(I am large, I contain multitudes.)**

As a kid growing up in California in the fifties and sixties I came to believe that the “me” I called Dan Gurney was separate from everything outside of my skin. I saw my situation as just another “Me versus the World” drama.

Inside I thought I was totally germ-free. To stay healthy I thought I needed to follow the rules of general hygiene and keep my environment as close to germ-free as possible. 

Image credit: http://modaainc.blogspot.com

Since then I have gradually become aware that my boyhood ideas were quite incomplete. In the past several months I have come across several articles that make the point that most of the cells inside my skin aren’t even human cells. 

For example, the California Monthly (a journal that comes to me from my alma mater, U.C. Berkeley) recently featured an piece titled “The Teeming Metropolis of You” by Brendan Buhler that begins:

You are mostly not you.That is to say that 90 percent of the cells residing in your body are not human cells, they are microbes. Viewed from the perspective of most of its inhabitants, your body is not so much the temple and vessel of the human soul as it is a complex and ambulatory feeding mechanism for a methane reactor in your small intestine.This is the kind of information microbiologists like to share at dinner parties....

My body, the one that I walk around in every day, could be regarded, quite reasonably, as a complex community of living microbes. 

From this perspective, we look after multitudes of sentient beings when we look after our bodies and minds skillfully, you know, according to the advice grandpa (hopefully) taught you: getting enough rest, taking regular exercise, eating nutritious food and perhaps most important, cultivating a warm heart, a forgiving nature, and a contented outlook. 

For me, knowing all this (I am large, I contain multitudes) is a happy twist on the Mahayana Bodhisattva vow to save all sentient beings. 

**By the way, the title for this post comes from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. I do not believe Walt was thinking about the microbes in his small intestine when he wrote that line.

Link to the article in California Monthly, The Teeming Metropolis of You

Spinning Round and Round

Although the world seems flat, most of us know it ain't flat. Our senses create an illusion of flatness that's not there.

In a very similar way, the sun appears to climb up over the horizon at dawn and sink under the western horizon at sunset. It just ain't so.

When we understand that the earth spins on its axis we can begin to see that the sun is comparatively motionless in the sky. We're simply sitting on a little ball that spins us round eastwardly at about 1,000 miles per hour.  If we could hop on a plane flying east at 1,000 miles per hour,  the sun would stay approximately motionless in the sky. Geosynchronous satellites do this trick up in space.

This is hard to describe, but easy to see in this video clip that appeared on the NASA apod site the other day.

Enjoy!




Credits:



Earth Rotating Under Very Large Telescopes 
Credit: S. Guisard & Jose Francisco Salgado, ESO, Bulletpeople.com; Music: Arcadia (License: Kevin Macleod)Explanation: Why is the Earth moving in the above video? Most time lapse videos of the night sky show the stars and sky moving above a steady Earth. Here, however, the frames have been digitally rotated so that it is the stars that stay (approximately) steady, and the Earth that moves beneath them. The video dramatically shows the actual rotation of the Earth, called diurnal motion, in a clear and moving way, as if the camera were floating free in space. The telescopes featured in the video are the Very Large Telescopes (VLT) in Chile, a group of four of the largest optical telescopes deployed anywhere in the world. A discerning observer of the above time lapse movie may also note the use of laser guide stars, zodiacal light, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, and fast-moving, sunlight-reflecting, Earth-orbiting satellites. The original video, on which the above sequences are based, can be found here.

Where Science and Buddhism Meet Part 1

Last post I just linked to the video...

Here, for your convenience, is the video ready to go



Enjoy

And here's Part 2

Where Science and Buddhism Meet

If you should have 20 minutes or so to watch some video, I recommend linking over to Stream Source's blog (there's a link in the "Blogs I Read" list) and watch parts 1 and 2 of this video.

Maybe because my father worked for Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and JPL with the top physicists of his day, I find this sort of inquiry absolutely fascinating.

If you would be delighted to ponder how what Buddha taught 2500 years ago and what quantum physics have in common, then go over there and watch... LINK to Part One