Blackberries - Last Season's Reflections Resumed

We tend to forget that everything is connected but it is

- Kum. Hella Naura

A year has passed, as the ripening of blackberries besides other signs show. How it is it that among a whole bunch of berries, yet greenish in colour, there is just one single berry that is already reddish-black? All of them are almost identical in size and have been exposed to the same amount of light, rain or sunshine. Yet only one single berry is ripe, the others are not. Why?

A remark by Dr. Jayadeva Yogendra, when I was fortunate enough to attend his meetings with us few residential learners of that time, i.e., roughly intermittently through the 1980's, comes back to mind. What he said was this: One monkey living on an island, one day cracked some hard nut not with his teeth as usual but by dashing it against a stone to crash its shell. It worked. Shortly after, several monkeys opened their nuts in the same way. Had they copied him? But on another island, monkeys were soon found to do the same. And they could not possibly have watched the first monkey doing so.