws of life and mind, and you stop only there where your heart delights.
The 1845 depiction of a galaxy that inspired Van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night,’ from Michael Benson’s Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time
Through the thick darkness, he sees a star — the same little star he had seen before shooing the girl away. As the dream continues, the protagonist describes a sort of transcendence akin to what is experienced during psychedelic drug trips or in deep meditation states:
He finds himself in another world, Earthlike in every respect, except “everything seemed to be bright with holiday, with a great and sacred triumph, finally achieved” — a world populated by “children of the sun,” happy people whose eyes “shone with a bright radiance” and whose faces “gleamed with wisdom, and with a certain consciousness, consummated in tranquility.” The protagonist exclaims:
Conceding that “it was only a dream,” he nonetheless asserts that “the sensation of the love of those beautiful and innocent people” was very much real and something he carried into wakeful life on Earth. Awaking in his easy-chair at dawn, he exclaims anew with rekindled gratitude for life:
Dostoyevsky concludes with his protagonist’s reflection on the shared essence of life, our common conquest of happiness and kindness:
[…]
And it is so simple… The one thing is — love thy neighbor as thyself — that is the one thing. That is all, nothing else is needed. You will instantly find how to live.
A century later, Jack Kerouac would echo this in his own magnificent meditation on kindness and the “Golden Eternity.”
A Writer’s Diary is a beautiful read in its entirety. Complement it with Tolstoy on finding meaning in a meaningless world and Margaret Mead’s dreamed epiphany about why life is like blue jelly.
A large sum of cash in a pink envelope will arrive in your mailbox today. Use it to purchase 30 cases of Sizzlean.
A tour of a peanut factory ends in tragedy when you are accidentally honey-roasted.
With summer around the corner, it’s time to get in shape. Have your beefy mid-section excised by a plastic surgeon.
Improve your performance at the office. Slaughter your coworkers to eliminate competition.
You’ll save thousands of dollars in food bills when you become a plant. Stock up on fresh soil.
Now that the kids are all grown-up, it’s time for you and your spouse to rekindle old flames. Get that much-delayed divorce.
An awkward silence will threaten to ruin one of your many blind dates this month. Break the ice by displaying your homemade necklace of census taker’s ears.
You’ll meet a handsome stranger at a wild party and make mad passionate love. Then you’ll be flattened by a stampede of oxen.
Financial dealings look brighter now that you’ve cashed in that jar of pennies. Spend that $12 wisely.
The stars say you should get a pet because they are a great source of companionship and cheap meat.
Don’t be self-conscious about a little unwanted facial hair. Electrolysis can remove that, monkey boy.
A long rest is in order when you splinter both tibias and fibulas.
MATTER (NYTimes.com)
Genetic analysis of bones discovered in a Siberian cave hints that the prehistoric world may have been filled with “hybrid” humans.
By Carl Zimmer
In a limestone cave nestled high above the Anuy River in Siberia, scientists have discovered the fossil of an extraordinary human hybrid.
The 90,000-year-old bone fragment came from a female whose mother was Neanderthal, according to an analysis of DNA discovered inside it. But her father was not: He belonged to another branch of ancient humanity known as the Denisovans.
Scientists have been recovering genomes from ancient human fossils for just over a decade. Now, with the discovery of a Neanderthal-Denisovan hybrid, the world as it was tens of thousands of years ago is coming into remarkable new focus: home to a marvelous range of human diversity.
In 2010, researchers working in the Siberian cave, called Denisova, announced they had found DNA from a scrap of bone representing an unknown group of humans. Subsequent discoveries in the cave confirmed that the Denisovans were a lineage distinct from modern humans.
Until now, scientists had indirect clues that Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans interbred, at least a few times. But the new study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, offers clear evidence.
What makes the discovery all the more remarkable is that scientists didn’t have to look all that long to find a hybrid. Until today, scientists had discovered only four Denisovans; the fifth turned out to be a first-generation hybrid.
Hybrids may not have been all that uncommon. In 2015, researchers discovered that a modern human who lived in what is now Romania 40,000 years ago had a great-great-grandparent who was Neanderthal.
“It seems that this world at this time was a place full of near-hybrids,” said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University who was not involved in the new study. “It must have been a very interesting place.”
The discovery in 2010 of the first Denisovan fossil (called Denisova 3) spurred Russian researchers to carry out a more systematic exploration of the cave floor. It is littered with bone fragments, deposited in sedimentary layers.
Many of those mysterious fragments were sent to Svante Paabo, a renowned geneticist and the director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
The cave, it turned out, had a long history of occupation. The researchers found the genome of a Neanderthal in a toe bone dating back 120,000 years.
Denisovans appeared later, and from the fossils alone it was hard for scientists to know if Denisovans and Neanderthals had ever come into contact. But their DNA hinted at one union, at least: Denisova 3’s genome, researchers discovered, contained traces of Neanderthal DNA.
The newly discovered hybrid came to the attention of Dr. Paabo’s team in 2014, when Russian collaborators sent his team 2,000 badly damaged bone fragments from the cave.
He and his colleagues extracted collagen from the bones and compared the protein to that of living species. Only one fragment had collagen that resembled our own.
That fragment came from an arm or leg bone — it’s impossible to say which. The bone is thick, which means that it belonged to someone at least 13 years old.
Viviane Slon, then a graduate student at the institute, led a search for DNA in the fragment. She began by hunting for a special set of genes found in the fuel-generating factories of the cell, called mitochondria.
Mitochondria carry a set of genes distinct from those of the cell’s nucleus; these genes, unlike those in the nucleus, are inherited solely from the mother.
In 2016, Dr. Slon and her colleagues reported that they had gotten mitochondrial DNA from the mysterious bone fragment, and that it closely matched genetic material from Neanderthals.
The researchers called that individual Denisova 11, and they began searching the bone for nuclear DNA. Fragment by fragment, they began reconstructing the entire genome.
Strangely, only some of the fragments of nuclear DNA matched Neanderthal genes. There was just as much Denisovan DNA in the bone.
In each pair of chromosomes, one came from a Neanderthal, the other from a Denisovan. This individual, she and her colleagues concluded, was a hybrid. “It was a good proof that this was real,” she said.
An examination of the X chromosome showed that Denisova 11 was female. As for which parent was which, the mitochondrial DNA held the answer: Since these genes are only passed down from mothers, Denisova 11’s mother was Neanderthal.
Her Denisovan father’s kin were local, it turned out. His DNA most closely resembles the genetic material from Denisova 3’s pinky, discovered at the cave in 2010. She lived in the cave a few thousand years after Denisova 11, the hybrid human.
Her Neanderthal mother, however, was closely related to Neanderthals who lived thousands of miles to the west in what is now Croatia, 20,000 years after Denisova 11 died. She was only distantly related to the Neanderthals who lived in the cave 120,000 years ago.
“It seems like Neanderthals were moving around quite a bit,” said Dr. Browning.
Dr. Paabo said it’s not possible to figure out why the Neanderthals traveled, or when, until more genomes are discovered.
Despite interbreeding, Neanderthals and Denisovans never merged into a single genetic population. For hundreds of thousands of years, they remained distinct.
“They didn’t meet that often, but when they met they seemed to not have prejudices against each other and mixed freely,” he said.
It’s also possible that hybrids suffered from reproductive disorders, having fewer children than humans without mixed DNA.
Broader interbreeding may have gained momentum when modern humans emerged from Africa roughly 70,000 years ago.
Modern humans lived in bigger, denser groups than Neanderthals or Denisovans, and they moved quickly across Europe and Asia. Recent archaeological digs suggest they reached Australia as early as 65,000 years ago.
Dr. Paabo wonders if it’s a coincidence that these branches of humanity vanished from the fossil record shortly after modern humans showed up in their territories. Neanderthals disappear from the fossil record 40,000 years ago. Evidence from the Siberian cave indicates that Denisovans were gone by then, too.
“Maybe Neanderthals and Denisovans were absorbed into the modern human populations,” said Dr. Paabo. “That could be a big part of the story.”
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A7 of the New York edition with the headline: You Should Meet Her Father. He’s Really Something Else.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
(Submitted by Michael Kelly)
August 26, 2018 (brainpickings.org)
Chance doesn’t deal happiness with an even hand — some lives are more weighed down by sorrow than others. It can be easy, and misguided, to romanticize suffering — despite Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s superb admonition against it, we have a long cultural history of perpetuating the “tortured genius” myth, the reality behind which is far more complex. What would it mean, instead, to orient ourselves toward sorrow neither with indulgence nor with self-pity, to regard it not as a malignancy of life but as part of its elemental richness?
That is what Vincent van Gogh (March 30, 1853–July 29, 1890) addressed in a remarkable letter to his brother Theo, found in Ever Yours: The Essential Letters (public library) — the treasure trove that gave us Van Gogh on talking vs. doing and how inspired mistakes move us forward.
‘Self-Portrait with Straw Hat’ by Vincent van Gogh
Despite his lifelong poverty, despite his debilitating mental illness, Van Gogh managed to transmute his various hardships into some of the most visionary art humanity has produced. During one particularly harrowing period of struggle, he writes to his brother in a letter from the Hague penned in mid-September 1883:
Van Gogh had set out on this particular walk in order to clear his head and his heart after finally splitting up with Sien — the alcoholic prostitute with whom he had fallen in love a year and a half earlier, just after recovering from the heartbreak that taught him how to turn unrequited love into fuel for art. It was a deeply ambivalent breakup — Van Gogh recognized that they couldn’t make each other happy in the long run, but he was deeply attached to Sien and her children, as was she to him.
Seeking to quiet his mind, Van Gogh headed out “to talk to nature for a while.” From this turbulent inner state, he witnessed a violent storm which, paradoxically, reconciled him to his sorrow and helped him rediscover in it the elemental beauty of life.
Vincent van Gogh: Pine Trees against an Evening Sky, 1889. (Van Gogh Museum)
He recounts this transcendent encounter with nature to his brother:
Then, the whole was almost finer than those windblown trees seen on their own, because the moment was such that even those absurd summer houses took on a singular character, rain-soaked and dishevelled. In it I saw an image of how even a person of absurd forms and conventions, or another full of eccentricity and caprice, can become a dramatic figure of special character if he’s gripped by true sorrow, moved by a calamity. It made me think for a moment of society today, how as it founders it now often appears like a large, sombre silhouette viewed against the light of reform.
Writing half a century before before Rilke contemplated how great sadnesses bring us closer to ourselves, Van Gogh adds:
Vincent Van Gogh: Landscape in Stormy Weather, 1885. (Van Gogh Museum)
Seven years later, the drama of sorrow disfigured the silhouette of Van Gogh’s life.
Complement this fragment of Van Gogh’s deeply alive Essential Letters with French philosopher Simone Weil — one of the most luminous and underappreciated minds of the twentieth century — on how to make use of our suffering and Tchaikovsky on depression and finding beauty amid the wreckage of the soul, then revisit Nicole Krauss’s beautiful letter to Van Gogh across space and time about fear, courage, and how to break our destructive patterns.
Translators: Mike Zonta, Melissa Goodnight, Richard Branam
SENSE TESTIMONY: Corporations create policies that limit self-expression.
5th Step Conclusions:
1) The policy of Truth is the infinite, limitless expression of Itself: the only Corporation, the only Body, the only Populace, the only Politics.
2) One infinite Consciousness Beingness, asserts absolutely legitimate responsibility, and is always expressing perfect principles of action, that enable infinite individuating functionality.
3) Fully living, Being this Genuine Ingenuity is Truths’ Infinite Consciousness Aware Real Estate, Self nourishing Administration of Political organization, Truths’ Corporation, which is Autismically Certain Identity.
