paleo-geography

A Letter to my Mother for her last Birthday

Anil Mitra, 1998

Document Status: June 22, 2001

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Thursday, November 26, 1998

Dear Mother,

I hope you have a happy birthday and a very nice year

Thank you very much for your very nice letter on birds…and “Anil Mitra”. I am glad you see that “you are being you, the way you are happy”…this makes me happy. I think it matters not very much when casual acquaintances do not understand, it matters a little more with friends, but family is important and it is difficult in some ways when they do not understand or disapprove. So - it means very much that you stated your understanding

I am glad you enjoyed our talk. I have thought and written so much, and the “path” has been varied, rich [I believe] and complex. The motives, I think, have included: just loving the explorations of nature and ideas - contact with what is real…and sacrifice and contribution to the world. Although I am very much American in my ways - my American friends have noted this - I am also Indian and have never forgotten India. There is also a corner in my heart for England. But, in addition to these very real and immediate relations and even the more particular ones like a blade of grass that might catch my attention on a spring day, there is also my relation with the universe, the whole, all being which I love and, of which, through my thought, experience and choices I have fashioned a personal understanding and which I have come to know

Through all this, I was reflecting recently, there are some basic truths:

1. The essential truths are few and simple – though not “easy”:

The path may be difficult, detailed, rich…and recreated again and again at many places and throughout history

2. The truths are accessible to and best known from common experience

…with trial and persistence…and support from specialized disciplines or study. This naturally brings into question the nature of these disciplines and whether they are not common after all and if so how to render them as such

These truths…and the present principles follow from the nature of being, of who we are

3. The most important relation is with all being

This does not deny the particulars…each day, disappointments, sunsets, ambitions, jobs, family, mountains…which, after all, are among the elements that constitute ‘ultimate being.’

Two hypotheses:

The fundamental principle of ontological psychology: The process or attempt to become the highest being available is the highest reward - the only completion of individual psychology

The hypothesis of being: It is possible for an individual, a being with a sense of “I”, to become and know all

You wondered whether there were human beings when India and Africa separated. The following rough reconstructions from geology, paleontology and anthropology address that question. 245 million years ago there was one super-continent, Pangaea. This became Laurasia that was made up of what is now Eurasia and North America…and Gondwana that was Antarctica, Australia, Africa and India. 65 million years ago South America and Africa and Africa and India had separated, Africa was just about to touch Europe and create the Alps and India was well on its way to union with Asia. The primates - they included the ancestors of the modern great apes and man - appeared about 65 million years ago. Hominidae, the family of the earliest distinctly human-like animal, appeared about 6 million years ago

Lots of love to you and Dad!,

Anil