We have visited Down House many times in the past – as it is situated about an hour from where we live in Sutton. It is a beautiful manor house situated in Kent – with a large garden full of all the natural experiments Darwin developed over many decades – as he slowly but surely correlated the information he had gathered in his youth aboard the HMS Beagle. He further developed all this by closely observing how nature functioned and unfolded in his native England – realising that environmental conditions (natural selection) creates changes in living organisms so a to better enhance the chances of a) survival, and b) reproduction. Whether occurring in South America, the Pacific, or the UK, the evolutionary forces acted in exactly the same way. Of course, what is near at hand to each of us becomes the “familiar” – and what is far away becomes the “unfamiliar”. However, this is just a matter of sensory “immediacy” – the point that Darwin made is that there is a greater principle underlying it all that we, as individuals, must strive to appreciate and understand. As part of this process, myself, Ge, Mei-An, and Kai-Lin all donned bowler hats and fake beards – so that we could – even if only for a moment – become Vharles Darwin!
SANGHA KOMMUNE (SSR) 