My blog seems mostly to be wordless these days! Once I clear a backlog of work that built up over the summer I plan to get back to ranting more regularly, but for now it’s nice to put something more visual out there. This pic is an Ethiopian Orthodox priest at Debre Libanos, a couple of hours north of Addis Ababa.

Click on the image to see the full-size version.

For this contribution to Wordless Wednesday I’ve chosen a picture of a humpback whale that I took a couple of years ago off the coast or Rye, New Hampshire. It was a rough day and the boat was being tossed around so much that it was hard to hold a camera straight. It also doesn’t help that the whales don’t give any warning of where they’re going to resurface, and so you have to wait for them to appear, point, focus, and shoot in double-quick time while your body is crashing against the hull of the boat.

The white pach you see under water is a lateral fin. What looks like blurring over the body is actually spray from the blowhole. I’d suggest viewing the large image to get a better impression.

Click on the image for a larger version.

This blog doesn’t lend itself well to wordless posts, so I’m having to write a short intro for the benefit of the (imageless) excerpt that appears on the home page. The picture is of a Canada goose and four goslings, taken May 26, 2007 at Pawtuckaway State Park in southern New Hampshire.

Click on the picture for the full-sized image (1.8MB).

What letter does the following image suggest:

Maybe an “i”?

Yeah, probably.

It’s more or less a straight(-ish) line (really an oval) with a dot (really a circle) above it.

If there was a Nordic letter that was a cross between “å” and “o” then I guess that would be a candidate as well.

…

So what’s this one?

Probably an “e” I’d guess. Would you agree?

Well, it could be an “o” or an “a” but it’s most like an “e”. After all it has the loop at the top and the little tail at the bottom.

…

And what about this one?

To me it looks most like a “G”.

…

So put them together and what do you get.

G + i + e = ?

Why it’s “God” of course!

Interesting, isn’t it?

You look at the marks on the eggplant individually and you get one set of letters, while if you look at them collectively you get another set. You can see the full story about the Holy Hand-grenade of Antioch — sorry I mean Sacred Eggplant of Boothwyn — here.

The human mind is good at seeing patterns. It’ll even see a pattern — and even meaning — where there is none. Muslims see the word “Allah” in eggplants (aubergines to non-Americans) while Christians see “God.”

Many Catholics thought they saw in the image below the Virgin Mary. The image was caused by condensation between two panes of glass.

This site became a shrine (presumably until they fixed the window). Of course the question that arises in my mind is, if God creates images of the Virgin Mary in a window, why is the image so vague? I mean, can’t the guy pull off a more convincing miracle than that?

Anyway, it’s “obviously” Kwan Yin. The image in the window, being so vague, will be seen as any female (why female?) robed figure that is universally known in the local culture.

And why just the word “God” (or “Allah”) in an eggplant? Why not an entire verse from the Bible or Koran? I mean, that would be a fairly trivial accomplishment for a deity that can apparently bring a whole universe into being from nothingness. It’s like God has the artistic ability of a three-year-old.

But seriously, we’ve evolved to be able to see patterns. If that pattern of light and shadow we see amongst the leaves of a tree really is a person hiding there then we might be in trouble. So we make patterns first and then confirm or deny their reality later. Of course with our religious beliefs we’re so desperate for confirmation that we often don’t get around to sorting fantasy from reality. It’s not just theists that are prone to this, of course. Buddhists do it as well, although in the West this generally involves seeing significance in coincidences (”It’s karma, man”) rather than seeing questionable images or words in sacred vegetables. Although Sri Lankan Buddhists at one point had an outbreak of Buddha statues radiating light.

I’ll give the last word to a wit who once said “I once cut open a watermelon and found it totally empty. Does that count as a Buddhist miracle?”

I found the following in a comment on the Crooks and Liars blog:

The United States is a Christian nation founded upon Christian principles and beliefs.
~ George W Bush, 43rd President.

The Government of the United States is in no sense founded on the Christian religion.
~ John Adams, 2nd US President.

Excellent!

The attribution to John Adams appears to be not entirely accurate, but not totally inaccurate either, at least according to NoBeliefs.com, which says that the line was part of a treaty written by Joel Barlow and ratified by President Adams in 1797. Although it’s a bit naughty to put the words into Adam’s mouth, the quote does highlight the absurd ignorance of Bush’s position.

Also, the quote to be a bit wrong. The treaty actually says: “The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

The California Catholic Daily recently had an article critical of teaching meditation in public schools (“Not the business of schools to lead kids to inner peace”.

The piece smacks of sour grapes — we’re not allowed to have kids praying but “they” are allowed to teach them meditation. It’s also marred by a misunderstanding, which is the conflation of mindfulness meditation with Transcendental Meditation. Here’s the slick join:

“Emerson Elementary, however, has but one of many such mindfulness programs, the number of which have grown nationwide to more than 100. One organization that is encouraging schools to adopt meditation practices for students is the Hollywood-based David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. The Lynch Foundation promotes Transcendental Meditation…”

There you go. Quicker than a pedophile priest being transferred to a new parish, the CCD lumps two completely different traditions together.

Now Transcendental Meditation involves reciting mantras, which are essentially the names of Hindu deities. It’s already been found to be a form of religious practice, and therefore not permissible in public schools. In 1977, Transcendental Meditation was ruled a religion by the United States District Court, District of New Jersey, in the case of Malnak v. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Last year David Lynch’s foundation withdrew a grant to Terra Linda High School after an outcry about establishing a Transcendental Meditation club there.

Mindfulness meditation, on the other hand, involves cultivating an attitude of attentiveness through focusing on the breath, and by doing so becoming more aware of thoughts and emotions that arise. Instead of getting caught up in those thoughts and feelings the practitioner stands back from them and simply observes them. Thus, thoughts that would cause anxiety, for example, are allowed simply to pass by, without being obsessed upon and without leading to the intensification of worry and fear. This doesn’t involve religious belief of any kind, nor the statement of religious belief (as Christian prayer tends to do), nor the use of the names of deities. Rather it’s a kind of exercise, not unlike mental aerobics.

Mindfulness exercises do come from the Buddhist tradition of course, and Buddhism is arguably a religion. However they can, as I’ve said, be taught simply as mental exercises. It’s worth noting that trigonometry and geometry evolved as part of Ancient Greek religious practice — Pythagoras was a religious teacher and the exploration of geometry was the search for divine truth — and yet we have no problem extracting trigonometry from its religious context and understanding it as a purely mathematical discipline.

So mindfulness meditation and TM are completely different, although you wouldn’t know that from reading the article, although it does give the last word to a Catholic proponent of mindfulness meditation, who observes: “What’s religious about learning to follow your breath?”

The answer or course, is “nothing.”

But we won’t have heard the last of this. The article indicates that secular humanists are upset by the teaching of meditation in school, although it’s not clear whether the commentator from Americans United for the Separation of Church and State was talking about mindfulness meditation or TM (or both) when he says “It’s not the business of schools to lead kids to inner peace through a spiritual process.” I think we can expect a fair amount of resistance to build as mindfulness meditation — having already being widely shown in scientific trials to have psychological and physical health benefits — continues to grow in schools.

Such resistance is, I believe, healthy. I think it’s vital that we do stop US schools from promoting specific religions, and a watchful eye should be kept on anyone who wishes to promote spiritual practice there. I’d even welcome a court case because I’m convinced that any reasonable judge would confirm that mindfulness meditation is not in fact a religious practice. In short, “bring it on!”

On Aug 3 Maia said the word “dada.” She’d been babbling for months and her experiments in phonics had often included “dada” (which she said for the first time on Fathers’ Day, bless her) but this time she was really excited. She knew, this time, that it was a word. She also seemed to know that the word applied to me. When I tapped my chest and said “who’s this?” she’d say “dada.” When Shrijnana asked the same question she just got a stare. That, plus her obvious excitement, convinced me that she was finally making a word, and not just a noise.

Sometimes she even says “Hi, Dada” (or “hada”).

I’ve heard her say “mama” three times. In each case she’d seemed a bit distressed and the word just came out. I don’t think she can say “mama” deliberately, but that she knows the word and that under stress the word bypasses her conscious control and just erupts. In the past she’s even said words as complex as “hello” before (quite distinctly) but again those seem just to slip out, and she hasn’t seemed to be able to do it at will, although I think that might be changing.

Plus, just a couple of days before all this Maia started rolling with new deliberation. She’d been flipping herself from tummy to back for months and from back to tummy for weeks, but then she discovered that she could turn this into a method of locomotion, and she started steering herself across the length of (and all around) the livingroom. She’s unstoppable! Since she’s also at the chewing stage we’re having to babyproof by moving things out of reach.

All in all it’s been an exciting week. More baby news (and recipes) can be found over at my wife’s blog, Conscious Mom.

Well, I survived another year teaching at Upward Bound. If that makes it sound like an unpleasant experience I stress that I really enjoyed teaching my classes and the staff were (are) all magnificent. I got fantastically appreciative feedback from the students, which just about brought me to tears. But it is a lot of work, especially since I’m a new dad and since I was also trying to keep some things ticking over at Wildmind.

Two years ago, when I last taught at UB, I bought myself an “I survived another year at Upward Bound” present in the form of a very nice Skagen watch — very simple, slim, and elegant (a bit like me in my dreams). I needed a watch and it was just soooooo pretty. This year I bought myself something a bit less external, namely a new had drive for my iPod.

So first, I successfully talked myself out of buying an iPhone on the grounds that while it may be the ultimately cool electronic device I just really don’t use cellphones much. I have one and have used it for less than 70 minutes in the past year. That makes me sound like a freak, doesn’t it? So I thought I’d make do with my current iPod, LifeDrive, and really-just-for-emergencies cellphone until Apple bring out an iPod that’s like the iPhone but less, well, phone-y.

Second, my iPod promptly dies, displaying (at best) a little folder icon emblazoned with a rather alarming-looking exclamation mark. I try resetting it, formatting, it — all that good stuff — but it remains resolutely dead. I toy with buying a new one, and then I come across Josh Highland’s site, which describes how to replace the hard drive. I didn’t even know the hard drive was user-replaceable.

Then I find the DriveGuys website and pick up a replacement 20 Gig drive for just over $50 including shipping. It took five minutes to pop open the back, take out the old drive, swap it out with its replacement, and restore the iPod’s software. Then another 20 minutes to sync all my music and podcasts. And there you have it — a functioning iPod. I’m chuffed. Really chuffed.

I hardly ever listen to music on it (does that also sound weird?). Instead I listen to podcasts while I’m driving. Mostly it’s my favorite radio shows — the ones I keep missing live because I happen to be driving at the wrong times. I enjoy being able to pause a show while I’m concentrating on navigating or getting out of the car to get gas. I love that little electronic device!