Dear Mudcatters,

Having survived my first bouts of culture-shock here, I pray you allow me to try again. The words of a 500 year old Sikh folksong are included here. I would love to send the words of encouraging American songs from various eras back to Sikhs(who are still working round the clock to stop the outbreak of USA Hate Crimes) if you would be so kind as to post some.

Love and Light - Kamalla Rose Kaur

Two Sermons - One Very Scientific and One Very Sikh

From: Blue Baroque a performance art experience with permission from Dr. David T. Mason copyright 1990 David T. Mason

THE SERMON David T. Mason

Life, it seems, has built of itself a tiny dam on a small diversion of the great river of solar energy that arrives on earth. The dam - the dam that is life - holds that diverted energy on earth for a few cosmic moments longer than it would were there not life, were there not the dam on its diversion. The energy slows down - it is held in the web of life-and then life lets it go again, out to the cold cosmos.

Through the long history of living process on earth, the diversion of energy to life has grown and expanded as plants spread from the seas to the lands and as eaters ensnared the energy in longer and more complicated slow pathways. Evolution and the spread of life have increased the volume of energy held by the biotic dam, have increased the biomass on earth. It appears that earthly life has always maintained an overall strategy or purpose of increasing the length of time that useful energy spends on this living planet. Life does this by offering energy the possibility of passage through a continuing, complex, slow cascade of low temperature improbabilities that constitute the metabolism of the whole globe.

In the time since the plague of photosynthesis, since the great oxytoxic crisis, billions of years ago, humans seem the only organism ever to have managed large-scale simplification of the global biosphere, the only organism ever to have impacted major pathways and flows of materials and energy on the planet. We mine and disburse phosphates, we fix and pump nitrogen out to our fields, and we burn forests and fossil fuels in the great incessant hearth roar of a hot civilization spreading across the earth. We are, it seems, acting contrary to the example of all life before us by opposing life's very purpose, by tunneling through the dam, weakening it by exploitation and extinction, draining to atmosphere through our flames the vast reduced-carbon past.

It is full time to forget the crap about out human nobility and to begin to regard ourselves as a seriously pathogenic organism, essentially out of any currently "humane" control, doing and threatening further and greater irreparable damage to the life of this lonely planet.

############################### I enjoyed Dr.Mason's sermon.We humans need to live in harmony with Nature instead of greedily destroying it for transitory material benefits. I believe our Guru's command to revere long hair in Khalsa tradtion has its roots about honoring & living in harmony with Divine Plan for mother nature. In SGGS (the Sikh's scripture and Sikh's only Guru), in the Japji Sahib & Aasa Di Vaar, there is ample evidence about it.

Kamalla, could you please pass this info. to Dr.Mason for his consideration.Thanks.

Kirpal Singh

##############################

Dear David, and Friends of David, and Dr. Kirpal, and fellow Sikhs,

This is from the morning prayer that Sikhs everywhere sat down and read today (and yesterday and tomorrow) upon rising. It is called "Japji - Beloved Meditation" and it is a song written by the source of the Sikh path, Guru Nanak; 500 years ago or so.

Love and Light - Kamalla Rose Kaur

Japji Sahib Stanza 22

Limitless the worlds beneathe us, limitless the worlds above us, one will become weary trying to figure out the limits of Infinity, of Creation, of GOD. We can never reach the end of Creation/Creator's vastness. The scriptures speak of 18,000 worlds, but in reality there is but ONE, of which all this whole infinity is formed. In trying to define GOD/Infinity/Cosmos, your life will end in failure. Ours is but to lose ourselves in the Beloved ONE's adoration and praise! Because GOD knows! Yes, only the Infinite Creator/Creation truly knows.

23. Those who sing Creation/Creator's praise, know NOT how great GOD is, as the river flows knowing not the size of the sea. The man of vast wealth and abundant treasure is not equal to an ant who never forgets the Maker.

24. Infinite Praise! Infinite those singing! Infinite the workings and Infinite the Ways. Limitless the GIVINGS. limitless the sounds and the sights, limitless the mysteries of the Beloved ONE's might, infinite the Creation, endless it's expanse. We're engaged in endless struggle to find what can not be found. The more one has to say, the more must still be said. Hail the Creator of the play, higher than our minds is GOD's high abode. One must gain those heights before one can see the way. The Creator/Creation's greatness is known only by the Creator/Creation. Yet still, the Beloved ONE's Grace CAN raise us high enough to really see.