 presentsSunday Meeting with Thane — May 31 |
 Thane of Hawaii “Determined Assumption”In this lesson, the third and final of the “Greater Freedom” series, Thane explores the ways in which our unrecognized determinations can subvert the joy and satisfaction of our heart’s desire. He further develops one of the fundamental principles of Mind practice, the principle of assumption. Thane provides insights into many metaphysical and spiritual questions, drawing upon of lifetime of experience in spiritual studies as well as in entertainment and public speaking. Please note that this lesson is almost an hour long, thus the meeting will last about an hour and fifteen minutes. We trust you’ll be able to join us for the entire meeting — we look forward to seeing you there! Click here for further information: https://www.theprosperos.org/prosperos-events/thane-the-law-of-the-vacuum-nwa3h-wbpk5 SUNDAY MEETING — May 31 11:00 am Pacific / Noon Mountain / 1:00 pm Central / 2:00 pm Eastern Join Sunday Meeting By contribution. Please click here to contribute: Contribute! Call In Information: One tap mobile +16699006833,,85882863391# US (San Jose) +16694449171,,85882863391# US — Meeting ID: 858 8286 3391 Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kdTAYZq0XQ |
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Category Archives: Uncategorized
My Scientology Movie
Documentarian Louis Theroux is denied admittance to the Church of Scientology’s headquarters, setting into motion a clever, confrontational and funny plan to try and reveal the inner workings of the mysterious organization. Inspired by the Church’s use of filmmaking techniques, and with the aid of real ex-scientologists, Theroux uses unconventional methods to expose and antagonize the Church. In a bizarre twist, it becomes clear that the Church is also making a film about Louis Theroux. Infused with a good dose of humor and moments worthy of a Hollywood script, My Scientology Movie is stranger than fiction.
How We Are All Haunted by Hegel
Popular Philosophy May 24, 2026 In 1806, the night before the Battle of Jena, a philosopher sat in his rooms finishing a manuscript while Napoleon’s army moved through the streets below. When he looked out his window and saw the emperor ride past, he wrote to a friend that he had seen the world spirit on horseback.That philosopher was Hegel. And what he meant by that sentence cracked the history of philosophy in two.This episode is the third in our series on the birth of continental philosophy. We follow Hegel from his student days in Tübingen, through the revolutionary fever of the 1790s, to the moment his system came together in Jena and changed everything. We look at how he answered Kant, what he meant by the dialectic and by Geist, and how his ideas generated two of the most powerful thinkers of the 19th century, Marx and Kierkegaard, while simultaneously provoking the birth of an entirely different philosophical tradition that wanted nothing to do with any of it.This is the story of how one man’s ambition to think everything at once split the modern mind into two halves that have barely spoken since. Primary Texts: Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) — The central text of this episode. The journey of consciousness from sensation to Absolute Knowing. Hegel, G.W.F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820) — Where his political philosophy and theory of history mature. Hegel, G.W.F. Lectures on the Philosophy of History — The source of the idea that history is the unfolding of Spirit toward freedom. The world spirit on horseback lives here in its fullest form. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason (1781) — The wall Hegel was responding to. Essential background for understanding what he was trying to overcome. Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 — Where Marx’s debt to and departure from Hegel is most visible and raw. Kierkegaard, Søren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) — Kierkegaard’s most direct confrontation with Hegel’s system and its inability to contain the individual. Secondary Literature: Beiser, Frederick. Hegel (2005) — The most accessible serious introduction to Hegel’s full system. Pinkard, Terry. Hegel: A Biography (2000) — The definitive English language biography. The Napoleon letter is here in full context. Taylor, Charles. Hegel (1975) — Demanding but essential. The best account of how Hegel’s system holds together as a whole. Singer, Peter. Hegel: A Very Short Introduction (1983) — For newcomers who want a clean entry point before tackling the primary texts.
The Horror of Sexual Assault in Israeli Prisons
New York Times Opinion and The New York Times May 21, 2026 Sexual violence by Israeli forces against Palestinians is widespread, according to new reports and harrowing first-hand accounts. The Opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof details a pattern of systemic abuse and “unrestrained power” within Israeli detention centers that challenges the moral silence of the international community. Read Kristof’s column here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/op… Read a Q&A about his column here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/21/op…
By Nicholas Kristof
May 11, 2026 (NYTimes.com)
Transcript:
Sexual violence by Israeli forces against Palestinians is widespread, according to new reports and harrowing first-hand accounts. The Opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof details a pattern of systemic abuse and “unrestrained power” within Israeli detention centers that challenges the moral silence of the international community.
When Israel was attacked on Oct. 7, 2023, officials were quick to condemn the sexual violence of Hamas. “You’ve heard of the rape of Israeli women. Where the hell are you?” “Women raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies.” “Uses rape as a weapon of war.” “Sexual violence as a weapon of war by Hamas.” I went to the West Bank to talk with Palestinians who experienced sexual assault firsthand by Israeli soldiers, settlers and prison guards. Their harrowing accounts, backed by lawyers, surveys and international reports, suggest that sexual violence by Israelis against Palestinians is widespread. And that raises the question: Where is the revulsion against sexual assault now? I don’t see any evidence that Israeli leaders order rape, but they have built a security apparatus where, according to a 2025 United Nations report, sexual violence is a a major element in the ill-treatment of Palestinians. Prime Minister Netanyahu has called accusations of sexual violence by Israelis baseless. But my reporting suggests that sexual violence has greatly worsened under Netanyahu in recent years. What exactly does this look like? Here’s what I found. This is Sami al-Sai, a freelance journalist for international news organizations. They [prison guards] took me to a solitary cell, while handcuffed, leg cuffed and blindfolded. They put me on the ground in kneeling position with head down. They took off my pants and boxers, and started raping me with sticks and carrots in a very aggressive and painful way and harassing and touching my genitals in a very painful and forceful way. I spoke to a farmer who recounted how 20 settlers rampaged through Palestinian homes and used a hunting knife to cut off his clothes. I got out of the tent. I was standing right here. They pulled me inside. They used those zip ties, tied my hands with more than one zip tie. They tied my legs too. Hit me in the eye with a fist. They pulled me inside right here and started pouring dirt on me and water. They took off my pants and zip tied my penis and started pulling it. The zip ties were still on the ground when I visited. And this is Mohammad Matar, a Palestinian Authority official —— —— who says he was with two other Palestinians trying to protect a Bedouin village under attack from settlers when the settlers seized them, stripped them, beat them. And he says one tried to rape him with a stick. And he actually has some evidence of this interaction with the settlers in the form of a photo that the settlers posted to social media. One woman, 23 at the time of her detention, told me that she was regularly stripped naked, forcibly bent over and groped all over her body by male and female guards. One journalist said he had been held down and raped by a dog, a claim backed by other accounts from prisoners who report they underwent the same thing. I’m appalled by this pattern of abuse, partly because our American tax dollars subsidize the Israeli security forces. I fear that leaves us complicit. The United States has leverage, and we could use it to insist on an end to the impunity and to demand that Red Cross visits be restored for Palestinian detainees. Look, whether you consider yourself pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian, here’s one thing we should be able to agree on: We’re anti-rape. The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day after day.
HAL 9000: “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”
KlingonSpider Apr 8, 2012 An excerpt from the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey” directed by Stanley Kubrick. Synopsis: Mankind finds a mysterious, obviously artificial, artifact buried on the moon and, with the intelligent computer HAL, sets off on a quest, where the way the HAL 9000 super computer malfunctions. © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. (MGM)
The Green Ticket Roundup, May 14, 1941, Paris, France
May 17, 2026 (NYTimes.com)
Guest Essay by Jean-Marc Dreyfus France Has a New Picture of the Holocaust
Mr. Dreyfus is a Holocaust historian at the University of Manchester. He is co-author, with Lior Lalieu, of “La rafle du billet vert. 14 mai 1941. Les photos retrouvées.”
ChatGPT:
Yes — the “Green Ticket Raffle” (more accurately called the Green Ticket Roundup or rafle du billet vert) absolutely took place in Paris on May 14, 1941.
The New York Times guest essay you’re referring to involved historian Jean-Marc Dreyfus discussing newly surfaced photographs of that roundup.
The event was one of the first mass arrests of Jews in occupied France during World War II. Thousands of foreign-born Jewish men in the Paris region received summonses printed on green paper (“green tickets”), supposedly for a routine administrative review. When they reported to collection points around Paris, many were arrested by French police collaborating with the Nazi occupation authorities.
The tragedy and deception of the event are part of why it remains historically important:
- the summons appeared bureaucratic and ordinary,
- many victims complied voluntarily,
- and French authorities themselves participated in the arrests.
Many of those detained were later deported and murdered in Nazi camps.
A Complete Guide to Pope Leo’s First Encyclical: Magnifica Humanitas
May 25, 2026 (ascensionpress.com)
Everything You Need to Know About Magnifica Humanitas
Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), addresses one of the defining questions of our age: how to safeguard human dignity in the era of artificial intelligence. Signed on May 15, 2026, and released on May 25, 2026, the document explores technology, human identity, work, truth, and the Christian vision of authentic humanity. The Ascension edition of Magnifica Humanitas will feature a foreword by Harvard professor and bestselling author, Arthur C. Brooks, PhD, and an afterword by Bible in a Year host Fr. Mike Schmitz.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of the key points and themes of Magnifica Humanitas. 
Brief Summary of Magnifica Humanitas
Magnifica Humanitas acknowledges familiar concerns about AI, including job insecurity, manipulation of information, privacy violations, ideological bias, autonomous weapons, and a futuristic vision of an “enhanced human being.” But Pope Leo XIV identifies a deeper danger: that human beings may begin to see themselves and others as projects “to be optimized” (Magnifica Humanitas 112).
Against this, the encyclical teaches that human limits such as illness, aging, suffering, and vulnerability are not simply defects to be corrected; rather, human beings often flourish through their limitations, where they can discover wisdom, experience the closeness of others, and encounter the Lord (MH 118–119). Therefore, AI should serve humanity not by tempting us to escape limitation through optimization, but by supporting a life of “openness and communion” (MH 231).
Who is this encyclical for, and how should it be received?
Magnifica Humanitas is addressed “to all the Catholic faithful, to all Christians and to men and women of goodwill” (MH 16).
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Catholic faithful are called to receive the pope’s ordinary teaching with “religious assent” (CCC 892).
Christians who are not Catholic are invited to receive magisterial teaching, such as this papal encyclical, as a serious Christian reflection on what it means to remain human in the age of AI. Its biblical foundations, such as the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9), the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem under Nehemiah (Nehemiah 2–6), the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14–30), and St. Paul’s words that “power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9), offer a deeply Christian framework for discerning technology, human dignity, truth, work, and the common good.
Non-Christians are invited to receive it as a contribution to the shared moral conversation about humanity’s future. Its central questions apply to all people: What is a human person? Should technology serve human dignity or reshape it? How do we protect truth, freedom, work, relationships, and especially those who are poor and vulnerable in an age of AI?
Why is it called Magnifica Humanitas?
The title is Latin for “magnificent humanity.” It points to the document’s teaching that no machine can replace the God-given magnificence of the human person. Pope Leo XIV writes: “We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace” (MH 15).
Learn More About Magnifica Humanitas
What is the encyclical’s most important message about AI?
The encyclical acknowledges familiar concerns about AI, including “job insecurity and inequality” (MH 151), “manipulation of information or violations of privacy” (MH 102), “ideological bias” (MH 102), “autonomous weapons systems” (MH 197), and “a futuristic vision of an ‘enhanced human being’” (MH 115).
But Pope Leo XIV identifies a deeper danger: that human beings may begin to see themselves and others as projects “to be optimized” (MH 112).
The encyclical teaches that what seems to be human “limits,” such as “incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, [and] vulnerability,” must not be seen simply as “a defect to be corrected.” Rather, the magnificence of humanity is that we flourish “not despite [our] limitations, but often through them” (MH 118).
In those moments, we can “discover a new wisdom, tangibly experience the closeness of others and encounter the presence of the Lord” (MH 119). Therefore, AI should serve the common good of humanity not by tempting us to escape human limitation through optimization, but by supporting a life of “openness and communion” (MH 231).
What are some practical takeaways from this encyclical?
Pope Leo XIV warns that “when efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion” (MH 112).
This means asking practical questions about AI-assisted technology in ordinary daily life:
- Does it help me remain faithful to the truth, despite the most appealing content? (MH 237)
- Does it help educate me and allow me to educate others? (MH 238)
- Does it help me cultivate genuine closeness in relationships and cherish places and times where physical presence remains crucial? (MH 239)
- Does it help me participate in the promotion of justice and peace? (MH 240)
The encyclical is not a call to reject AI. It is a call to guide our development and use of AI toward the magnificence of humanity. (MH 4).
Does this encyclical offer specific AI governance policies?
No, the encyclical does not provide technical policy blueprints for AI governance. Instead, it offers the principles grounding the Church’s Social Doctrine as principles for discerning the development and use of AI, especially regarding its impact on human dignity, truth, responsibility, work, freedom, solidarity, peace, and the common good.
Learn More About Magnifica Humanitas
What biblical images does Pope Leo XIV use to teach about AI?
The encyclical is framed by two biblical images: the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) and the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem under Nehemiah (Nehemiah 2-6).
Babel represents a project of self-assertion, uniformity, and control: a society that sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and tries to reach heaven without God’s blessing.
Nehemiah represents a different kind of building: prayerful, communal, responsible, and ordered toward communion. Nehemiah does not impose a solution from above; he listens, organizes, assigns responsibility, and helps the people rebuild together.
Pope Leo XIV warns against the “Babel syndrome”: the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the illusion that a single language (even a digital one) can translate the mystery of the person into data and performance (MH 10).
Is Pope Leo XIV against AI? Is he saying AI is “good” or “bad”?
No. Pope Leo XIV is not against AI. He does not issue a blanket condemnation of AI, nor does he praise AI as inherently good. The encyclical addresses the goods and dangers of technology, while also supporting innovation, productivity, and business enterprise. He teaches that these advances must remain ordered to human dignity rather than becoming the ultimate measures of value.
Pope Leo XIV teaches that technology can “heal, connect, educate and protect our common home,” but it can also “divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice” (MH 9). AI can be a “valuable tool” (MH 100), but it is not morally neutral in practice because it takes on the characteristics of those who “devise it, finance it, regulate it and use it” (MH 9).
The key question is not simply whether or not we use AI, but whether our use of AI is ordered toward the dignity of the human person and the common good.
What does the encyclical say about “disinformation” and “fake news”?
“Disinformation,” “fake news,” and other forms of manipulation of information are not new, but AI can amplify them dramatically.
The encyclical’s concern is not specific policies for the control of speech, but to call for the shared pursuit of honest communication and social trust (MH 132).
Pope Leo XIV emphasizes that the shared pursuit of verified facts is a common good. A society cannot reason together, deliberate justly, or build trust if the difference between truth and falsehood is constantly manipulated. In addition, manipulated narratives can obscure the lessons of history and make people more vulnerable to fear, propaganda, and control (MH 191).
Does the encyclical address AI consciousness or sentience?
Yes. The encyclical warns against equating artificial “intelligence” with human intelligence. The Holy Spirit has inscribed dignity in each of us, and “no computational system, however sophisticated, can create a heart that gives itself, or a conscience that discerns good from evil” (MH 233).
Human intelligence is embodied. It matures through experience, relationships, joy, suffering, moral conscience, and responsibility. AI can imitate language, behavior, analysis, and even empathy, but its outputs remain tied to data processing, statistical adaptation, and feedback. It does not possess a body, conscience, moral responsibility, or the capacity for genuine human understanding (MH 99).
What does the encyclical say about the protection of privacy and governance of data?
The encyclical identifies violations of privacy as one harmful use of AI, but it places privacy within a broader concern: the danger of delegating moral responsibility to automated systems (MH 102).
This is especially serious when AI influences decisions about employment, credit, access to public services, reputation, or opportunity. Such systems do not know “compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and above all, the hope that people are able to change” (MH 102). For this reason, important decisions affecting human dignity, as well as the governance of data, require transparency, accountability, and human responsibility.
What does the encyclical say about transhumanism and posthumanism?
Transhumanism and posthumanism are two philosophical currents related to the future of technology. For a brief definition, transhumanism advocates using technology to overcome or enhance the limits of the human condition. Posthumanism goes further, imagining that humanity itself may be surpassed, replaced, or merged with machines or other forms of life.
Magnifica Humanitas critiques these visions when they treat the human person as something to be perfected, surpassed, or optimized. Pope Leo XIV warns: “If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy” (MH 117). Against this, the encyclical insists that history can be changed for the better “when individuals truly take the dignity of everyone seriously” (MH 124).
The fulfillment of humanity, in all its magnificence and woundedness, does not come through “technological divinization,” but through “God’s grace received in Christ” (MH 126).
What precedent exists for popes to address technological issues in encyclicals, messages, and other official teachings?
It is common for popes to address the social, moral, and theological dimensions of new technologies. Pope Pius XII’s Miranda Prorsus (1957) addressed film, radio, and television; Pope St. John Paul II described the opportunities that came with the internet as “a new forum for proclaiming the Gospel” (2002); Pope Benedict XVI taught in Caritas in Veritate (2009) that technology is an expression of human freedom that must be governed by charity and truth; and Pope Francis addressed artificial intelligence directly in his 2024 messages on peace and communication.
Learn More About Magnifica Humanitas
How does Magnifica Humanitas relate to the teachings of Pope Francis, Pope Benedict XVI, and earlier popes?
Magnifica Humanitas stands in continuity with the Church’s Social Doctrine. It is anchored in Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”). It also follows Pope St. Paul VI’s Apostolic Letter Octogesima Adveniens (“On the Eightieth Anniversary” of Rerum Novarum) and Populorum Progressio, in which Pope St. Paul VI teaches on the relationship of the Church’s Social Doctrine to peace, integral human development, and the Gospel’s perennial value for society. Magnifica Humanitas also draws on Pope St. John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens (“Through Work”) to frame the dignity of work; Pope Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate (“Charity in Truth”) to frame technology and integral human development; and Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ (“Praise Be to You”) and Fratelli Tutti (“All Brothers”) to address the technocratic paradigm, fraternity, social friendship, and peace.
Background and Further Reading
Sacred Scripture
The encyclical frames the development and use of AI through two biblical images: the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9) and the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem under Nehemiah (Nehemiah 2–6). Babel represents self-assertion, uniformity, and control, while Nehemiah represents prayerful, communal rebuilding ordered toward communion. This vision culminates in the New Jerusalem, “coming down out of heaven from God” (Revelation 21:2), as a “gift for all humanity” (MH 10).
The encyclical also grounds human dignity in Genesis, teaching that men and women are created “in the image and likeness” of God (Genesis 1:26–27). It points to Christ, the Word made flesh, as the one in whom the mystery of humanity becomes clear (MH 1).
Pope Leo XIV refers to the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14–30), teaching that “scientific discoveries are talents entrusted to humanity that they may bear fruit” (MH 9). He cites St. Paul’s words that “power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9) to emphasize that no one is too weak to play a part in building the common good (MH 13).
Later, the encyclical invokes Isaiah’s promise of renewal: “Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:19). This passage supports the encyclical’s call to hope: even amid confusion and conflict, God is still bringing forth new possibilities for goodness, peace, and communion (MH 210).
St. Augustine
Pope Leo XIV quotes St. Augustine’s famous line from The Confessions of St. Augustine: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” This supports the encyclical’s teaching that human flourishing cannot be reduced to technological fulfillment; the human heart is ordered toward God (MH 11).
The Social Doctrine of the Church
Pope Leo XIV notes that the full richness of the Church’s social teaching is “presented in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church” (MH 28).
Book: “Complete Works of H. Emilie Cady”
Complete Works of H. Emilie Cady
H. Emilie Cady
The spiritual concepts presented in these three timeless books will increase your personal empowerment and enhance your spiritual growth. Cady’s complete works are a clear, concise representation of New Thought philosophy and metaphsical Christianity. The original manuscripts of all three books have been carefully studied and restored wherever possible. God a Present Help, in particular, contains much material that has not appeared in recent editions.
Contains Lessons in Truth, How I Used Truth and God a Present Help.
(Goodreads.com)
Harriet Emilie Cady was an American homeopathic physician and author of New Thought spiritual writings. Her 1896 book Lessons in Truth: A Course of Twelve Lessons in Practical Christianity is now considered one of the core texts on Unity Church teachings. Wikipedia
Born July 12, 1848, Dryden, NY
Died January 3, 1941 (age 92 years), Manhattan, New York, NY
Why We Argue: The Brain’s Certainty Trap with Chris Niebauer
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove May 26, 2026 Chris Niebauer earned his Ph.D. in cognitive neuropsychology at the University of Toledo, specializing in the differences between the left and right sides of the human brain. He is the author of the bestselling book No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology Is Catching Up to Buddhism and the workbook that followed it. He was a professor at a state university in Pennsylvania for 22 years, where he taught courses on consciousness, mindfulness, left- and right-brain differences, and artificial intelligence. In this episode, Chris shares his research into left and right-brain processing and how these differences shape the way we perceive reality. He suggests that much of our suffering and conflict arises from mistaking our thoughts and stories for truth. We explore how this shows up not only in personal life, but also in politics and cultural division, and consider the role of openness and empathy in navigating these tensions. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:03:54 Meaning beyond success and abstraction 00:12:49 Language, representation, reality and AI 00:18:15 Split-brain research, storytelling and certainty 00:23:21 Leadership, integration, and being right 00:31:27 Empowerment and inner agency 00:40:31 Attachment, safety, and fear 00:45:51 Openness and curiosity 00:48:00 Final thoughts
What It’s Like to Be a Panda
By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
“What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” Stephen Hawking wondered, recognizing the quixotic nature of his quest for a theory of everything — a complete and final explanation of the universe, a universe only rendered real in the mind.
Around the same time, on another landmass, watching finches cling to the swaying branches in the wind, a scientist as original and unrelenting in his own quest was wondering about the “internal fires that fuel these wisps of feather and bone,” recognizing that each mind is itself a universe, that inside every skull, even the smallest, is a place black and fathomless as pure spacetime, housing an umwelt of which an outside observer can only ever have an incomplete theory.
Considered by many the most effective conservationist of the past century, George Schaller — the first researcher to walk among wild gorillas unarmed and be rewarded with unprecedented insight into their universe, the first to take a photograph of the elusive snow leopard, rigorous and sensitive biographer of the lives of species as varied as the African lion and the Tibetan antelope, and now himself the subject of Miriam Horn’s rigorous and sensitive biography Homesick for a World Unknown (public library) — has spent the better portion of his days in wild places where “one settles at times for mere survival,” bitten and blistered and burnt, often haunted by his sense of “terrible loneliness” and “utter insignificance,” yet determined to prevail over parasites and bureaucrats and armed rebels to bring us a little bit closer to the abiding mystery of that unreachable otherness dwelling inside every consciousness, every sensorium, every animal body nerved with the history of its habitat and its habits.
Out of his life arises the unnerving, redemptive intimation that all the whys of our theology and philosophy are dwarfed by a single how honed to the point of revelation on the whetstone of observation and interpretation we call science; that the most interesting question about life is not why it exists but how it coheres, how it sings, what it is like to be alive — a question only ever answerable through what Horn calls “sustained intimacy” with the other via our own animal bodies, only answered with a “willingness to confess bafflement.”
Of all the baffling creatures whose universes Schaller entered with his torch of thought and tenderness, none was a greater mystery than the giant panda — doubly so for having be so rampantly Disneyfied and Instagrammed into a stuffed toy for the modern mind, shorn of its creaturely reality, all the more unknown for being so voyeuristically objectified.
Chinese watercolor from George Schaller’s 1993 book The Last Panda.
Born uncommonly vulnerable — a pink handful of hairless flesh one nine-hundredth of the weight they would grow to, entirely dependent on the mom that must carry the infant in her mouth or paw continuously until it has grown to what Schaller described as a “panda-colored beanbag with legs” — pandas, even in their full-grown gigantism, remain one of our planet’s most vulnerable creatures, dealt a cruel hand by evolution, displaced and enslaved in our own hands. Schaller saw that what was needed was not merely better science but a restitution of these creatures’ dignity by meeting them, with curiosity and empathy, on their own terms — not as a symbol, not as a plaything, but as a living mystery with a sensorium and umwelt all its own.
Contextualizing the alien world he entered when he began his work with the giant panda, Horn writes:
A wild panda… doesn’t announce its presence like gorillas with big, noisy families, nor does it roam like a tiger. Instead, it stays mostly alone and mostly still, inside a world that seems designed to hide it: of bamboo screens all around made still more opaque by near-constant mists and rains. There it sits, just quietly eating, day and night. It must, because in one of the clumsier turns of evolution, it has become wholly dependent on a food it can barely digest. Though the purest of herbivores, eating only bamboo, a panda still has its carnivorous ancestors’ gut. Lacking the internal fermentation vat and symbiotic microbes that enable cows, giraffes, and other grass and leaf eaters to access the nutrients in cellulose and lignin, a panda can assimilate just 17 percent of the bamboo it eats. It can’t build enough fat to hibernate or even to sleep all night, but can survive only (like the orbiting humans in WALL-E) by combining gluttony with sloth.
Horn observes that the qualities we find most endearing in pandas — those traits most emblematic of their commodified cuteness — are an evolutionary consequence of this metabolic dictum:
Taking in such meager energy, pandas must spend just as little. Most barely budge in a day, traveling no farther than a few hundred meters. Like Roman emperors, they eat slouched or reclined; George watched one lie on his back and use his hindpaws to bend stems toward his mouth, saving both forepaws for shoveling in the leaves. They don’t build beds, their plush bodies serving as both mattress and comforter. More than once, George saw a sated panda abruptly flop over onto its side or belly like a wound-down toy, fall promptly to sleep, then wake like Winnie-the-Pooh: raising arms overhead to yawn, rubbing their back end against a tree, even (when fed) licking a porridgy paw clean. Yet for all that adorableness, they were the most truly solitary animal George had ever known.
Chinese watercolor from George Schaller’s 1993 book The Last Panda.
But despite how closely and patiently he observed the pandas, Schaller felt the cold edge of their otherness. “Her being eludes me,” he wrote after countless hours observing a particular female he saw as “complete in herself… final and preordained,” finding himself “hopelessly separated by an immense space.” An epoch after Kepler invented science fiction with his imaginative parable about life on other worlds, Schaller turned to that most ancient of storytelling forms to imagine life in other worlds — the inner world of a panda — in a parable serving a moving reminder of just how alien this planet’s life-forms ultimately are to one another. Reaching across the immense space, he channeled the voice of the panda warning about her own unknowability:
Recognizing that we can only ever perceive other creatures the way we perceive one another — in fragmentary glimpses of a remote reality stitched together into a coherent picture by tenuous threads of theory and speculation — Schaller added in the urgent voice of his parable-panda:
Exposing the weft of science’s warp, he wrote:
In a sentiment part Emily Dickinson, part Wittgenstein, part Zen kaon, he captured the central mystery of aliveness:
Chinese watercolor from George Schaller’s 1993 book The Last Panda.
Complement this fragment of the wholly magnificent Homesick for a World Unknown with a taste, delicious and incomplete, of what it’s like to be an orca, what it’s like to be an owl, and what it’s like to be a falcon.