Insolation. Inculcation. You can’t escape some outside influence.
​
In a study of the history of Asian monsoons, Hai Cheng and others conclude that insolation (incoming solar radiation) had a demonstrable effect on monsoons during the past 640,000 years.* We think of monsoons as seasonal wind and rain associated with semi-permanent low-pressure systems. Those rain events over India, for instance, occur when the Northern Hemisphere counterclockwise rotation around a Low sits over the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, spinning moist air inland. The maritime air mass, moist and warm, rises to get over the Deccan Plateau, affecting western India, or over the Himalayas, affecting eastern India and Bangladesh. As it rises, maritime air loses its moisture to condensation, and rains its moisture onto the landscape. The influx of rain frequently causes devastating floods.
 
Floods caused by monsoons in June, 2016, killed more than 100 people. In the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand the rising water also killed more than 50,000 cattle. Flooding during the event destroyed about 3,000 homes and damaged more than 300,000. The effects of such flooding are obviously local; the cause is distant.
 
That the sun has influenced Asian monsoons for more than a half million years is an important discovery. It shows us how our planet’s hydrologic cycle, distribution of surface energy, and the breakdown or redistribution of materials are sun-dependent. Forces external to Earth can exert influences with both beneficial and dire consequences. We need the sun’s energy because we convert it through plants to food. That same energy can, in the absence of rain, dry out and destroy crops and desertify a landscape. We need the sun to evaporate ocean water so that the atmosphere can carry it to the land, but too much water presents its own set of problems.

Each of us is an Earth analog. We can’t exist in a vacuum. External influence, though intermittent, alters the topography of our lives, at times for good and at other times for bad. The reality of human life is that external human influences are like the sun’s energy: Inescapable, necessary at times, and somewhat variable. Each of us bears some mark of past influence, of ideas that have washed over us. Inculcation suffuses who we are and, like floodwater, permeates our mental homes. Our only partial escape is to head to high ground. It’s only above a floodplain where we can find individuality and independence.

​All of us are products of past floods caused by monsoons no more in our personal control than seasonal rains are in the control of people in the Indian subcontinent. Fortunately, we know that although we have no ability to alter the sun’s activities past or present, we do have the ability to move off the floodplain and to build a flood-control system. Personal levees and dams lessen the potential for damage or negative influence.

Monsoons are historically seasonal, and that’s good news. Though less regular, human influences, like the sun’s effect on monsoons, might be traceable into our personal pasts. That, too, is good news. We might not be able to stop completely such influence, but we do ourselves some good by understanding what has caused either flooding or drought in our lives. The knowledge prepares us for seasons to come.
  
* Hai Cheng, R. Lawrence Edwards, Ashish Sinha, Christoph Spötl, Liang Yi, Shitao Chen, Megan Kelly, Gayatri Kathayat, Xianfeng Wang, Xianglei Li, Xinggong Kong, Yongjin Wang, Youfeng Ning & Haiwei Zhang, The Asian monsoon over the past 640,000 years and ice age terminations. Nature 534, 640–646 (30 June 2016) doi:10.1038/nature18591. The authors published a revision in January, 2016, showing more exact data for the last 400,000 years and extrapolated data for the period between 400,000 and 640,000 years ago, but they argued that their conclusions are still valid for the entire period in question. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v534/n7609/full/nature18591.html

We’re used to electric guitars and acoustic guitars, to electronically amplified strings vibrating through a riff and coffee house strings plucked without amplification. That’s a wide range of “being used to.” Does it show our musical sophistication? Probably. We are used to resetting our natural rhythms, also, when syncopation and rapid beats alter our pulse rates. Unaccompanied Renaissance guitar music and the lute music of Bach engender in the listener a set of images distinct from the riffs of today. Without lyrics, a slow Renaissance guitar* or Bach lute piece** conveys the antithesis of our hurried world.
 
Yes, we have elevator music, new age music, and easy listening music. Most are the results of complex orchestras or bands or of sythesizers backed by supporting percussion. A slow Renaissance song played on a guitar is the ultimate fruit-slices-over-the-eyes-mud-masked-and-robed spa music. Millions attempt to get away from the frenzy of the times through such experiences. Supposedly, the spa is a place of rebirth without the doctor’s slap on the butt and the crying first breath of the newborn. Under the influence of slow Renaissance guitar music, a once frenetic adult relinquishes syncopated breathing. The pulse smooths into quiet steadiness.
 
We look back in imagination to simpler times when we might have heard Renaissance guitar strings plucked without accompanying percussion in a room of massive stones and heavy wooden beams. Bach’s slow lute music presents the same imagery. In truth, however, no general peacefulness has ever existed, and the guitar and lute music’s existence might mean that humans have always wanted to “get away.” Being immersed in frenzy wears one down. Or so the common psychology leads us to believe.  
 
But frenzy is also what drives the world toward technological advances. Escaping frenzy completely also means escaping all those technological advancements that make a noisy, riff-like world. All societies are noisy orchestras or bands. All have syncopated rhythms at times. Those spa moments are individual experiences. They are moments of quiet withdrawal. But to what end for most people? To renew? To undergo a personal Renaissance? To be reborn? And then to do what? To reenter the temporarily abandoned music hall filled with diverse instruments and pounding drums and to once again synchronize pulse to external drumbeats?
 
Carry your Renaissance guitar music with you. Make it your earworm. While all are frenetic around you, you will sit in a Renaissance room listening to unaccompanied guitar or lute, hearing no repeatable melody, but somehow enjoying a smoothness that counters all the roughness, complexity, and noise that surrounds.
 
*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FepAWlgqt2w   
 
**
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGpl1Utbqzw

Museums might exist because we are hoarders. Or, maybe they exist because we are somehow tied to pasts that aren’t even ours. We can’t let go. Can’t clean out our junk drawers. But keeping bodies on display? We visit the mummy exhibit and look because we’re driven to look. Notice how on one hand we talk seriously about human dignity and on the other hand about embalming fluids and instruments used to extract the brain without damaging the skull. That “on the other hand” sounds a bit morbidly hypocritical, doesn’t it? “Hey, I’m dignified, but I just gotta take a look.”
 
In 1834 Lieutenant E. C. Archbold of the Bengal Light Cavalry sent a letter to Secretary James Prinsep in India that announced a gift of a mummy he was sending to the Asiatic Society of Bengal. That mummy is now in need of some repair as it lies in the Jadughar (Jadu Ghar), a museum in Kolkata, India. Archbold had to send the mummy on a separate ship from the one on which he sailed because the crew had misgivings about transporting a 4,000-year-old corpse. It was the nineteenth century, so who can blame them? Seamen had enough superstitions plaguing their lives. They certainly didn’t want some sort of mummy’s curse to condemn their ship. A dead shipmate was one thing to deal with; a mummy, another.
 
What’s this obsession with mummies? Why do they fascinate so many? Books, movies, legends, curses! We seem to have devoted considerable living time to these dead. Think of the hours (years) spent finding, digging up, transporting, and displaying mummies in museums around the planet, and add to that the hours studying, caring for, and viewing these lifeless forms from antiquity. And in imitation of the Egyptians, we mummify.
 
In Kolkata one can look into the eye sockets of the mummy. The death mask has been removed from the skull and placed on the mummy’s chest. Eyeless sockets look up, seeing nothing of the world that looks down in wonder for whatever reason: Anthropology, art, history, science, ghoulish interest, or innocent curiosity? What can the mummy convey about its life and times? What can it convey about its beliefs? We look for meaning in any objects or remnants of messages inside or surrounding the sarcophagus. Was the person mummified and given objects to use in the other world? (Curiously, we ask, “How will it know that it has them if the brain has been removed?”)
 
Do we wonder about our own mummified fate? Four thousand years will pass. Some group will dig us up and say, “There, that’s curious. What do you think that was used for? It has a reflective surface and a metal back with a little hole. Surely, these people meant for this object to travel with the deceased into the next world because the deceased thought it was important. It has markings, and they don’t seem to be random. Is it language? If we can decipher the language, we might be able to explain its significance. And the object’s position in the sarcophagus, placed in a hand positioned near the side of the skull, might be a clue. Language? There’s a vertical mark, I, and then there are other marks beside it. A circle with a stick, p, and a stick with an arch, h. the next mark looks like a wheel, but it might just be a circle. Is that another mark, maybe a little arch, n? It lies beside a circular mark, one that is not a completed circle, but is interrupted by a chord or a diameter inside a circle, e. Does the circle represent some Heraclitean cycle between states of godhood, the Pyr Aeizoon, and humanity? Does that last interrupted circle indicate death’s barrier? Doesn’t make any sense, but I’m sure the writing is a clue to the importance of this no doubt religious object buried with the mummy. And what is this? It looks like an engraving of a piece of fruit. Is it a fertility symbol. Could it be an apple with a missing bite? Is it possible that this strange object was meant as symbolic food or as an instrument to connect the dead to the living? is it a belief that those in some other world can communicate, are still interested in communicating, or, like our having a 4,000-year-old corpse on display, an indication that we just can't let go?” 

​We think of some places as sacred, others as haunted, and still others as peaceful or beautiful or rugged. We invariably ascribe some metaphysical characteristic or meaning to place, and in doing so, we bond with it both intellectually and emotionally. Place suffuses us.
 
Early this morning I had a Face Time chat with a young friend who stood at Siccar Point in Scotland, a site significant to geologists. The rocks there lie in angular unconformity, revealing a gap of more than 50 million years in sedimentary deposition. Siccar Point’s rocks also show the result of continental and ocean floor collisions that built not only Scotland, but also parts of northeastern North America. And Siccar Point played a significant role influencing the thinking of Sir James Hutton, the Father of Geology. Hutton came to the realization that Earth was not only old, but also a continuation of geologic processes that occurred from very long ago. His realization stood in contrast with most of the people of eighteenth century Europe. To Hutton, Earth appeared to be so old and so enduring that he could see no “vestige of a past, no prospect for an end.”
 
Siccar Point has become a symbol of “deep time.” No place has remained the same, and all place records time in some way. Siccar Point’s unconformity (a gap in the rock record) reveals that while the place has existed for hundreds of millions of years, it features a large temporal gap. And that in itself is instructive.
 
Even the most common and taken-for-granted places in our lives hide something of their pasts. We aren’t the first to see meaning in a place. Beyond mere hypotheses we can’t know the human prehistory of most places. The place where you now sit reading this might have been the site of romance or war, of charity or cruelty. There’s always a gap, but that doesn't mean the absence of some past event or condition.
 
Gaps (unconformities) in the rock record reveal the limits of our knowledge about the past. In curiosity we attempt to understand our world; in pride we attempt to master it.
 
Hutton once said, “The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.” If Hutton had traveled to Alexandria Bay in New York, he would have encountered an even greater unconformity and a greater age in rocks, a gap not of 50-plus million years, but rather of some 600 million years, lying between rocks 1.1 billion years old and younger rocks about 500 million years old. There’s a gap to make one giddy.
 
What about much smaller temporal gaps, say, those in the lives of people we meet? No one can reveal all that has happened in his or her life; much is lost in the depths of forgetfulness, and much is infused without one’s conscious knowledge like sediments settling in murky water. We can look at one another and realize that we see a partial history. How do we handle the deep time of another and the lost records of the unconformities in another’s life? We can get caught up looking for vestiges of the past in another’s life, or we can ask ourselves about the prospects for a future. In a world so caught up in filling in gaps in hopes of finding out some hidden evil in others, a little forward-looking wouldn’t hurt. We have the rocks on record. Where do we go from here?  

Canals changed the world. Think Panama and Suez, and remember those canals that connect the Great Lakes. One canal in particular is an impressive cut through rock that joins the Gulf of Corinth to the Saronic Gulf. The high walls of the narrow Corinth Canal in Greece are connected by bridges, and far below the rims wide cruise ships squeeze through the passageway. With so many cars getting door scrapes in parking lots, I am personally amazed at how the captains of larger vessels pilot through the Corinth Canal without banging the sides of their ships against the rock walls. Although the canal’s width limits the passing ships to a width of less than 60 feet and a draft of 24, even a person on a personal fishing boat has to steer carefully to avoid those almost vertical side walls of the canal. Paying attention isn’t an option; it’s a necessity.
 
We’ve all been through tight squeezes, where we must focus our attention. In the Corinth Canal there can be no daydreaming, no wandering mind. From one end to the other someone has to make sure the ship doesn’t hit the rocks. Many of life’s shortcuts are like the canal. We find ourselves trying to save time or energy only to realize that there’s a price of concentration to pay and a different kind of energy to spend. Here’s an analogy: College students who postpone studying for finals until the days just before the tests. Here’s another: Taxpayers who postpone gathering their receipts and documents until the days before tax day. One more: People who say they will change an unhealthful lifestyle or habit, but who wait until the doctor says, “We’re going to run some tests.” Finally, some who go on crash diets for summer bikini season or for the insurance company’s nurse’s visit that determines the cost of premiums.
 
Squeezing through life’s canals is a common process. We think we can avoid lengthy, steady, day-after-day trips by taking shortcuts. We believe we will find canals. The Corinth Canal cuts out about 400 miles of journey around the Peloponnese Peninsula. The Panama Canal saves thousands of miles. Shouldn’t there be a canal that allows us to avoid the long, plodding journey? When we can’t find one, we hustle to dig one. There’s always a price to pay for shortcuts, such as the canal toll, the expense of concentrated effort and care, or the danger that once in the canal we might find ourselves too big to squeeze through without some peripheral damage.
 
Just about every postponement requires us to search frantically for or to dig a canal.
 
 
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=pic+of+corinth+canal&id=A9D66692E3629F3488D6F85B824CDDC71C0F29EA&FORM=IQFRBA

When thirteen-year-old Erasto Batholomeo Mpemba suggested in 1963 that warmer water freezes faster than colder water, a number of his classmates and teachers laughed. To them it only made sense that water closer to the freezing point should reach freezing sooner than water farther from it. Erasto was right, and he had rediscovered a phenomenon intermittently encountered by past curious minds, such as those of Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, and Joseph Black. The phenomenon now bears his name as the Mpemba Effect.
 
That a child should make a befuddling discovery is nothing new. Even in the questions of toddlers we can find insights. As a child visiting the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, I saw the Apatosaurus (called Brontosaurus at the time) skeleton. I turned and said to my father, “That can’t be the right head.” My father looked up at the head on the skeleton, looked down at me, and simply smiled. As an eight-year-old, I didn’t publish anything about my observation nor did I ask the paleontologists at the museum about their skeleton, but in the 1970s, the Apatosaurus did get a different head. For decades the skeleton had the wrong head.
 
In Mpemba’s case, Dr. Denis G. Osborne of University College in Dar es Salaam experimented to see whether or not Erasto was on to something. He was, and later they published jointly on the effect.
 
Adults also run into doubt and ridicule when they make observations that seem to run counter to common understanding. I’m reminded of a lecture I heard in 1980 by a friend of the Alvarez father-and-son team that pushed the hypothesis that a 10-km-wide comet or asteroid had struck Earth 65 million years ago. The scientists in the room were rightly skeptical, but they also laughed like Erasto’s classmates and teachers.
 
Just as Osborne experimented to support Erasto’s claim, so the scientists at the lecture (and around the world) needed additional evidence for the Alvarez claim. The hypothesis set off a multi-decade search for definitive evidence of an impact. That led to the discovery of the 110-mile-diameter Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan and the Caribbean and additional evidence from iridium-rich ash deposits around the world. In effect, the Alvarezes had their Osbornes in Antonio Camargo and Glen Penfield, discoverers of the crater.
 
Skepticism is what drives confirmation in science. Laughter at a discovery, observation, or insight that runs counter to intuition, however, is simply the product of insecurity or pride. Very few people want to be told their beliefs or positions are incorrect. There are many examples of such ridiculing in the history of science, including the guffaws that American geologists shouted upon hearing Alfred Wegener, a meteorologist, say that the continents had moved away from a supercontinent he called Pangaea. That big continents could move seemed counterintuitive to early twentieth-century geologists. Besides, Wegener wasn't even a geologist. But like Erasto, the Alvarezes, and yours truly, Wegener made counterintuitive observations that proved to be correct. His “continental drift” is now known as “sea floor spreading," the cause of mountain-building, sea and ocean formation, volcanic activity, and most earthquakes.
 
Here’s the problem scientists have. They invest their careers in a particular science, such as the debunked science of phrenology. After years of work, someone comes along to observe, discover, or demonstrate that what has been a center of scientific attention either lies on the periphery or doesn’t even exist. Investing in a science isn’t a purely rational enterprise. As finite beings, humans so invested realize they have only so much time to achieve goals. When someone discovers that the goals are either unreachable or distant mirages, he or she suffers frustration. That’s the human part of science. Upon the realization that we might be—or actually are—wrong, we feel deceived. That’s an appropriate feeling. The word frustration derives from the Latin frustrari, “to be deceived.”
 
It seems as though we can’t remove our emotional response from what should be a purely rational discussion. One might infer that if the best of scientifically trained minds can’t deal with something counterintuitive without injecting personal feelings, then the rest of us are probably also guilty of laughing at what we don’t truly know.
 
But how does this apply to you? Have you made an observation that drew ridicule because others thought it was counterintuitive? Have you ridiculed someone who made a counterintuitive observation? Do those with whom you associate believe they have all the answers they need to have about society, politics, spirituality, and human behavior? Do you?
 
Be an Erasto, or consider seriously the ideas of an Erasto. To discover a reality or truth, an Erasto doesn’t have to be a certain age, have a certain education, look a certain way, or belong to a certain like-minded group. Erastos have open minds. They might be wrong, however. So, if an Erasto approaches you with an observation, be an Osborne. What is counterintuitive might be less funny than true.  

Oriental and Occidental uses of similar spaces can differ. As Dr. Tian Xiaoli says in an interview published in the University of Hong Kong’s Bulletin, friction between Chinese villagers and western missionaries in nineteenth century China stemmed, possibly in large part, from the differences in the use of space.* The missionaries built churches with doors. The Chinese built temples without doors. The westerners practiced medicine in closed off rooms. The Chinese did not. The differences led to suspicions by villagers that missionaries stole body parts to practice medicine.
 
What was going on behind those doors? Word spread that the medical care offered by nuns specifically involved stealing eyes. When an outbreak of disease led to the deaths of orphan children taken into the convent and church by the nuns, locals believed the quickly buried bodies were proof of the bizarre medical practices. Dr. Tian looked at 207 anti-missionary pamphlets of the time to discover that differences in both medical practices and the use of space were the reasons behind the Tianjin Massacre of 1870 that took more than 50 Christian lives. Even the efforts of Chinese authorities to mollify the villagers did not stop what eventually exacerbated in villagers a decades-long tension between East and West. It wasn’t until the 1930s—a time of western support for the Chinese in their fight against the Japanese—that attitudes changed and suspicions about the use of spaces and medical practices abated. 
 
We use place culturally. And the use of spaces can lead to death, to wars, to generations of animosities. When in Rome…
 
When in Rome, use spaces as the Romans do until you establish trust. Do you balk at such advice? If you do, is it a matter of security, ownership, or pride? People take the use of space personally. Now imagine a heavily trafficked highway as a space. Think of the deaths that resulted from road rage because someone was offended that another used his or her space on the highway.  Now think neighborhood. Think of neighbors in conflict because of hedges or weeds, a cracked sidewalk, or a celebration next door.  
 
Say someone deigns to use spaces differently from you. Do you start or believe rumors about the use of space? Do you exacerbate the tension? A state trooper working undercover during his early days on the force had to “look the part” of someone in the drug underworld. As he related to me, he went into and out of his house at odd hours, disappeared (on assignment) for a week or two at a time, and kept to himself and family at home so that no one would know his secretive job infiltrating groups of bad guys. What do you think the neighbors thought he did behind closed doors? They suspected among other things that he produced drugs inside; that his house was a “drug house.” It was only after he left the undercover detail that he could reveal his identity as a state trooper and the nature of his job to neighbors across the hedges and sidewalks. He wasn’t, as they thought, “stealing eyes” from children.
 
As silly as it sounds, judging others on their use of spaces is a common human practice that can have dire consequences. Is it not a bit curious that those who close doors and control their own spaces see nothing wrong in their own use but see others’ similar actions as suspicious?
 
What are you doing behind closed doors? I have my suspicions.
 
(May 2015, V. 16, #2): http://www4.hku.hk/pubunit/Bulletin/ebook_2015May(16.2)/#18-19/z  

Without the aid of an observing instrument, you see the Orion Nebula as a gray-green hazy object. Even with the use of binoculars, you don’t see much color. If you use a charge-coupled device (CCD) to capture an image of the nebula, you will see a multicolored celestial object. The unaided human eye just isn’t very good at seeing color in a dimly lit object. As light intensity fades, color washes out.
 
Seeing with the help of optical instruments is what we have done since the telescope’s invention. We’ve added devices to help us see, and we have explored as best we can the unseen. With technology we have come to believe we can see the true colors of our universe, and we apply that belief to our own humanity. We ask, “Will technology enable us to understand ourselves and others?”  
 
Take the brain, for example. No, make that the mind. We have looked into the brain in our attempt to see the mind. We use fMRI to image which parts of the brain are active during certain behaviors or during thinking about certain phenomena or actions. We see sections of the brain “light up,” and we map where the brain is active. “There, that’s the part of the brain devoted to seeing. And that over there is the part of the brain devoted to speech.” Yes, we have clearly mapped much of the brain, but nothing in our maps tells us about mind. Mind, not brain, carries purpose. Mind, not brain, carries intention. And intention seems to be what we are about when we examine one another’s or our own actions.
 
But in fact, even with the help of instruments that show us colorful portrayals of brain activity, we can’t know anyone’s intentions. Intention is always a gray-green haze, somewhat recognizable, but often mysterious. When it comes to the intentions of others, we simply apply reductionism to satisfy our desire to understand. Only the mind with intention can express its purpose, but even self-expression is hazy.  Because subconscious* motivations are also at work, we can’t be quite sure that self-reporting intention is entirely accurate.
 
The rich colors of intention are generally hidden from observers—even self-observers—who wish to understand motivations. Obviously, mapping one hundred trillion connections among cells in the brain is quite a task, but maybe some super computer the size of the Solar System will one day complete the map and give us a very detailed and colorful image. On that day, the neuroscientist who completes the work will say, “Okay, that’s done. But I still don’t see the mind any more clearly than my ancient ancestors did when they could only look at a fuzzy, gray-green hazy nebula in the constellation of Orion.”


 
*The term subconscious has always intrigued me because it implies a physical layering. Why does "part" of the mind lie below (sub)? Does it (assuming its separate nature) not work as an active agent of mind in both synchronicity and function? Should I even speak of the subconscious as a separate influence? Is mind not holistic? Realize that in using sub, we have ascribed to mind a physical placement and structure. It’s a bit like putting wings on angels.