I felt tired when the sun appeared low in the sky and my alarm clock made loud sounds.
I stayed in bed until the need to urinate overpowered the desire to stay in bed and stay warm.
I dressed and ate some toast. I drove to an exercise class. The sun was bright and made my eyes squint. I followed the instructions of my teacher. I felt pain in my back. I still feel some pain in my back. I drove home. I took some books off my shelf and read them in an attempt to set the information in to my memory. I walked some blocks to the building where information on Chinese medicine is taught. I sat in a room and listened to a woman talk about herbs. I felt interested and bored simultaneously. I walked back to my house. I turn on my radio and am listening to the man elected as president. His voice sounds like velvet but when I hear his words I feel angry and disappointed.
Can I synthesize East and West?
Although I will make an attempt to synthesize, I'm not sure that an individual mind can really separate out from the cultural influence from which it grows. The Western mind is deeply imbedded in my mind even if I feel drawn to so-called Eastern philosophy or medicine or food. Even though I've seen acupuncture work I still have moments of skepticism; even though I have personally felt a change from acupuncture, herbs and qi gong, I still wonder how that can be, what is the mechanism at work. However, I do think the mind is capable of expanding - perhaps you can teach an old dog new tricks. We now live in a globalized world and that begs a certain degree of synthesis or integration. When television from the US gets broadcast in India there is a forced synthesis as this Western message gets interpreted through an Indian mind. And when Chinese medicine is taught in Berkeley, CA it is interpreted through an American lens. So synthesis happens all the time. I just don't think it's always as sophisticated as one hopes.
The tip-of-the-iceberg taste of physics this semester has offered a really interesting entrance into an integration of East and West. It's curious to find the synthesis in a class that is part of the Western science curriculum. There is a Western tendency to think in dialectics or dualisms but sometimes something can go so far right or left on the scale it actually comes all the way back around to the other side - like libertarians are so conservative they're liberal. It's like physics as it is studied now is so far western it has become eastern.
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