Thursday, June 30

            Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench near the Mariana Islands east of the Philippine Sea is the deepest point in Earth's oceans. The bottom there is 10,924 meters (35,840 feet or almost seven miles) below sea level. If Mount Everest, the highest mountain on Earth, were placed at this location it would be covered by over one mile of water. The Challenger Deep is named after the British survey ship Challenger II, which discovered this deepest location in 1951.

           

Wednesday, June 29

            Our senses, even common sense, do not always allow us to perceive truth and may even deceive us, as in when we used to think, quite logically and rationally that the earth stood still and is stable and unmoving and the center of the universe.  So we had to learn to “see the invisible” of the world and universe around us.

            Turning inward is no easier.  Leonardo Da Vinci said it best,

“Experience does not ever err, it is only your judgment that errs, in promising itself results which are not caused by your experiments.”

           

Tuesday, June 28

            Poet, Alexander Pope, 1734:

Plac’d on this isthmus of a middle state,

A being darkly wise and rudely great,

With too much knowledge for the skeptic side,

With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,

He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest;

In doubt to deem himself a god or beast,

In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer,

Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err;….

Chaos of Thought and Passion all confus’d,

Still by himself abus’d, or disabus’d;

Created half to rise and half to fall,

Great lord of all things yet a prey to all;

Sole judge of Truth, in endless error hurl’d;

The glory, jest and riddle of the world.

Monday, June 27

            “If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of things.  Accordingly we find that the more clear-sighted evolutionary philosophers are beginning to posit it there.  Each atom of the nebula, they suppose, must have had an aboriginal atom of consciousness linked with it…the mental atoms…have fused into those larger consciousnesses which we know in ourselves and suppose to exist in our fellow animals.”

                                 William James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890

Sunday, June 26

            Tolstoy, in describing his “thirst for God” that came from his heart, not his mind, said it was the result at about age 50 of developing “a consciousness of life”.  He said these feelings helped mitigate his otherwise feelings of dread “by the hope of finding the assistance of some one.”

                                                  Saturday, June 25

           Authors Burstein and Isenberg, in Madison and Jefferson, described landowner and farmer Jefferson’s attention to the rhythms of nature (even while in Washington as president) by charting changes in weather, when vegetables were picked and sent to market as follows:

“He luxuriated in this kind of thinking and planning, as though keeping tabs on the predicable and unpredictable would lead to a more appreciable control over the course of life.”

            The authors described Madison’s personality as “less of an essentialist, with a less deterministic way of mulling over human foibles,” than his friend Jefferson.

            I think we all try various methods to control events and individuals.  

I like journaling as a way to record events and somehow make sense of them, maybe with the subconscious hope of then controlling them or at least my own behaviors, if not the behavior of others.

Friday, June 24

            What do we hide from others?  What do we do that we do not want anyone else to see or know of?  How do we justify continuing those actions/behaviors?  What deeper issues might they be masking?  We have recently seen in the news some spectacular falls from grace as very successful and powerful individuals are caught in a double life or lies where their private actions do not match their public personas.  We all probably share this same challenge to some degree.  What does pressure, especially the kind of  pressure we place on ourselves make us do or not do?