Antropological Concept in Mystical Poetry of Parvin Etesami

The essay reflects on the creativity of Parvin Etesami (1907 – 1941), a distinguished Persian poet, little known abroad. We highlight anthropological teaching based on the religious worldview as one of the aspects of her mystical poetry. Created in the era when Persian literature and its classical tradition were breaking, Parvin’s poems affirm loyalty to the mystical tradition and the ways of self-creation of an individual laid down in it. The article shows that the Muslim science of behavior guides a person striving for wisdom and determines their path. The preaching of morality in Parvin’s poems, coupled with her mystical enlightenment, attempts to return her contemporaries to the classical world of their tradition. This research investigates the concept of man and is based on the only collection of 60 poems published in Russian (Journey of Tears, 1984), as well as on the new poetic translations. Two of the poems translated by M. Yahyapour and M. L. Reysner are introduced to the readers for the first time. The paper describes different facets of personality and fate, found in poetic self-reflection, the most significant of which is Parvin’s Auto-Epitaph. The values corresponding to Parvin’s spiritual personality are revealed: purity of soul, strictness, restraint, intellectualism, moral seriousness. Following the Sufi teachings about men, Parvin criticizes deviations from the true path —such as susceptibility to passions and pride. The poet considers them the destroyers and believes that they occur because of the evil forces distorting the human soul. The poet proposes a way out for the soul captured by the world — the knowledge of the Truth and the appeal to the experience of the righteous. The essay demonstrates that in Parvin’s poetry, fidelity to a thousand-year-old spiritual tradition and individual creativity appear as an organic unity. In the era that leads a person of the West and the East away from the spiritual roots of culture, the poet becomes a gnostic and a mystic in his individual creative life and, abandoning modern trends, consciously takes the path of mystical enlightenment and brings to her readers the wisdom found on these paths.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF “TAO” AS A SPECIAL WAY IN THE EDUCATION OF PERSON

The article is devoted to the philosophy of «Tao», one of the ancient Chinese teachings, aimed at improving the education of the individual. The author shows that Taoist teaching is a complex system of unity between the world and man, where special attention is paid to family relations. An important criterion is that thanks to good upbringing, which is the true path of the Tao of life, one can achieve a state of true harmony and mental order.

Philosophical Truth and Buddhist Wisdom For a Dialogical Dialogue

This essay offers a ‘dialogical dialogue’ between the philosophical and the Buddhist experiences. The first is represented by the philosophy of pure difference and pure positive, which shows how even truth, which characterises Western thought, is based on axiological assumptions, in particular that of the pure positive. The second is represented by Buddhist wisdom, specifically that explained by M. Raveri in his essay on Buddhism within Japanese society in the first centuries of the last millennium. Contradictions and conflicts, that seem to prejudice Buddhist conception and practice, appear instead, in the gaze of pure difference, as the true path that can lead humans to salvation.

Scallop2 enables accurate assembly of multiple-end RNA-seq data

Transcript assembly (i.e., to reconstruct the full-length expressed transcripts from RNA-seq data) has been a critical but yet unsolved step in RNA-seq analysis. Modern RNA-seq protocols can produce paired-/multiple-end RNA-seq reads, where information is available that two or more reads originate from the same transcript. The long-range constraints implied in these paired-/multiple-end reads can be much beneficial in correctly phasing the complicated spliced isoforms. However, there often exist gaps among individual ends, which may even contain junctions, making the efficient use of such constraints algorithmically challenging. Here we introduce Scallop2, a new reference-based transcript assembler optimized for multiple-end (including paired-end) RNA-seq data. Scallop2 uses an algorithmic frame-work that first represents reads from the same molecule as the so-called multiple-end phasing paths in the context of a splice graph, then “bridges” each multiple-end phasing path into a long, single-end phasing path, and finally decomposes the splice graph into paths (i.e., transcripts) guided by the bridged phasing paths. An efficient bridging algorithm is designed to infer the true path connecting two consecutive ends following a novel formulation that is robust to sequencing errors and transcript noises. By observing that failing to bridge two ends is mainly due to incomplete splice graphs, we propose a new method to determine false starting/ending vertices of the splice graphs which has been showed efficient in reducing false positive rate. Evaluations on both (multiple-end) single-cell RNA-seq datasets from Smart-seq3 protocol and Illumina paired-end RNA-seq samples demonstrate that Scallop2 vastly outperforms recent assemblers including StringTie2, Scallop, and CLASS2 in assembly accuracy.

Doing Hijrah Through Music: A Religious Phenomenon Among Indonesian Musician Community

This paper studies the variants of hijrah movements among Muslim youths in Bandung, Indonesia, in responding music. Hijrah (to migrate spiritually) was first interpreted as abandoning the past sinful life into the path of Islam. In its development, it is defined as leaving behind “un-Islamic” activities, including music. The latter meaning of hijrah conveys to ex-musicians performing hijrah to completely abandon music and even destroys their musical instruments. Among hijrah groups, Gerakan Pemuda Hijrah conveys the detrimental effects of music for Islamic morality and faith. For them, music will drive Muslims to the jāhilīyah (ignorance), shirk (polytheism) and bid‘ah (innovation/heresy). Amidst this situation, Komunitas Musisi Mengaji (KOMUJI) emerges to practicing hijrah by performing musical activities and even employing “musicking” as a way to attain the true path of Islam. This paper reveals the different views of those groups concerning music and hijrah, as well as shows an alternative path amid Islamism and globalization.

Measuring the double-drift illusion with hand tracking

If a gabor pattern drifts in one direction while its internal texture drifts in the orthogonal direction, its perceived position deviates further and further away from its true path. We first evaluated the illusion using manual tracking. Participants followed the gabor with a stylus on a drawing tablet that coincided optically with the horizontal monitor surface. Their hand and the stylus were not visible during the tracking. The magnitude of the tracking illusion corresponded closely to previous perceptual and pointing measures indicating that manual tracking is a valid measure for the illusion. This allowed us to use it in a second experiment to capture the behavior of the illusion as it eventually degrades and breaks down in single trials. Specifically, the deviation of the gabor stops accumulating at some point and either stays at a fixed offset or resets toward the veridical position. To report the perceived trajectory of the gabor, participants drew it after the gabor was removed from the monitor. Resets were detected and analyzed and they suggest that there is a spatial limit beyond which the illusion saturates or resets.

“Building Communism”

In 1958–1959, Khrushchev launched his program for the “full-scale construction of communism.” Not coincidentally, in the same time period, China’s Mao launched his disastrous “Great Leap Forward,” Yugoslavia generalized its program of “workers’ self-management” as a blueprint for the communist world moving forward, while North Korea presented the late-Stalinist policy of monolithic, terroristic control as the only true path to communism.

Mirages

Turning fifty, Kelso planned to enlist “in the invincible little army of Liberalism” by lecturing across the country and publishing his books. A report he published from the road tried to explain desert mirages. In New York City, he met with other freethinkers and arranged to have some of his books printed. In Rochester, New York, he met with reformers and spiritualists. But his health would not permit him to be a public lecturer. For months, the disappointment nearly paralyzed him. On a train trip he saw another mirage and reflected that the weary desert traveler who leaves the true path to pursue a phantom lake was like people “who have left the paths of reason, science, and common-sense to follow the phantoms” of religion. Yet he himself soon converted to spiritualism, convinced that the spirits of his dead children hovered about to comfort him.