From: 'Debashish Banerji' <ewcc@…
Date: Thu Mar 3, 2005 10:26 am
Subject: From Amrita - an older preAum posting which never got onto jyotilist

——- Original Message ——-
From: Amrita Banerji
To: jyotilist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2005 9:31 AM
Subject: RE: [jyotilist]DNA, Evolution, etc..

I am sorry if this is going out as a multiple posting…..!

Hello and greetings again,

While I am still wondering what 'one-celled immortal cells' are, I have once again resumed following the pre-AUM dialogs with interest.

Here are my comments, questions and quotes that I would like to share.

Rich wrote:

Although I am not equating yoga to science but rather see Yoga as the conscious attempt to dovetail ones activities with the divine. On the other hand science rather unconsciously - attempts to detail the laws of matter… I see the integral yogi aspiring for the Divine to bring down the spirit into consciousness and matter, and the scientist aspiring to give Humanity more mastery of matter …

Yes, I agree. Here is a quote from Sri Aurobindo which I found printed on every note book cover of Ashram students:

A Yogin's aim in the practical sciences, whether mental, and physical or occult and psychic, should be to enter into the ways of the Divine and His processes, to know the materials and means for the work given to us so that we may use that knowledge for a conscious and faultless expression of the spirit's mastery, joy and self-fulfilment.

The above once again is reminiscent of the lines that were most striking to me from a previous quote of Sri Aurobindo's given by Dorian:

It is the magic of the Magician you are trying to analyse, but only when you enter into the consciousness of the Magician himself can you begin to experience the true origination, significance and circles of the Lila.

Those who aspire to seek the how and why of the 'Lila' and have the 'adhikara' (to whatever extent) to do so, could do so via Sri Aurobindo's Yoga.

Somewhat similar to the quote of Marshall McLuhan:

('man shapes his tools and then they forever shape him')

Re. evolution / evolution of consciousness and recombinant DNA technology, I was quite intrigued by a statement made by Dr. David Martin of the School of Medicine, U.C.S.F.:

'We humans are participating in the process of evolution per se. By that I mean that our ability, acquired through evolution to manipulate genomes by selective breeding, and more recently by recombinant DNA technology is an integral component of evolution itself and is not, as has been claimed in the past, 'tinkering with evolution'. Instead it is evolution.'

There were places in the dialog where the word 'Brahma' was used perhaps mistakenly while meaning 'Brahman'. Brahma, as you know, is the Hindu God, the Creater.

Now, I cannot resist sharing with you yet another quote of Sri Aurobindo about Brahman, in the light of the Upanishads, with relation to this world. He says that Brahman is transcendental as well as all pervasive in the world. It is one intelligence which is multidimentional and infinite in expression. I quote from His book, The Harmony of Virtue, from 'The Three Purushas':

The Upanishads do not deny the reality of the world, but they identify it with Brahman who transcends it. He is the One without a second; He is All. If all is Brahman, then there can be nothing but Brahman, and therefore the existence of the All, sarvam idam, does not contradict the unity of Brahman, does not establish the reality of bheda, difference. It is one intelligence looking at itself from a hundred viewpoints, each point conscious of and enjoying the existence of the others. The shoreless stream of idea and thought, imagination and experience, name and form, sensation and vibration sweeps onward for ever, without beginning, without end, rising into view, sinking out of sight; through it the one Intelligence with its million self-expressions pour itself abroad, an ocean with innumerable waves. One particular self-expression may disappear into its source and continent, but that does not and cannot abolish the phenomenal universe. The One is for ever, and the Many are for ever because the One is for ever. So long as there is a sea, there will be waves.

I enjoyed reading about the emergent properties and the complexity and non-linearity of living systems. I can see how this would add to the wonderment and make science ever-more mysterious ' possibly goading scientists to find a higher faculty of knowledge and to 'enter into the consciousness of the magician'.

It was also enlightening to get snippets of various authors and scientists whose books you have read and shared your thoughts on. I cannot deny though, that a good chunk of your writings went over my head because I am not so familiar with the new concepts and terms in physics, cybernetics, etc..

The experiment on E.Coli, described by Rich is interesting. Similarly, Dr. Jerry Joyce's Lab at Scripps, La Jolla, San Diego, worked on molecules rather than full fledged 'organisms' and showed a mentality / evolution in them. The molecules of study were ribozymes (RNA enzymes) which can 'evolve' and circumvent unpalatable environmental conditions. Subject to selective pressure, a tiny population of these molecules underwent miniscule mutations and survived the environmental stress. They could then be enriched by serial dilutions and you would have a population of mutant enzymatic rna molecules fit to survive in otherwise unfavourable conditions. At the time when I was working there, we were trying to select for Ribozymes which could cleave certain genes of the AIDS virus ' and optimize the level of cleavage using molecular evolution experiments. The experiments were somewhat successful.

As for predicting the Supermind and its utilizing or being facilitated by DNA technology, etc.., I would not hazard a guess.

Amrita.