Daily Theosophy

Later I will try to tell you something about the training and struggles in the present life of Beauty or Moimoi or whatever had been her names. But first we follow Shano on his ever greater adventures.

(134)

(the scary mountains continued)

At one time, after heaving spend more than two weeks walking east in the Scary Mountains region, he saw, or thought he saw, at the distance in the North, on a large bare rock side, the head of an elephant – a kind of 3D-picture, and moving. He could not clearly see its body, but this must have been rather small, no bigger that a human child – simply because the rock wasn’t large enough for an entire elephant. Moreover it seemed surrounded by scores of humanlike creatures or shadows. He saw vaguely that the elephant was moving his trunk from left to right and from right to left, like a swing. Some of the creatures were obstructed in their path every time when they tried to move from one place to another, and toppled over and tried again and again. But others were actually effortless and gently carried on the trunk of the animal, and reached their destination with ease. Whether it was real or a hallucination due to his tiredness, hunger or the thin air, he didn’t know. He thought a lot. Why do people exist? What is the reason and does it have a purpose? Or is it all just a mistake of the universe, made by chance, without anyone’s will and love? He wanted to meet the gods – whoever they were, ‘people’ who would understand his heart and to whom he could and would give his heart. He knew, he felt, that they existed, not even far away, but they evaded him.

Shano was still a lover of nature, and though his depression of the loss of his girlfriend always loomed in the background, he had an open eye for all that he saw in this unknown and lonely landscape. His mind and distinctive perception were much more developed than when he was five and sitting and looking and listening to the brooks and insects in his village. He saw many more details now, and how it all worked. Sometimes he would walk on for days, from sunrise to sunset, and making only short stops for taking some food and drinking water. Sometimes he ran or jumped or climbed a rock, just to see what was behind it, or he ran a match uphill, fancying that he was the fastest runner, and jumping down with steps of yards at a time. Sometimes he was laying on his stomach smelling the soil and grasses and herbs and the little feces balls of rabbits. Even smelling mere soil was tastier than an up class dinner in a city restaurant. At other times he could sit somewhere for hours. He watched how tiny stalks came out of the ground, which apparently ‘knew’ that they had to grow into the direction of the sun. Some enfolded one little leaf, others two to begin with. But they all would move and stretch themselves. This stretching in itself was a artistic movement, like a ballet, or even more perfect that a ballet. Nothing was ever ugly during the process, as when humans build something. Not only the result, but the whole process of becoming reflected beauty, and everything seemed to be the expression of some heart with feelings. No builders were seen by normal eyes, no noises made, it all came from inside and seemed to have a thought about its own perfection in its own being. Nothing was exactly predictable though, because every individual grass or herb was a somewhat different variation on a basic theme – called species. Step by step more leaves, of different shape, would grow, though it looked as if they were just unfolding what already was there, and following an invisible and perfect model of their from. Every single molecule which was to build the stalks and the leaves, came, first through the seeds, and then, when some of these had together formed veins, from the soil to the seed and through its newly formed rootlets, and moved to its right place to perfectly form the body of the growing organism.

And so the days went on, with sunrises, warmths, colds, rains, winds and snows, sunsets and clear skies with millions of stars.

The microscope

Wherever he could Shano walked bare foot, because he loved the contact with the earth, the sand, the plants, the stones. Every step was a little different: sometimes dry, or warm or cold, and the soil had all kinds of different textures which gave different feelings. He could even feel a little of what was under the soil: rock, thick layers of clay or loam or sand, and the character of the various minerals which formed the sands, clays and loams. Vegetation varied widely, consisting of leaves, sprigs, sometimes nuts, and these spread different smells. If he only put attention to the feelings in his feet and nothing else, sometimes walking, sometimes standing still with his eyes closed, his experience was as beautiful as a concert, either a concert of birds and insects or one played on musical instruments. Through his feet he learned much about the land, and it was as if he could penetrate deep into the earth, and feel something about its history and destination. He also enjoyed the winds – which could be soft, but also fierce and biting cold. The soft winds, and the smells and the subtle feelings through his feet harmonized remarkably. He wondered whether all the elements were together playing a song for the same god, the invisible supervisor and protector of the region where he walked. This could be valleys, or mountain sides, high plains or along rocky creeks. Sometimes he found a lake in a valley where he could swim – no doubt his favorite occupation. The water itself had different streams and different temperatures, and forming small whirls and undulating streams against his body. Above the water was either sun or rain, or only the mountains around. Swimming in hard rain was the best: he loved the very tunes of high and low-pitched sounds the drops made when hitting the water all around him, and the forms in which the lake water spattered up when hit by the raindrops, each coming down with its own sound. In such moments he had forgotten all about his lost girlfriend and the gloom and problems of life. Heaven could not have been more beautiful. Everything was alive.

Because Shano had earned quite some money by his work for the music instrument maker, he had, some time ago, bought a gsm with a very special gadget. In the cities there were so many different tiny gadgets that could be attached to phones that having them all (if you were a millionaire) would fill up a backpack. But Shano had only one, and that was a microscope. Not a classical microscope with lenses and all, not even an electron microscope – which was outdated now, but a type of focuser with the proper electronics to make things visible far beyond the powers of light or electron microscopes. Science had found that Heisenberg with his quantum theory had been greatly mistaken. It applied only to the coarsest form of atomic matter. Heisenberg’s idea had been that perception itself disturbed the object of perception, because you had to send rays against these objects, and if the objects you wanted to see were very small, the power of the ray would hit these objects so hard that they were thrown out of their pathways or orbits and you could never be sure where the object had been in the first place. This had all been based on the idea that there existed smallest particles, smallest waves and other absolutely smallest quantities in the universe. But this was not true. There was no conceivable limit to either the smallest or the biggest. A quark, which in the twentieth century and after had been regarded by many as the ultimate unit of matter, was in itself as complex as a whole universe, and full of life, and therefore full of conscious beings with their own will-powers, well comparable to what exists and happens on our human level of measurement. The same applied on the large scale: every universe was part of a bigger system, this again of a bigger system, and so on ‘ad infinitum’ as regarded from our seemingly finite consciousness, and all systems communicated instantly, disregarding the ‘law’ that the highest speed possible in the universe was that of light – that means, no more than 300,000 km per second! On a cosmic scale this is ridiculous.

What has this to do with Shano’s microscope? Everything. Because on every level of minusculity everything was composed of still more minuscule, living, radiating entities, carrying infinite amounts of information, which on its own scale was analogous to the events on our human scale. Basically it was just a matter of transforming this information to another scale, our scale, like playing music in a different octavo. This gadget had only been developed in the last ten years or so, and it had become available for the general public only recently, and still at high cost. But Shano had one. And he didn’t regret it. He got more from it than he ever expected. Moreover, he could watch every organism or ‘thing’ while it was alive – he didn’t have to interfere with or color or damage his object of perception, or kill his living objects as was needed for electron microscopy. He could, for example look into the cell of a plant. He could focus it on an enlargement of 300 times, and see the cell organelles and the movements within cells. That people could do even 200 years ago. But then he could go on, and focus on smaller and smaller objects. Down to atom level and further. In the cell, at 600 x, he saw a nucleus, with inside it long threadlike structures, known as chromosomes, and they all seemed continuously active, as far as he could see in this magnification. Because this microscope had no lenses or other hindering material parts, the quality was much better than with the old-fashioned microscopes that were still used for biology lessons in schools. He could see that exchange of matter took place through special provisions in the membrane of the nucleus, and that outside the nucleus was an enormous activity of smaller and larger protein molecules, moving this side and that side. There were roundish particles called ribosomes, who where known to be the cell’s factories of proteins. Magnifying further, he saw, as he had learned at school many years ago, that proteins are fairly complicated molecules, consisting of specific three-dimensional structures of atoms, which were far apart, but nevertheless held together by their innate force-properties. In the case of proteins, mainly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen atoms were the composing atoms, and sometimes sulfur or some other of the 92 natural chemical atoms. Of course the various atoms had no name labels, but Shano remembered enough of his lessons in organic chemistry to know them by their size and location. Every single molecule was traveling around by transportation molecules or transportation extensions of themselves and reaching some destination within the cell, and then each arriving molecule was treated individually. Every chemical connection or decomposition which took place was organized – nothing was left to chance – as in the chaotic haphazard chemical activity in a mixture at a chemical laboratory. There were also channels with particular electrical properties along which materials moved or were transported. At the same time everything seemed to move around, and there was also exchange of matter with the environment outside the cell: either another cell, or a fluid rich in ions and other particles. Within the cells where many smaller cell-like structures, but still very much bigger than molecules, usually of an bacterium-like outlook, which had there own membrane around them, and other membranes inside perpendicular attached to the cell’s walls, and very complex molecules inside – what kind of molecule he still couldn’t see. These entities seemed to be living beings on their own, but fully embedded and dependent on the cell in which they lived. They had everything to do with the energy regulation in the cell. Scientists call these ‘beings’ mitochondria. When he went to a larger scale of magnification Shano saw inside a mitochondrion that the complex molecules were of the same type as the ones of the chromosomes. They are known to science as DNA, or DesoxyriboNucleic Acid. But what Shano found most intriguing is that in cells that were able to move from one place to another – what happens during growth processes of larger organisms or in the individual cells of unicellular (= one-celled) being, there was a special organelle existing of two little points, or rather tiny cylinders placed in perpendicular position in relation to each other. It seems that from there all movements were organized, and also the processes of cell-division (mitosis or meiosis, as you have probably learned at school if not google) started from that region. So he focused in on the centrosome and the two centrioles, a name given to them when people didn’t know anything about them.

If a passer-by – something that never occurred though – would have seen Shano sitting there in the middle of a field on the gentle slope of an enormous hillside, he would merely have seen a young man, perhaps a student, sitting with his nose near the ground,