In the European scientist the steeling of the mind to the interpretation of nature has often been accompanied by a withering of the feeling for beauty.
[Charles] Darwin bitterly lamented the fact that his research in biology had completely atrophied his appreciation of poetry. With [Jagadis Chandra] Bose it is otherwise.
—Romain Rolland
I recently read an inspiring chapter about turn-of-the-century Indian botanist/scientist Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose, in a book called The Secret Life of Plants, which was written in 1973 by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird.
If you can get hold of the book, for the sheer fun of its ideas and its lyricism, I recommend it with gusto.
ON YOUR WAVELENGTH
To begin, here’s a little known addendum to the invention of the short wave:
While Marconi in Bologna was still trying to transmit electric signals through space without wires, a race he was to win officially against Lodge in England, Muirhead in the United States, and Popov in Russia, Bose had already succeeded.
In 1895, the year before Marconi’s patent was issued, at a meeting in the Calcutta town hall, presided over by Sir Alexander Mackenzie, the lieutenant-governor of Bengal, Bose transmitted electric waves from the lecture hall through three intervening walls—and Mackenzie’s portly body—to a room seventy-five feet away, where they tripped a relay which through a heavy iron ball, fired off a pistol, and blew up a small mine.
For more about this, with great photographs, and for those who understand a little of the experimental technical stuff (pas moi), press here.
And to think we turn on our car radio without giving it another thought (not to mention our lights).
IMAGINATION IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN KNOWLEDGE
Refusing to patent his findings, Bose would say in a speech at the opening of his own Institute for Research, on his 59th birthday:
Not in matter, but in thought, not in possessions, but in ideas, are to be found the seeds of immortality.
Not through material acquisitions, but in generous diffusion of ideas can the true empire of humanity be established. Thus, the spirit of our national culture demands that we should forever be free from the desire of utilizing knowledge for personal gain.
Thought-provoking to say the least, given today’s climate of ownership and profit maximization at the expense of countless sisters and brothers (particularly where conditions are under-regulated).
HAVE YOU HUGGED YOUR PLANTS TODAY?
Bose went on to study in remarkable detail and with incredible precision the nature of plants, and the incredible “connection”, let’s say, between living and non-living matter. Two more excerpts you might enjoy.
In retirement, summing up his scientific philosophy, Bose writes:
In my investigation on the action of forces on matter, I was amazed to find boundary lines vanishing and to discover points of contact emerging between the Living [things] and the non-Living.
My first work in the region of invisible lights made me realize how in the midst of luminous ocean we stood almost blind. Just as in following light from visible to invisible our range of investigation transcends our physical sight, so also the problem of the great mystery of Life and Death is brought a little nearer solution, when, in the realm of the Living, we pass from the Voiced to the Unvoiced.
In his wonderful The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan asks (pg 331):
In a 3.8 billion-year-old rock, you find a ratio of carbon isotopes typical of living things today, and different from inorganic sediments. Do you deduce abundant life on Earth 3.8 billion years ago? Or could the chemical remains of more modern organisms have infiltrated into the rock? Or is there a way for isotopes to separate in the rock apart from biological processes?
And two great lines from Sagan:
“Science is never finished” and “We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depths of our answers.”
No true yogi would disagree.
About his studies with plants, Bose writes:
Is there any possible relation between our own life and that of the plant world? The question is not one of speculation but of actual demonstration by some method that is unimpeachable.
This means that we should abandon all our preconceptions, most of which are afterward found to be absolutely groundless and contrary to the facts.
The final appeal must be made to the plant itself and no evidence should be accepted unless it bears the plant’s own signature.
Having great faith in the utterly evident universal wisdom, and its collective genius (to say the least!), I just adore that last line.
The Scientific Method is incredible, but who can or even tries to understand, say, love or beauty, by prodding, cutting, disecting and poking? (except perhaps your standard Nazi—using Nazi as metaphor).
At the end of the day, dare I say (and I say it with a smile), it will be, if anything, intimacy of the sweetest, most humble, devoted, reverential and listening kind that ultimately leads humans to some of the deepest secrets that actually serve the journey of all sentient beings, sisters and brothers.
THE GREAT FLOW OF BEING
And here’s one more quote from Bose—for a dear friend of mine, and a remarkable teacher of Vedic philosophy, Jeffrey Armstrong—after Bose had done countless experiments on both metals and muscles, and found similar responses.
I have shown you this evening [before the Royal Society, May 10, 1901] autographic records of the history of stress and strain in the living and non-living. How similar are the writings! So similar indeed that you cannot tell one apart from the other.
Among such phenomena, how can we draw a demarcation and say, here the physical ends, and there the physiological begins? Such absolute barriers do not exist.
It was when I came upon the mute witness of these self-made records, and perceived in them one phase of pervading beauty that bears within it all things—the mote that quivers in ripples of light, the teeming life upon the earth, and the radiant suns that shine above us—it was then that I understood for the first time a little of that message proclaimed by my ancestors on the banks of the Ganges thirty centuries ago:
“They who see but one, in all the changing manifoldness of this universe, unto them belongs Eternal Truth!—unto none else, none else!”
In the meantime, a non-Scientific Method experiment for all of us: try to see and relax into that unstoppable beauty, both diverse and unified, in yourself and all the sisters and brothers around you—for we may just be infinite in potential, mystery and love, if we keep asking and keep looking towards its unfathomable source…
Oh yeah, and love more.
Pete xox