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Example research essay topic: Light And Darkness Plants And Animals - 2,553 words

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, and again now, we heard that wonderful bass hum of the heating system as it whirs away up in the ceiling. In the silence of this room the sound of that motor became very prominent in our consciousness. Usually, while talking and listening, thinking and worrying, we don't notice it. That motor reminds me of a wonderful realization I had in the hotel room where I'm staying a couple of blocks from here. There's a refrigerator in the room, and of course the refrigerator goes on and off as its thermostat switches in and out.

I was lying in bed, with the low, continuous drone of the refrigerator (which is something like the sound of this heater) and then suddenly Pop! - the refrigerator turned off. Even though the machine made a very subtle noise, its cessation in the quiet and dark of the night seemed almost like the wonderful moment when someone is repeatedly beating you over the head and then they stop. How good it feels! The acute silence that occurred when the refrigerator shut off was an extraordinary event, as I lay there in the dark smiling with a great contentment. It sounds silly but I'm almost tempted to cut out all the other titles of this talk and simply talk about the refrigerator. Spiritual realization is often sparked by the most humdrum events.

While we were sitting here in our brief meditation, somebody coughed. You may have noticed how beautiful and resonant that cough sounded. When we " re just going about our business and somebody coughs, it's just a noise, a distraction, but against the background of the minute of silent concentration and clarity that we have shared here, that cough was just a marvelous sound that went out into the universe; it had a wonderful clear resonance and a structure. It lasted only a half a second, but you could almost hear the different phases of the cough so that it became something rather beautiful in its own way. Later on, I hope to return to the cough and the silence of the refrigerator because they are of fundamental significance to our purpose here. Now let's talk about frogs.

In the 1950 's and 60 's a group of neuroscientist's and cybernetician's led by Warren McCulloch at MIT were trying to figure out how vision works at the level of single nerve and brain cells, how information arises from the raw stimulus of light and darkness. In particular they were studying the retinas and visual cortex of various animals. They created electrodes that could follow the firing of a single nerve cell. With such electrodes in place they would show various visual stimuli to the animals, to see which cells fire under what conditions.

One of the seminal papers that came out of this research was called "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain. " We think of the eye as a camera that takes in, in the modern-day computer analogy, pixels of light, and the information about the pixels gets transferred up into the brain and the brain does processing on it and recognizes faces or letters of the alphabet or all the things we " re used to recognizing. Well, it turns out that in the case of the frog the recognition happens not even in the brain, but in the nerve cells in the retina at the back of the eye. These cells are predisposed to fire most strongly when what they see is small, dark dots moving around, i. e. flies.

This of course is because frogs eat flies. Finding flies is vitally important to frogs and it turns out that what the frog's eye tells the frog's brain is whether or not flies seem to be present - everything else is secondary. McCulloch and his researchers would put various types of stimuli in front of the frogs, big open areas or colors or different shapes and they'd all produce a mild excitation in the nerve cells in the eye, but the nerve cells would really be jumping around when something that could have been a fly (a moving black dot) is presented. You could almost say that, before the information even gets to the brain, that the frog's eye has an epistemology. Epistemology is about the question "What is knowledge? What is real?

What is illusory knowledge? Verifiable knowledge? What is important?" And all of that. Even at the neuronal level, the frog is predisposed to see flies and predisposed to classify the universe into flies and not-flies. Epistemology is a necessary function of all sentient beings, and is also necessarily limiting. Imagine a pond at sunset, the beautiful lily pads, the blazing sky, the frog.

The frog sits there thinking "not-flies. " In the case of ourselves, who are much more grandiose epistemological organisms we don't have that specific processing for flies; but we do have, even at the retinal level, processing for edges and differences. If you look behind me at these blackboards and the panels of yellow wood that separate them, the retinal ganglion cells in the back your eyes are going to fire more when they see the edges than when they see the middle of the blackboard. As the information gets bumped up through more and more levels of brain cells, more and more information is squeezed out of those edges. We " re looking for shapes and forms and moving things and so forth, but first of all we " re looking for edges because that presumably is where the information is. There isn't necessarily that much information in the middle area of the blackboard here, though if I now make this line across the blackboard, then there's a piece of information there and your eye gravitates there. This line has divided the blackboard into two pieces.

It is now understood that information is measurable in bits or binary digits - a single distinction. So this mark on the blackboard creates one bit of information - either a yes or no, on or off, one or zero, this side of the line or that side of the line. Logicians, philosophers, and neurologists, people who are involved in the question of how the mind works, realize that the fundamental unit of mentation is a single discrimination. In biblical terms, the universe begins with a single binary distinction: "Let there be light" cleaves the unformed void into light and darkness, and everything develops from there. If you look at the first page of Genesis, the page that is entirely in consonance with the theory of evolution, you see how more advanced life forms evolved from less advanced life forms. By advanced I mean more differentiation, more divisions.

First there's the division between light and darkness. Then the division between above and below. Then the division between wet and dry; between land and sea; living things and non-living things; plants and animals; and you know how it goes, by powers of two. Just as in the human zygote, we all begin as one fertilized cell and it divides into two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, etc. , and pretty soon you have (and are) a very complicated, advanced, sentient organism. It all comes out of one distinction, one binary division, one mark on the blackboard. "What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain" tells us that we " re programmed, hardwired, to look for these distinctions. Now let's jump our frog from the realm retinas, brain cells, and epistemology to a famous frog painting by Sengai, the great Japanese Zen artist.

In Zen Buddhism, there is a long tradition of drawing pictures of frogs and talking about frogs. Frogs were very interesting to Zen and Taoist masters throughout the centuries. There's a famous poem by Bash, on which this painting is partly a comment: Now to Bash and Sengai, that Plop! is like the moment of shocking, blissful clarity that came for me in the middle of the night when the steady background noise of the refrigerator suddenly ceased. Or, yet again, this from Genesis: "Let there be light" - that starkly amazing moment of illumination, literal enlightenment, when something arises from nothing and the universe comes into being.

Plop! in a way, is the Zen equivalent of "Let there be light. " Plop! and "Let there be light" represent a moment of creativity that is potentially available to us at every moment, right before our eyes, right under our fingertips. But usually we are too busy looking out for flies. In the case of "What the frog's eye and the frog's brain, " there is a predisposition to see the universe in terms of one question, whether or not there's a fly there. That question is hard-wired right into the nerve cells of the frog's eyes, and for good survival reasons, for the frog must eat.

Yet there's something else to the universe of the pond, behind and before and above and beyond that question. Many American institutions in the 1990 's have their own version of the frog's-eye-frog's-brain question - seeing the universe in terms of a single question, "Is there a profit there? What's the bottom line?" Everyone in this room who studies religion believes that there is more to the universe than flies and profit. We are interested in ways of getting some personal experience of that bigger universe. That's the Plop! of Bash's frog.

We don't need to take exotic journeys to realize that experience. It is available to us here, now, and at every instant of our lives. Now. Raise your right hands and repeat after me: "Plop!" [Audience repeats]. Louder! [Audience plops louder]. Louder! [Louder again].

All right! Wonderful! [Laughter]. When we meditate or engage in the spiritual practices from the many traditions that led us to be together in this room, we " re attempting to get behind and before the epistemological distinctions that we normally accept what was on that blackboard before I drew the line? In Zen they often ask you "What was your original face?"What was the face you had before you were born?" before all of those millions of cell divisions.

Here's this wonderful text by Seng-Than, the Third Patriarch of Zen in China, called the Hsin Hsin Ming, which means "Verses on the Faith Mind. " He says the "Great Way" (meaning the Great Tao) "is not difficult - just avoid picking and choosing. " Another translation says everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike When the deep meanings of things are not understood the mind's essential peace is disturbed to no avail. where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess.

Indeed, it is due to our choosing to accept or reject that we do not see the true nature of things. It's a strange thing that we " re looking at here, because he's saying you can find the Great Way by going beyond preferences, by having no preferences. This, of course, is a paradox, because people had a preference to come to this room at 4 o'clock and that's why we " re here listening to Seng-Than talk about how wonderful it is to have no preferences. We had preferences to put on whatever clothes we put on, we had preferences to come to this building and study religion. Life is full of preferences.

Every time you open your mouth your making preferences. Yet he's saying that you can see things more clearly - you can get to what's behind there when you have no preferences. Even hard-wired as our brain cells may seem to be, it is possible to get beneath that programming to a place where it's possible to see things clearly, as though for the first time. We all have had the contrary experience, of having our understanding of something stopped by knowing the name for it. I come from California, where we used to have a governor called Ronald Reagan who was famous for the statement: "If you " ve seen one redwood tree you " ve seen them all. " This was his justification for allowing the logging companies to come in and chop down our precious forests of 2, 000 year old redwood trees.

In a sense, from his limited point of view he was right, because as soon as you put the label "redwood tree" on a natural phenomenon then you begin to see the name and not the thing itself. Then I guess you only need one. It is so easy to look around the world and put names and concepts on things and dismissively say "I know what that is, I've heard that before, that's old hat. " In Zen, in many spiritual traditions, we " re often pull our lessons from the most everyday and ordinary things, things that can sound silly when you talk about them, like the noise of the refrigerator. "Everyone knows that. " Except that, as soon as we think we know it we don't really know it any more because to actually walk into to the redwood forest and see the unique, minutely delineated structure of each of those trees, and see them as individuals and see the amazing ecological system that you are standing in the middle of, how the tiny insects and the huge redwood trees are feeding each other and how all the species of plants and animals are interconnected into a single biological flow which is interconnected and intricate so that if you take one piece out of the system the whole system can collapse. That's an extraordinary thing. So if with your words you place a simple identity on the redwood tree then you " re mentally stuck; the redwood tree loses its meaning and loses its context.

The karmic consequences are immense, because in your mental sickness you give permission for the tree and its forest to be killed, and the consequences of that flow back onto the viability of the human species as well. In the same way, we falsify ourselves by placing a sense of identity on ourselves. I have run into so many people who were told in the fourth grade that they couldn't carry a tune or they tried to play the piano and somebody told them they " re making too many mistakes; and they were told about these mistakes in such a way that stuck to them, that made them never want to walk into that room again, never touch another musical instrument again, never sing again. I'll bet that many people in this room have had that experience. That teacher has laid a container around you, laid an identity on you as somebody who is not a musician or who can't hear a tune or something like that. And we carry that with us.

The entertainment industries, by pushing highly produced media performances before our eyes, by emphasizing superstars, do the same thing. Why try being creative when there is such a gap between what we can do and what is promoted "out there"? There are so many things that we carry with us th...


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Research essay sample on Light And Darkness Plants And Animals

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