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The Constitution of India is the longest written constitution of any sovereign country in the world, containing a preamble, 470 articles grouped into 25 parts, 12 schedules, 105 amendments, and comprised of 146,385 words (in its English language version).
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The question is, to borrow from the Dutch
primatologist Frans de Waal—are we smart enough to know how smart
plants are? I might also add—are we brave enough?
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rd bk qlanta sapiens
let’s focus on the fact that these abilities can be taken away with the very
same anaesthetic that might put a cat to sleep—or you or me, for that matter.
It’s not just mimosa leaves or Venus flytraps that lose their dramatic abilities
under anaesthetic. All plants will stop whatever they were doing when under
the influence, whether that be turning their leaves, bending their stems or
photosynthesising. Seeds will even halt their germination.
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In short,
anaesthetic causes plants to stop responding to the environment in all the
ways they usually do.
This similarity is surprising, seeing as the lineages that produced
animals and plants diverged over one and a half billion years ago.4 We are in
entirely different kingdoms, and yet can be “knocked out” by the same
drugs. To put this into context, even bacteria can be anaesthetised. These
organisms are not even in the same domain as us, the highest level of
division in the tree of life.5 Yet these single-celled organisms, like the cells
of our bodies and those of plants, are sensitive in just the same way to being
temporarily shut down. Even the structures inside our own cells that release
energy—mitochondria—and the photosynthesising chloroplasts inside plant
cells are sensitive to anaesthetics. To be alive is to be susceptible to
anaesthesia.6
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Let Your Mind Be Pure – 13
The deer falls a prey to the sense of sound, the elephant to that of touch, the moth to that of sight, the fish to that of taste, and the bee to that of smell. But man falls a prey to all these live senses. How difficult it is for man to free himself from the clutches of these five senses and obtain liberation!
When wells and ponds are full during the rainy season, the water is muddy and not fit for drinking. But when the water gets decreased it is clean and sweet. So also, when the mind is filled with subtle desires, it is clouded by inertia and darkness. When it is free from sensual desires through the practice of dispassion, it is filled with pure Sattwa.
Sivananda
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PLANT BLINDNESS
Here we come across another paradox of plant blindness: we tend to
think of things with the ability to feed on other organisms, as mammals do,
as more intelligent. After all, you have to outwit your food, right? This kind
of diet is called heterotrophy, whereas plants, which produce their own food
using the power of sunlight and photosynthesis, are autotrophs. Well, fungi
with their root-like mycelium and ephemeral fruiting bodies are heterotrophs
just like us. Their mycelia use enzymes to break down the tissues of other
organisms and allow the fungus to absorb them for food. But most of us
would probably balk at the idea that a fungus had the same kind of diet as an
animal, because most of us wouldn’t consider a fungus to be particularly
smart. As with movement, the “animal” quality of heterotrophy is not a good
indicator of intelligence. It doesn’t even divide neatly between these
kingdoms: animals such as corals can co-opt photosynthesisers and plants
can be carnivores, as we saw with the Venus flytrap. We need to look in a
different way.
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JH Six months after I started taking Ozempic, I noticed something. Every
morning, when I woke up, I experienced two sensations at the same time. I
felt that my body was shrinking. I could put my hands on my stomach and
feel that where I had been potbellied, I was now lean. I felt fitter, and betterlooking, and more confident. But I also felt something else. My mood was
strangely muted. I didn’t feel as excited for the day ahead as I normally do.
I felt a little listless. I don’t want to overstate this—I wasn’t depressed. I
was often emotionally dulled. A
