Are Giants Returning to the Holy Land?

Via The Watcher Website

Are the Anakim or the Refaim, the giants of the Bible, returning to Israel today? There are only two periods of recorded history when giants were reported in Israel; In biblical days from the time of the Flood to the ascension of King David and since 1993 in modern Israel.

The case for the return of giants to Israel is strong. In fact, what characterizes the current Israeli UFO wave from others in the world, is the shere abundance of physical evidence left behind by the visitors. Consider the first incident to usher Israel into the UFO age.

On the evening of Sept. 28, 1987, a 27 year old auto mechanic, Ami Achrai was driving just south of Haifa when he saw what he thought might be a helicopter in distress hovering just above the sands of Shikmona Beach on the Mediterranean Sea. He stopped his car and to his utter amazement saw a disc-shaped craft which emitted a bright red flash before disappearing.

Two days later he returned to the site with a ufologist the police referred him to, Hadassah Arbel. What they discovered remains one of the most lasting proofs ever left by a UFO of its physical existence. The flash emitted by the craft burned its image into the sands of Shikmona Beach. A fifteen metere ellipsoid disk was burnt black into the sand but what was more interesting was what wasn't burned. In the vegetation which wasn't burned was a clear image of the pilot of the craft facing a control board.

Seven years later I sent samples of the burnt sand to the television show Sightings which subjected it to laboratory tests. The sand seemed to melt in the heat of the camera light. The reason later discovered was the sand particles were covered by a low melting hydrocarbon material. The laboratory could find no natural or human explanation for the phenomenon.

Ami Achrai's incident was followed by a repeat performance on June 6, 1988 when a similarly shaped craft was once again burned into the sands of Shikmona Beach, about 100 yards north of the first site. This was followed by the most spectacular display of all. On April 27, 1989, two teenagers witnessed a UFO explode into thousands of shards over Shikmona Beach.

By now, Israeli ufologists were prepared to handle the latest incident more scientifically. The beach was strewn with burning white metal which was cool to the touch. The metal even glowed in water. When picked up, the shards turned into a white ash. Scientists from the Technion Institute of Technology tested the site and found that magnetism was 6000 times higher than the surrounding area. The shards were found top be very pure magnesium.

Two hundred yards above Shikmona Beach is a biblical shrine called Elijah's cave. Here Elijah preached and here or somewhere nearby in the Carmel Mountains, Elijah challenged the Canaanites to a duel of Gods. Two bulls were tethered and the gods were beseeched to roast them. Naturally, baal failed the Canaanites but Elijah's God sent a ray of light from heaven which cooked the bull on the spot. This ray must have been similar to the kind of beam which burned the sands of Shikmona Beach into a saucer shape.[watcher comments: The ray which Elijah's God sent from heaven was similar to the that which burned the sand into a saucer shape, but not for the reason Chamish is suggesting. While the power source of Chamish's two rays are distinct, the similarity results from the masterful counterfeiting by rebel angels masquerading as aliens in UFOs. Satan and his rebel angels seek to IMITATE & COUNTERFEIT the Creator, or as satan declares: "I will be compared to the Most High - Isaiah 14:13"]

Within the Cave of Elijah is an ancient drawing of something that was the spitting image of the craft burned into the sands below. The Sightings team decided the image "was a coincidence. Maybe it was a bat." When Michael Hesemann filmed the drawing he left certain it was a match for the burned sand pictures.

Although the cave drawing's meaning is in dispute, the fact of the modern UFO- burned inscriptions is not. Something unique occurred at Shikmona Beach. Alien craft decided to leave souvenirs there at least three times. By doing so, they revealed the dimensions of their craft and apparently pilot, as well as their construction material. These were not crop circles nor were they formed the same way. A very different message was left on Shikmona Beach's sands.

After the UFO explosion, there was a hiatus of UFO activity until 1993 broken only once in late 1991 over the village of Sde Moshe, some five miles from Kadima. There, after two straight nights of having the inside of his house lit up by an unexplained craft hovering above it, Eli Cohen captured the responsible UFO on videotape. Several minutes of the tape were filmed after daybreak making the result a most clear and convincing record of a UFO.

It seems the visitors were merely scouting the Kadima area in 1991 but they returned in force in 1993. And this time, the occupants of the crafts did more than merely hover in the sky.

In the early morning of April 20, Tsiporet Carmel's house glowed from within. She stepped outside and saw what she thought was a new fruit silo built outside her back yard. But then she saw the silo add a second storey to itself. Ten yards to the side of this magical silo, Tsiporet saw a seven foot tall being wearing metallic overalls. Its head was covered in a what looked like a beekeeper's hat. Tsiporet said, "Why don't you take off your hat so I can see your face?" The being answered her telepathically, "That's the way it is."

An Introduction to pho-wa: Transference of Consciousness

Via The Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive e-Newsletter

The teachings on transference of consciousness (Tib: pho-wa) come from Shakyamuni Buddha. They weren't made up by Tibetan monks. These teachings passed down from the Buddha through the Indian oral transmission lineage and eventually reached Tibet. That's how come the Tibetan tradition contains the practice of pho-wa.

Who does this practice and what are its benefits?

First of all, from the Buddhist point of view, human life and death are equally important events. There's no reason to think that life is important and death is bad, unimportant. Both are important.

Now, in the same way that we want to have happy, joyful lives, Himalayan yogis want to have happy, joyful deaths. They certainly don't want unhappy, confused, disaster deaths.

Of course, those who attain enlightenment in their lifetime don't need transference of consciousness. It's a practice for those who don't reach enlightenment in this life and need another in which to do so.

At the time of death, everybody's consciousness has to leave the body, but sometimes the conditions at that time are disastrous: overwhelming disease, grasping, attachment, wrong thinking and so forth. Therefore, yogis like to have at their disposal a method that will allow them to die perfectly, before such disadvantageous conditions arise. The practice of pho-wa is one such method.

At present, it seems that we're completely stuck in this body of sense-gravitation attachment, with no way out. Call it karma, life-force or whatever, but yogis who are fully trained in pho-wa are able to transfer their consciousness out of their sense-gravitation body and are therefore free from dying a disastrous death. Whenever they feel like it, they're free to employ the meditation techniques they've accomplished and transfer their consciousness out of their body.

I'm not just talking philosophy here. Many Tibetan monks and meditators have really been able to use these methods at the appropriate time.

For example, I heard that in 1959, when China overran Tibet, many ordinary monks employed the techniques of pho-wa because they felt that under occupation they would no longer be able to exercise their religious faith. So they were glad to have a method whereby they could happily leave this life.

Why is it helpful to know about this kind of thing in the West? It seems to me that the modern world has become so preoccupied with material things that it has neglected the potential of the human mind. Therefore, I feel it's a good thing to make known the fact that people have the power to eliminate the fears of life, death and sense-gravitation attachment and disastrous situations. In fact, everybody does have the potential to eliminate such fears because all beings' minds have buddha-nature. It really exists.

So you should not feel stuck and incapable of doing anything. We have the capacity to free ourselves from all suffering and confusion. However, the important thing to realize is that the actual source of all happiness, misery and confusion is the mind, not the body. Thus, by investigating and coming to know the nature of our own consciousness, we can free ourselves from all fear.

When should we choose to transfer our consciousness? We're not allowed to do it at just any time. The time has to be chosen carefully; otherwise we're in danger of simply killing ourselves. We choose the right time by scientifically checking the signs that warn us that the time of death is approaching. These signs can be internal or external...there are detailed explanations.

However, the appearance of these signs doesn't necessarily mean that death is imminent. There are things we can do to postpone it, such as reactivating the energy in our nervous system. Because this is just an introduction, I'm not going to go into more detail here.

Since death is definite and at that time our consciousness will transfer naturally, why should we practice pho-wa? Because usually we die from some kind of disease, and at the end we are totally ravaged by it and unable to do anything. So, before we're reduced to a situation with which we can't cope, the methods of transference of consciousness allow us to leave our body with control, before that final devastation. That's the right time to use it. But, to reiterate, before doing pho-wa we need to be able to recognize the signs of death and know clean clear when we've reached the right point to transfer our consciousness.

What do we do in the practice of pho-wa? Basically, through concentration we put our energy into the right channel and stop it from going the wrong way. Again, the technical details are in the commentaries and I'm not going to describe them here.

For example, at the time of death the consciousness can leave the body from one of its many orifices, such as the nose, mouth, navel and lower orifices, and the one from which it leaves indicates the realm of rebirth. However, the best point from which the consciousness can leave the body is the crown of the head and that's what we try to ensure by practicing pho-wa. If we consciously, mindfully separate our consciousness from our body through the crown we give ourselves the ability to select our next rebirth in the best way and thus put ourselves on the path that leads from happiness to happiness. That's the main point.

The thing is, in this life you can be a good, kind, loving person but still be unable to cope and get angry at the time of death. If that happens you've basically ruined any positive energy you might have generated during your lifetime.

Why do we sometimes call transference of consciousness a super method? Because even incredibly negative people like Hitler—who killed millions of human beings and created unbelievably bad karma—can kiss all their negativity goodbye if they're able to practice pho-wa perfectly at the time of death and die with a clean clear mind. We also say that death is a kind of final destination in the sense that it's a chance to make a clean break with the past and make the next life perfect.

Before Himalayan practitioners transfer their consciousness they prepare—they practice the special techniques, of course, but they also eliminate every last atom of attachment; they make sure they do not have a single object to grasp at. This is the most important thing.

What interferes with a peaceful death, what causes fear, is the grasping mind. Grasping attachment to any object at the time of death is the source of confusion and a bad rebirth.

I don't know if you like to hear about rebirth or not; you may not believe in the existence of future lives; still, I think that most people feel something's going to happen after death. If you feel from your heart or intellectually that something continues, that's good enough.

The way Tibetans prepare for death is by giving away all their possessions. Seeing old monks die perfectly not owning a single object when I was a young, inexperienced monk was very helpful and gave me a lot of confidence. Of course, anybody can understand this intellectually, but to see it actually happen makes you feel that it's something you can do yourself. That's very important.

Usually we talk about transferring our consciousness to the pure land but what is that? From the Buddhist point of view, it's not like there's some pure place out there waiting for you. "Pure" means it's a reflection of your own pure thought, your own pure, clean mind. Actually, we say that any good or bad environment is a manifestation of the mind rather than really existing externally out there.

Normally we like to project good things but without control, bad projections appear. However, it's important to know how good, positive, happy projections arise.

When I talk about good projections, I don't mean good in our usual over-estimated, or exaggerated, way. It's possible for good projections on other people to be realistic.

The thing is that people appear the way you want them to. If you want to see others as negative, once your mind has made that decision, that's how they'll appear to you. In other words, your view of good or bad comes more from you than from the object you're looking at.

So we do have a choice in how things appear to us...in our views and concepts. And we also have the capacity to amplify such views, both positively and negatively. Since we have a choice, we should choose the good.

As I mentioned before, at the time of death energy leaves the body through different orifices. In order to prevent that from happening and to increase the energy of our life force, there are meditation techniques that help us keep this energy inside and thus extend our life, because life depends on the breath.

How many breaths are there in a twenty-four hour period? Buddhism does have a number, as I'm sure the West does, too. Anyway, in terms of signs of impending death, changes in the pattern of respiration are very important and can be detected, if you know what to look for. Sometimes exhalation gets stronger from the right nostril, sometimes from the left—this is the kind of thing we look for. We examine our breath and if we detect any of the signs of approaching death we can avert it through the special meditation techniques given for this purpose.

Also, when we practice transference of consciousness, it's not only a matter of concentration. In training we also use the physical energy force that moves the breath. In addition, we meditate on the chakras as well, and this brings different experiences and realizations.

In other words, Tibetan Buddhist practice involves not only the mind but also the physical elements of our existence. I've heard that medical science has recently described pain and pleasure centers and chemicals in the brain. Buddhist tantra has always done so. Furthermore, tantra teaches us how to concentrate on our pleasure center on order to activate it, releasing peace and bliss. Therefore, when we practice pho-wa, we do focus on the chakra energy centers.

What are some of the signs of success in this practice? There are many, but one is the generation of inner heat, which is indicated by improved digestion of food. Also, you get the feeling that you are no longer stuck in the mire of sense-gravitation; you feel that you have somehow gone beyond mundane experience.

We should develop our life; we should enjoy it. But if we feel somehow bound and stuck yet at the same time realize that we have the ability to transcend such feelings, we should definitely utilize the skills we have to do so.

Many people are scared of death. First, they feel that it's disastrous and that they're going to experience difficulty and suffering. Second, some of them are also afraid of what comes after; they assume something terrible awaits them.

In order to avert such worries, even if you can't practice transference of consciousness, you can decrease your self-cherishing mind and attachment to body and possessions and generate loving kindness for others. That's absolutely good enough to eradicate fear of death and what comes after. The dedicated attitude kind of guarantees a good rebirth and itself makes you peaceful. So, if you can't do pho-wa, cultivating the mind that cherishes others is a good way of ensuring a good death and eliminating fear of a bad rebirth.

Besides learning to transfer your consciousness [to a pure land] you can also send it into another body. Concentration and meditation are really that powerful. You can even move or heat objects with your mind. I'm sure you've heard of that.

Through power of mind you can also eliminate your disturbing emotions, your attachment and confusion. That's actually the main point of practicing Dharma. In other words, you can change your mind from misery to happiness.

The question, however, is whether you really want to or not; are you truly seeking liberation or not? If you are, you should know intuitively that you can really do something. That's the power of the human consciousness. Don't place limited judgments on yourself.

All of us do have good thoughts and a positive mind that has the potential for limitless development. That's the beauty of the human consciousness. For example, we all possess a certain degree of loving kindness—that can be developed limitlessly. The nature of loving kindness is such that it brings peace and happiness; the nature of the self-cherishing thought and attachment is such that it brings misery and confusion.

Therefore, to have an easy-going, happy life, you have to be willing to correct yourself, to change your attitude. By exerting right effort you can definitely do it, so encourage yourself. Allowing your weak mind to take over eliminates your human potential.

The reason we feel trapped is because we're so attached to our body. We identify with it so strongly: "This is me." The true fact, however, is that your body is not you. The real essence of the human being is the consciousness, which has neither shape nor color.

The materialistic attitude makes you think, "I'm my body; I'm my body." That's the fundamental wrong thinking: "I'm my body." Then what follows is, "My body is nice, so I'm nice," "My body is awful, so I'm awful," "My body is happy, so I'm happy." It's totally the wrong attitude. Your body can be cut to pieces while your mind remains tranquilly peaceful and blissful. It's possible. That's the point. Your body can be sick but your mind can be completely radiant and blissful. Therefore, you should abandon all concepts of "I am this body."

My point is that Western people can't understand the difference between the physical body and the mind. You must understand the distinction otherwise you'll continue finding it difficult to conceive of life after death. Believing that your body is you, you'll think that when your body breaks or burns out, where can you be?

The thing is, however, that Buddhism doesn't hold that you're permanently existent or that you go to the next life as the you that you are now. When we talk about rebirth we're talking about the consciousness taking another body, a different shape.

Anyway, you're always grasping at something, aren't you? So when your relationship with this body finishes, you're going to grasp at something else. And at that point your consciousness takes another form, another life. That's what Buddhism calls rebirth. It's not that you go into the next life with this body.

It sometimes seems that even in this one life we take many different bodies, different manifestations. Check out the details of your life's experiences in this body; you'll see.

Anyway, the basic thing to understand is that after you die your mind continues and carries your life experiences with you. If you understand it in this way your mind will relax. Otherwise you'll have the underlying thought, "Twentieth century life offers so much. I have to do it all." This keeps you so busy. I mean, check out how many things on this Earth there are to do. You can't do them all in one life. However, there's no need to rush.

If you understand the power of your mind, you'll find a way to satisfy yourself. I think it's very important that you find a way to make your life content. Otherwise you'll just feel that your life is empty and worthless. You should feel that your life is more precious than the entire wealth of the world.

Knowing the characteristic nature of your own mind is the way to bring peace to both yourself and the whole world. Peace is an inner, personal experience, not something external. The beauty of peace is that it's something to be experienced, and with it comes great satisfaction. First you generate this within yourself and then you share it with others. That's the way to truly bring peace to others and the world.

The opposite of peace is grasping; the grasping mind is the opposite of peace. You can see this within yourself and in the external world as well. Everything destructive comes from grasping.

The Buddha As Gay Icon (Part One)

Via QueerDharma

At the dentist's office the other day my eyes seized upon a photo of a shirtless David Beckham on a Vanity Fair cover. He was perfect Vanity Fair material -- disheveled, pouty, tattooed, and the photo exuded his eagerness to slip out of those jeans. I opened the article and found a comment in which he referred to himself as the "new gay icon." Hmmm. Fabulously rich, glib, metrosexually cool, alluringly heterosexual. Here was one straight guy who really didn't need a queer eye to get his act together. But "gay icon?"

I don't think so!

The term "icon," from the Greek Eikos, isn't about glorifying the latest "it" boys. Webster defines it as "a symbol that evokes spiritual power." A real icon would be, say, a painting of the Virgin of Guadelupe carried aloft by Mexican devotees in a Holy Week procession. They must have staying power. So who is the real gay icon?

Why, Siddhartha of course. He was no more bent than Beckham, but now here is a role model queer women and men can aspire to be. Since Buddhism has no god, an examination of the stages of the life of Siddhartha leading up to and after his enlightenment as The Buddha comprises a big part of what Buddhism is. For 2500 years he has been the ultimate role model for those who want to follow his path of awakening. Of course his life is equally relevant to any person with this aspiration. But as we examine his life now from our very modern and very queer perspective, it will be clear that the Buddha's story may well be particularly relevant to the spiritual challenges faced by us queers today. It explains why gays and lesbians nowadays fill meditation halls and Why Queer Dharma itself builds upon a wellspring of appreciation of the Buddhist tradition by queers who have been turned off by other religions.

Siddhartha's Four Phases

1. The first phase of Siddhartha's life could be called Rejecting the Story Line. This period covered his life as a pampered young Brahmin prince up till his early 20s when he ventured out of the palace on his own. As a teenager, his protective father would take him out in the carriage and point out the wonderful things in the kingdom that he would inherit. Bored by material wealth, the prince's eyes caught sight of things his father couldn't explain: like the suffering of a lower-caste mother holder her dead baby, or the fact that a penniless beggar seemed happier than his own privileged family back at the palace. Eventually it would be clear to Siddhartha that the cyclical process of life � birth, old age, sickness and death that he observed from his carriage � was driven by an underlying quality of frustration and bewilderment that pervades human existence. There must be a way, he thought, to understand and somehow overcome the misery he saw everywhere. Perhaps his father would have been happy even if the prince had begrudgingly gone along with the royal program, at least to pass as a normal royal while keeping his questions to himself. But the young prince said. "No way. It's not me. I'm outta here."
   
   
2. Siddhartha's Second Phase could be called Choosing an Identity: It must have been scary for the ex-prince, in his early 20s, to venture out of the palace gates on his own. No trust fund. No safety net. Some really basic choices lay in front of him. Do doubt raging with hormones, he could have just gone to the baths, hung out with prostitutes or otherwise frittered his life away. He could have railed against Brahmin privilege by creating a political movement, like an early Gandhi. Or he could have imitated the family set up that his father wanted to construct for him, but doing it his way a la Frank Sinatra. Living in a spiritual golden age, he knew that he had to change his own understanding before trying to change the world.
   
   Impressed at the half-naked yogis he saw meditating along the side of the river, he sat down beside one of them. Donning the white robe of a sadhu, he switched his tiara for a humble white robe, so to speak. He chose the life of the sadhu, those funky gentlemen with matted hair that you still see on the banks of the Ganges today. He became a hard-driving ascetic. Besides his teachers, he also created his own family, including five comrades who became each other's spiritual friends, which Buddhists henceforth have understood to be an essential part of the spiritual journey. These friends challenged each other to go further into increasingly more extreme disciplines that nearly starved Siddhartha. But after achieving all the spiritual realizations that asceticism had to offer, he had a new life-throttling realization: he wasn't free. He realized that, though he had left behind material comforts, he was still caught by materialism � only now in reverse.
   
   But it is not as if he had wasted his time. Siddhartha's identity as a sadhu had given his mind tremendous stability and focus. Like a clinical scientist who had made a laboratory discovery, he was now able to investigate how materialism worked on a truly subtle level. He found that it wasn't essentially about surrounding oneself with material comfort, like Imelda Marcos' attachment to all those shoes. Materialism was expressed through largely unconscious efforts to convince oneself that one's ego is solid like a rock. It is as if one's sense of "I" were a material thing, providing the only permanence in the midst of the chaos and change. Only at the point of death, when one's ego construction comes unraveled, is the whole game of I-creation revealed as pure fiction. The life of a sadhu may have been a more spiritually advanced version of "I" than Siddhartha could have known in his father's palace, but it was still based on a futile effort to find a refuge from the realities of existence.
   
   
3. The third phase of his life could be called dropping the identity. The Buddha's decision to drop any identity became the basis of the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness. It is the notion that one's experience, properly understood, is "empty" of any permanent self. In the Buddhist view, taking on any identity at all � even a queer one -- is ultimately a cop out. In light of this realization, the only choice left for Siddhartha was to let go of any search for a solid place and instead, empower himself to enter the moment to moment mystery of the present moment without any fixed vantage point. Having discovered emptiness did not mean that he could hold onto it, however. So he made a decision to Come Out even further. He took the scary step of simply sitting under a tree, courageously staring at his own mind with no crutch at all. He did this for a long time � seven years � until all meditation technique fell away and there was no filter between his sense of self and his sense of the world that was seemingly outside his experience. In other words he became fully Out. Without a way of withdrawing into his mind, there was no choice but to wake up unconditionally.
   
   He was no longer grasping at spiritual perfection. He was no longer seeking. He dropped all need for meditation technique, and even dropped the pretense of being a spiritual person. Once he achieved this realization, he passed various challenges that he knew he must overcome in order for his realization to be sustainable. A siren, someone who represented his ideal sexual type tried to seduce him, but he was unmoved. A demon challenged him to prove his spiritual powers through external validation and he simply smiled and put his hand on the ground and said, "The earth is my witness." In other words, he was finally attuned to nature itself and had nothing to prove. Finally, a maid offered sweet milk, the sort of thing he would have denied in the past. He sipped it and found it delicious and found that the simple non-grasping experiences of the senses can actually strengthen one's state of awareness. This final realization meant he no longer had a need to withdraw from the world. Already in his 40s, he was ready to greet the world.
   
   
4. The fourth phase of Buddha's life could be called living the engaged life. It wasn't clear at first what The Buddha should do with his realization but eventually he began to wander throughout India. Many people, impressed with his presence, asked questions. His answers were pithy distillations of the nature of experience which were codified 400 years after his death as the Buddhist canon. He found that his spiritual realization went hand in hand with an ability to communicate his understanding to others. In this way, he moved people, setting forth waves of change that were later to rock the world. This was, perhaps, the most radical phase of his life because he was putting the teachings to work, engaging everything in his path. In this final phase of Buddha's life, which extended well into his 60s, he Came Out in a different sense. He came out into a fully engaged life.

The Origin of Life: Ceptual Version Of 'Origination'

Via The Ceptual Institute

Once upon a time .. there were imaginings and suppositions, guesses and explorations, facts and possibilities, reasons and propositions of purpose. The Origin of Life is a mystery that begs resolution. The Origin of Life is a question for science and theology alike, and is not to be shirked by either. The Ceptual Philosophy's impression of Life's origins embraces spiritual imperatives - it doesn't deny them - but Ceptual concepts are expressions of 'technique' .. the workings of how Life arose, more than pensive considerations of the Eternal per se.

In my brief span of breath and consciousness, the plan and purpose of why there even is a universe seethes through my being every moment I live. Sometimes, I catch glimpses of eternal truths. And I keep them in my heart. And every so often, one idea or another simply begs to be given a voice. The 'origin of life' is one such notion for me. I am an artist and a passion and a spirit and a mind. And I see the universe contrived to enact life. Not necessarily 'human form' .. but Life .. always and absolutely. I take no religious stance, but never deny God. And, I have to say, that that is my preference. Yet, it's possible to understand and accept the performances of dimensions, time and space .. and live an irreligious perception of life. That's a 'life's prerogative, though it doesn't happen to be mine.

So the commentary presented here - and spoken of elsewhere in my writings - reflect only the Ceptual view of the architecture of existence, not any rationale for the purpose of existing ... which I can't repeat often enough .. resides within each heart and which must be respected by every other. The excellent thing is, that when each life respects and values all other lives, then no sentience will waste or harm another - from either maliciousness or uncaring.

It is only "insensitivity" - reactive or by choice - that holds any life back from enjoying the freedoms and possibilities of Being.

On May 13, 1999 the following item was published by New York University and distributed to the media, including the Internet:

Source: New York University ( http://www.nyu.edu/ )
Date: Posted 5/13/99

"NYU Chemist Supports New Theory For Origin Of Life

New York University chemistry professor Robert Shapiro has published a new book and paper that challenge existing assumptions about life on Earth and elsewhere in the Universe. In Planetary Dreams, Shapiro raises the issue of whether that laws of nature might favor the generation of life throughout the Universe. Furthermore, Shapiro suggests that the hypothesis that life is unique to Earth could prove to be just as implausible as theories of Divine Creation.

These arguments are presented in Shapiro's article, "Prebiotic cytosine synthesis: A critical analysis and implications for the origin of life,"which appeared in the April 13th Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Vol. 96, Issue 8, 4396-4401). Shapiro also lays out his argument in a new book entitled PLANETARY DREAMS, which was published by John Wiley& Sons in April.

In the book and paper, Shapiro argues that standard origin-of-life theories are badly flawed. Such theories are dependent on a miraculous event: the once-in-a-universe spontaneous generation of RNA, DNA or some related gene from lifeless matter.

Shapiro marshals an array of data to argue that the simplest kind of cellular life may arise as a predictable result of organic chemistry and the physics of self-organizing systems whenever planets exist with the right constituents and conditions: a liquid or dense gas medium (not necessarily water), a suitable energy source, and a system of matter capable of using the energy to organize itself. He calls this hypothesis the Life Principle. Furthermore, he argues that no predictable directions exist for life's later development from these basic beginnings.

In addition, Shapiro argues that humankind's search for life beyond Earth should continue to focus on those nearby worlds -- Mars, Jupiter's Europa and Saturn's Titan -- where the conditions appear to support the developmentof life.

He writes, "The debate over extraterrestrial life has been carried out with a great deal of passion, but with little progress, for centuries. Only in the last decades have we gained the ability to move it forward by collecting data at close range. We can send robots to inspect likely worlds such as Mars, Europa and Titan, and return photographs, information and samples, or, if we choose, we can go there ourselves and look around. We may find existing life, remnants of extinct life, or chemical systems evolving in the direction of life.

Alternatively, we may encounter monotonous wastelands, lacking any sign that a process relevant to life has taken place there. The results will help decide which of two very different views of the Universe is more nearly correct."

Robert Shapiro is a professor of chemistry at New York University. He is the author of the critically acclaimed books Life Beyond Earth, Origins, and The Human Blueprint. A specialist in the chemistry of DNA and RNA, Shapirohas published over 90 articles in research journals.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by New York University for journalists and other members of the public. If you wish to quote from any part of this story, please credit New York University as the original source. You may also wish to include the following link in any citation: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/05/990513070141.htm "

And now .. the Ceptual perspective ...

The nature of the universe is that it is true to itself .. in its entirety. Odd little sentence. Sort of a 'given', I suppose. A thing is what it is. Nothing really special or profound in that.

Except, it really is profound and special, and means something very particular in regard to Dr. Shapiro's notions and to concerns about the 'origin of life' in general.

It means that in the long enactment of existence, every place and every time has the potential to do or be what every other place and time is capable of doing or being. If similar conditions arise because the universe unfolds its potential in similar ways then similar things will happen. Stars formed everywhere, galaxies too. Not because something was unique or exclusive or exclusionary when it happened once ... somewhere, someplace ... but because the universe is made and capable of enacting the same thing in many places at different times.

The situation in relation to whether life spontaneously 'originated' on earth, of earth, and by earth related processes, making Earth and its creatures independent, unique and/or special .. is really an absurd question to think about. Oh, it's possible that it did happen. But the greater likelihood is that the creative generation of Life's component structures are part of the innate structure and dynamics of existence everywhere. It makes no difference if molecules organized and formed in mid-space - or - because of how chemicals present in a comet were able to re-form when energized by passing close to a star - or - occurred when similar chemicals formed when the oceans of this planet cooled sufficiently so that they didn't decompose by being boiled beyond their breaking point.

It makes no difference if the 'seeds' of Life that blossomed so phenomenally on this planet came from stars in galaxies halfway across the known visible universe and billions of years in the past or formed close at home. It makes no difference. It makes the lives of this planet no less special or important. It does not make us 'strangers' or alien tenants - squatters, intruders - to a planet which had some territorial sovereignty to retain. And it doesn't make us orphans of existence, with no 'true' place to call home.

Oh, it's nice to have a place that is haven and home. I wrote as much in 1992, expressing that the universe in its total fullness is that place. But. I didn't stop there. I take the Ceptual perspective that Life is not a resident of the universe. Neither of it nor in it.

Rather, Life is an aspect of the universe. It is a quality the universe itself acts out. It is a form that the universe is capable of Being. We aren't residents or visitors to this place, these times ... we are this place, these times. We are an extraordinary aspect of the universe, a universe which exists and examines/knows itself and its aspects. "We" are "it" ... "we" are the universe engaged in realizing and understanding itself.

That the creation and enactment of "life" happened here, there, or anywhere, is no phenomenon open to dispute. I claim that it is hollow to be so judgmental, or to lay claim to some territorial imperative, or to feel adrift or unattached to this world simply because we are more a part of the whole than of any local part ... land, or country, or planet, or star system, or galaxy.

There will be life on other worlds. There has been and will be again. It will feel comfortable and at ease in surroundings of familiarity, in environments of nurture and possibility ... no matter the chemistry or metabolics or conditions to be coped.

I agree that humanity and Earth-life should explore its whole extensive environment. I am hopeful that creative evolution will continue, against the flow of its seeming current retractments, diminishments. I dream that Solarian worlds will become like continental isolates once were, which fostered newnesses and creativity of unimaginable wonderment.

But it ought to be done not just to confirm or specify our heritage and ancestry, but instead, to hallmark our matured recognition of who we are .. as a species, one among many .. continuing to change and transform and actualize the possibilities of the universe. During Life, by way of it, and around it.

An Interview with Stephen Batchelor, Author of "Buddhism Without Beliefs"

Via Sasana

Bammes: You are best know for a book entitled Buddhism Without Beliefs. It is an approach to Buddhism from a very non-traditional path even though your own training is very traditional, first in Tibetan and then in Korean Zen. What led you to reject, as it were, the trappings of traditional Buddhism in favor of what you see as the center?

Batchelor: What led me to the approach I'm developing now, and is expressed in Buddhism Without Beliefs, is really my own personal, ongoing inquiry into what Buddhism is about, or perhaps we can even rephrase that somewhat differently. In some ways, I'm not particularly interested in what Buddhism is about. I'm more interested in understanding how one can live an authentic life on Earth, and as a means to that end, I've found the Buddhist tradition extremely valuable.
My own training was very traditional, and I deliberately chose to study with rather more traditional than non-traditional teachers. I felt I really wanted to get back as close as I could to the Asian sources of the tradition.

Bammes: What led you to that? What led you to Buddhism to begin with?

Batchelor: Very difficult question to answer because it is so difficult in restrospect to reconstruct one's motives. In broad outline, I was a child of the late '60's, as it were, and was very much enamored of the '60's counterculture in growing up just outside London. When I left high school in 1971, I was very disillusioned by the idea of continuing a Western academic education. I had no interest whatsover in pursuing a Western academic career. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I was very attracted by the idea of India and the East. At that time I had no real clear understanding of Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism as separate traditions. It was really the allure of the East. And so I left home at the beginning of 1972 and just sort of wended my way across Europe, the Middle East, into eventually India and there I settled in the community around the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. But I feel in some ways it was not so much a conscious decision to go to Dharamsala. It was rather the consequence of a whole complex of conditions that sort of threw me up on their shores.
I have to admit that once I met Tibetan lamas I was deeply impressed. To what extent that impression came out of my own romantic and perhaps rather adolescent yearnings and to what extent it was the recognition of something more profound than that I don't really know; I can't really say, but as my traditional training progressed, as much as I valued many of the core insights that these practices and these texts gave to me, nonetheless, felt the language in which they were articulated was so culturally determined, be it either the culture of Tibet or Korea or India or whatever, that I found it quite difficult to actually take many of these beliefs on board as someone who, deep down, really felt far more to be a Westerner, let's say, rather than someone pretending to be a Tibetan or Japanese.

Bammes: You have to ask yourself, and I'm sure you did, in your monastic training, how much of this is symbolic and figurative, and how much does the tradition expect me to accept literally?

Batchelor: Well, that, of course, is the question. The way in which I remember phrasing it at that time was to distinguish betweenBuddhism as a cultural phenomenon and Buddhism as a trans-cultural spiritual or philosophical tradition, and we often discussed this, I remember, in India at this time, that's the Westerners amongst themselves would often discuss what is essential to Buddhism, what is that is not determined by a particular Asian culture, and what is, as it were, the cultural wrapping of that tradition. And one of the things that strikes probably any Westerner who takes a look at Buddhism is immediately to recognize the sheer diversity of Buddhist traditions reflects the diversity of Asian cultures. It's very difficult, I think, for many Westerners, to feel that any particular version of Buddhism in the East is necessarily the one that's the truest or the most authentic.

Bammes: But for its practitioners in Asia, this is a central question.

Batchelor: A central question?

Bammes: As to which tradition is the most valid.

Batchelor: Well, in the traditions in Asia, they don't honestly really have much sense of any traditions other than their own. In other words, Buddhism has grown up in Asia over the last two thusand years, but for the last several hundred years, there has been quite literally no contact whatsoever between the different Buddhist cultures. And so if we take Tibet as an example, it regards its traditions as the ones that are truest and authentic, but it has really little understanding of any other form of Buddhism in Asia, and what understanding it does have is usually some version that was brought into Tibet in about the 10th Century, and there's no sense whatsoever, for a Tibetan, of how, let's say, Zen Buddhism may have evolved since the 9th Century when they did, in fact, encounter it. So there is a kind of cultural myopia operative in most Asian Buddhist countries, particularly among the more traditional teachers who simply see themselves in isolation as carrying the Buddha's teaching. A Tibetan, for example, would actually find it slightly offensive to be told that he was practicing Tibetan Buddhism. For them, they're practicing the Dharma, end of story. But in the modern world, in the West here, for example, we cannot fail but to be conscious of cultural diversity within the forms of Buddhism.

Bammes: And that, perhaps, is one of the foundations of what is coming to be called "Western Buddhism." I'm going to ask you if there is such a thing, but it seems to me that the foundation in part grows out of the fact that Westerners are conscious of many of the various traditions of Buddhism.

Batchelor: Perhaps the thing that will define Western Buddhism in the end will be the presence of historical consciousness. In other words, Western consciousness is far more historically aware than Asian traditions would have. So when we look at these diversities, we notice immediately that Japanese Buddhism is somehow a reflection, an integration of Buddhism with the culture of Japan, ditto Tibetan Buddhism. So it seems almost self-evident to us that if Buddhism is to find its way in the West it will assume the trappings and the values and the ideas of Western traditions just as Japanese or Tibetan Buddhism carry the values and the cultural trappings of those places.
I think it's somewhat premature to speak today of Western Buddhism. I feel that we may be on the way to Western Buddhism, but I feel that one of the things that history teaches us in the transition of Buddhism from one cuture to the other is that this process doesn't happen overnight. It generally takes several generations within a period, let's say, of about 200 years before, say for example, the Buddhism that came from India into Tibet became recognizably Tibetan, or the Buddhism that came from India into China became recognizably Chinese.
I feel that the transition of Buddhism from one culture to another is somewhat like an organic process; something that, no matter how sophisticated your technologies of communication might be, the actual process of integrating something as complex and sophisticated as Buddhism is not just a matter of the transfer of information, but it occurs through a kind of integration into the life of the other society. My own gut feeling is that it would only be meaningful to speak of a Western Buddhism after there has been a generational process at work. In other words, not my generation, perhaps. Perhaps not even the one after, but if Buddhism can survive, say, for another hundred years in the West, then we might meaningfully be able to talk of something that is authentically Buddhist and at the same time authentically Western. But again, I think one should even question the very notion of "Western Buddhism.'" After all, we no longer live in a world that is neatly bifurcated between East and West. We are moving into a global situation, one in which, especially with the advent of information technologies, could well lead to a dissolving of many of these national and kind of large-scale cultural differences like East-West, for example.
East-West in many ways is simply a relic of the colonial era. It increasingly has less and less to say to us in terms of an interdependent global society. So how Buddhism moves into the future, I think, also has to be seen in terms of how our conventional sense of cultural boundaries are actually breaking down, or perhaps becoming something else. We cannot really foresee that. All that we can do is, if we find the traditions of Buddhism speaking to us, then the challenge is to integrate those teachings into our lives and seek to live them out. That to me is the crucial issue. So in terms of Buddhism Without Beliefs, beliefs here refers here to the sense that we have to believe the sort of things that Tibetans or Japanese might believe about reincarnation and whatnot. If Buddhism is to survive, if the teachings of the Buddha are to survive, they have to be able to speak to our condition in immediate and in an authentic way, and in such a way that we can actually internalize them and then realize those values in our own lives, through our expressions, through our creative activities and so forth, and that is something that we cannot predict or foresee, what the outcome of such a procedure will be.

Bammes: What, then, is essential to Buddhism as you explain it in Buddhism Without Beliefs, and what is cultural baggage that need not be included?

Batchelor: I think there is a danger in the very [term] "essential." Buddhism is in many ways an anti-essentialist tradition; in other words, it is very suspicious in much of its thinking of the idea that anything can be reduced to any sort of core or essence. I think it's more useful to look at this question in terms of what we can recognize as cultural rather than, let's say, Dharmic features.
I think here we have to go back to recognize that the Buddha himself, in 5th Century BC India, was, of course, speaking to a particular culture at a particular time, and it seems that he, necessarily was a product of that culture. He took on board, for example, the idea of reincarnation and so forth, without really questioning it. He never actually had to stand up in front of an audience and persuade people that there are many lifetimes from which you pass through from force of karma.

Bammes: This was the context . . .

Batchelor: This was the context of his time. It's very difficult for us to put ourselves back into another epoch so remote in time from our own. I think it's much the same as if, for example, someone were teaching today and simply spoke about the sense of the universe as having arisen from the Big Bang and the universe as being an expanding thing and so forth and so on. No one would actually stand up and say, "Wait a minute, I don't think that's true."

Bammes: Or the idea that humans evolved . . .

Batchelor: Or the idea that humans evolved from other forms of life. We simply take that for granted. Now it could be that in 500 years' time we could have a very different view of things. But that is the world that we collectively assent to, much in the same way that a view of life as consisting of many different rebirths and so on was the collective consensus in India at the time of the Buddha. Now the question, of course, and this is a very debatable one, is to what extent is that idea true and to what extent is it simply a feature of that world view. I dont have really any interest in declaring that rebirth is true or false. I cannot, from my own experience or from my own reflection, decide one way or the other. I have a hunch that it's probably a cultural idea.

Bammes: But your view is essentially an agnostic one, as opposed to an atheist, again using terms that listeners are going to understand, an agnostic view, saying, "I don't know and I don't need to know."

Batchelor: Yeah. I would actually describe my position as agnostic, but perhaps to be more exact, I would describe it as a deep agnosticism. In other words, I think one can take the Western notion of agnosticism one step further through the Buddhist tradition and recognize at the very heart of Buddhist practice lies an ongoing inquiry, and any kind of inquiry or questioning requires an openness to the fact that there is something about our lives, who we are, what the world is, that we do not know. Buddhism pursues that kind of inquiry and not-knowing through its various contemplative disciplines. The practice of awareness, of Vipassana, of Zen and so on are all ways of, as it were, penetrating into the very depths of our experience, and that, I think, always requires an openness to the fact that perhaps reality is not pin-down-able in neat, clear-cut assertions or beliefs, but there is something fundamentally mysterious about it, and it's in that sense, I think, that we can move from a superficial agnosticism in which, as you said, it's simply a statement of "I don't know and I'm actually not terribly interested," into taking the principle of agnosticism, of not knowing, as a kind of principle of spiritual and meditative inquiry.
So I would suspend judgement about many of the metaphysical beliefs of Buddhism, but at the same time, I would seek to elevate the critical thread that runs through Buddhist tradition to a somewhat higher level than it is often presented in the traditional schools. I think Buddhism has within itself its own tradition of skepticism, its own tradition of inquiry, that have many strong resonances with the kind of inquiry we would associate with Western philosophy and science.

Bammes: You have tried to tap into some of that tradition of inquiry and skepticism in your most recent book called Verses from the Center, focusing on a Buddhist leader who you say spoke with his own voice as compared to leaders of some other traditions. Introduce this person to us.

Batchelor: Verses from the Center is a translation of a core Buddhist text called in Sanskrit, Mulamadyamakakrika, which I have translated as Verses from the Center, which is somewhat a free translation. This was composed by Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna lived in India in the second century of the Christian era and was a figure who somehow stood between the early traditions that we now call Theravada in which the primacy lies in recollecting the Buddha's discourses, in organizing the ideas of which he spoke in kind of a schematic way. Nagarjuna sought to try to tap into what he saw as the core liberative vision of the Buddha, which he centered around this notion of emptiness. Nagarjuna's writing subsequently became the foundation for what is now called Mahayana Buddhism, but my own sense of looking over some years now at Nagarjuna's own work is that he doesn't fit neatly into either camp. He's a kind of liminal or transitional figure, someone who looks back to the Buddha's own vision, but does not, as it were, set the scene for some kind of neo-orthodoxy that then will develop further doctrines, dogmas and whatnot.

Consciousness in Meme Machines

Via Dr. Susan Blackmore

I am going to set aside some of the major problems facing machine consciousness and concentrate on the question of what sort of machines might acquire human-like consciousness.

The main problem to be ignored is that we do not know how to recognise consciousness in a machine. That is, there is no obvious equivalent of the Turing test for consciousness. I shall define consciousness here in terms of subjectivity; what is sometimes known as “phenomenal consciousness” (Block 1995) or “what it’s like to be” (Nagel 1974). With consciousness being subjective, any objective test, such as any variation on the Turing test, fails to grasp it. You could certainly have a test that shows whether other people think a machine is conscious but this is not the same thing, as our eager propensity to attribute feelings and intentions to even the simplest of robots and mechanical toys reveals. Once we start asking whether there is really something it is like to be the machine, or whether the world appears a certain way for that machine, then our usual tests fail.

In fact we don't know how to recognise consciousness in anything at all. As far as other humans are concerned this is the problem of other minds, but we usually ignore it on the grounds that we think we know what our own consciousness is like and we then extrapolate to others. We cannot do this so easily for other species, hence the problem of animal consciousness, and it is even more difficult with machines.

This first problem is exacerbated by the suspicion that there may be kinds of consciousness utterly different from human consciousness, or indeed from any naturally occurring kind of consciousness. This suggests many interesting lines of thought, but many difficulties too. So I am going to ignore this here, and stick to questions concerning only human-like consciousness. This is quite hard enough to be going on with.

Having put these problems aside I shall ask how we might set about constructing a machine that will have human-like consciousness. I am not a programmer or robot engineer and my purpose is not to discuss the details of construction (I would not be able to do so) but is instead to consider the general principles involved. All theories of consciousness have implications for how consciousness might be artificially created, and pondering these may help us better understand those theories. The theory to be discussed here is that ordinary human consciousness is an illusion created by memes for their own propagation. The implication for machine consciousness is that only a machine capable of imitation would develop a human-like illusion of consciousness.

I shall take the most obvious approach, which is first to ask how the illusion of consciousness comes about in humans, and then use that to ask how it might be artificially created. I shall first make some comments about the general nature of consciousness, then consider how it arose in humans, both during evolution and during individual development, and then see what implications this has for machine consciousness.

Consciousness as illusion

If we hope (or fear) to make a conscious machine it would be helpful to know what consciousness is. We do not. I shall not claim here to solve the hard problem, or to say what consciousness ultimately is (if anything). Instead I shall argue that ordinary human consciousness is an illusion. Therefore making a machine that is conscious in the same way as we are, means making one that is subject to the same kind of illusion. Before explaining this in more detail I want to distinguish this view from some other major positions on machine consciousness, crudely divided here into three.

1. Machine consciousness is impossible.

Among those who have argued that machine consciousness is impossible are dualists, those who believe in a God-given soul as the seat of consciousness, eliminative materialists who do not believe that consciousness exists in the first place, and those who argue that there is something special about biological brains that precludes anything else from having human-like consciousness. This last is particularly confusing but the problems are well known and discussed (Dennett 1995, McGinn 1987, 1999, Turing 1950). It is worth noting that Searle, in spite of his theory of biological naturalism (Searle 1992), does not exclude the possibility of machine consciousness. Rather he says that any machine could be conscious if it had the same causal properties as a biological brain (Searle 1997). Since he does not say what those properties are, this is no help in creating artificial consciousness.

Arguments against computational functionalism and good-old-fashioned Strong AI (e.g. Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment), are considered by some to weigh against the possibility of machine consciousness. A more common view is probably that while syntax (or running a formal program) is not sufficient for semantics, and symbols must somehow be grounded in the real world, this can be done by allowing a machine to interact with the world. Developments in neural networks, embodied cognition and situated robotics (e.g. Brooks 1990, Clark 1997) suggest the same thing. So this line of argument does not preclude the possibility of conscious machines. Finally, there may be some people who apply to consciousness, rather than to intelligence, what Turing called the “Heads in the Sand” objection; “The consequences of machines thinking would be too dreadful. Let us hope and believe that they cannot do so.” (Turing 1950). None of these arguments provides a good reason for thinking that machine consciousness is impossible.

2. Find consciousness and put it in a machine

Perhaps there is an “X”, or “extra ingredient”, that if we could give it to machines would ensure they were conscious (Chalmers 1995). McGinn calls the property that would explain consciousness C*, and asks whether it is possible in inorganic materials or not (McGinn 1999). Some theories of consciousness can be used to derive an “X” and so to suggest how it could be given to a machine.

I shall not review all the many theories here, but will take just one example as an illustration; the currently popular Global Workspace Theories (Baars 1988, Dehaene & Naccache 2001, Dennett 2001). GWTs equate the contents of consciousness with the contents of a global workspace, likened to a bright spotlight shining on the stage of working memory (Baars 1988). The GW is a large network of interconnected neurons. Its contents are conscious by virtue of the fact that they are made globally available, or broadcast, to the rest of the system which is unconscious. I have argued elsewhere that this notion is incoherent and cannot explain consciousness (Blackmore 2002). GWT depends on the assumption that at any time there is a valid answer to the question “what is in consciousness now”, and that things can meaningfully be said to be either ‘in’ or ‘out’ of consciousness, as though consciousness were a container. This is a version of Cartesian materialism (Dennett 1991) and cannot, I suggest, explain consciousness.

On these theories “X” is having a GW. So presumably a machine should be conscious if it is designed with a GW whose contents are broadcast to the rest of its system (see Franklin this volume). Unfortunately, as mentioned above, even if such machines were built, it would be impossible to test whether they were conscious or not. I can only say that I do not believe that GWT is the way to understand consciousness, and in any case it will have to be tested by other means than making such machines. In the mean time I prefer the third approach which is to say that consciousness is not what it appears to be.

3. Consciousness is an illusion.

There are several ways of thinking about consciousness as an illusion. Most important is to distinguish them from the view that consciousness does not exist. To say that consciousness is an illusion is to say that it is not what it appears to be. This follows from the ordinary dictionary definitions of “illusion”, for example “Something that deceives or misleads intellectually” (Penguin); “Perception of something objectively existing in such a way as to cause misinterpretation of its actual nature.” (Webster). This point is frequently misunderstood. For example Velmans (2000) wrongly categorises Dennett’s position as eliminativist when it is better described as the view that consciousness is an illusion. I shall explore a version of this position here.

On this view human-like consciousness means having a particular kind of illusion. If machines are to have human-like consciousness then they must be subject to this same kind of illusion. I shall therefore explore one theory of how this illusion comes about in humans and how it might be created in machines; the theory of memetics.

Hermits in the 1990's and 2000's: Surveys

Via The Hermitary

In the September 1994 issue of the American Catholic magazine America, writer Karen Karper published an article titled "By No Worldly Logic: To Be a Hermit in the 1990's."¹ In the context of the magazine, the article intends to address the topic of Catholic hermits. Karen Karper herself was a Poor Clare nun in a cloistered community for thirty years before becoming a hermit in West Virginia. She is now Karen Fredette, married and residing in North Carolina, where she and her husband Paul edit Raven's Bread, a newsletter for hermits.

In 1992, during her stay in West Virginia solitude, Karper conducted a survey of hermits.

Through the most rudimentary system of networking, I obtained names and addresses of men and women hermits in 35 U.S. states and four Canadian provinces, as well as in Mexico, the Philippines, France, the British Isles and Australia. I sent a simple questionnaire to 84 of these, to which 64 responded with their unique and fascinating stories

Of the 64 respondents, 49 were women and 15 were men. Twenty women and ten men were members of religious communities, while twenty-two were former religious. Hence 52 of her 64 respondents were professed religious. Of the former religious, only one was a male, suggesting to Karper that nuns expressing a desire for eremitical life were essentially expelled from their orders, while men were not [witness the case of Thomas Merton in the 1950's and sixties]. Of the professed religious, the majority had been or were Franciscans, followed by Carmelites, Camaldolese, and others. Additionally, nine hermits had originally been secular clergy. This totals one short of the sum of respondents.

Two-thirds of the current members of orders were subsidized in their eremitical lives, but the others were self-supporting. These had simple part-time jobs "ranging from bookbinding and forest management to proofreading and sewing." A number received government retiree pensions (social security) or other retirement benefits.

All appear to desire close relations to religious communities or parishes, and twelve had been "publicly recognized as professed diocesan hermits." Of course, the age-old skepticism on the part of ecclesiastical authorities remains, despite Canon 603 of the Catholic Code of Canon Law recognizing "eremitic or anchoritic life." "My research (and personal experience)," writes Karper, "has shown that some -- perhaps many -- bishops are unwilling to accept such responsibilities and refuse to allow men or women aspiring to a canonically recognized eremitic state to make public profession of such within their jurisdiction."

Hermits in the 2000's

In 2001, Karen and Paul Fredette surveyed readers of their newsletter with a more detailed survey,² the results of which they have published with useful respondent comments over successive issues. The following information only records the initial impressions and data.

In contrast to the scope of the 1992 survey, they mailed nearly six-hundred copies in May 2001, with a 22% return rate by August, or 132. The initial compilation of data is based on 122 responses processed.

Of the 122, 86 were women and 36 men, or about two-thirds women. About the same percentage came from the United States, with other respondents from Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, Mexico, New Zealand, and Poland. Most of the respondents were mature, as this table shows:

NUMBER	AGE
3	80's
15	70's
34	60's
44	50's
20	40's
6	30's

Likewise, their decision-making took place in mature years. A quarter of respondents began an eremitic life in their fifties; a smaller percentage started in their forties. Most considered their health to be good or excellent, and cited this as a positive factor in choosing solitude. Though many lived in rural settings, the majority described their environs as urban or subsuburban, with a few in poor inner city areas. Others lived in religious communities, and only two of the 122 respondents described their setting as wilderness. This suggests that proximity to ecclesiastical resources may have been an overarching concern of respondents. Of the group surveyed, the overwhelming majority were not only Christian but "high church": Catholic, Anglican, Episcopalian, Lutheran. Of course, the Protestant tradition has little history of or sympathy with hermits.

Much of the rest of the survey concerned itself with religious affiliation and canonical status. Twenty percent of the Catholic respondents had in fact gained canonical status for their eremitical life. Most respondents followed traditional structures of prayer and liturgy, and reported dealings with religious authorities as problematic. Interestingly, 22 of the 122 respondents were married.

Finances are always a concern. While a third of respondents received church-related income, two-thirds worked at home. Most had modest incomes. Half owned computers and most enjoyed players and radios.

The Fredettes conclude that many are being called to a life of solitude and are

responding in whatever fashion is available to them. New lifestyles are emerging without significant support from leadership other than that of the Spirit speaking in individual hearts and souls.

David Wojnarowicz: The "Pre-invented Existence" of Religion and the Secular "State of Grace"

Via CESNUR (The Center For Studies On New Religions)

1. As a photographer, painter, installation artist, filmmaker, musician and writer, David Wojnarowicz became a central figure in New York's East Village art scene of the 1980s. Having lived since early childhood on the margins of American society, he sought to expose the soullessness of the American societal myths propounded by organized religion, politics and the media. At the same time, he explored with unparalleled integrity and intensity the life-styles and experiences, which the fear of diversity he denounced generally represses or silences. The following considerations focus primarily on the post-religious and non-theistic conception of reality[2] that underlies Wojnarowicz's critical views on American organized religion and eventually leads to the spirituality of human finitude he envisaged in his last years. The interpretive approach of Wojnarowicz propounded in this presentation is based on a close reading of his published oeuvre, especially the collection of essays Close to the Knives. A Memoir of Disintegration (1991) and the selection of his diaries titled In the Shadow of the American Dream. The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz (1999).[3]

2. The critical import and spiritual relevance of David Wojnarowicz's work can be better assessed against the backdrop of biographical data concerning the destitution of his formative years and the subsequent outsider existence he chose for the rest of his life.[4] Born in Redbank, New Jersey in 1954 "to a sailor from Detroit and a very young woman from Australia,"[5] Wojnarowicz spent his childhood first in an orphanage, then in the home of a violent (later suicidal) father, and finally in New York with his (mostly) disinterested mother.[6] In 1970, at the age of 16, the future writer and artist dropped out of school and lived on the streets of New York City, where he hustled suburban married men and began taking drugs. After having "[w]orked as a farmer on canadian border [and] in san francisco [...] as an egg bootlegger"[7] between 1972 and 1973, Wojnarowicz began to develop a keen interest in literature under the influence of Jean Genet's "Un Chant d'amour" and the books by William Burroughs. Although he never went to college, Wojnarowicz's extant library shows that his spectrum of intellectual concerns ranged from zoology to politics and classical music.[8] In 1979, he became a member of a post-punk band called "3 Teens Kill 4 - No Motive." The alternative name which Wojnarowicz regrets the group did not use was: "Sissies from Hell," an obvious reference to his much-admired literary hero Arthur Rimbaud. Having left the band, he concentrated on his visual work and writing. In 1983, he met the photographer Peter Hujar, who became his close friend and mentor. Besides being a renowned artist, Wojnarowicz attained prominence as an outspoken AIDS activist and anticensorship advocate. In July 1992, Wojnarowicz died of AIDS at the age of 38.[9]

3. David Wojnarowicz's life-long experience of estrangement led him to a view of reality that, on its deepest level, is articulated by the conceptual opposition between "World" and "Other World". In the seminal essay "Living Close to the Knives", Wojnarowicz points out: "First there is the World. Then there is the Other World. The Other World is where I sometimes lose my footing. In its calender turnings, in its preinvented existence."[10] Despite the religious and philosophical dimensions it evokes, the concept of Other World in the context of Wojnarowicz's work does not refer to a metaphysical dimension of positive transcendence, but, on the contrary, to an alienatory modus deficiens of the one and only existing reality. Lacking the immediacy and plenitude of the World's immanence, the Other World appears linked in Wojnarowicz's discourse with "[t]he bought-up world; the owned world. The world of coded sounds: the world of language, the world of lies."[11] These attributes notwithstanding, the Other World does not constitute a discrete, self-sustaining entity, but is dependent upon the World it perverts and denies. Since imagination itself is "encoded with the invented information of the Other World,"[12] the tools of art can at most adapt and stretch out the Other World, but not overcome it. This can only be achieved, according to Wojnarowicz, by that "distance of stepping back or slowing down," which reveals the Other World"[13] in the full extent of its misery. Thus Wojnarowicz pleads for a "sceptical" perception of the Other World as a means of grasping its alienatory contradiction to the World's immediate fullness.[14] While for Wojnarowicz the Other World is perceived as external, the actual locus of its counterpart is the realm of invisible inwardness: "There's no enlarged or glittering new view of the nature of things or existence. No god or angels brushing my eyelids with their wings. Hell is a place on earth. Heaven is a place in your head."[15] Having broken with the long history of theism and the supposedly objective mysticism it entails, Wojnarowicz does not seek to attain visio beatifica, but rather to explore the ambit of "[t]he possibility inherent in impossibility."[16] Since everything within the order of the Other World pays tribute to the self-referentiality of the given, surpassing the allegedly unquestionable factuality of the Other World seems unviable, except if the "distance of stepping back" reveals the fallacy of identifying the totality of the foreseeable with the possible. Wojnarowicz's "negative" grasp of the unmediated World as a realm of possibilities will eventually prove to be the actual raison d¨être of his libertarian protest against a life lived within the closed range of other-worldliness. Well aware that the price to be paid for attaining the comforts of insight is high, Wojnarowicz counters the pervasive might of factual reality and asserts: "There are those of us that sleep well in doorways and on benches, not for reason or choice but because of the hard edge of vision in these times."[17]

4. Wojnarowicz's life and worldview was deeply marked by the fact that, in 1963, the nine year old began to earn money as a prostitute in New York City[18] and continued to do so until the age of 20. In his initial years as a hustler, a customer attempted to murder him,[19] and later on, after having "[e]ntered the underground of man/child sexual connections,"[20] he "[w]as almost murdered twice more in ratty hotels and sidestreets of times square."[21] Far from idealizing his previous outlaw existence[22] in the way his literary model Jean Genet did, Wojnarowicz remained relentless in his rejection of the reification and alienation of the body inherent in commercial sex. Thus he writes in a diary entry from 1991: "I sold my body literally thousands of times and always thought it was sad that people paid others for the use of their mouth arms legs hands assholes chest back feet."[23] It is not by chance that Wojnarowicz relates his zeal in protecting the privacy and details of his sexual leanings "to years as a hustler and wanting never to go back to that sensation of being meat or object unless it was a mutual desire."[24] Given the way Wojnarowicz assumed his debasing experience as a male prostitute, it is all the more relevant that when articulating his criticism of Western religion, he depicts it in terms of prostitution. In the Diaries, for instance, he notes: "[...] I didn't know much about [Eastern religion] but had I ever the desire to get into such a thing [i.e. religion] it would indeed be some form of Eastern religion as Western ones were too prostituted and controlled and distorted by papal and clerical creeps [...]."[25] Although "prostitution" as metaphorical term of reproach to Christianity echoes his own sense of estrangement as having been "meat or object" in sexual intercourse, it is abundantly clear that while Wojnarowicz regarded his prostitutional past as a sequel of his own disempowerment by society, he viewed the prostitution of Christianity as an active self-estrangement for the sake of illegitimate power.

5. Wojnarowicz's writing is based on his "keen sense of awareness of the darker areas of society and its characters."[26] Since he was "not so much interested in creating literature as [he was] in trying to convey the pressure of what [he had] witnessed or experienced,"[27] the body of work he produced was eminently testimonial, offering penetrating analyses of two life domains. On the one hand, Wojnarowicz reveals his own world as a child and adolescent abandoned by family and society, and forced into destitution and criminality. On the other, he bears witness to the life-styles and aspirations of the minority groups to which he belonged once he realized, toward 1973,[28] that he was "truly queer,"[29] and decided to become a writer and artist.[30] As an adult immersed in New York's sexual subcultures, Wojnarowicz experienced first-hand the ravages caused by AIDS among the men of his generation. Peter Hujar, perhaps the most decisive influence in Wojnarowicz's life, died of complications accompanying the disease in 1987. In the same year, Wojnarowicz himself as well as his partner Tom Rauffenbart[31] were tested positive for HIV. In a telling passage he portrays his reaction to his own illness: "WHEN I WAS TOLD THAT I'D CONTRACTED THIS VIRUS IT DIDN'T TAKE ME LONG TO REALIZE THAT I'D CONTRACTED A DISEASED SOCIETY AS WELL."[32] Acknowledging from early on the social causes and implications of his predicament, Wojnarowicz soon became an outspoken AIDS activist and critic of the official policies dealing with the pandemy. His powerful diatribes show a distinctive theo-political edge corresponding to his growing awareness of the shared responsibility of politics and Christian religion for the spread of AIDS in America. Throughout his writings, Wojnarowicz targets not just the Reagan administration and New York Major Eduard Koch for their policies on AIDS information and research funding, but also the official homophobic policies of the Vatican and the deleterious role played by New York Cardinal John O'Connor concerning AIDS prevention. Wojnarowicz did not content himself with denouncing the statements issued by the Vatican and the Catholic archdiocese that "it is a more terrible thin[g] to use a condom than to contract AIDS."[33] He also exposed with unyielding pungency "those thinly disguised walking swastikas that wear religious garments over their murderous intentions"[34], as well as "the religious types outside st. patrick's cathedral shouting to the men and women in the gay parade 'You won't be here next year - you'll get AIDS and die [...].'"[35] The peremptory conclusion Wojnarowicz drew from the murderous scenario he depicted runs: "If I die it is because a handful of people in power, in organized religions and political institutions, believe that I am expendable."[36]

Secret Tradition of Islam

Via Alpheus

"The initiatic journey to Islamic soil has been a repeated theme of European esotericism, ever since the Templars settled in Jerusalem and the mythical Christian Rosenkreuz learnt his trade in "Damcar" (Damascus). We find it in the lives of Paracelsus and Cagliostro, then, as travel became easier, in a whole host that includes P. B. Randolph, H. P. Blavatsky, Max Theon, G. I. Gurdjieff, Aleister Crowley, Rene Guenon, R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, and Henry Corbin. There was very likely some element of this in Napoleon's Egyptian campaign of 1797, when he announced to an astounded audience that he, too, was a Muslim.."
- Joscelyn Godwin (1)

In the modern world, religion has been reduced to 'moralism' and a question of faith. Once cherished doctrines are now just simple formulas and routine practices, devoid of any higher meaning. It is not really surprising that for large numbers of people in the Western world the great religions are unable to answer the most fundamental questions of existence. Yet throughout history we find people convinced the great religions are a necessary 'outer shell' veiling a Primordial Wisdom that alone can reveal humanity's real origin, purpose and destiny. Hidden behind vital religious practices and doctrines is an esoteric or occult knowledge. But as the scholar of religion James Webb points out:

Something may be hidden because of its immense value, or reverently concealed from the prying eyes of the profane. But this hidden thing may also have achieved its sequestered position because the Powers That Be have found it wanting. Either it is a threat and must be buried, or simply useless, and so forgotten. (2)

Some of Europe's leading seekers after ancient secret wisdom were convinced that in the Muslim lands of the Orient could be found a Primordial Tradition transmitted from generation to generation within closed communities of initiates. They sought inspiration in a cultural and religious milieu long denounced as the 'enemy' by European Christianity.

The French poet and historian Gerard de Nerval (1808-1855) was of the opinion that secret Islamic communities, principally the Druze, the Ismailis and the Nusairis, had been responsible for transmitting ancient wisdom to Europe through their influence on the Knights Templar.

Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, the reactionary nineteenth century chronicler of secret societies, believed the Knights Templar (and the Freemasons) derived their doctrines and practices from the Ismaili Assassins, who in turn inherited them from the ancient Gnostics.

Godfrey Higgins (1772-1833), whose books influenced Madame Blavatsky and the early Theosophists, also concluded the Ismaili Assassins passed their mysteries on to Europe's Templars, Freemasons, and Rosicrucians. Higgins resolutely defended Muhammed, the Prophet of Islam, and expressed the hope to visit the Moorish lands of Egypt, Palestine and Syria before he died.

Early this century the writer and mystic Laurence Oliphant reasoned the Druze and Nusairi sects were the custodians of the most complete system of secret knowledge. In The Treasure of Montsegur, an authoritative book on the medieval Cathars, the scholar R.A. Gilbert argues that the doctrines of the Nusairis are identical to those of the Cathars.

Wherever we look we find historians and authors searching for the key to spiritual enlightenment among the Orient's arcane Muslim communities. Elaborate 'myths' may guard the source of the teachings of Europe's occult fraternities, but they all point to the Muslim lands of North Africa and the mysterious East.

Eighteenth-century Rosicrucians claimed sources in Arabia for their secret wisdom. Indeed, a central Rosicrucian 'myth' tells how young Christian Rosenkreuz [Rosie Cross] journeyed to "the mystic Arabian city of Damcar" in search of lost knowledge. According to Manly P. Hall:

C.R.C. [Christian Rosie Cross] was but sixteen years of age when he arrived at Damcar. He was received as one who had been long expected, a comrade and a friend in philosophy, and was instructed in the secrets of the Arabian adepts. While there, C.R.C. learned Arabic and translated the sacred book M into Latin, and upon returning to Europe he brought this important volume with him. After studying three years in Damcar, C.R.C. departed for the [Moorish] city of Fez, where Arabian magicians declared further information would be given him. (3)

Returning to Europe from his sojourn in the Moorish lands, C.R.C. is said to have established a secret "House of the Holy Spirit" modelled on the Muslim "House of Wisdom" he visited at Cairo in Egypt. Even the name Rosicrucian, a follower of the path of the Rose Cross, is remarkably similar to the common Moorish Sufi phrase "Path of the Rose." One has only to intelligently study Rosicrucian rituals and legends to see the borrowing of Moorish imagery and the debt to Islamic esotericism.

The Rosicrucians - also called the 'Society of Unknown Philosophers' and the 'Invisible College' - counted among their number not only Sir Francis Bacon, but Robert Fludd, Saint Germain and Cagliostro. Held to be one of the founders of Western science and philosophy, Francis Bacon is also the real author of Shakespeare's works. Within the writings attributed to Shakespeare can be found Sufi ideas placed there by Francis Bacon.

Roger Bacon, known as the "miraculous Doctor," received his knowledge of medicine and the natural sciences from North African Moorish teachers. He often wore Arab dress at Oxford, knew the Arabic language, and translated Sufi texts. Bacon asserted that his knowledge was only part of a whole body of ancient wisdom known to Noah and Abraham, to Zoroaster, to the Chaldean, Egyptian and Greek masters, and to Muslim mystics.

At the end of the eighteenth century, Napoleon invaded Egypt. The French Emperor "held long discussions with the Ulema [religious scholars] of Cairo on Moslem theology, holding out to them the possibility of the whole French Army being converted to Islam." (4) The French writer Gourgaud noted in his Memories, "the Emperor reads the Koran in silence. He raises his head and says, as in a dream: 'Muhammad's religion is the most beautiful'." Under Napoleon's patronage, one of his generals embraced Islam and founded the secret Order of the Seekers of Wisdom.

Like Christian Rosenkreuz, the Sicilian magus Alessandro Cagliostro (1743-1795) reputedly travelled to the Moorish lands in pursuit of ancient wisdom. And like Rosenkreuz, Cagliostro - dubbed the "noble traveller" - was seen as the emissary of a powerful secret society. He claimed to have received initiation into Eastern mysteries at the pyramids of Egypt. Cagliostro wore Moorish robes and worked to establish a universal esoteric Order "above all sects and schisms, which would restore the patriarchal religion under which Adam, Seth, Noah, Abraham, etc., were in direct communion with God, and eventually lead mankind back to the state enjoyed before the Fall." (5) After spreading his ideas throughout Europe Cagliostro travelled to Rome, where he was arrested by the Catholic Inquisition and died in prison.

Dr. Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825-1875), the influential Black American Rosicrucian author, also followed in the footsteps of the legendary Christian Rosenkreuz. He journeyed over much of the old Moorish lands through Ireland, North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Arabia, Palestine and Turkey. His encounters with Sufis, Dervishes and other Muslim mystics undoubtedly influenced much of his writings. In these Randolph refers to the Muslim "Ansairs" (also known as the Nusairi and Alawis), the "Ansairetic Mysteries", and the secrets of "the Syrian mountaineers." From his solitary travels in the Orient, he claimed to have brought back arcane knowledge and practices that revolutionised Western esotericism. Randolph's biographer says his ideas "left their traces on Madame Blavatsky, her Theosophical Society, and many practising occult organizations in Europe and America today." (6)

The enigmatic teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1872-1949), who travelled the Orient in search of lost wisdom, mentions the mysterious "Aissors" in his book Meetings with Remarkable Men. At least one writer speculates they are the same as the secret community of Islamic esotericists encountered by Randolph. Today, Gurdjieff's students believe his system to be derived from centuries old arcane traditions, whose representatives he met in the Muslim lands of Central Asia. The Russian journalist P.D. Ouspensky, perhaps Gurdjieff's greatest pupil, thought his teacher had derived his ideas from the hidden wisdom found among the Muslim Sufis. The British author and mystic J.G. Bennett attempted to replicate Gurdjieff's journeys in Central Asia. In Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Persia he met Sufi masters and wandering Dervishes.

Early this century another "noble traveller", Noble Drew Ali (born Timothy Drew), the self-taught son of former Black slaves, took a job as a merchant seaman and found himself in Egypt. According to one legend, Noble Drew Ali travelled around the world before the age of twenty-seven, in an effort to discover all he could about the heritage of his people and the tenets of Islam. It is commonly believed he received a mandate from the king of Morocco to instruct Black Americans in Islam. At the Pyramid of Cheops he received initiation and took the Muslim name Sharif [Noble] Abdul Ali; in America he would be known as Noble Drew Ali. On his return to the United States in 1913 he founded the Moorish Science Temple, "to uplift fallen humanity by returning the nationality, divine creed and culture to persons of Moorish descent in the Western Hemisphere."

A charismatic leader, Noble Drew Ali taught that the true origin of Black Americans was 'Asiatic', and Islam their original religion. "The fallen sons and daughters of the Asiatic Nation of North America," he wrote, "need to learn to love instead of hate; and to know of their higher self and lower self." Allah, the one true God, has been known by many names, "but everywhere His is the causeless cause, the rootless root from which all things have grown". Noble Drew Ali acknowledged Prophet Muhammad as "the founder of the reuniting of Islam" and the promised one foretold by Jesus. All prophets came with basically the same message, and Islam was the original divine faith to which Muhammed called people to return.

Noble Drew Ali laid the foundations of the Islamic movement in the United States. He showed that knowledge of one's own identity - one's self, community and religion - is indispensable to a creative life for the individual and community. Noble Drew Ali commented, "When we rely upon others to study the secrets of nature and think and act for us, then we have created a life for ourselves, one which is termed 'Hell.'" Through his message thousands of Black Americans were exposed to Moorish history, culture, religion, as well as the Islamic principles of "Love, Truth, Peace, Freedom, and Justice." But his meteoric success brought disaster. Noble Drew Ali died in 1929, in the words of one commentator, "some say from severe police beatings, others say he was assassinated by his rivals in the movement. In his sincerity and undoubted innocence, Noble Drew Ali met a martyr's end." (7)

A Million Fleshy Things: The Songs Of Comus

Via Rubberneck's Millenial Mavericks...Thanks to BloodStar Nebula for turning me on to Comus!

Comus emerged from the now much maligned, polystylistic ferment of late 60s/early 70s British progressive rock, though few now remember them. They quit after a second LP in 1974. I have to thank Vernon Joynson's wonderful encyclopedia, The Tapestry Of Delights, for bringing their extraordinary 1971 debut First Utterance (Beat Goes On BGOCD275 CD) to my attention.

This six-piece certainly lived up to their name. In Greek mythology Comus is the god of revelry, the son of Circe and Bacchus. Comus is also the title of a dramatic poem by the renowned 17th Century English poet, John Milton, and the poem's central theme - female chastity tempted in the archetypal 'wild wood' of moral perplexity by the demonic enchanter, Comus - sets the tone for First Utterance, especially 'The Song To Comus'. 'Diana', another allusion to Greek/Roman myth, also describes the threat of insatiable lust to virtue. Other vulnerable innocents face abusive power in songs about brutal murder mixed with Gothic eroticism ('Drip Drip'), Christian martyrdom ('The Bite') and mental illness ('The Prisoner') - all described with disturbing candour. The acerbic lyrics and Roger Wootton's vocals (echoes of Family's Roger Chapman) convey terror and hysteria with alliterative force; there's often a sense of sadistic pleasure in Wootton's tone which gives the album a nasty, yet compelling edge. This is certainly no idealised, Hippie evocation of a mythical, bucolic past. Even Wootton's cover artwork, as memorably grotesque as Barry Godber's for King Crimson's debut, suggests a darker direction. And the angular dissonance of Andy Hellaby's bass guitar and Colin Pearson's violin on 'Bitten' sounds very much like free improvisation in action, though sadly it only lasts a mere two minutes.

Throughout, the musicianship is thoughtful and applied to well crafted arrangements with instrumental episodes that present a considerable dynamic range - poignant, lyrical pastoral-folk, typified by the purity of Bobbie Watson's high vocal register, skewed blues and chamber rock, to some of the most menacing acoustic guitars, violin, hand drums and bass, I've heard from this era. First Utterance is certainly one of a kind, and one of the most inventive and distinctive works to come out of the 70s progressive rock movement. A minor classic.

In his informative sleevenotes, Fraser Massey puts forward a resourceful, if not entirely convincing, case as to why Comus and First Utterance didn't make the big-time. Disruptive postal strike of 1971 apart, selected unfavourable press reviews remind us of the basic, inescapable fact that Comus' music was an acquired taste; too damn spiky and unruly for the average folkie, yet too concerned with intricate arrangements and acoustic instrumentation to fire up a hard rock fan. A headline tour supporting hugely popular progressive folk-rockers Jethro Tull would have been just the ticket to raise the profile; however, it's unlikely that Tull management would have risked serious competition from such a stylistically idiosyncratic outfit.

If the Comus story had ended here, all would have been gloriously perfect. One audacious album left to tantalise posterity's obscure-vinyl junkies into posing the unanswerable question: what would they have done next? Unfortunately, perhaps, Comus answered this question themselves by producing a second album - one that devotees of the first would not have expected or hoped for.

Accomplished musicianship from more or less the same line-up, plus guest appearances by Henry Cow's Lindsay Cooper and Didier Malherbe of Gong, can't overturn the abiding feeling that, although satisfying in places, 1974's To Keep From Crying (Virgin V2018) is a sporadically fascinating flop. That it was released by Virgin, then arguably the most 'progressive' of the British labels serving the progressive rock market, makes the commercial and conventional nature of the recording initially appear somewhat baffling. But, on closer inspection, the mid-70s also saw Virgin release unexpectedly conventional/commercial recordings by Captain Beefheart (Unconditionally Guaranteed and Bluejeans And Moonbeams) and Can (Landed) - none of which were greeted with much enthusiasm by discerning fans of these groups, who regarded them (and still do) as questionable attempts to achieve wider recognition and higher record sales. Comus, then, were probably willing participants in a similar marketing strategy which also failed to achieve the desired commercial goal.

It's perhaps not surprising that To Keep From Crying still hasn't been reissued on CD, and unless Comus suddenly become fashionable (Steven Stapleton and David Tibet praising them in The Wire will certainly help matters) there seems no compelling reason for Virgin to deliver. Moreover, unlike the First Utterance LP (Dawn DNLS 3019), which has long been a much sought-after and expensive item for prog collectors, To Keep From Crying is not regarded as an especially rare acquisition, though this doesn't prevent it from being a reasonably pricey second-hand purchase.

Nevertheless, 'Down (Like A Movie Star)', the opener, augurs well - a punchy folk-pop song with hints of Wootton's vocal wildness at its edges, and some colourful touches from Cooper's bassoon and Keith Hale's marimba. It's the strongest song on the album. Third track, the brief 'Waves And Caves', reveals Andy Hellaby's interesting "effects and tape music"; what sounds like looped backwards bass guitar and discreet synth is sufficiently moodily pre-ambient for it to be at home on an album like Eno's Another Green World, released the following year. Two other miniatures by Hellaby, 'Panophany' (its percussive bass guitar effects rather like Kev Hopper's ingenious 90s "spoombung" preparations) and the concluding 'After The Dream' (multitracked auto harp), again give hints as to how the group might have explored more promising experimental pathways; but the overall impression is of studio engineers and, presumably, group opinion, conspiring to create a more polished sound with all the exciting, untamed qualities of the first album smoothed out, or pushed to the periphery. Catchy, inoffensive folk-pop is, for the most part, the end product, though 'Perpetual Motion' flirts with Beach Boys style vocal harmonies, and the title-track contains some driving bass by Hellaby; haunting melodies, like 'Touch Down' and 'Children Of The Universe', are sullied by twee Hippie versifying, or develop into inflated anthemic singalong.

Notwithstanding this absorption in the conventional, Bobbie Watson's impossibly high vocals retain a lingering sensuality, yet the delicacy of her tessitura is no longer counterbalanced by Wootton's seething hysteria; here, he and his lyrics are distressingly benign, and quite unlike Roger Chapman. A key element in First Utterance's invigorating drama was this striking dichotomy of vocal expressivity and the sexual charge it generated. Sadly, To Keep From Crying is a much safer soundworld to inhabit, and consequently a disappointing finale to Comus' career.

Merely Labeled

Via The Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive

We believe that there’s an I, a real self, in our body. But if you look for it, if you analyze the appearance to see whether or not the I really exists in your body, or on your aggregates, you can’t find it. If you don’t analyze, it looks like it’s there, but if you do, you discover that it’s non- existent. This is what your wisdom discovers. When you do not analyze, do not meditate, when you haven’t realized the ultimate nature—the emptiness of the I, the ultimate nature of the self—it appears as if there’s a real I there, in your body or on your five aggregates of body and mind. When you search with wisdom, you discover that the real I, appearing from there, is totally non-existent. It exists nowhere. That absence of the real I is what we call emptiness, or shunyata, the very nature of the self. That is the reality of the self. That’s what the I is. It is empty—empty of the real I that appears from there—and exists merely in name. The only reason the I exists at all is because of the existence of a valid base, the aggregates. The five aggregates—form, feeling, cognition, compounding aggregates and consciousness—are a valid base for labeling “I,” therefore the I exists.

For example, a child is born and its parents give it a name, a label. First the child, an association of body and mind, is actualized; then comes the label. So, depending on the base, let’s say the parents call the child Richard. First the base comes into existence, then the label is applied. The base is not one with the label, “Richard.” If it were, as soon as the base came into being, so would the label, “Richard.” But the two are different. The child—the association of body and mind, the aggregates—and the label—the name, “Richard”—are not separ-ate, but they’re different. Similarly, our base—the association of our body and mind, our aggregates—is not one with the label “I.” The base and the label do not exist separately, but they exist differently. The definition of why Richard exists is because the association of body and mind—the base that can receive the label “Richard”—exists. Richard exists because his base exists. That’s the main reason. Similarly, the only reason the I exists is because the base, the association of body and mind, exists—the valid base that can receive the label “I.” Because of that, the self exists.

But our deluded mind does not see this. To us it appears as if the I exists from the side of the aggregates, as if there’s a real self there. But by analyzing this appearance and your belief in it, you can discover that what you see and believe is a hallucination. The real I that appears from there is completely non-existent. There’s not an atom of real self there. In reality, it is non-existent, but not recognizing this, not realizing this, believing the illusion to be real, believing one hundred percent that the I that appears from there is its reality, blocks you from seeing the ultimate, empty nature of the I.

The I that exists, that experiences happiness and suffering, that walks, talks, eats, sits and sleeps is nothing other than what has been merely labeled by the mind. But even though that merely labeled I exists, if you look for it on the aggregates, on the base, you cannot find it anywhere, from the ends of your hair to the tips of your toes. There’s no question that the merely labeled I exists. It’s just that you can’t find it on the base, on your aggregates.

The I that appears to you in your body or on your aggregates as not merely labeled by the mind—as if it has nothing to do with your mind, as if there’s a real I there that never came from your mind, that exists from its own side—is the I that does not exist. Neither in your body nor on your aggregates nor anywhere else—that I exists nowhere. This is reality. The absence of such an I, the emptiness of that, is the ultimate nature of the I.

The hallucinating mind—the wrong conception holding on to the I as not merely labeled by the mind, as existing from its own side; holding as true that something real is appearing from there—is the root of all delusion, karma and suffering. This unknowing mind, this ignorance, is the main suffering. This hallucinating mind—the wrong conception that believes the I to be other than it really is, in completely the wrong way—is our worst suffering. This is the basic ignorance that we have to eradicate in order to escape from all suffering and its cause.

The only way to do this is to realize emptiness. The wisdom realizing the emptiness of the I is the only solution, the only direct remedy, for this wrong conception. By developing this wisdom we can remove all delusions, liberate ourselves from suffering, and, by revealing the truth to others, liberate numberless other sentient beings as well.

Conscious Acts of Creation: The Emergence of a New Physics

Via The Tiller Foundation

The experimental observations of Copernicus and Galileo eventually overcame, after great struggle, the prevailing and deeply entrenched science paradigm of their time. Over the subsequent centuries, what we now call classical mechanics gained ascendancy in the physics community and, by the 19th century was deeply entrenched as the prevailing physics paradigm of its time. By the last quarter of the 19th century, world leaders in the physics community were advising young students not to enter this field as “there are only a few t’s to cross and a few i’s to dot and then everything fundamental in physics would be known that could be known.” And then a new doorway seemed to open in the universe and two new concepts, (1) the quantum and (2) relativity, were born to account for some troubling experimental observations of the time.

Once again, the establishment science of the day strongly resisted the new concepts but, after about three decades of serious struggle, the new fields of quantum mechanics and relativistic mechanics had become strong enough and integrated enough to be begrudgingly accepted by the scientific community as a serious part of nature’s expression. By the end of the 20th century a new physics paradigm was in full acceptance and quantum/relativistic mechanics is the entrenched paradigm of today.

From the foregoing, one should deduce that nature always has richer modes of expression than our models and paradigmatic approximations to nature circumscribe. We should also deduce that it is reproducible experimental data generated via a well-defined protocol, which is inconsistent with any prevailing paradigm, that heralds a need for expansion of that particular world view into a new paradigm. Finally, we should also deduce that the process of change from one paradigm to its replacement does not occur easily and quickly because entrenched mindsets cause humans to reject what they don’t understand (from their viewpoint) even in the face of abundant experimental data. It is psychologically easier to reject the existence/validity of such data than to go through the difficult process of changing “hardwired” mental patterns concerning reality.

Today, we once again have abundant experimental evidence concerning nature’s expression that is being “swept under the rug” by the scientific establishment because it doesn’t fit into the current prevailing paradigm. This concerns the issue of whether or not human qualities of spirit, mind, emotion, consciousness, intention, etc., can significantly influence the materials and processes of physical reality. The current physics paradigm would say “no” and indeed there is no place in the mathematical formalism of the paradigm where any human qualities might enter. However, the database that supports an unqualified “yes” response is very substantial [1-10].

This article is dedicated to illustrating to this readership both why, from a scientific perspective, the “yes” response is the correct one and, briefly, what some of its implications are for philosophy, religion and technology.

The Active Future as Divine

Via The Paideia Project

Ordinarily we think of the future as a blank background on which we imaginatively project our plans, hopes and fears. Or we may consider it as a receptacle, passively registering the conditions the present and past lays upon it. Once all these conditions are completed, it comes into being-only then it is no longer future but present. As long as it is still future and still indeterminate, we do not see how it could be active. How could the future actively receive and respond to its world?

Besides the ordinary passive future we are all familiar with, I wish to propose a notion of the future which can serve as the appropriate mode of divine activity. First, I need to show how an active future is possible. Then I must try to show that God can be appropriately conceived as the activity of the future. In this account I shall be relying heavily on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, primarily as found in his main work, Process and Reality (1929). In part I shall be presenting his ideas, while in part I shall be building on them in ways he did not foresee.

The future is usually considered to be exclusively passive because it lacks any discernible activity. Most deem whatever discernible activity there is to be present, relegating to the past whatever is no longer active. This makes good sense for those who assume that world is constituted out of enduring substances, but it makes less sense if the world is conceived in terms of events. Substances can inhabit different temporal modalities, such as persisting from the past into the present. Thus a substantial cause can lie in the past of the substance it affects (thus being before its effect), and yet also be present as actively causing. In an event theory, on the other hand, an actual event must be present or past, but not both. Then a causal transaction must be analyzed in terms of two events, only one of which is present. Since the cause must be earlier than its effect, the event serving as cause must lie in the past of the present event which is its effect.

Most consider that the causes are active, the effect its passive result. But if only the effect event can be present, and only it is vested with activity, the conception of causation needs to be reversed in the event theory. The effect actively appropriates or prehends its causes. Whitehead's coined the term 'prehension' from 'comprehension' or 'apprehension'. The prefixes were omitted in order to call attention to any taking account of another, whether or not this is conscious. This is a generalization from perception, and so generalized, it applies to causation as well.

Thus a present event prehends only past objects. For something to be discernible, then, it must be objective, and to be objective, it must be past. If so, then the discernible is not active, and the active is not discernible. Thus there a fundamental shift in the characterization of the temporal modes when we enter the context of process philosophy, a shift which calls question the notion of a 'discernible activity'.

'Discernible activity' ordinarily means the perceptible changes we now experience as going on. But if nothing can be both active and discernible, these perceptible changes must belong to the immediate past. These discernible changes result from the indiscernible activity of what just happened. Immediately past events, those deemed present by most, are concretely determinate and have the same ontological status as the more distant past.

The present then becomes the domain of activity in terms of which determinate events come into being. In this radical sense we experience the present only in terms of our own subjective immediacy. Objective, discernible activity is then to be understood as being derived from subjective, indiscernible becoming.

There are many acts of subjective becoming taking place in the present. Yet the creative advance need not be restricted to the present. It could extend into the future as well. This future activity might be universal and one, first being pluralized in the particular acts of the present.

Flesh & Consciousness: Georges Bataille & The Dionysian

Via Philosophical Conversations and The Journal For Cultural And Religious Theory

Je regrette les temps où la sève du monde,
L’eau du fleuve, le sang rose des arbres verts
Dans les veines de Pan mettaient un univers!
—Rimbaud

Dazu muß ich in die Tiefe steigen: wie du des
Abends tust, wenn du hinter das Meer gehst
und noch der Unterwelt Licht bringst; du
überreiches Gestirn!
—Nietzsche

FIRST, A TRUE MYTH: The Zoological Gardens of London, 1927. Georges
Bataille is momentarily blinded by the sun -- like Saint Teresa enraptured by solar emanations that tear the flesh, pierce the soul, and occlude consciousness. But this sun is “shit-smeared” and rests between the red-blue buttocks of a baboon. Bataille collapses, blown apart by the solar rays.1 In Paris his analyst hands him a photograph: a Chinese man undergoing the “death of a hundred pieces,” is lashed to a pole. His arms have been severed just beneath the shoulders and his legs are missing below the knees. The chest has been cut away
exposing the ribcage and vital organs underneath. While these wounds are almost unbearable to look at, perhaps the most disturbing gash is the smile on the uplifted face of the victim, Fou Tchou Li, blinded by the sun.2 The analyst encourages his patient’s own little death of a hundred pieces, the self-dissolution that precipitates the more-than-human consciousness of Apollo-Dionysus.

Georges Bataille believed that self-consciousness was potentially a curse. Though we are condemned to bear it, we are not, however, condemned to suffer its limitations. One can overcome it, finding the energy and resolve to uplift it by way of consciousness itself. A dialectical solution overcomes the limits of selfconsciousness, a dialectic whose final turn parodies Absolute Spirit in an overcoming that transforms mere consciousness into superconsciousness, a
dialectic it must be stressed that is consciously pursued, as the mystic pursues daemonization,3 and not passively anticipated as an eschatology, as an historical rupture. In superconsciousness alone one finds the resolution of Self and World, of Apollonian self-reflexivity and Dionysian self-loss. Bataille embraced Nietzsche’s superhumanism. “Perhaps,” Nietzsche has written, “the entire evolution of the spirit is a question of the body… In the long run, it is not a question of man at all: he is to be overcome.”4

The numenal nature of Bataille’s post-humanism becomes clear when viewed in the light of the “Gnostic” idiom that informs his thought. His was a singular kind of Gnosticism, but it had antecedents in Renaissance Neoplatonism and modern German phenomenology. Bataille never explicitly identifies himself as a Gnostic. But when we consider the “onto-poetic”5 nature of his discourse in the light of his knowledge of archaic, medieval and Renaissance cosmogony, his preoccupation with “inner experience” and “numinous consciousness,”6 and his insistence on the active, creative nature of matter, the “Gnostic” orientation of his thought is apparent. The central problematic of Bataille’s philosophy is the ostensible cleft between spirit and matter, between consciousness and flesh, a devirilizing and desacralizing polarity Bataille rejected in favor of the “tumultuous effervescence” of what he called universal existence: "For universal
existence is unlimited and thus restless: it does not close life in on itself, but instead opens it up and throws it back into the uneasiness of the infinite.

Universal existence, eternally unfinished and acephalic, a world like a bleeding wound, endlessly creating and destroying particular finite beings."7 This is a nontheistic cosmogony, a mysticism without a godhead; nevertheless it is a mysticism that upholds the existence of a numinous Source, a creative agency that manifests itself in the material universe. To engage in “inner experience” is to communicate with this Source—a consummation equally material and spiritual in nature.

Bataille was essentially a Gnostic dialectician in search of a totalizing
consciousness that would restore to “discontinuous beings” a sense of continuity between Self and World, Self and Nature, Self and Numen. While his thought does not follow, to the letter, the tenets of “orthodox” Gnosticism as it flourished in the ancient world, there is a prevailing “Gnostic” orientation in those aspects of it concerning ontology and the role of consciousness in defining the human condition. This “Gnostic” orientation informs Bataille’s assessment of the symbiosis of flesh and consciousness in terms of sacred experience, and determines his emphasis on the material world in general, and the body specifically, as the loci in which this experience unfolds. My purpose in what follows is to identify these Gnostic elements and demonstrate their role in shaping the “Dionysian dialectic” at the heart of Bataille’s thought.

How Evolutionary Psychology Can Make You Look Like an Ass

Via Mixing Memory and Majikthise

There is something about evolutionary psychology (EP) that makes it very attractive to non-psychologists (and to undergraduate psych majors -- you should see them rushing to register for EP courses). I've never been entirely sure what it is about EP that makes non-experts find it so fascinating, and more often than not, swallow it's claims without hesitation. Perhaps it's the simplicity and intuitiveness of many of the explanations. Cheating is bad, and harmful, therefore it is adaptive for us to have evolved a mechanism for detecting it. That's pretty simple and intuitive, right? Of course, this is one of the many reasons that most psychologists don't seem to find EP very attractive. The explanations generally rely on little more than intuition bolstered by sketchy, usually non-experimentally derived data. A careful review of the EP literature would give a scientist little confidence in its claims. However, there are plenty of non-psychologists who are happy to read some trade books on EP, and treat it as gospel. Doing so leads them to come up with all sorts of nonsensical arguments about human behavior. This is especially true when EP "theories" are used to make political arguments, as was the case in a recent essay by Will Wilkinson for the Cato Institute.

Now Wilkinson's formal training is in philosophy, and while he does cite three books on EP and politics, making it reasonable (or at least less charitable) to assume that he's read something on the topic, it's quite clear that his knowledge of EP is minimal. We see this, for instance, in his citing of Oliver Goodenough and Kristin Prehn, whose name he misspells, as the sources of original research on the detection of moral transgressions, when, in fact, she has not published any such research, only a review of the literature for a special issue of a philosophy journal. He furthermore cites the Tooby and Cosmides' social exchange theory, for which there is preciously little (if any) evidence, and even cites their Wason selection task experiments, which have been shown to provide no evidence for their conclusions. He also cites Robert Kurzban's research on social groups as having "shown," which I assume means demonstrated with certainty, that certain aspects of in-group, out-group dynamics have an evolutionary basis. However, if he had even read Kurzban's research, he would know that there are plenty of other alternative theories that explain the data, and that Kurzban has produced preciously little new data in support of his own theory. Given this, we can be sure that Wilkinson is not interested in the science of EP, but only in accepting its claims uncritically, and drawing his own conclusions from them. And that is in fact what he does. I'll go through his major claims, one by one.

The Nile Decoded

Via Fantastic Planet

What lies at the core of the ‘Time River Theory’ is more than just a theory, but a factual ‘smoking gun’ capable of utterly decimating what is being passed off as ‘reality’ today. The Time River Theory is undoubtedly an ‘extraordinary claim’. But it is one that is supported by ‘extraordinary evidence’. Indeed, it is this author’s position that the discovery of the Time Rivers heralds the last tick of the ‘time bomb’ that ends the illusion of the ‘Matrix’, so to speak. The new reality lets us discern who we really are, where we came from, and where we are going.

The Time River Theory primarily involves two ancient river systems: the Nile in Africa and the Tigris-Euphrates in the land of Mesopotamia. By the end of this paper, the reader will come to understand the explosive implication of the strange configuration depicted in the image right – that our planet’s major rivers have been intelligently designed. It would represent the closest thing mankind has seen to the ‘fingerprints of the gods’.

The strength of the theory lies in the fact that its basic claim can be presented concisely and understood by the average people without much difficulty. It is the unusual combination of clarity and seeming impossibility that makes this ‘extraordinary claim’ extraordinarily plausible, if not undeniable. It would ultimately come down to the question: ‘Do you believe your own eyes or not?’

It is of course ridiculous to think that major rivers such as the Nile are intelligently created ‘monuments’ bearing encoded messages. But that is exactly what is logically demanded by the body of evidence presented in this paper.

The Nile or denial – that may already be the real issue.

Having expressed the level of confidence, the author would like to sincerely encourage all to critically examine the following discussion, designed to present a key portion of the Time River Theory.

For a complete presentation of the wide-ranging theory and its unsettling implications for our own time, please see the book The Time Rivers (2003) by the author.

Hints of Intelligent Design

Shown below is an overview map of the Nile in Africa, the world’s longest river. This is the ancient river that gave rise to the mysterious ancient Egyptian civilization thousands of years ago.

image link

And here are the initial clues hinting at the existence of intelligence behind the river’s layout:

image link

1. The Nile is distinctively vertical (longitudinal), and it is the only notable river on this planet to flow directly northward.

2. The Nile begins at the equator and disintegrates precisely at 30°N latitude, marked by Egypt’s capital Cairo and Giza, the home of the great pyramids and the Sphinx.[1]

3. The generally straight Nile makes a dramatic turn southward near the halfway point. The northern peak of this remarkable bend – sometimes referred to as the ‘Great Bend’ – pinpoints latitude 19.5°N.

The significance of #3 comes from the fact that 19.5° is considered a ‘tetrahedral constant’, deriving from the geometric configuration of a circumscribed tetrahedron shown below.

image link

In terms of the ‘hyperdimensional physics’ model promoted by researcher Richard Hoagland, well known for his investigation into the ‘monuments of Mars’, the angle even represents an inter-dimensional ‘gateway’ of some sort. This notion is echoed by the great pyramids at Giza - a place traditionally signifying a 'gateway' (Rostau) - in that their layout prominently produces this very angle.

image link

The fact that the longitude pinpointed by the same Bend’s peak is 33.0°E intensifies our curiosity as ‘33’ too happens to be a key number detected by Hoagland’s team (The Enterprise Mission).

Indeed, 19.5 and 33 are said to be the two ‘ritual numbers’ repeatedly encoded into various aspects of NASA space missions.

image link

In 1997, for example, the Pathfinder space probe landed on Mars at almost exactly 19.5°N. 33°W. That this was no coincidence is evidenced by the fact that: 1) the lander dropped on the ‘tetrahedral latitude’ was tetrahedral in shape; and 2) at the moment of touchdown, Earth was positioned 19.5° above the eastern Martian horizon as seen from the landing site.

As Mike Bara, Hoagland’s right-hand man at the Enterprise Mission, wrote:

Pathfinder’s unique tetrahedral spacecraft design geometry, coupled with the totally “recursive” tetrahedral geometry of the landing site itself, was obviously intended by NASA “ritualists” behind the scenes to celebrate – on their first return to Mars in over twenty years – the two key Hyperdimensional numbers underlying all the NASA rituals – “19.5” and “33.”[2]

Musical Theory and Ancient Cosmology

Via Halo Manash

If science is conceived of as knowledge and philosophy as love of wisdom, then the invention of musical theory clearly is one of the greatest scientific and philosophical achievements of the ancient world. When, where, and how did it happen?

Assuming that Cro-Magnon man processed sound with the same biology we possess, humans have shared some fifty thousand years of similar auditory experiences. Musical theory as an acoustical science begins with the definition of intervals, the distance between pitches, by ratios of integers, or counting numbers, a discovery traditionally credited to Pythagoras in the sixth century B.C.

Not until the sixteenth century A.D., when Vincenzo Galilei (Galileo's father, an accomplished musician) tried to repeat some of the experiments attributed to Pythagoras, was it learned that they were apocryphal, giving either the wrong answers or none at all. Today, as the gift of modem archaeological and linguistic studies, our awareness of cultures much older than that of Greece has been phenomenally increased; this permits us to set aside the tired inventions about Pythagoras and tell a more likely story, involving anonymous heroes in other lands.

My story is centered in Mesopotamia. It demonstrates how every element of Pythagorean tuning theory was implicit in the mathematics and mythology of that land for at least a thousand years, and perhaps two thousand, before Greek rationalists finally abstracted what we are willing to recognize as science from its long incubation within mythology.

What seems most astounding in ancient Mesopotamia is the total fusion of what we separate into subjects: music, mathematics, art, science, religion, and poetic fantasy. Such a fusion has never been equaled except by Plato, who inherited its forms. Socrates' statement about the general principles of scientific studies in book 7 of Plato's Republic, with the harmonical allegories that follow directly in books 8 and 9, guides my exposition here. The Mesopotamian prototypes to which they lead us fully justify Socrates' treatment of his own tale as an "ancient Muses' jest," inherited from a glorious, lost civilization. Scholars who have become too unmusical to understand mankind's share in divinity, as Plato feared might happen, still can lean on him for understanding, for all of his many writings about harmonics and music have survived. (I must suppress here, for reasons of space, the extensive harmonical allegories of the Jews, whose parallel forms infuse the Bible with related musical implication from the first page of Genesis to the last page of Revelation.)

Music was as important in ancient India, Egypt, and China as it was in Mesopotamia and Greece. All these cultures had similar mythic imagery emphasizing the same numbers, which are so important in defining musical intervals; this raises doubts about whether any people ever "invented" acoustical theory. For instance, in any culture that knows the harp as intimately as it was known in Egypt and Mesopotamia, its visible variety of string lengths and economy of materials (strings require careful and often onerous preparation) encourage builders, as a sheer survival strategy, to notice the correlation between a string's length and its intended pitch.

Similarly, in China, where by 5000 B.C. the leg bones of large birds, equipped with tone holes appropriate for a scale, appear as paired flutes in ritual burials, the importance of suitable materials conditioned pipemakers to be alert to lengths. The basic ratios could have been discovered many times in many places, more likely by loving craftsmen and practitioners than by philosophers. Certainly, the discovery came no later than the fourth millennium B.C., before even the first Egyptian dynasty was founded or the Greeks had reached the Mediterranean shore.

A NEWLY EMERGING PERSPECTIVE.

In the fourth millennium B.C., the Sumerians, a non-Semitic people of uncertain origin, developed a high civilization in Mesopotamia, now the southern part of Iraq. For reasons that have been vigorously argued but remain unclear, they developed a base-60 number system. Waiting to be recognized within it--and in ways obvious to any scribal adept, although invisible to the illiterate--were the main patterns of harmonical theory that appear later in India, Babylon, and Greece. Sumerian tombs of this early period yield a harvest of harps, lyres, and pipes, and the literature surviving on clay tablets abounds in elaborate hymns.

In the cuneiform writing of the Sumerians, which was invented concurrently with the base-60 number system, the pantheon of deities is rationalized by assigning to the high gods the base-60 numbers that, as we shall see, encode the primary ratios of music. The glyph, or symbol, for heaven or star, followed by the appropriate number, functions as a "god nickname." (See fig. 1. The numerical values of the deities are given in Budge 1992.) The numbers reveal their significance in triangular arrays of pebble counters.

Furthermore, in the mythology of their religion, the responsibilities and behavior of the gods correspond with the functions of the god numbers in base-60 acoustics. Sumerian cosmology is grounded in the metaphorical copulation of the male A and female V numerical arrays, from which the Greek "holy tetraktys" is abstracted.

For example, the head of the pantheon and father of the gods is the sky god An (the than Anu), god 60, written in cuneiform as an oversize 1 sign (see fig. 5). Because base-60 numbers enjoy potentially endless place value meanings as multiples or submultiples of 60 (like the unit, 1, in decimal arithmetic), An = 60 (written as 1) functions as the center of the whole field of rational numbers. In mathematical language, An is its geometric mean, being the mean between any number and its reciprocal.

Anu/An, therefore, is essentially a do-nothing deity, as he was later accused of being-, a reference point, perfectly suited to represent simultaneously the middle band of the sky, the center of the number field, and the middle, reference tone (the Greek mese) in a tuning system. He was fated to be deposed by more active leaders among his children, as harmonical logic focused more clearly on structure and sheer virtuosity in computation became subordinated to deeper mathematical insight.

Theology, from its birth as "rational discourse about the gods" and in many later cultures influenced by Sumer, is mathematical allegory with a deeply musical logic. Tuning theory today remains a fossil science with no change at all in its basic parameters--structured by the gods themselves in numerical guise--since it premiered in Sumer about 3300 B.C.

To glimpse this new vision requires that we lay aside our algebra, our computers, and our pride in rational superiority and represent numbers to ourselves as the ancients did: concretely. We must learn to do musical arithmetic with a handful of pebbles in a triangular matrix, as the Pythagoreans teach us, imitating the pattern of bricks in the Sumerian glyph for mountain.

Then, like Socrates, we must show ourselves the harmonical implications of that arithmetic with a circle in the sand, for that circle is the cosmos, viewed as endlessly cyclical, like the tones of the musical scale (fig. 2).

In what follows I am presenting Mesopotamian arithmetic as Plato still practiced it in the fourth century B.C., studying his mathematical allegories for clues to earlier examples. Plato is the last great harmonical mythographer of the European world; never again did a major philosopher so thoroughly ground his thinking in music.

A Relationship Between Moving Reality and Static Constructions of Logic?

Via The Buddhist Channel

Western science and philosophy have always been dominated by non-process thought. This 'historical record' or being model of reality has been with us since Parmenides, and his student Zeno of Elea, and is known as the Eleatic model (c500 BCE). Zeno gave us the first insights into the inherent problems of comprehending motion, a problem long forgotten by conventional non-process physics, but finally explained by process physics.

The becoming or processing model of reality dates back to Heraclitus of Ephesus (540-480 BCE) who argued that common sense is mistaken in thinking that the world consists of stable things; rather the world is in a state of flux. The appearances of 'things' depend upon this flux for their continuity and identity. What needs to be explained, Heraclitus argued, is not change, but the appearance of stability. With process physics western science and philosophy is now able to move beyond the moribund non-process mindset. While it was the work of Gödel who demonstrated beyond any doubt that the non-process system of thought had fundamental limitations; implicit in his work is that the whole reductionist mindset that goes back to Thales of Miletus could not offer, in the end, an effective account of reality. However the notion that there were limits to syntactical or symbolic encoding is actually very old. Priest [25] has given an account of that history. However in the East the Buddhists in particular were amazingly advanced in their analysis and comprehension of reality. ...

Reality according to Buddhists is kinetic, not static, but logic, on the other hand, imagines a reality stabilized in concepts and names. The ultimate aim of Buddhist logic is to explain the relation between a moving reality and the static constructions of logic.

In theWest the process system approach to reality was developed, much later, by such process philosophers as Peirce, James, Bergson and Whitehead to name a few, although their achievements were very limited and substantially flawed, limited as they were by the physical phenomena known to them. A collection of their writings is available in [2]. Perhaps a quote from Charles Peirce [2], writing in 1891, gives the sense of their thinking;

The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws. But before this can be accepted it must show itself capable of explaining the tridimensionalty of space, the laws of motion, and the general characteristics of the universe, with mathematical clearness and precision; for no less should be demanded of every philosophy.

With process physics we have almost achieved this end, and Wheeler has already expressed this notion of inveterate habits as "law without law" [27]. As the reader will note the self-referentially limited neural network model, that underpins process physics, is remarkably akin to Peirce's effete mind. It is the limitations of syntax, and the need for intrinsic or semantic information 'within' reality and at all levels, that reality is not imposed, that drives us to this approach. Einstein, the modern day eleatic thinker, realised all too well the limitations of non-process thinking but was unable to move out of the non-process realm that the West had created for itself, for according to Carnap [28];

Once Einstein said that the problem of the Now worried him seriously. He explained that the experience of the Now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but that this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics. That this experience cannot be grasped by science seems to him a matter of painful but inevitable resignation. I remarked that all that occurs objectively can be described in science: on the one hand the temporal sequence of events is described in physics; and, on the other hand, the peculiarities of man's experiences with respect to time, including his different attitude toward past, present and future, can be described and (in principle) explained in psychology. But Einstein thought that scientific descriptions cannot possibly satisfy our human needs; that there is something essential about the Now which is just outside of the realm of science.

It was the Einsteins error in rejecting absolute motion that trapped twentieth century physics in the non-process or no now mindest. As is shown here experiments that could detect absolute motion did so, and those that could not not do so in principle of course did not detect absolute motion. Nevertheless all of these later experiments were claimed to have confirmed the SR and GR formalism which is fundamentally based an the absence of absolute motion as an aspect of reality.

What is Division Theory?

This cat should just read the Bardo Thodol...it talks about all the same phenomena and even gives the reader strategies for maintaining consciousness in order to effect a better rebirth. Via Division Theory.

The Binary Soul Doctrine is different, in three respects:

1. It accounts for virtually all the reports emerging from modern research into afterlife phenomena.

2. It accounts for the vast majority of humanity’s religious teachings about death and the afterlife, explaining why people would have arrived at those conclusions.

3. It is based on modern scientific knowledge about how the mind functions.

But the oddest thing is that this theory, though newly rediscovered, is among the oldest of explanations – perhaps the oldest explanation – ever devised by the human mind for a series of puzzles about life, death, and the afterlife.

The simple premise of DivisionTheory is that we DO survive death - our psyches do continue to exist and function after the demise of the physical body, but at the tragic cost of being ripped apart into two separate pieces, each of which goes on without the other into a different, crippled afterlife experience. The conscious mind, known for eons in the East as the Spirit, loses its memory and goes on to reincarnate. The unconscious mind, known for eons in the West as the Soul, becomes trapped in a heavenly or hellish afterlife dreamworld of its own unwitting creation. Both scientific and scriptural evidence exists to support this startling conclusion, which not only explains the differences between many of the world's great religions, but also shows that humanity's intuitions about the soul's survival has a reality separate and distinct from the mind's philosophical conflicts.

Ancient religious beliefs from all over the globe contain elements of DivisionTheory, suggesting that this was once a world-wide religion. And now our modern science is again pointing in that same ancient direction.

Has modern science finally arrived at the underlying mechanics of Life After Death? It now seems possible, perhaps even likely, that humanity's many various reports of heaven & hell, reincarnation, and ghosts are all the common effects of a single, scientifically definable "Life After Death" condition. A great wealth of scriptural evidence, compiled from the sacred texts of religions all across the world, also seems to constitute substantiating evidence for a radical new, scientifically-based vision of Life After Death. And yet more evidence for this has been added to our cultural storehouse by recent sociological research into Past-Life Regression, Near-Death Experiences, and ghost reports.

The ancients believed, as modern psychology does, that the inner SELF is composed of a fundamental duality.

Whether one calls the two parts of that duality a conscious and an unconscious, or a mind and a heart, or (as in ancient China) a p'o and a hun, or (as in ancient Greece) a thymos and a psyche, or (as in ancient Egypt) a ba and a ka, or (as in ancient Persia) an urvan and a fravashi, or (as in ancient India) an asu and a manas, or (as in ancient Hawaii) the uhane and unihipili souls, or (as in ancient Israel) a soul and a spirit, humans have always seen themselves as possessing two non-material psychic components.

Like that ancient SELF described in so many cultures, modern science has in this century also discovered that our mind is composed of two parts - one conscious and one unconscious. And the characteristics of the two parts that science has discovered (surprise!) are the very same characteristics those ancient cultures described the two parts of the ancient duality has possessing.

The ancients (Greece, Egypt, Persia, China, Hawaii, Israel) all believed that these two parts separated from one another at death; most cultures believed that one of their two parts would become trapped in some sort of netherworld (a heaven/hell type scenario), while the other part slipped away freely. Some of these ancient cultures believed that this second part went on to reincarnate.

What is particularly interesting to me about this is that :

(A) These ancient cultures described the functions and characteristics of the two parts in terms virtually identical to how modern psychologists describe the functions and characteristics of the conscious and unconscious halves of the human psyche.

(B) If one then asks what would happen if the two halves of the human psyche survived the death of the physical body, but divided from one another in the process, one finds that the unconscious would seem to become trapped in a self-induced dreamworld (think netherworld), while the other would loses its memory and sense of identity but remain free to go on to have new experiences (think reincarnation).

(C) The Bible, as well as many other ancient scriptures, includes literally hundreds of passages supporting such a soul/spirit division concept (although no one seems to have noticed this relationship).

A Master Equation for All Life Processes?

Via Dzed and Roland Piquepaille

In "Life on the Scales," Science News recently wrote that some simple mathematical equations, known as quarter-power scaling laws, can explain the metabolic rates of living organisms. For example, "an animal's metabolic rate appears to be proportional to mass to the 3/4 power." And this "3/4-power law appears to hold sway from microbes to whales, creatures of sizes ranging over a mind-boggling 21 orders of magnitude." The ecologists, physicists and chemists behind this research are now successfully applying this equation to plants, fish, full ecosystems and even biology and genetics, by adding a new key parameter: temperature. Please read this fascinating article for many more details and references. But save some time to read another long article, "Ecology's Big, Hot Idea," published by PLoS Biology, which states that "the way life uses energy is a unifying principle for ecology in the same way that genetics underpins evolutionary biology." Read more...

The Science News article starts with a simple observation. Although a mouse has a shorter life than an elephant, both clock approximately the same number of heartbeats during their lives. Simply, their metabolisms are different. Now, let's go back several decades ago.

Scientists have long known that most biological rates appear to bear a simple mathematical relationship to an animal's size: They are proportional to the animal's mass raised to a power that is a multiple of 1/4. These relationships are known as quarter-power scaling laws. For instance, an animal's metabolic rate appears to be proportional to mass to the 3/4 power, and its heart rate is proportional to mass to the –1/4 power.

In subsequent decades, biologists have found that the 3/4-power law appears to hold sway from microbes to whales, creatures of sizes ranging over a mind-boggling 21 orders of magnitude.

But nobody had an explanation for this scaling law -- until 1997.

The beginnings of an explanation came in 1997, when ecologist James Brown of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, physicist Geoffrey West of Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory, and Brian Enquist, an ecologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, described metabolic scaling in mammals and birds in terms of the geometry of their circulatory systems. It turns out, West says, that Rubner was on the right track in comparing surface area with volume, but that an animal's metabolic rate is determined not by how efficiently it dissipates heat through its skin but by how efficiently it delivers fuel to its cells.

The idea, West says, is that a space-filling surface scales as if it were a volume, not an area. If you double each of the dimensions of your laundry machine, he observes, then the amount of linens you can fit into it scales up by 2³, not 2². Thus, an animal's effective surface area scales as if it were a three-dimensional, not a two-dimensional, structure.

This law also can be applied to plants, fish, or even cancer growth rates -- providing you add a new parameter: temperature.

In 2001, after James Gillooly, a specialist in body temperature, joined Brown at the University of New Mexico, the researchers and their collaborators presented their master equation, which incorporates the effects of size and temperature. An organism's metabolism, they proposed, is proportional to its mass to the 3/4 power times a function in which body temperature appears in the exponent.

When the researchers filter out the effects of body temperature, most species adhere closely to quarter-power laws for a wide range of properties, including not only life span but also population growth rates. The team is now applying its master equation to more life processes -- such as cancer growth rates and the amount of time animals sleep.

Now, it's time for two key quotes [which don't appear in bold characters in the original article.]

"We've found that despite the incredible diversity of life, from a tomato plant to an amoeba to a salmon, once you correct for size and temperature, many of these rates and times are remarkably similar," says Gillooly.

"Metabolic rate is, in our view, the fundamental biological rate," Gillooly says. There is a universal biological clock, he says, "but it ticks in units of energy, not units of time."

Then the researchers applied their master equation to ecosystems such as forests, and even to evolutionary biology, trying to answer this question: "Why do the fossil record and genetic data often give different estimates of when certain species diverged?"

When the researchers use their master equation to correct for the effects of size and temperature, the genetic estimates of divergence times -- including those of rats and mice -- line up well with the fossil record, says Allen, one of the paper's coauthors.

As I wrote in the introduction, don't miss this other paper by John Whitfield in PLoS Biology on a similar subject, "Ecology's Big, Hot Idea." Here are the two first paragraphs.

Life is complicated. It comes in all sorts of shapes, sizes, places, and combinations, and has evolved a dizzying variety of solutions to the problem of carrying on living. Yet look inside a cell and life takes on, if not simplicity, then at least a certain uniformity -- a genetic system based around nucleic acids, for example, and a common set of chemical reactions for turning food into fuel. And looked at in broad swathes, life shows striking generalities and patterns. Every mammal's heart will beat about one billion times in its lifetime. Both within and between species, the density of a population declines in a regular way as the size of individuals increases. And the number of species in all environments declines as you move from the equator towards the poles.

Wouldn't it be good if there were a simple theory that used life's shared fundamentals to explain its large-scale regularities, via its diversity of individuals? In the past few years, a team of ecologists and physicists have come up with just such a theory. At its heart is metabolism: the way life uses energy is, they claim, a unifying principle for ecology in the same way that genetics underpins evolutionary biology. They believe that energy use, in the form of metabolic rate, can be understood from the first principles of physics, and that metabolic rate can explain growth, development, population dynamics, molecular evolution, the flux of chemicals through the environment, and patterns of species diversity -- to name a few.

If you don't have enough time today, print the two articles I mentioned and read them next weekend. I promise you will not waste your time.

Sources: Erica Klarreich, Science News, Vol. 167, No. 7, p. 106, February 12, 2005; John Whitfield, PLoS Biology, Vol. 2, Issue 12, December 14, 2004

The Shape of the Next Religion

Via Chapel Perilous

Modern America, like Rome at the time of Christ, is in a period of rising secularism and religious chaos. Christianity has lost the power to shape our culture, and no rival religion or philosophy seems able to take its place. I argue that this period of tension will end as the Roman one did--with the advent of a new religion that will synthesize the best features of our current religions into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Waiting for the Unknown God
The Athenian citizens who gathered on Mars Hill to listen to Paul talk about "the unknown God" had little reason to be optimistic about the future of religion. Or rather, they had little reason to be optimistic about the future of any of the religions they knew about. Neither do we. But does that mean that there will never again be a dominant religion?

Why None of the Contenders can become Champion
Almost all of the religions currently contending for dominance in America can be placed in one of the following four categories: historical monotheism, Scientism, Eastern religions, and Earth-centered religions. None of them is in a position to pick up the baton that Christianity has dropped.

Predecessors of the Next Religion
At any given point in history there is a central metaphor, a field of thought which provides the images and vocabulary for a culture's religious expression. This field of thought--be it hunting, agriculture, politics, or physics--may have no explicit religious content of its own, but the images and concepts that it provides have a profound effect on the religion of its time.

In the history leading up to modern Western culture, I identify six epochs with six central metaphors: hunter-gatherer animism, agricultural Earth worship, city-state polytheism, imperial monotheism, medieval Catholicism, and finally the modern era's design monotheism, in which the Universe is a machine, and God is the Great Designer.

The Breakdown of the Great Design
The last two centuries have been difficult ones for proponents of the Great Design. In the prior centuries scientists had found that the harder they looked at phenomena, the simpler their descriptions became. The more they thought about a subject, the more they realized that its apparently complex manifestations were just the logical consequences of a few simple laws. But in the 19th and 20th centuries, the harder scientists looked, the more they saw that the apparent simplicity was only an approximation. Rather than unifying, things began to splinter.

Ecology as the Next Central Metaphor
As the old, Newtonian physics becomes more and more inappropriate as a central metaphor, many observers are looking to the "new" physics to take its place. They're looking in the wrong place.

Implications of the Change in Metaphor
Shifting our central metaphor from physics to ecology will have effects far beyond the scope of this essay. Most importantly from a religious point of view, it will facilitate three changes that will have great impact in their own right:

• Immediate experience will take on a new importance
• Polytheism will return under the umbrella of pantheism
• We will learn to value diversity rather than merely tolerate it.

Characteristics of the Next Religion
Once the shift to an ecological metaphor is made--and with it a shift toward experience, polytheism, and diversity--many of the artificial barriers between conflicting points of view melt away, and it becomes clear what parts of our current religions will carry over into the next religion.

Emergence of the Next Religion
To my knowledge there is no religious group that fits the description I have given. Nonetheless, I believe that the religion I have described is viable today in America, and once introduced could rise to dominance within fifty years. This is extraordinary speed for a religious revolution, but it is possible because the triumph of the next religion will not require conversions of Pentecostal magnitude.

Conclusion
The next religion will re-assemble the desirable pieces of our current religions just as Christianity re-assembled pieces from the religions of Roman times. It will take the social structure of Christianity, Scientism's respect for facts and logic, Eastern religion's focus on experience, and the ecological awareness of the earth-centered religions. It will accept the religious experiences of all religions, value their practices, study their myths, and meditate on their symbols. It will be a welcoming place for people of all beliefs. It will help them learn to live lives of value, and to find what is waiting to be found in the experience of the divine.

Invisible Jukebox: Chris Watson

If you haven't encountered Chris Watson through his stunning field recordings or work with Cabaret Voltaire and Hafler Trio, you really ought to...Via The Wire

Chris Watson's fascination with recording sound dates back to his pre-teen days with a portable reel-to-reel recorder, but was first heard publicly in 1978 on Cabaret Voltaire's debut recording Extended Play. A box set, Methodology 1974-78: Attic Tapes, released in 2003 on Mute, shows that the group had been extensively recording in Watson's loft well before that date. In fact, they started in earnest in 1973, although Watson and colleagues Stephen Mallinder and Richard H Kirk had been collaborating since 1972. Cabaret Voltaire's heyday came in the late 70s and early 80s, when their experimental approach crossed over from Industrial music into aggressive post-punk blasts such as the single ÒNag Nag NagÓ. Watson left in late 1981 having worked on the albums Mix-Up, The Voice Of America and Red Mecca. From 1981-87 he worked as a sound recordist for Tyne Tees Television and later for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. During this period he was also constructing tape collages with Andrew Mackenzie in The Hafler Trio. Since then he has worked extensively in film, TV and radio as a freelance recordist, specialising in natural history and documentary. These projects have included David Attenborough's acclaimed BBC TV series The Life Of Mammals and The Life Of Birds, for which he received a BAFTA award for Best Factual Sound. Since 1996 Watson has released three solo albums of wildlife and environmental recordings for Touch: Stepping Into The Dark, Outside The Circle Of Fire and Weather Report. 2002's Star Switch On features recordings based on his work by artists including Biosphere, Philip Jeck, AER and Mika Vainio, and Watson reconfiguring his own raw sonic material. Since 1994 he has been a partner in the group Hoi Polloi Film & Video Recording. Watson also lectures and is involved in performance and installation work, his current project being Sound Oasis at the Palacio de Belles Artes, Mexico City. Based on sounds of Mexican railways, it runs from 29 September (info: www.noiselab.com). Appropriately enough, the Jukebox was itself a field recording. It took place on Dunstanborough Beach, about an hour's drive up the coast from Watson's Newcastle home.

ROXY MUSIC "THE BOB (MEDLEY)" FROM ROXY MUSIC (Island) 1972

(On opening synth pulses) It's a very familiar sound. (Vocals come in) Fantastic! Roxy Music. Is it "2HB"?

Close, it's "The Bob".

Great track, I haven't heard this for 20 years. This stuff was a huge influence. I love it - it has that beautiful, seductive sound quality with Andy Mackay's sax and oboes mixed in with this really fantastic electronic music, synthesiser music from Eno. Seductive is the best way I can describe it both in terms of the sound quality - it was just outstanding to be able to hear stuff like this.

MB: I think what a lot of people liked about the group was Eno's approach - that you could be a bit of a dabbler and that you didn't need to be Keith Emerson to play keyboards in a group.

Yeah, interestingly he didn't really play the keyboards; it was just a device for controlling the instrument, which is something I had a go at. I ended up with a very similar synthesiser, made by the same company as he used, a now deceased English company called EMS. I built a homemade synthesiser when Cabaret Voltaire first kicked off and then I found enough money to buy one of these EMS AKS synthesisers, which had this beautiful two and a half octave keyboard painted onto plastic. It had no moving parts, it was controlled by capacitance in the way that Brian Eno used his VCS3.

It was such a great sound, it was a breath of fresh air to us all at the time, myself and Steve Mallinder and Richard Kirk [later of Cabaret Voltaire] and the wider circle of friends that we had. I always remember reading the reviews of the first album and everybody said it was great but had really bad production. I never could understand that: I thought all the tracks sounded great.

One of the things that drew [Cabaret Voltaire] together was seeing Roxy Music live. I've still got the poster at home, which is why I know the date - it was November 10th 1972 at Sheffield University, one of the Halls of Residence called Ranmoor. So a tiny gig, it would have been round about a hundred people there. It wasn't Cabaret Voltaire then, but a lose association of friends and like minded individuals who used to hang around together, make recordings and play them back. We were all interested in other things than what we were being fed at the City Hall and on the radio, and on record.

MB: This might sound an odd question but were you ever a 'proper' keyboard player?

No. I never was, am, or will be interested in playing a musical instrument in that sense. It was a good way to control some of the sounds were were producing. It never really appealed to me at all. It wasn't a case of wanting a short cut, it was just doing it in a way that was different. I was interested in going against what was still a 70s convention and also couldn't be arsed to practice in order to produce sound that had already been produced, or to rearrange that in another way. Without sounding too grand I think we were all more interested in the greater aspects of the music rather than the minutiae of whether we could play or not (laughs). We knew what we wanted to do at the time.

MB: Has Eno's work continued to interest you?

He always has because I like the way he shaped ideas. I like his production work as well, especially his work with Talking Heads. He brought some very interesting techniques into their music. The other thing I remember is seeing him with Robert Fripp at the London Palladium. That again was incredible. It was the first time I'd ever seen the creative use of electronic imaging on video rather than film. We could never afford to use video and film was far more mechanical and accessible medium which Richard used to work on a lot and produce some outstanding stuff, but seeing simple but powerful video techniques live in association with that music was great.

I've got a lot of respect for him. I don't continually listen to what he does but I like to catch up and to hear stuff. Because with a lot of musicians like that, what I'm interested in is that exchange of ideas and possibilities as much as the end result, which can often be disappointing - in all our cases. But it's those discussions, exchanges of ideas and little snippets of sound that certainly help me with my work.

RICHARD HUELSENBECK "INVENTING DADA" FROM FUTURISM AND DADA REVIEWED (SUB ROSA) 1959

So it's someone talking about Hugo Ball. Tristan Tzara? Can I have another guess if it's not him? Fantastic I've never heard it whatever it is but it sounds interesting. I'm fascinated, but I'd have to guess. I don't know who this is but I'd love to get a copy.

MB: It's Richard Huelsenbeck, the German writer and poet, and one of the original Dadaists.

I used to like the Performance Cancelled, a group from the Cabaret Voltaire. They used to organise concerts, but they used to write Performance Cancelled horizontally across the poster. Then they would turn up and do it.

MB: The music in the background is a composition by Marcel Duchamp.

Really? Music by Marcel Duchamp? Astonishing.

MB: I was wondering whether Dadaism was actually an influence on Cabaret Voltaire or whether it was simply a neat name to use for a group?

No, it was a massive influence, because we were all interested in the history of art and we all seemed to come across it at more or less at the same time. And the more we explored it, we couldn't believe people were getting up to this stuff in the early part of the 20th century, when it would have been genuinely outrageous and clearly unique, and also highly creative as well. I love that association of poets, musicians, artists writers - a free flow of information in somewhere like a cafe. We used to hang out a lot in pubs in Sheffield and just sit and talk - not about higher things like art - but there was an exchange of ideas. The more I looked into the history of it the more I found it compelling and fascinating. I loved the humour and I loved the darkness of it as well. It just seemed perfect and it seemed perfect for us to lift the name, for it spoke for us very well.

Particularly [the influence of ] the poetry in Mal's vocals. We explored the cut-up techniques of later on, Burroughs and Bowie and people like that, but then to go further back and look at some of their work, that again was an inspiration to us: the vocals and some of the writing as well. Cos I'd never heard this CD, I'd heard some crackly recording of the Ur Sonata [by Kurt Schwitters], but I certainly wasn't aware that Duchamp had made music, for example. I just wish I'd been to a performance at the Cabaret Voltaire - a poetry reading, or someone bringing in a new painting, or smashing something against the wall.

MB: Why did you leave the group?

Because I knew there was something else that I wanted to do and it was very, very difficult: I still think about it. But I was getting increasingly unhappy and dissatisfied about what was going to happen. I could see us going more down the road of signing a record deal and we'd never intended to do that, really. It was just that old thing of Revolt Into Style that did concern me genuinely at the time, and there were other things I was quite keen to explore. It was quite a selfish -or solo - thing I was interested in and I introduced some elements of those using tape recordings into our work, which I thought was quite successful. But one of the key things was, I remember we had a connection with Soft Cell and when "Tainted Love" got to number one, we got invited to the Top Of the Pops studios. I spent a day or so in amongst all that nightmare and thought, 'This really is bollocks; I really don't want to be ever part of this'. I felt quite shocked and upset about it. So that really made me start thinking about alternatives and that grew. There weren't really any tensions within the group, we were still more or less headed in the same direction, but it's a difficult thing to decide. I still don't know if I did the right thing or not. You always think, 'What if'?

MB: Into the late 80s, they seemed to get into that awkward area where they were stuck between being experimental and almost, but never quite, breaking through commercially.

I think Richard has done a lot better since producing his own work, which is original and inventive and he's prolific as well. So maybe that's how it had to be.

MB: Is Steve Mallinder still doing music? I've lost track of him completely.

So have I. I think he emigrated to Australia over on the west coast in Perth. I think that he's got a radio show and did a collaboration with someone else out there like a DJ or something but it's all third hand information.

WILLIAM BURROUGHS "THE SAINTS GO MARCHING THROUGH ALL THE POPULAR TUNES" FROM NOTHING HERE NOW BUT THE RECORDINGS (INDUSTRIAL) (1979/80)

Nothing Here Now But the Recordings, William Burroughs. Fantastic. I was so pleased when Genesis [P-Orridge] got this out and brought this stuff all together. So syrupy and so chilling, the voice. [At words coming out in clumps due to the tape editing] Those words do just come off the page; that's how it is.

MB: What do you think about the recordings that Burroughs did latterly with people like Bill Laswell. Do you think music was a good medium for him to work in?

I don't really, no. You couldn't really improve on what he did in literature. It was an interesting departure. I liked his ideas in Electronic Revolution about his use of sound recording and tape recording techniques, but as for crossing over into music, it was an interesting diversion but had nowhere near the power of his text, or indeed his spoken word, or this [referring to abstract blast of noise between speech fragments]. This is perfect and I guess this is music. I was always interested in his street recordings in Tangier. If you read Electronic Revolution, there's some fascinating stuff in there about it. And recording and playing things back in the streets as well. Which again is something we had done before Cabaret Voltaire. Without anywhere to perform we would make recordings and play them back out of the back of a van when we were driving round Sheffield. And it was great then discovering that someone like Burroughs had also done it.

MB: What about your editing of tapes - was that influenced by Burroughs or did it also just develop independently?

Again, with Mal and his vocals, that was a technique that was definitely applied even though it was down more to free association rather than actual cutting up bits of vocals. We did a couple of experiments where we actually cut up the multitrack tape, which was less successful, but it was something to explore, to investigate, which we did all the time. It was exciting to try and see what these things would reveal. I still like that, the subliminal aspects of sound: I don't think that's been fully explored at all. There's such a wide range of material to work on.

MB: What exactly do you mean by subliminal aspects of sound?

Hearing things in recordings that listening to them in other ways can reveal. Even simple things like putting a microphone down here among this marram grass and hearing the wind blowing through the grass, but also listening on another level so you can hear the insects in the bottom end of the grass. And then by manipulating those recordings you hear other things. It reveals things other than what is just on the surface. It's a powerful technique.

ANNEA LOCKWOOD "LAKE TEAR OF THE CLOUDS, MT. MARCY - THE SOURCE, ELEVATION 4,322 FEET. JUNE 19, 1982 AT 2PM" FROM A SOUND MAP OF THE HUDSON RIVER (LOVELY MUSIC LTD) (1982)

I don't immediately recognise it but I like the sound. I'd say it was recorded in the New World, North America.

MB: It was indeed.

I'm just trying to narrow it down. It sounds relatively unprocessed so I would say someone like Gordon Hempton, Doug Quinn or Bernie Krause, perhaps Hildegard Westerkamp, I don't know, I've not heard it [before]. It's very well recorded whoever did it, a beautiful section of sound.

MB: It's Annea Lockwood's A Sound Map Of The Hudson River. She is principally a musician, composer and sound artist.

I know her name, I don't know the piece.

MB: When you are making your own recordings like Weather Report, how much do you try and get a flavour of the overall environment and ambience of the area and how much is it a recording of discrete phenomena that took place at a specific location and time?

I like to hang out in place if I can. I like to spend time there, I like to explore it, and I like to go round and listen. The easy analogy is it's rather like landscape photography. I first of all wander around without any gear because its quite heavy and then I go back, usually out of hours, like very early morning or through the night. So then I spend time there recording and listening, moving the microphones around. It's quite time consuming if I have the luxury of time, but that's by far the best way to do it. It sounds a bit odd, but I sometimes do some research beforehand on the social history and geography of the place cos that can effect how a place sounds as well. A lot of what I do is revealing sounds, but also revealing something of the place, because it's tied up with the history and the geography and that's reflected in the animals as well.

MB: What was the project where you were testing the acoustics of ancient burial chambers?

I worked on a programme for Radio 4 called Stone Age Sound, but it wasn't my project. It is believed that a lot of megalithic tombs like Maes Howe in Orkney and New Grange in Ireland have special acoustics and they didn't just happen - they were designed, so that people making music or vocalising in there could set up standing waves, which can then have significant psychological effects. It appears to amplify itself and it also had a ventriloquial quality so that sound can appear to emanate from places where there are no people. So, interesting idea, although not my project. [Referring to track] It's nice the way it builds up. It's a beautiful rich, textural sound..

MB: What I personally find fascinating is that field recordings always capture unique unrepeatable events within continuous processes.

Yes, like the sound of the sea. What I'm also interested in is when things have been recorded and presented on CD, you then have a chance to listen to it properly rather than walking past and sort of hearing it, or ignoring it. It can have tremendous depth and content or it can be just nice to put on when you are making the tea.

What about the question that's always asked about environmental recordings: are they more or less than the thing itself? In a way they can't be more because a recording is by definition a facsimile, but it does focus you on something you might not otherwise notice.

It's something I've thought about a lot. The first thing I did on Touch, Stepping Into The Dark was quite simple in that it was recordings of particular places that I thought had particular significance as well as having a remarkable sound. And by playing them back, it was very much an experiment to see if any of the effects, the consequences of being there and listening, could be reproduced. I think some of them can - a lot of us have feelings of a room or a house that has an atmosphere, the sound of that place contributes a lot to how we feel about it.

MB: Like the acoustics of a train station?

Yeah, the thing I'm doing at the moment in Mexico [ Sound Oasis, a sound installation in Mexico City] I'm basing it on sounds of the Mexican railway system, rather than any natural environment, it's complete urban industrial environment along the rail system. Although there are periods of quietness and stillness in it in the desert, they are always broken by the thunderous animals roars of massive diesel engine bearing down upon you. But some recxordings I made there in very reverberant acoustics, in railway stations, one in Vera Cruz. You only need to hear two or three seconds an all of us would be able to know what place it was, we immediately have a mental image.

VARIOUS (RECORDED BY MARK GERGIS) "VIP DINNER KNIVES AND THE SONGBIRDS OF AL HARAMAIN"/"WINGED AND WINDED RECEPTIONS" from I REMEMBER SYRIA (SUBLIME FREQUENCIES) (2005)

Is this commercially available? I wish I'd got it. I love hearing Arabic. There's so many people who have done stuff like this, even going back to Holger Czukay and his radio sounds.

MB: It's a kind of travelogue of street sounds, radio, TV and interviews from Syria - Damscus on this disc - by Mark Gergis. It's on the Sun City Girls' Sublime Frequencies label.

I don't know him but it's fantastic. I'll get a catalogue number of that as well.

MB: When you used Middle Eastern sounds on Cabaret Voltaire's Three Mantras, I assume that was from a commercially available recording rather than one you did yourself?

It was a friend of ours, who had gone to Israel and some other parts of the Middle East and brought me back an audio cassette. I thought it was great. This is too.

MB: I like this as a sort of sonic patchwork of parts of the country.

I love that sort of thing, it's so effective. I was working with Justin Bennett the other week and he gave me a couple of his CDs, including a little CD single, The Mosques Of Tangier which is incredibly atmospheric. Beautiful record, the.artwork's lovely and a great sound. Also he did something in an apartment in Beirut, which is another place I've recorded and it was magical, like this. This is turning into a real education, I must get that CD. I miss out on so much and a lot of the time it's because I'm often away.

MB: Do you listen to this kind of recording for pleasure as well?

Very much. I love compilations like this. I think they've got fantastic quality. I like listening to music like this but also, recordings of music made in streets. I find them really deeply involving and interesting and like listening to them like pieces of music. I find it richly rewarding.

STEVEN FELD "GALO, AFTERNOON" FROM RAINFOREST SOUNDWALKS: AMBIENCES OF BOSAVI, PAPUA NEW GUINEA (EARTH EAR) 2001

MB: It's quite a strange experience listening to this in some sand dunes in Northumbria.

I like displaced sounds, yeah. Well, it's a recording from the Tropics. That's a sort of gaseous hiss of cicadas, the deep beat of pigeons or doves and that beautiful whooping. It could be Madagascar; they could be Gibbons. It's not easy to tell if it's Africa, Asia or South America. Let me have a think for a bit. It sounds like an unprocessed recording. It sounds to me like it's Madagascar or South East Asia, so it could be one of the [John C.]Roche series of CDs. Just give me another minute. It's a good track, a good recording; it's got a really nice richness to it. It could be one of Hildegard Westerkamp's pieces but I don't think she's ever been to South East Asia. [Looks at CD sleeve]. So I was right about the area. It's not one of Earth Ear's that I've seen. I like those large scale macro environments, especially played on those wider angle, larger stereo systems because they become very otherworldly. It also amplifies elements like the rhythm and the dynamics, they become very powerful and so bizarre - you couldn't make music like that. I really like that Cage-ian attitude, that there's enough sound out there without the need to make any more music - its just a case of capturing some of it.

MB: I'm interested in the techniques you use to record wildlife close up rather than in a soundscape like this.

It's time consuming but I enjoy being absorbed in that sense of place. It's a bit like stalking something or hunting, you really need to get to know the subject. It's so rewarding when you get that close-up detail of sound because so much is revealed, things you wouldn't normally have the opportunity of hearing. And I like the combination of the two: the wide-angle perspectives of places, and that really intimate detail, where all the rhythms and textures are revealed.

MB: How did you place the microphones in your famous recording of the Zebra carcass being ripped apart by vultures, for instance?

That recording I'd been after getting for two or three years. I'd seen it happening at a distance and often wondered, as with a lot of those close up sounds on Circle Of Fire, what it sounded like being in amongst it and what it would be like being in there - that's the most extreme example.

We were out one morning in Kenya's Masai Mara doing general recording, and we came across this zebra carcass, which must have been killed by lions in the night. It was quite early on so it wasn't that hot. Way above, 10,000 feet above us ,were a group of vultures circling . They had obviously seen it, but they are very wary and it takes some time for them to come down. So I quickly took the opportunity and used some little nylon cable ties and tied some tiny cable microphones to the ribs. I buried the body of the microphone and buried the cable and then ran 60-odd metres of cable and sat and waited. So once you've done that, put the work in, you really just have to wait and wait and wait for four or five hours. By then it was really hot so the whole thing was full of flies, which added to it.

I like the proximity of things like that. I'm not usually anthropomorphic about animals but vultures sound exactly as we image them to - the calls they make sound like bursts of guitar feedback and then this sort of threatening hissing and breathing, and powerful wing flaps, so it's a very oppressive, sinister and horrifying environment.

I sometimes do talks at schools: I did a talk at my kids' secondary school and the middle school when they were about eight or nine. I played that track and said, 'If you are ever going to be eaten alive by vultures, these are the last sounds that you will ever hear,' (laughs) and then played the track. And about three of them burst into tears.

After I flew back from Kenya, I was going to work on a film project and my cameraman colleague picked me up at Heathrow. We had a couple of political interviews for a very regular, straight TV documentary. We had to interview some Whitehall mandarin, and because it was a press conference we didn't have much time to record it properly. I just got my personal mikes out and I remember clipping one to the lapel of his pin stripe suit and I could see bits of dried blood and hair, and zebra viscera stuck to this microphone. He was sat there throughout the interview and I thought 'If you knew the last place that microphone had been we would all be chucked out' (laughs).

BASIL KIRCHIN SKETCH TWO FROM CHARCOAL SKETCHES TRUNK (1970)

[After a few notes of the exotic bird, guitar and flute duet] I really, really hate this, whatever it is. No, stop it, it's dreadful.

MB: This is Basil Kirchin. Do you know his music?

I've heard the name and I may even have got an LP of his. That is just so bad.

MB: Is the music or the fact that it's a dialogue with some sort of bird?

It's everything I don't like. Honestly. It's a strange mix of what to me sounds like slowed-down bird song and some ghastly quartet of meaningless nonsense. The music sounds like a prelude to some 1970s porn film - an accidental meeting in a country lane between a window cleaner and some poor woman who's broken down. I can't be unkind enough about things like this. They are so wide of the mark to me. After my initial horror, it's quite funny.

Kirchin was keen that his solo music was, in a sense, against musique concrete; he wanted it to sound more organic.

I've got a vinyl record of his somewhere in my collection, Worlds Within Worlds, is that it? I've not played it for twenty years but something In the back of my mind tells me I thought it was OK. It's certainly better than this.

I wondered if your work in the Hafler Trio shared a similar view towards the organic quality of tape music.

There were a lot of tape collages which is what we were interested in at the time, when I first got together with Andrew Mackenzie. It was a great time to be doing it and we felt we were getting somewhere. It was a short time but it was exciting. There were a lot of recordings that we made and a lot material we manipulated and I suppose that's the best word for it because it was nearly all analogue then. It was all based around ideas that we were currently interested in as well, maybe current things but using old techniques. It was certainly pre-digital, which sounds astonishing to be able to say that, that you've lived through that era. But I sued to love that process. To go back to basil Kirchin's desire, it was an organic process that, manipulating tape rather than pushing a mouse around a screen, it was satisfying in that sense and I particularly enjoyed it.

I still record on quarter inch some things that are on the extreme ends and I found it much more successful than digital recording.

But hasn't digital got a wider frequency range?

It does, it's just the way it treats the sound. With some things, when analogue gets to the saturation point, the very loud sounds it maybe starts to distort a little bit. With analogue recordings when it becomes saturated the distortion is harmonically related to the fundamental frequency. But with digital technology, when you get near to those extreme ends, the sounds hits a brick wall and squares up, you just run out of numbers. I recorded some elephants this way and I'm sure in bioacoustic terms it's not as accurate but it's got a greater richness to it. I'm talking about decent analogue machines; I use Nagra tape recorders. Also if it's got great dynamic range - I've recorded a grass fire in Africa and Coptic monks in Ethiopia with this huge drum, it's better to use analogue sound on that.

How did you actually become a sound recordist then ? I wondered if it was a seamless progression from working with Cabaret Voltaire and then the Hafler Trio?

I always was. My parents bought me my first reel-to reel tape recorder when I was 11, a small Japanese portable player. They set me off. And When I'd gone around the house recording every thing from my mum in the kitchen to our budgie singing, to squeaking doors, the toilet flushing, things like that, I realised it was a portable recorder so I could take it outside. We had a little bird table in the back garden at home on Sheffield and I remember always looking out through the window and seeing what was happening with the birds feeding but just dying to know what it sounded like. Of course, you could never be there because you would frighten everything away. So this was a fantastic opportunity. I remember putting some bird seed down then fixing this little microphone to the bird table, turning it on, running inside and pressing my face up against the window ands seeing all this activity next to the microphone then running out frightening everything off and coming back and putting the tape on and I was just taken into this other world and it was just a beautiful; experience. And when I started working with sound recording and thought of the musical possibilities, the worked with Cabaret Voltaire and just carried on and the just gradually got more drawn towards recording sounds.

And with my pocket money I bought this book in a little shop in Sheffield and it was called Composing with tape Recorders by Terence Dryer or Terence Dwyer, a little paperback. As a 12 - 13 year old I had no experience of musique concrete or experimental music and when I saw these pictures of tape loops round jam jars and stuff like that, it was just great: grown-ups are doing this so I can have a go.

As I've said it was a much more interesting music than could be contrived in a studio, really. It might look a strange kind of path, but to me it seems seamless.

MIRA CALIX Excerpt from Nunu (Warp) 2003

Lots of interesting insects. [At appearance of loop] Oh dear what's this? I know it's not, but this sounds like it should be called Another Green World. It's not as offensive as Basil Kirchin to my ears, but it's a collection of mixed cicacda and cricket recordings, with some ambient music, but I don't know who it is.

It's Mira Calix. This is part of a 30 minute piece commissioned by the Natural History Museum, Geneva.

I don't know why people feel it necessary to put music...those insect sounds to me are far more interesting. Like the stuff that Francisco Lopez does, I love those dense layers of sound. The music on its own I can take it or leave it but it's not bad, it's the mix of the two that I find odd. I've heard of Mira Calix.

I know that some of your own recordings have been processed and remixed and that you've done some yourself. What sort of contrast would you draw between that approach and the one used here?

The stuff that I do, I like to think, stands on its own. But that compilation piece I did with Touch, Stars Switch On, the reason why I was very happy to do it and liked the results was that people I liked and had respect for treated it stylistically very differently. There was a reason for them doing it. I get lots of requests from people wanting my material just to have a go with it, you know? To mess about with it. I really don't like that and don't do it basically. People like Philip Jeck and Christian Fennesz, I'm very happy to collaborate with them. Some of those tracks were very different and I got a different experience listening to some of those. But it's still few and far between: I don't seek to collaborate in that sense.

Do you think it has a certain novelty element to some people?

I'm sure, yeah. But it's been around a long time I've just been doing this soundscape recording course with CMMFA [Contemporary Music Making For Amateurs] and doing a bit of research. Some of the people were amazing, they were just very keen to learn to record, go out and investigate places, make their own collages of material and present it or make what they thought were particularly interesting recordings. There was another guy on the course who was professional musician. He was a cellist who specialises in Baroque music, but he was wanting to get some recordings he could use with his cello playing so he could explore that. I took with me a 78 rpm disc from 1936, which was the first recorded example of a soundscape that I could find. It was a cellist called Miss Beatrice Harrison accompanying a nightingale in her back garden in Oxted Surrey. I think it was one of the first outside broadcasts the BBC made.

How did that work compared with Basil Kirchin and Mira Calix?

Well, for 1936 I thought it was pretty cool. The other one that I really like is a recording made of nightingales on the south coast nearly a decade later, there's a whole fleet of German bombers crossing the channel to bomb London as a nightingale sings in this orchard - a nightingale accompanied by the Luftwaffe. It's a stunning recording that mix of an incredible birdsong and this hell that's about to fall out of the skies.

THOMAS LEER & ROBERT RENTAL "DAY BREAKS, NIGHT HEALS" from The Bridge Industrial Records 1979

Sounds like something Daniel Miller did under a pseudonym. Robert Rental and Thomas Leer?

You're right.

I don't know the track it's just a really characteristic sound. What year is it?

1979.

That was a great time down at Rough Trade in those days. We used to go down there and hang out with Geoff Travis and Pete Walmsley. In many ways it was a similar time to the way I feel it is at Touch now. There's always a great atmosphere about it.

Do you think that rather primitive electronic pop stands up now?

I don't think it does, no. But I still enjoy it: I'd play it. I'd like to think we've moved on a bit as well. The areas of experimentation have moved on considerably. That's just been absorbed. But at the time it was really cutting edge stuff. It's certainly a long time ago... A quarter of a century.

This was on Throbbing Gristle's Industrial Records and I believe Cabaret Voltaire released a cassette on that label. How did that come about?

That was the great thing at that time because we did one or two things for Rough Trade then we did the Factory Sample [compilation album]. We used to go over and play at the Factory Club in Hulme in Royce Road (check) - Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus were kicking off with that.

We could swap about, mix and match, so that was a good time. I think Industrial also did some Boyd Rice and possibly even z'ev. We knew them, in the olden days we used to write each other letters and meet up. Whenever they played north of Watford, sometimes in London. We would go down and see them and to a degree, hang out a bit, share and talk about ideas. I think it just came out of that, over a period of seeing them a few times. We'd done a few very, very limited edition audio cassettes ourselves, so the idea of doing something with Industrial, which had a decent track record and had better distribution than we had was a good way of...we were never going to collaborate musically, so if we could do it in that sense it was a very satisfying thing to do.

I would guess that's the way things came about although I'm very cautious now talking about things like that. Someone contacted me from some e-mail group about something that Cabaret did when we played in Europe with Joy Division at a festival on the outskirts of Brussels called the Plan K, where in fact I actually met William Burroughs. It was a big festival on about three floors and was like this 60s happening - it was great. It was an old sugar beet plant: there was a stage on one floor, they were showing some Brion Gysin films, all sorts of things, performers, dance, readings - Brion Gysin and William Burroughs were on one floor just reading. Cabaret and Voltaire were playing downstairs so we went over in a big furniture van. And somebody asked me something about it for some e-mail group and so I e-mailed them what I thought had happened, in my dim and distant memory and I saw it published and then five people who obviously weren't there and possibly weren't even born, emailed in, corrected my correspondence and said 'No THIS is what happened' [laughs]. They set the record straight. It was quite a shock...

Sam Harris Interview, Part One

Via Dzed and Strange Doctrines

Sam Harris is author of the new book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. The book's central thesis is that religious thinking brings with it predictable perils--perils most recently exemplified by the attacks on 9/11. For that reason, meaningful tolerance cannot mean tolerance for views that, like those of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, claim to have unique knowledge of God and God's will. And indeed tolerance requires that we subject such beliefs--as we would any other kind of belief--to the standard tests of rationality and reasonableness. To suggest otherwise is to sanction intolerance for rational discourse.

Given Harris' convictions about the manifest irrationality of religion, his convictions about spirituality will come as a surprise to many. Harris believes that spirituality is a "rational enterprise," so long as it is unimpeded by dogma. For Harris, reason commends a specific, undogmatic form of spiritual practice because it yields substantial, net-postive existential and social utility. On this view of spirituality, then, religion is actually a hindrance. (For a similar view on this topic by yours truly, go here.)

It is toward addressing this somewhat narrower thesis that The Raving Atheist has sponsored an interview series with Harris, and has kindly solicited the cooperation of Yours Truly, Brian Flemming, a playwright and filmmaker, and Under No Circumstances.

Starting today and continuing on successive Wednesdays, this interview will be "simulcast" in installments on all four sites. Each installment will conclude with the question which will open the next week's continuation of the interview; readers are invited to supply their own answers, or predict Harris' response, in the comments section.

The Raving Atheist is first up to bat:

---

RAVING ATHEIST: Many hardcore atheists like myself are wary of meditation, viewing it as religious or spiritual practice akin to prayer. How is what you're proposing different?

HARRIS: Well, the first thing to realize is that "meditation" is a word like "learning" -- it can mean many things in different contexts. It is certainly possible to practice a kind of "meditation" that is indistinguishable from prayer, in that it rests on very dubious assumptions about divine agency, the supernatural, etc. Needless to say, this is not the sort of meditation I endorse in my book.

There are, however, many forms of meditation that merely require that a person pay extraordinarily close attention to the flow of his experience. There is nothing irrational about doing this. In fact, it constitutes the only rational basis upon which to make detailed claims about the nature of one's own experience.

RAVING ATHEIST: When I've tried that sort of introspection I've found my mind gets stuck in a loop, obsessed with the thought that "here I am thinking about my thinking process" and not progressing anywhere beyond that. What am I doing wrong?

HARRIS: Meditation is definitely not a matter of thinking about experience in a new way; it is a matter of witnessing the flow of experience (including the flow of thought) from the perspective of consciousness itself. For most people, this is not easy to do. Serious training is usually in order.

A case in point: one of the easiest forms of meditation to learn entails nothing more than mere attention to the process of breathing. A person sits comfortably, closes his eyes, and simply attends to the sensations of the breath as it comes and goes at the tip of the nose. The moment a person attempts to do this, however, he begins to notice that he easily gets distracted by his thoughts. In the beginning, he will be a very poor judge of how distractible he is, in fact. While attempting to meditate on the breath, he will think thoughts like, "So I'm feeling the breath at the tip of the nose... so what? What's the big deal about the breath?", and he won't notice that each of these thoughts diverts his attention from the breath itself. He will, in other words, spend most of his time thinking without knowing that he is thinking.

Of course, this is precisely how most of us spend every waking moment of our lives. If a person really wants to get to the bottom things, he might go on a silent retreat and engage a practice like this, to the exclusion of all else, for 12 to 18 hours a day. In the beginning of such a retreat, many people feel that they can pay attention to the breath for several minutes at a time, before getting distracted. They are inevitably wrong about this. The truth is, they are so distracted by torrents of thought that they can't even begin to notice how distracted they are. After some days, or even weeks, they begin to report that they can only stay with the breath for a few seconds at a time before thoughts intervene. Eventually, however, there does come a point when a person gains extraordinary powers of concentration, and then he can actually see some things of real interest about the nature of his mind.

This is simply to say that the fact that you don't see anything of immediate interest when you look inside should not be taken as a sign that there is nothing of interest to see. Before a person learns how to read a CT-scan, all he sees is a gray mess. After a little training, anatomical details begin to emerge. The details were there all along, of course, they were just difficult to see. This is by no means a perfect analogy, but it works up to a point.

RAVING ATHEIST: Christians are fond of telling me that if I pray hard enough, Jesus will come into my heart. Many of them swear that during prayer they experience some real communication or conversation with God, and that if I don't, I'm either doing it wrong haven't done it long enough. But I'd never sit in a church for 12 to 18 hours a day to test their hypothesis, any more than I'd try sleeping for two weeks straight on someone's mere say-so. What empirical data do you have, different from theirs, that could induce me to go on that retreat? Stated another way, what exactly are these things of "real interest" about my mind that I'd discover, and what is the evidence that others have discovered them derived extraordinary benefit?

HARRIS: Needless to say, the difficulty of mastering a skill (or any domain of knowledge) doesn't make it intellectually suspect. If you came to me and said, "I want to understand the brain in great detail from the perspective of neuroscience," I would say, "okay, go get your Ph.D. in neuroscience." This would take years. Likewise with anything else. There's an old saw from psychology that expertise in any domain usually takes about 10,000 hours to acquire. This seems true enough, whether you are talking about chess, physics, or meditation.

Still, you have raised a reasonable concern. Some projects are bogus. There is, in fact, a big difference between the above invitation to prayer and the claim I am making about meditation. There is a difference in what one must assume about the world to get these two projects off the ground. And there is a difference in the theory by which one will subsequently interpret the data of experience. I have
no doubt that interesting experiences await the man or woman who prays to Jesus for 12 to 18 hours a day. In fact, I have no doubt that some of those experiences would be normative (that is, desirable and worth seeking out). I just dispute the logic by which such experiences are sought and interpreted. Whatever happens to you while you are praying to Jesus, it is unlikely to confirm the claim that he was born of a virgin, rose bodily after death, etc. If it makes you a more loving person, however, the effort was not totally wasted.

The only claim I making with respect to meditation is that there are methods of training our powers of attention, such that we can come to observe the flow of our experience with astonishing clarity. And this can result in a range of insights that, for millennia, people have found both intellectually credible and personally transforming (mostly in the East). The primary insight being that the feeling we call "I"-- the sense that we are the thinker of our thoughts, the experiencer of our experiencer -- really disappears when looked for in a rigorous way. This is as empirically confirmable at looking for one's optic blind spot. Most people never notice their blind spot (caused by the optic nerve's transit through the retina), but it can be pointed out with a little effort. Loss of the feeling of "self" can be pointed out and discussed in a very similar way. It's just a little harder to get someone to notice it, because most people can't stop thinking for more than instant.

RAVING ATHEIST: You've written that during this state of selflessness, the subject/object distinction vanishes but "consciousness remains vividly aware of the continuum of experience." I have to say this sounds incoherent to me, in a way that the notion of a God secretly and simultaneously tapping into all our brains and knowing all our thoughts does not. It seems to me that someone has to be vividly aware, someone has to be sensing that the sense of individuality has disappeared - in the same way that Descartes' "I" still remains after the evil demon has deceived it about all reality (if only to notice that it is perceiving the deception). Are you saying that the thoughts that exist during mediation are (1) nobody's thoughts, (2) everybody's thoughts flowing together (or at least all those who are then mediating) or (3) something else?

HARRIS: When I say that "consciousness remains vividly aware of the continuum of experience" after the feeling of "self" vanishes, I simply mean that nothing necessarily changes at the level of perception. If the birds are chirping, you will still be able to hear them. The difference is that rather than feeling like "you" are hearing "them" (subject and object), there will simply be the pure experience of hearing (without hearer and thing heard).

Another way to think about this is that the feeling of being a separate self has a kind of qualitative feel to it. As such, it is an appearance in consciousness. It stands to reason, therefore, that consciousness might be able to recognize this feeling from a position that stands outside it. This is, in fact, the case. It is possible to recognize that just as consciousness is not itself itchy when cognizing an itch, it is not a self when feeling the feeling we call "I." Granted, this can all sound a little spooky until you've had this experience, but it really does capture the flavor of it.

Neurologically speaking, this possibility should sound quite plausible to you. Whatever stream of processing is doing the job of representing the organism as standing apart from the world of its experience, it is not surprising that this processing could be inhibited, or cease to occur. It is not a logical requirement of sensory perception that a system represent itself in the world in order to represent the world. And there is certainly no requirement that it represent itself as a subject that is somehow interior to its own body (rather than merely existing as its body), which is more or less how we tend to define ourselves as conscious agents. After all, most of us feel that we are riding around inside our bodies, inside our heads especially, thinking thoughts. Meditation reveals that this feeling is itself a product of thought. More precisely, it is what if feels like to be identified with the process of thinking (that is, to not recognize consciousness itself as the prior context of every thought that arises).

As far as Descartes is concerned, he seems to have been entirely identified with his thoughts and, for that reason, mistook thinking for subjective bedrock. What the Demon really cannot deceive us about is not the sense of self, but the fact of consciousness. Even if this is all a dream, consciousness is no less a fact: because even if nothing is as it seems, the fact that anything seems any way at all is itself the fact of consciousness.

Architecture and Structures of Consciousness

Via John Lobell

The means whereby to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law.

The means whereby to understand living forms is Metaphor.

- Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

Seven Pillars

The primitive hunter-gatherer lived in the body of Gaia, the Earth's biosphere named after the Greek mother-goddess and now perceived by contemporary biologists as a living organism. Individual consciousness was not differentiated from the flow of the earth 's consciousness. Thus the Amazon Indian moved in the shadow of a perpetual green canopy, deriving food, shelter, and psychoactive drugs from an unbounded organic home. The Australian Aborigine lived under a dome of stars that encoded ancestral stories. There was no monumental architecture, as frozen stone would have blocked the flow of consciousness and disrupted an umbilical union. 1

Once separated from Gaia, the early monument builders used their stones to direct the flow of energies. Stonehenge is but one of thousands of megalithic structures built to serve as great acupuncture needles, marking first the earth's energies, then the moon's cycles, and finally the sun's movement through the seasons. No longer a part of the earth, human consciousness now gained a power over it. The umbilical cord was cut and innocence ended. Differentiated consciousness set out on its wanderings of the earth and, most recently, of the heavens.

The Egyptian moved through a narrow corridor of time, with smooth stone walls defining the Path of a linear progression through life and into death. Orderly social customs prescribed activities in life, and the Book of the Dead prescribed the precise manner in which one was to advance through successive tests in death. There was no field of action for the Egyptian, no openness of space. Nothing existed outside the one dimension of the Path. He polished faces of the Pyramid in the sun defined the Path across the desert. Likewise, at Luxor (figure 1), the avenue of sphinxes from the river led directly to the pylon of the Temple, beyond which the court, hypostyle hall, and sanctuary also marked a clear progression. The columns of the Egyptian temple were on the inside to screen the walls. A bare wall led the eye to focus on a space on the other side of the temple. The screen of columns denies the existence of anything beyond the wall. Outside the temple, architecture, with the exception of the pylon, had no existence. 2

Egyptian directional movement can be contrasted with the flowing Chinese Way of the Tao. Lao Tzu wrote:

The highest good is like water.

Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive.

It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao. 3

The Chinese followed this flow, achieving a harmony that comes from a focus on non-desire. The Chinese temple and palace complex is not a self-contained building, but rather an open complex that includes hills, water, trees, flowers, and rocks, as well as the building. The openness of the Kuan Yin hall of the Tu Lo Temple (figure 2), erected in wood in

Ch'i-hsien in 984 A.D., is expressed through the layers of the roof and the spaces between the bracketed supports over the columns. They let space flow through the building like a breeze.

The Greeks experienced the beginnings of an emergence of the individual from society and nature. In his study of Greek tragedy, Nietzsche wrote:

At the very climax of joy there sounds a cry of horror or a yearning lamentation for an irretrievable loss; to these Greek festivals, nature seems to reveal a sentimental trait; it is as if she were heaving a sigh at her dismemberment into individuals. 4

The Greek temples at Paestum (figure 3) stood apart from nature, the geometric form of the buildings contrasted with the landscape, and the freestanding columns outside the temple represented the complete emergence of the individual. From the outside, columns screened the walls from view. Focus was not on the partially hidden walls, which brought awareness to the interior space they contained. The experience of the Greek temple was as a piece of sculpture. The Greeks were only concerned with the bodily whole, as may be noticed in their sculpture, abhorring the voids of space and time. In the Greek tragedy there was no development of character as seen in the Western novel. Character exists at birth, waiting to be revealed. In the Greek vase there is no depth, and Greek arithmetic sees only one number between two and three, as opposed to our mathematics of fractions, irrational numbers, and functions. Greek mathematical thought did not extend in abstraction beyond X2, and thus Euclidian geometry could neither square the circle nor trisect the angle 2 .

The Gothic world was defined by a total presence of a God who cast souls into the material world to be tested by bodily temptations. The response to this test was an asceticism, a "starving away of the flesh." The Gothic cathedral at Chartres was similarly stripped of all unnecessary material, leaving the thin ribs of the vaults and flying buttresses. Openings in the walls allowed the luminous presence of God to flood through stained glass windows filling the interior space. This was analogous to the experience of God's presence flooding through the body of a person, thus illuminating the soul (figure 4).

The Renaissance replaced the centrality of God with the centrality of the human being: "Man is the measure of all things." Newton's uniform space and time defined a crystal clockwork in which people moved. Their senses connected them to nature, and mathematics connected them to nature's laws. Perspective painting measured the lattice of space and time, and the rational symmetry of renaissance architecture established a setting in which the human being, positioned under the dome, could look out: front, back; right, left. Palladio's Villa Rotonda (figure 5) laid Cartesian coordinates onto the landscape.

The early 20 th century witnessed the fall of the central point of reference with an emergence of an existential, relativistic cosmology. Einstein's equations shattered Newton's assumptions about absolute space, leaving the human observer in referenceless motion. The novels of Proust and Joyce were organized by the flux of the consciousness of the protagonist rather than by the tick of a universal clock, and mathematics became topological, concerned with patterns rather of relationship than of measure. In Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House the chimney core displaced the human being from the center, putting it into motion, once again a part of nature.

Currently it may be suggested that Eastern influences on the West have enhanced a merger between Buddhism and existentialism, facilitating the development of a world in which the dichotomy between the existing Western notion of a self and an exterior world are diffusing into one.

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Comprehending Madness: The Contextualization of Psychopathology in the Work of R.D. Laing

Via Janus Head

The essential project of R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self (1960/1990) is to make "insane" experience intelligible in terms of the patient’s agency and the context in which s/he is situated. Its purpose is "to make madness and the process of going mad comprehensible" (p. 9). In contrast to the approaches of formal clinical psychiatry and psychopathology, Laing seeks an existential-phenomenological account of schizoid and schizophrenic people. Laing utilized the existential-phenomenological method to characterize the nature of the schizoid’s and schizophrenic’s experience of him/her self and his/her world. He wanted to describe the individual so as to set all of his/her experience in the context of his/her total being-in-the-world. Issues pertaining to the schizoid and schizophrenic require the existential-phenomenological perspective to uncover their true human significance.

Like others (e.g. Szasz, 1970, 1974) Laing rejected the disease model of mental illness and expressed open hostility to exclusively genetic or organic explanations of mental disorder:

It seems extraordinary that whereas the physical and biological sciences of it-processes have generally won the day . . . an authentic science of persons has hardly got started by reason of the inveterate tendency to depersonalize or reify persons. People who experience themselves as automata . . . are rightly regarded as crazy. Yet why do we not regard a theory that seeks to transmute persons into automata or animals as equally crazy? (Laing, 1960/1990, p. 23) Laing did not argue that schizoidness and schizophrenia were in no way biological. He disputed the assumed meaninglessness behind behaviors characteristic of these disorders. When examined phenomenologically, these apparently meaningless behaviors could be understood as the individual’s attempts to contend with his/her frightening existential condition. These behaviors were not symptoms of a medical disease; they were defenses to ontological insecurity. Laing’s work with people who had been labeled "schizophrenic" led him to believe that their symptomatic behavior may be understood as a defensive "strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation" (1964/1970, p. 186).

Laing asserted that the anxiety his patients defended against could be explained in terms of ontological insecurity, an insecurity about the individual’s very being. Ontologically insecure individuals experience a split that extends into two relational dimensions: there is a disruption in his/her relation with his/her world and there is a split within him/her self. On one level, the individual experiences a split between him/her self and others who become viewed as being potentially dangerous to self-autonomy. On another level, the split reflects an internal fragmentation such that a rent is experienced between aspects of the self, which have been accepted, and others that appear to be alien. Laing used the term schizoid to refer to an individual whose totality of experience is split in these two ways. The term schizoid was not restricted only to extreme forms of psychosis because most everyone experiences some degree of schizoid splitness at times in their lives. The defensive behavior of "normal"— that is ontologically secure— individuals differs only in degree, not kind, from that of ontologically insecure people.

The ontologically secure individual has temporal continuity and a sense of being with others who are equally real, continuous, and alive. The ontologically insecure individual is "pre-occupied with preserving rather than gratifying himself: the ordinary circumstances of living threaten his low threshold of security" (Laing, 1960/1990, p. 42). The ontologically insecure person feels dead, unreal, and is hardly able to differentiate him/herself from the rest of the world. His/her identity and autonomy are always in question. S/he also lacks temporal continuity, cohesiveness, and tends to experience him/herself as partially divorced from his/her body. The ontologically insecure person becomes closed off from the world and begins to whither. He "is developing a microcosmos within himself; but of course, this autistic, private, intra-individual ‘world’ is not a feasible substitute for the only world, the shared world" (Laing, 1960/1990, pp. 74-75). "Normal" people dissociate from their bodies under extreme stress yet return once their crisis has passed. In contrast, the schizoid person experiences him/herself as unembodied and under threat on a day-to-day basis thus never fully inhabiting his/her body (Burston, 1986).

The unembodied self becomes the onlooker to the actions of the body. Existing as separate from his/her shared world, the schizoid person "becomes more and more empty and volatized. The ‘self’ whose relatedness to reality is already tenuous becomes more and more engaged in phantastic relationships with its own phantom imagos" (ibid., p. 85). The ontologically insecure individual, having a fragmentary sense of self, questions his/her being on three levels: his/her existence (that one is), essence (what one is) and identity (who one is). With such insecurities, interpersonal and intrapersonal relations may be interpreted as threatening and to be avoided in order to preserve one’s being (Spinelli, 1989).

The schizoid individual makes it his aim to make the split between his self, who only he knows, and what others can see of him. One can live his/her life in a seemingly "normal" way but may be schizoid. Laing (1960/1990) presented the case of a man whose original complaint was that he could never have intercourse with his wife but only with his own image of her. This man’s body had sexual relations with his wife’s body but, during these acts, his mental self only served as an observer to what his body was doing. His wife was unaware that he was never fully present during these acts. A schizoid’s actions may seem from another person’s point of view "normal" while the schizoid feels he is not "really" participating. The schizoid’s self, being disembodied, is free to engage in any fantasy s/he wishes yet this "freedom" becomes tortured by a sense of self-duplicity.

Laing presents three fears experienced by the ontologically insecure individual. These fears are not separate but ultimately linked in that they reflect anxieties about living. The first fear, engulfment, is characterized by anxiety related to feelings of being taken over by some alien external force. Engulfment is the "extreme distress of the person who finds himself under a compulsion to take on the characteristics of a personality . . . alien to his own" (Laing, 1960/1990, p. 58). The second fear, implosion, is similar to that of engulfment in that it too is a fear of being taken over. The difference is that one experiencing the fear of implosion feels the terror of his emptiness. S/he experiences "the world as liable at any moment may crash in and obliterate all identity as a gas will rush in and obliterate a vacuum" (ibid., p. 45). People experiencing the third fear, petrification, are afraid of being depersonalized by others: "The people in focus here both feel themselves as depersonalized and tend to depersonalize others. By destroying, in his own eyes, the other person as a person, he robs the other of his power to crush him" (ibid., p. 46-48). In the schizoid’s attempts at self-defense we see the beginnings of what could evolve into schizophrenia. In defending against these fears, the schizoid may act in strange yet meaningful ways. Few mental health professionals who seek to help schizoids or schizophrenics view any of their actions as meaningful. Interpreting their behaviors as symptoms of illness, they succeed in further alienating the ontologically insecure person from his/her shared world.

The Siberian Sorcerer

Via Jaq D. Hawkins

The Siberian old man, who healed people with one touch of his hand and who became especially close to the empress Alexandra Fedorovna, Grigory Rasputin is one of the most mysterious figures in Russian history. Everything which is known about him to modern historians is mostly based not on documental information, but on some stories of eyewitnesses. This naturally creates tons of mistakes and misunderstandings, when one is trying to make a whole idea about his personality.

Even his date of birth becomes a subject of discussion: in some articles we can find the 29th of July 1871, in others - the 10th of January 1869. Anyway, this fact is not too important.

The last Emperor of Russia and his wife called this man "Our Friend". Numerous admirers and worshippers called him "the saint old man" and "Father Grigory". Moreover, his enemies, who were numerous too, called him "Antichrist" and "the one, who ruined the dynasty". Most historians present him as "a drunk and corrupted male, who seduced the tsar's family and gained great power by some unknown and magical way". I think that the brightest example of the last point of view could be the book of the historian and writer Valentin Pikul "The Demonic Forces", that was published in 1989. In this book, the writer tells about all the corruption and filth, which were the real "tsars" of Russia of that times.

Grigory Efimovich Rasputin was born in the village Pokrovskoe (near Tobolsk). This place was really unattainable and an out-of-the-way district at that time, so we can't say much about his life on native land. All we have are just pieces of inexact stories, that mostly were invented by Rasputin himself. It is quite believable that he was a monk, but at the same time it is not excluded, that he was only a genius actor, who magnificently represented his intimacy with God.

At the age of 18 Rasputin made his first journey to the monastery in Verhotura, but didn't give the monkish vow. At 19 he came back to Pokrovskoe, where he married Praskovja Fedorovna. Later she gave birth to three of Rasputin's children: a son, Dmitrij and two daughters, Maria and Varvara.

But marriage couldn't stop Rasputin in his thirst for journeys, and he continued visiting different sacred places, even Atos monastery in Greece and Jerusalem. And all these only on his own feet!

After such "walking" Rasputin became conceited that he was elected by God and declared that he is "a saint, who is able to heal all diseases and mutilations". Rumours about the "Siberian saint" began to spread in Russia, and soon people started to aspire to see Grigory. Rasputin never studied anywhere and had no notion about medicine, but he really helped those who needed his help, and he was also able to understand and to calm people, who were at the edge of depression and despair.

One day during the plugging of a field, a vision came to Rasputin: he saw the virgin Maria, who told him about the illness of prince Alexey, the only son of the emperor Nikolas the Second (he was suffering from hemophilia - a disease, that was passed to him from his mother) and ordered him to go to Saint-Petersburg and to save the heir of the Russian throne.

In 1905, Rasputin found himself in the capital of the Russian empire in a very lucky moment for him. The church needed prophets - ones, who would be able to make people believe them. Rasputin was just that special man. He had a typical peasant appearance, natural and sincere language and strict character. But his enemies told that Rasputin just used religion as a curtain for his thirst for money, power and sex.

In 1907, he was invited to the emperor's court, when one of the attacks of Alexey's illness started. Long before the tsar's family was hiding the hemophilia of the prince, because they terribly feared that the people of Russia would start a disturbance, if they would get to know something, and Nikolas did not want to take Rasputin's offerings of help for a couple of months. Nevertheless, when the condition of Alexey came to a dangerous point, Nikolas decided to try his last chance. Here we also should mention, that the last Romanov's family was deeply interested in mystics, and before Rasputin among their favorites were persons like Daria Osipova, Antonij, (all are famous Russian prophets), and even foreign magicians like Papus, Sent-Iv de Alveider and master Philip.

All the life of Rasputin in Saint Petersburg after this moment was closely connected with the treatment of the prince (he even was able to cure Alexey, when they were only talking by telephone!), but was not limited only by that. Rasputin made many friends among the refined society of Russia, and when he became a friend of the tsar's family, all aristocracy began to search for his inclination. He became a famous "Siberian wise man", but behind his back people called him "Grishka Rasputin" (a scornful spelling of the name "Grigory").

In 1910, two daughters of Rasputin came to Saint Petersburg and entered the Academy of clergy.

Emperor Nikolas did not welcome such often appearances of Rasputin in his palace, mostly because of the rumors about Rasputin's corrupted behavior. People told that, using his strong influence upon the empress Alexandra Fedorovna, Rasputin began taking bribes for advancement of some projects and for progress of some people in their careers. His drunken riots and debauches were unprecedented. In addition, people began to talk about his too close relations with the empress.

After all the pan of people's patience became over-flowed, among the emperor's court a conspiracy against Rasputin came to a head. It's initiators were knjaz Felics Usupov (the husband of the emperor's niece), Vladimir Mitrofanovich Purishkevich (the deputy of the Forth State Government, who was famous by his ultraconservative views) and knjaz Dmitry Pavlovich (the cousin of Nikolas the Second). On the 30 of December 1916 they invited Rasputin to the Usupovskij palace for a meeting with the emperor's niece, a famous beauty of Petersburg. Wine and biscuits served for a guest were poisoned. However, the poison had no effect on Rasputin! When Usupov realised that Rasputin was still alive after he ate this dangerous treat, he shot Rasputin from a gun, but the "Siberian old man" survived again and rushed from the palace. When he ran out, he faced Purishkevich and Dmitry Pavlovich, who caught him and shot him again, then tied and put him into a sack, and then threw this sack into the Neva river. The autopsy showed, that even when the sack was lying on the bottom, Rasputin still was trying to gain release.

Here I can also mention that it was the second conspiracy against Rasputin, the first was in 1914, when the monk Iliodor, his mortal enemy, sent one fanatical woman to kill Rasputin. There is a theory that it was made because Rasputin was able to prevent Russia from participation in the First World War, and Colin Wilson considered that this attempt on the life of Grigory was when Frantz Ferdinand was killed in Saraevo (what actually caused the War).

In nowadays the interest in Rasputin is still very strong. For example, recently the book "Rasputin" of the most popular Russian historian Edward Radzinskij was republished (first time it saw light in 2000, second - in 2003). The author, using rare and unknown documents and evidence, is trying to create his own view on the personality of this outstanding man.

In addition, except only historical works, there are many attempts to rehabilitate and to prove the innocence of Grigory Rasputin. These attempts are mostly connected with the Church. Maybe it is all because the family of Nikolas the Second was recently canonized. In his article named "slandered old man", E. I. Evsin considers that Rasputin was "a saint, innocent man", and accuses the masons of conspiracy in his tragic death. He tells that masons are able to lie, to backbite, and even to kill for achieving their goals. It is hard to argue with Evsin, because it is true that the death of Rasputin was definitely intertwined with a crime. But when the Church is trying to make such rehabilitation and to show Rasputin as a deeply suffered old man (with this statement it is hard to argue too: Rasputin writes in his memoirs: "There were many pains in me. If there was any mistake or trouble anywhere, everybody accused me, even if I knew nothing. I worked hard and slept just a bit, and always thought about how to find something, that would save people from tortures of Hell"), who was innocent and pure, it forgets to tell us that Rasputin was an active member of a sect named "the Whips". The official Church called "the Whips" a heresy. It is time to say a few words about the "the Whips". The name of this sect takes origin in one of it's ceremonies, in its performance the sectarians beat and lashed themselves with whips, rods and such things. Or maybe it takes origin in the word "Christ", because in Russian "Whip" spells as "Hlist", and this word pronounced like Russian "Christ". "Whips" called themselves "God's people", and considered that the God lives in them for their truthful life. The founder of the sect was Danila Filippov (or Filippovich), a run-away soldier, who told that he is "God in human flesh". He traveled around Russia spreading his doctrines. Soon he found an apprentice, a country-man Ivan Timofeev Suslov, who was considered as "Jesus Christ" by Filippov.

Suslov surrounded his self with "God's mother" and 12 apostles, and came to Moscow, where his propaganda spreaded not only in the common people masses, but also in some monasteries and nunneries. He bought a house and called it "the House of God" or "the new Jerusalem", where sectarians gathered to perform their rituals and prayers. After the death of Suslov the next "Jesus" became Prokopij Lupkin, who died in 1972, but before that year he spread the teaching in 8 convents. Some of them also became the places of meetings of "the Whips". In 1973 the first judicial inquiry concerning "the Whips" started. After it leaders of the sect were executed, and other sectarians were publicly punished and then sent to Siberia. But inquiry and punishments were not able to stop "the Whips". The second inquiry completed without any "cuttings-off-of-heads", but 416 people (there were also some females among them) were sent for penal servitude to Siberia and to Caucasus. In the 19th century (when Alexander the First was the emperor) the sect prospered, and I could say that those times were mostly favorable for different mystical societies.

The fundamental rule or dogma of "the Whips" was the theory of Reincarnation. According to their views, God reincarnates several times in humans, if these humans live a truthful and innocent life. Also all souls reincarnate, and if one soul appears in one of the sectarians, it becomes pure and after death goes into Heaven with angels, but if one soul gets into an ordinary man/woman or into an animal, then after death Hell awaits it.

The moral conception of this sect consists of negation of matrimonial life and in killing and pacification of flesh, on the basis of what is a lying belief that the Soul is a source of all Good, and Flesh - of all Evil. That is why "the Whips" never lived with and never recognised their real parents, and also despised marriage. They tried to have no children and encouraged all kinds of relations between men and females, except when they were married, naturally. "The Whips" never blamed any corruption, and in their teaching all the most disgusting forms of it were connected with "killing of flesh". Maybe that sounds a bit strange, but "the Whips" believed that the salvation could be achieved only through Sin. "If You won't fall into the dirtiest filth, You'll never find salvation. The more corruption - the more imposing is the exploit of repentance". This conception fits Rasputin perfectly!

Separate communities of "the Whips" were named as "ships". In the head of every "ship" stood a man called "Captain", or "the Teacher", "Christ", "the prophet", etc. Usually there was also a woman, who helped "Captain" to rule the community ("the prophetess" or "the God's mother"). Other sectarians (or "brothers-sailors") were divided into three groups (depending on their stage and degree of initiation):

1) Those who only attended all the usual meetings of the sectarians,
2)Those who attended usual (or "simple") rituals and
3) Those who performed annual and extraordinary rituals.

During their rituals "the Whips" reached their purposes in getting closer to God (or "to the essence of All") through extreme nervous excitement, sexual releases, exhaustion and so on. After such so-called "prayers" sectarians saw hallucinations and visions, which were interpreted as "prophesies".

"The Whips" were very cold and even hostile to the official Church. They called it "evil world", "evil people", "false people", etc. in their songs. Also sectarians hated politicians and thought about government as about "blood-thirsty animals", "beasts in human flesh" and "liars". I think it would be true to say that sectarians scorned each person, who wasn't in their sect.

It is not excluded, that Rasputin's belonging to "the Whips" became one of the most important moments in his career, if we would take into consideration the wide-spreading and the power of this sect at those times, and also interests in mysticism of the empress Alexandra Fedorovna. Anyway, this fact contradicts with all attempts of the Church to rehabilitate Rasputin, but on the other hand it is natural for the Church to canonize people, who were "heretics" a long time ago.

Nowadays the interest in "the Whips" and in other mystical teachings of Russia is mostly historical and maybe in some cases religious. I think that after the Revolution, magic died on this territory, and only in the last year new societies and sorcerers are starting to appear again.

Mathematics Is Biology's Next Microscope, Only Better; Biology Is Mathematics' Next Physics, Only Better

Via Hive Mind and PLoS Biology

Although mathematics has long been intertwined with the biological sciences, an explosive synergy between biology and mathematics seems poised to enrich and extend both fields greatly in the coming decades (Levin 1992; Murray 1993; Jungck 1997; Hastings et al. 2003; Palmer et al. 2003; Hastings and Palmer 2003). Biology will increasingly stimulate the creation of qualitatively new realms of mathematics. Why? In biology, ensemble properties emerge at each level of organization from the interactions of heterogeneous biological units at that level and at lower and higher levels of organization (larger and smaller physical scales, faster and slower temporal scales). New mathematics will be required to cope with these ensemble properties and with the heterogeneity of the biological units that compose ensembles at each level.

The discovery of the microscope in the late 17th century caused a revolution in biology by revealing otherwise invisible and previously unsuspected worlds. Western cosmology from classical times through the end of the Renaissance envisioned a system with three types of spheres: the sphere of man, exemplified by his imperfectly round head; the sphere of the world, exemplified by the imperfectly spherical earth; and the eight perfect spheres of the universe, in which the seven (then known) planets moved and the outer stars were fixed (Nicolson 1960). The discovery of a microbial world too small to be seen by the naked eye challenged the completeness of this cosmology and unequivocally demonstrated the existence of living creatures unknown to the Scriptures of Old World religions.

Mathematics broadly interpreted is a more general microscope. It can reveal otherwise invisible worlds in all kinds of data, not only optical. For example, computed tomography can reveal a cross-section of a human head from the density of X-ray beams without ever opening the head, by using the Radon transform to infer the densities of materials at each location within the head (Hsieh 2003). Charles Darwin was right when he wrote that people with an understanding “of the great leading principles of mathematics… seem to have an extra sense” (F. Darwin 1905). Today's biologists increasingly recognize that appropriate mathematics can help interpret any kind of data. In this sense, mathematics is biology's next microscope, only better.

Conversely, mathematics will benefit increasingly from its involvement with biology, just as mathematics has already benefited and will continue to benefit from its historic involvement with physical problems. In classical times, physics, as first an applied then a basic science, stimulated enormous advances in mathematics. For example, geometry reveals by its very etymology (geometry) its origin in the needs to survey the lands and waters of Earth. Geometry was used to lay out fields in Egypt after the flooding of the Nile, to aid navigation, to aid city planning. The inventions of the calculus by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz in the later 17th century were stimulated by physical problems such as planetary orbits and optical calculations.

In the coming century, biology will stimulate the creation of entirely new realms of mathematics. In this sense, biology is mathematics' next physics, only better. Biology will stimulate fundamentally new mathematics because living nature is qualitatively more heterogeneous than non-living nature. For example, it is estimated that there are 2,000–5,000 species of rocks and minerals in the earth's crust, generated from the hundred or so naturally occurring elements (Shipman et al. 2003; chapter 21 estimates 2,000 minerals in Earth's crust). By contrast, there are probably between 3 million and 100 million biological species on Earth, generated from a small fraction of the naturally occurring elements. If species of rocks and minerals may validly be compared with species of living organisms, the living world has at least a thousand times the diversity of the non-living. This comparison omits the enormous evolutionary importance of individual variability within species. Coping with the hyper-diversity of life at every scale of spatial and temporal organization will require fundamental conceptual advances in mathematics.

Actions For Training From Developing The Pledged State Of Aspiring Bodhichitta

Via The Berzin Archives

Aspiring and Engaged Bodhichitta

Bodhisattvas are those with bodhichitta (byang-sems) - a heart totally dedicated to others and to achieving enlightenment in order to benefit them as fully as possible. There are two levels of bodhichitta:

1. aspiring (smon-sems),
2. engaged ('jug-sems).

Aspiring bodhichitta is the strong wish to overcome our shortcomings and realize our potentials to benefit everyone. Engaged bodhichitta means engaging in the practices that bring about this goal and taking bodhisattva vows to restrain from actions detrimental to it. The difference between the two levels is similar to that between wishing to become a doctor and actually entering medical school.

Merely Aspiring and Pledged Bodhichitta

Through participation in a special ceremony, we may generate the aspiring state of bodhichitta. Doing so, however, does not entail taking bodhisattva vows.

Aspiring bodhichitta has two stages:

1. merely wishing to become a Buddha for the benefit of others (smon-sems smon-pa-tsam),
2. pledging never to abandon this aim until it is achieved (smon-sems dam-bca'-can).

With the pledged state of bodhichitta, we promise to train in five actions that help us never to lose our resolve. Developing the merely wishing state does not involve this promise. The first four trainings help our bodhichitta resolve not to decline during this lifetime. The fifth training helps us not to lose our resolve in future lives.

Four Trainings for Bodhichitta Resolve Not to Decline in This Life

(1) Each day and night, recalling the advantages of the bodhichitta motivation. Just as we readily overcome our tiredness and tap our energies when we need to attend to our children, we easily surmount all difficulties and use all our potentials when our primary motivation in life is bodhichitta.

(2) Reaffirming and strengthening this motivation by rededicating our hearts to enlightenment and others three times each day and three times each night.

(3) Striving to strengthen enlightenment-building networks of positive force and deep awareness (collections of merit and insight). In other words, helping others as effectively as we can, and doing so with as much deep awareness of reality as possible.

[See: The Two Enlightenment-Building Networks (The Two Collections).]

(4) Never giving up trying to help anyone, or at least wishing to be able to do so, no matter how difficult he or she may be.

Training for Not Losing the Bodhichitta Resolve in Future Lives

The fifth point for training entails ridding ourselves of four types of murky behavior (nag-po'i chos-bzhi, four "black" actions) and adopting four glowing ones (dkar-po'i chos-bzhi, four "white" actions) instead. In each of the following four sets, the first type of behavior is the murky one that we try to stop and the second is the glowing one that we try to adopt.

(1) Stopping ever deceiving our spiritual teachers, parents, or the Triple Gem. Instead, always being honest with them, especially about our motivation and efforts to help others.

(2) Stopping ever faulting or being contemptuous of bodhisattvas. Instead, since only Buddhas can be certain who actually are bodhisattvas, regarding everyone in a pure way as our teachers. Even if people act in crude and distasteful manners, they teach us not to behave in these ways.

(3) Stopping ever causing others to regret anything positive they have done. If someone makes numerous mistakes when typing a letter for us and we yell with outrage, the person may never offer to help again. Instead, encouraging others to be constructive and, if receptive, to work on overcoming their shortcomings and realizing their potentials to be of more benefit to everyone.

(4) Stopping ever being hypocritical or pretentious in our dealings with others, in other words hiding our faults and pretending to have qualities we lack. Instead, taking responsibility to help others, always being honest and frank about our limitations and abilities. It is very cruel to promise more than we can deliver, raising others' false hopes.

Time Bandits: What Were Einstein & Gödel Talking About?

Via The New Yorker and 3 Quarks Daily

In 1933, with his great scientific discoveries behind him, Albert Einstein came to America. He spent the last twenty-two years of his life in Princeton, New Jersey, where he had been recruited as the star member of the Institute for Advanced Study. Einstein was reasonably content with his new milieu, taking its pretensions in stride. “Princeton is a wonderful piece of earth, and at the same time an exceedingly amusing ceremonial backwater of tiny spindle-shanked demigods,” he observed. His daily routine began with a leisurely walk from his house, at 115 Mercer Street, to his office at the institute. He was by then one of the most famous and, with his distinctive appearance—the whirl of pillow-combed hair, the baggy pants held up by suspenders—most recognizable people in the world.

A decade after arriving in Princeton, Einstein acquired a walking companion, a much younger man who, next to the rumpled Einstein, cut a dapper figure in a white linen suit and matching fedora. The two would talk animatedly in German on their morning amble to the institute and again, later in the day, on their way homeward. The man in the suit may not have been recognized by many townspeople, but Einstein addressed him as a peer, someone who, like him, had single-handedly launched a conceptual revolution. If Einstein had upended our everyday notions about the physical world with his theory of relativity, the younger man, Kurt Gödel, had had a similarly subversive effect on our understanding of the abstract world of mathematics.

Gödel, who has often been called the greatest logician since Aristotle, was a strange and ultimately tragic man. Whereas Einstein was gregarious and full of laughter, Gödel was solemn, solitary, and pessimistic. Einstein, a passionate amateur violinist, loved Beethoven and Mozart. Gödel’s taste ran in another direction: his favorite movie was Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” and when his wife put a pink flamingo in their front yard he pronounced it furchtbar herzig—“awfully charming.” Einstein freely indulged his appetite for heavy German cooking; Gödel subsisted on a valetudinarian’s diet of butter, baby food, and laxatives. Although Einstein’s private life was not without its complications, outwardly he was jolly and at home in the world. Gödel, by contrast, had a tendency toward paranoia. He believed in ghosts; he had a morbid dread of being poisoned by refrigerator gases; he refused to go out when certain distinguished mathematicians were in town, apparently out of concern that they might try to kill him. “Every chaos is a wrong appearance,” he insisted—the paranoiac’s first axiom.

Although other members of the institute found the gloomy logician baffling and unapproachable, Einstein told people that he went to his office “just to have the privilege of walking home with Kurt Gödel.” Part of the reason, it seems, was that Gödel was undaunted by Einstein’s reputation and did not hesitate to challenge his ideas. As another member of the institute, the physicist Freeman Dyson, observed, “Gödel was . . . the only one of our colleagues who walked and talked on equal terms with Einstein.” But if Einstein and Gödel seemed to exist on a higher plane than the rest of humanity, it was also true that they had become, in Einstein’s words, “museum pieces.” Einstein never accepted the quantum theory of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Gödel believed that mathematical abstractions were every bit as real as tables and chairs, a view that philosophers had come to regard as laughably naïve. Both Gödel and Einstein insisted that the world is independent of our minds, yet rationally organized and open to human understanding. United by a shared sense of intellectual isolation, they found solace in their companionship. “They didn’t want to speak to anybody else,” another member of the institute said. “They only wanted to speak to each other.”

People wondered what they spoke about. Politics was presumably one theme. (Einstein, who supported Adlai Stevenson, was exasperated when Gödel chose to vote for Dwight Eisenhower in 1952.) Physics was no doubt another. Gödel was well versed in the subject; he shared Einstein’s mistrust of the quantum theory, but he was also skeptical of the older physicist’s ambition to supersede it with a “unified field theory” that would encompass all known forces in a deterministic framework. Both were attracted to problems that were, in Einstein’s words, of “genuine importance,” problems pertaining to the most basic elements of reality. Gödel was especially preoccupied by the nature of time, which, he told a friend, was the philosophical question. How could such a “mysterious and seemingly self-contradictory” thing, he wondered, “form the basis of the world’s and our own existence”? That was a matter in which Einstein had shown some expertise.

A century ago, in 1905, Einstein proved that time, as it had been understood by scientist and layman alike, was a fiction. And this was scarcely his only achievement that year, which John S. Rigden skillfully chronicles, month by month, in “Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness” (Harvard; $21.95). As it began, Einstein, twenty-five years old, was employed as an inspector in a patent office in Bern, Switzerland. Having earlier failed to get his doctorate in physics, he had temporarily given up on the idea of an academic career, telling a friend that “the whole comedy has become boring.” He had recently read a book by Henri Poincaré, a French mathematician of enormous reputation, which identified three fundamental unsolved problems in science. The first concerned the “photoelectric effect”: how did ultraviolet light knock electrons off the surface of a piece of metal? The second concerned “Brownian motion”: why did pollen particles suspended in water move about in a random zigzag pattern? The third concerned the “luminiferous ether” that was supposed to fill all of space and serve as the medium through which light waves moved, the way sound waves move through air, or ocean waves through water: why had experiments failed to detect the earth’s motion through this ether?

Each of these problems had the potential to reveal what Einstein held to be the underlying simplicity of nature. Working alone, apart from the scientific community, the unknown junior clerk rapidly managed to dispatch all three. His solutions were presented in four papers, written in the months of March, April, May, and June of 1905. In his March paper, on the photoelectric effect, he deduced that light came in discrete particles, which were later dubbed “photons.” In his April and May papers, he established once and for all the reality of atoms, giving a theoretical estimate of their size and showing how their bumping around caused Brownian motion. In his June paper, on the ether problem, he unveiled his theory of relativity. Then, as a sort of encore, he published a three-page note in September containing the most famous equation of all time: E = mc2.

All of these papers had a touch of magic about them, and upset deeply held convictions in the physics community. Yet, for scope and audacity, Einstein’s June paper stood out. In thirty succinct pages, he completely rewrote the laws of physics, beginning with two stark principles. First, the laws of physics are absolute: the same laws must be valid for all observers. Second, the speed of light is absolute; it, too, is the same for all observers. The second principle, though less obvious, had the same sort of logic to recommend it. Since light is an electromagnetic wave (this had been known since the nineteenth century), its speed is fixed by the laws of electromagnetism; those laws ought to be the same for all observers; and therefore everyone should see light moving at the same speed, regardless of the frame of reference. Still, it was bold of Einstein to embrace the light principle, for its consequences seemed downright absurd.

Suppose—to make things vivid—that the speed of light is a hundred miles an hour. Now suppose I am standing by the side of the road and I see a light beam pass by at this speed. Then I see you chasing after it in a car at sixty miles an hour. To me, it appears that the light beam is outpacing you by forty miles an hour. But you, from inside your car, must see the beam escaping you at a hundred miles an hour, just as you would if you were standing still: that is what the light principle demands. What if you gun your engine and speed up to ninety-nine miles an hour? Now I see the beam of light outpacing you by just one mile an hour. Yet to you, inside the car, the beam is still racing ahead at a hundred miles an hour, despite your increased speed. How can this be? Speed, of course, equals distance divided by time. Evidently, the faster you go in your car, the shorter your ruler must become and the slower your clock must tick relative to mine; that is the only way we can continue to agree on the speed of light. (If I were to pull out a pair of binoculars and look at your speeding car, I would actually see its length contracted and you moving in slow motion inside.) So Einstein set about recasting the laws of physics accordingly. To make these laws absolute, he made distance and time relative.

It was the sacrifice of absolute time that was most stunning. Isaac Newton believed that time was regulated by a sort of cosmic grandfather clock. “Absolute, true, mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external,” he declared at the beginning of his “Principia.” Einstein, however, realized that our idea of time is something we abstract from our experience with rhythmic phenomena: heartbeats, planetary rotations and revolutions, the ticking of clocks. Time judgments always come down to judgments of simultaneity. “If, for instance, I say, ‘That train arrives here at 7 o’clock,’ I mean something like this: ‘The pointing of the small hand of my watch to 7 and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events,’” Einstein wrote in the June paper. If the events in question are at some distance from one another, judgments of simultaneity can be made only by sending light signals back and forth. Working from his two basic principles, Einstein proved that whether an observer deems two events to be happening “at the same time” depends on his state of motion. In other words, there is no universal now. With different observers slicing up the timescape into “past,” “present,” and “future” in different ways, it seems to follow that all moments coexist with equal reality.

Einstein’s conclusions were the product of pure thought, proceeding from the most austere assumptions about nature. In the century since he derived them, they have been precisely confirmed by experiment after experiment. Yet his June, 1905, paper on relativity was rejected when he submitted it as a dissertation. (He then submitted his April paper, on the size of atoms, which he thought would be less likely to startle the examiners; they accepted it only after he added one sentence to meet the length threshold.) When Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, it was for his work on the photoelectric effect. The Swedish Academy forbade him to make any mention of relativity in his acceptance speech. As it happened, Einstein was unable to attend the ceremony in Stockholm. He gave his Nobel lecture in Gothenburg, with King Gustav V seated in the front row. The King wanted to learn about relativity, and Einstein obliged him.

Nostalgia Tripping: Drexciya Interview from '89

Via TechnoTourist

Drexciya, the technolectro formation from Detroit, are without a doubt one of the most influential acts in the electronic music scene. In 1992 they emerged for the first time and since then they have developed a true cult following. The basis for this idolization is a highly original musical output and an impenetrable smokescreen masking all information on the group and its activities. Along with the mystery came the cryptic messages and intriguing stories about a utopian underwater world that bears strong resemblance to the mythical Atlantis. This world, its inhabitants and the element water are genuine leitmotivs throughout all releases and over the span of a decade they have sucked legions of fans into the immeasurable depths of the Drexciaya saga. The true identity of the members remains a mystery and interviews are scarce or even non-existent. However, for the release of ‘Harnessed The Storm’ on Tresor, five journalists got official permission to launch their underwater probes to Drexciya’s secret hideout deep underneath sea level. Get ready to step into the Drexciyan cruiser as Technotourist.org explores the Drexciyan underwater world as the final installment in the TT Electrospecial.

September 18, 1989, 3 am

Very little is known about the forces behind Drexciya, although links with Dopplereffekt, Japanese Telecom, Transllusion and The Other People’s Place are undeniable. Let’s prick one bubble by saying that James Stinson is responsible for the two latter projects and also is half of Drexciya. To get a bit of a grip on the mystery we tried to find out how Drexciya first saw the light of day. James: “I got my first taste of techno around 1980-1981. I was a kid riding my bike with a small radio and ‘Alleys Of Your Mind’ by Juan Atkins came on. I stopped my bike to get a better listen. It was the sweetest sound I had ever heard at that time. I was hooked and for the next eight years I would be programmed by some of the best electronic music on the planet by the Electrifying Mojo. When it was time I started hooking up with friends trying different styles until one night I could not sleep, cold sweat, tossing and turning and around 3 am September 18, 1989 I stood up and said ‘Drexciya’. It felt like a tidal wave rushing across my brain. All kinds of ideas were coming out. I could not stop it and I would not stop it. For the next three years we worked hard to perfect Drexciya before we would release it onto the world. Getting into production was not quick. It took a year of experimenting.”

“Our work has to be the best we can come up with at that time.”

Wavejumping

The Drexciyans are true perfectionists. Before releasing a track several others have already been committed to the trashcan. That also explains to a certain extent the long periods of time in between releases. James: “Our work has to be the best we can come up with at that time, hard work, long hours. Sometimes, at the start, we would be up for two days going to a job then work on the music and back to the job. We loved every minute of it. The time gaps between releases are time to experiment and perfect our sound. We try not to pile onto whatever is the hot sound at a given time, I really do not like that. We have to cut a new path. If we are going to be leaders on the cutting edge we can not follow someone else’s current work. That would make us followers and not leaders.”
Drexciya is equally picky when it comes to choosing a label to release their music on. Underground Resistance / Submerge / S.I.D., Warp, Rephlex and Tresor are the privileged labels that were allowed to transmit the Drexciya sound to the world. So how hard is it for the group to find a label worthy of releasing their music? James: “It’s not hard because we can bring a complete project. In the past we let up some and gave others the opportunity to help, but never again. Now we have Dimensional Waves as our production company. We will be giving 97% complete projects to whoever we wavejump to in the future. Wavejumping is not good for everyone, but due to the way we set things up it is good for us. One of the things we look for is: can we meet halfway and if things start going wrong can we work together as a team to get through it. We are very flexible as long as you are straight with me, not doing things around my back. Your word means more to me than a contract, your word tells me if you are a real man or woman. A false word can hurt me more than a contract. And yes, I am looking for more wavejumps for the other groups on Dimensional Waves and for doing remixes our way.”

One of the most outstanding contacts the Drexciyans have is the German leading techno label Tresor. They signed the group for their return to the music scene in the form of 1999’s magnificent ‘Neptune’s Lair’ and also were behind Drexciya’s latest offering ‘Harnessed The Storm’ as well as James’ soloproject Transllusion on Tresor’s sublabel Supremat. James: “Tresor is one of those labels I was speaking of. They are easy to work with, they will work with you, meet you half way and their word is good. They won’t smile in your face and say ‘yes’ to everything and then do the opposite. If something is not good they will say so, but they still will try to make it work.”

Recluses

Even in their hometown Detroit the members of Drexciya are known as very withdrawn and mysterious. They isolate themselves from the outside world to absorb as little influences as possible. A number of our questions on Detroit, the way Europe developed the techno sound and about the current political climate in the US whooshed right passed the bow of the Drexciyan cruiser like non-activated torpedoes. James: “I have a weird way of doing things and one of my ways is not to look at what is going on in the music world. For me this (way of working) is good, for others it might not be. All of the things you just asked me are toxins to my way of producing. If I want Drexciya and all that I do, then I must stay away. That way when I relocate to Atlanta (TT: Atlantis? ;-) this summer you will not hear a change. The mystery is fun for the Drexiyens (fans of Drexciya). At times I don’t have a lot to say so I don’t do interviews until I have something to say. Plus, we are working all the time so those two reasons are why we don’t do all the time.”
In 1997 fans worldwide cried their hearts out when The Quest was announced as the final chapter in the Drexciya story. Immediately rumors about a split began circulating. Two years later the group would make a triumphant return with the sublime Neptune’s Lair on Tresor. James: There was never a split and we did not plan to stop. We pulled back, put a mystery out that we were done just to see what going to happen, but at the same time we were redoing our production plans. Remember it took two to three years before we came out so we shut down and started over draining the tanks in 1999.”

“In Africa we have a dimensional jump hole.”

Welcome To Drexciya

Knowing that Drexciya has been even more mysterious about their mythical underwater world, the hardest part of our mission was still ahead of us. James: “It (the inspiration for the underwater world) came from deep inside my mind. God gave me this vision and I’m building on it bringing it to life for the whole world to see.” Yet it isn’t really hard to place these ideas about a utopian world. The electronic music that emerged from Detroit has often been characterized by a sort of escapism. For many of the Afro-American techno musicians space was fascinating because at least there they would be able to escape the hardship and racism they often faced in Detroit. Underground Resistance also grasped back to the mythical Aztec empire where the Knights Of The Jaguar took revenge on those who had caused injustice and suffering. Can we still learn from these mythical civilizations? James: “Yes! Work together, love each other and slow down. Look at your life deeper. You might not like what you see so change it. We move too fast and cannot see warning signs. We do not mind paying the heavy prices of consequences of our actions until we can’t pay no more. Take chances.”
We touch upon a sensitive issue when we link the historical drama of the slavery to the music of Drexciya. According to the legend the Drexciyan underwater people are descendants of pregnant slaves thrown overboard during their transatlantic deportation. James: “Some of the things of slavery will tell more when the time comes. Stay tuned! I can only tell you a little bit now. After the storm is over I will tell the story. What I can tell you is that in Africa we have a dimensional jump hole. Tell you more later.” James reassures us that there is peace among the different species in the underwater world and that they all live as one. In the future, we will get to know these many peoples and understand their differences and similarities in more detail.

Iconic Treatise on Gothic Futurism

Crank.Net has this categorized as illucid...which it is, but in the same way that Drexciya is/was illucid: funkily and with a sense of ironic humor...Via Afrofuturism

INFINITY'S ZOETICAL COMPOSITIONAL JUNCTION FROM ANTIKNOWLEDGE MATTERED A CONDENSED ABSTRACT QUANTRUM MECHANICS

Electromagnetic energys knowledge conformed in a stable formation function protection around any planet gives basis base for development of disease culture, on any planet with enough natural resources to conceive bacteria as long as the orbit is the right postition for that vital resource. Humans being disease culture (the body) spirtis being gaseous energy (disease culture manipulation). Death is remanuplation only be electromagnetic knowledge energy leaving disease because of malfunction of inhabited disease culture, other deaths are only CHANGE. Electromagnetics knowledge disperses back into the course of the Van Allen Belts (in purity) ° dianetical path, continuing on in evolution's path. Knowledge is scattered throughout Van Allen Belt in minute knowledge particles. Life. Electromagnetics in a photonic stage to conduct energys knowledge light (pure thought) which is in all atoms inhabits compatible disease by fusing into diseases DNA nervous system structure codeplan to energize the cerebrum before its embryotic stage sharing and manipulating and being manipulated with the composed knowledge of the atometric D x N =. A molecules and at the end of cellular construction is conformed into biochemical energy and is dispersed through motor neutron. This structural symbolic procedure code connects the Van Allen Belt as a symbol ° and a basic symbol and language for structural symbolic translations transformations of slanguage for energys purpose through the manipulation of insight and onsight of enerty and inhabited diseases. These completed symbols are: Roman, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, and any other symbol NOT resembling latter languare symbols or pictograms. Knowledge knowledges knowledge, the elevation of Wild Style knowledge is concluded as a SYMBOL DESTROYER, ARMORED, MEDIEVAL MECHANISM. This formation shall be known as IKON_ OKLAST PANZERISM: R.O.K.: GOTHIC FUTURISM, THIS IS WILD STYLE CORRECTED.

Unintelligent Design

Via NYT

Recently a school district in rural Pennsylvania officially recognized a supposed alternative to Darwinism. In a one-minute statement read by an administrator, ninth-grade biology students were told that evolution was not a fact and were encouraged to explore a different explanation of life called intelligent design. What is intelligent design? Its proponents maintain that living creatures are just too intricate to have arisen by evolution. Throughout the natural world, they say, there is evidence of deliberate design. Is it not reasonable, then, to infer the existence of an intelligent designer? To evade the charge that intelligent design is a religious theory -- creationism dressed up as science -- its advocates make no explicit claims about who or what this designer might be. But students will presumably get the desired point. As one Pennsylvania teacher observed: ''The first question they will ask is: 'Well, who's the designer? Do you mean God?'''

From a scientific perspective, one of the most frustrating things about intelligent design is that (unlike Darwinism) it is virtually impossible to test. Old-fashioned biblical creationism at least risked making some hard factual claims -- that the earth was created before the sun, for example. Intelligent design, by contrast, leaves the purposes of the designer wholly mysterious. Presumably any pattern of data in the natural world is consistent with his/her/its existence.

But if we can't infer anything about the design from the designer, maybe we can go the other way. What can we tell about the designer from the design? While there is much that is marvelous in nature, there is also much that is flawed, sloppy and downright bizarre. Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock's tail or the human male's nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their environments that they were doomed to extinction?

The gravest imperfections in nature, though, are moral ones. Consider how humans and other animals are intermittently tortured by pain throughout their lives, especially near the end. Our pain mechanism may have been designed to serve as a warning signal to protect our bodies from damage, but in the majority of diseases -- cancer, for instance, or coronary thrombosis -- the signal comes too late to do much good, and the horrible suffering that ensues is completely useless.

And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed? Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid abortionist, which ought to trouble Christians who believe in both original sin and the doctrine that a human being equipped with a soul comes into existence at conception. Souls bearing the stain of original sin, we are told, do not merit salvation. That is why, according to traditional theology, unbaptized babies have to languish in limbo for all eternity. Owing to faulty reproductive design, it would seem that the population of limbo must be at least twice that of heaven and hell combined.

Return Of The Beast

Article by David Tibet (Current 93)...Via Axis Archive

One of the most noticeable trends in our exciting music scene has been the return to the fore of the big bad Beast 666, - Sir Aleister Crowley, (1878-1947 R.I.P.)

Proof of the cynical nature of events in the Pop Biz, the last time Mr. Crowley found favour was in stoned-hippy late-60s and early 80s, when he vied for attention with Krishna, Yin-Yang and God knows what else. Now he's back with a vengeance it seems.

It seems that many bands, unable to project an image that is even remotely interesting because of their complete emptiness, have clambered on to the good ship image of Aleister Crowley. The method is simple - find a charismatic and uncompromising individual and imply that she or he is the inspiration and guidance behind the band, then project the image on this basis 'Basically I don't have anything to say, but as we are interested in Aleister Crowley, we must be pretty weird, don't you think?'

A sinister murmur of 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of The Law', pan to skeletons and grinning demons, wear lots of black, load up with large numbers of black crosses (a la hippy) and, hey presto, a new movement: Positive Punk, with bands that are old enough to have been hippies the first time around anyway.

Crowley's ideas and imagery have influenced bands from every generation. The most obvious are Black Sabbath, Hawkwind, Graham Bond (who claimed to be one of Crowley's illegitimate sons met his personal Abyss under a tube train), Led Zep, King Crimson, Toyah, Blood And Roses, Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Killing Joke and Sex Gang Children. There was also a short-lived outfit called Order Of The Golden Dawn and Haysi have a track on their LP called 'Here Comes The Beast'.

Jimmy Page of Led Zep is probably the most renowned Crowleyite in rock. He owns Crowley's old house in Boleskine on the shores of Loch Ness and was almost single-handedly responsible for the rise in value of Crowley's work in the early 70's. Page bought up everything to do with Crowley that went on to the market - he even had a person employed full time to go to auctions and bid for Crowley items.

Eventually he opened a shop in Kensington High Street called 'Equinox' to sell Crowley's writings (now closed). He started his own publishing company to put out books by Crowley and other such authors.

Black Sabbath used Crowleyan and Satanic imagery as early as 1969. The Satanic atmosphere was always heavy in their work, thunder, lightening and rain lashing Ozzy Osbourne as he wails 'What is this that stands before me? Figure in black that points at me… OH NOOOO, God please help me!' After Ozzy left Sabbath he got further into the Satan trip, biting off bats' heads and doing songs titled 'Mr.Crowley'. As he got more over the top he went more downhill…

Graham Bond, claiming direct descendence from the seed of the Great Beast himself, recorded an album of Holy Magick ritual, complete with pentagram.

Throbbing Gristle used Crowley's imagery and theories on power to drive their walls of sound and noise. Genesis P-Orridge would chant 'love is the law' in a tone of marvellous understatement in their almost hit-single 'United'. P-Orridge was always totally open about the primary influence Crowley and William Burroughs had on TG's work. At same the time, he never played them to death or attempted to convert his passions and obsessions into cheap publicity.

Unlike Toyah. Desperately grabbing any ploy to draw attention to her outstandingly boring work, she simpered about sleeping in coffins (weally shocking!) and that she read Crowley's 'Devil's Bible' (pathetic). She would then launch into such happy gibberings as 'found myself in a neon womb'. Far out.

Killing Joke captured the apocalyptic feel of Crowley's most important work, 'The Book Of The Law', in their stunning 'The Fall Of The Because' (an expression taken from that book). Singer Jaz and drummer Paul influenced the Joke Crowley-wise, but without name dropping at every opportunity. The sleeve of 'Follow The Leaders' depicted a procession holding aloft Crowley's self-designed Tarot pack. Eventually Jaz went to Iceland to seek the company of Peyr (Fear), a group with similar dark interests.

Meanwhile, a flash of lightening on a lonely moor reveals Blood And Roses, complete with 'beautiful' audience, chanting the odd 'Necromantra'. Their 'Love Under Will' sports Gothic skeletons on the sleeve and a spiel which starts and ends with Crowley's most well-known phrases - 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of The Law' and 'Love is the Law, Love under Will'. Blood And Roses had nothing to do with it, they say. The hippies keep marching on.

Crowley seems so popular with the uninspired image-seekers because he generated much powerful imagery. Symbols are ready-made and waiting for those with little respect for Crowley and their audience. Magick became this year's big thing. The punks that started off despising hippies gradually turned into the very thing they hated, while deluding themselves they were being revolutionary and shocking. An intelligent article on Crowley in Sounds by Sandy Robertson was unwittingly responsible for a lot of crap to come. Readers were presented with a perfect anti-hero who took drugs (in vast quantities!) And Got Noticed. He was WEIRD. Suddenly the Posi-Punk bands were competing with the Heavy Metal brigade (Witchfinder General - Ha Ha!) to see who could cram the most Satans and symbols on their sleeves. A Sounds headline announced 'The Magic And The Mystery of the New Punks'. This seemed to consist of wearing a top hat and having long hair, albeit spiked up (still long hair though).

From flares to bondage trousers, from patchouli oil to glue sniffing. Both sets of hippies ended up in Magick.

Achad's Physics

Via Ambrosii Magi Hortus Rosarum

Traditional Thelemic circles recognize the fact that Frater Achad found the ‘Key’ to Liber AL vel Legis, though much discussion does not exist that examines its import. Nor has much use been made of this key with the exception of the formula of LAShTAL in Liber Reguli. One additional work exists that uses this key and its an English Qabalah (Cf. Liber 805) that relies on this key in its authentication arguments. But this Qabalah holds no recognition nor any acceptance in traditional Thelemic circles. And for most, Crowley’s later rejection of Frater Achad as his ‘Magickal Son’ has led to an overall rejection of Frater Achad’s contributions to Thelemic science; if only because his writings have been generally ignored. In effect, the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater.

Fortunately, two forward thinking theorists have found value in Frater Achad’s work. They are the physicist, Richard Miller and the psychologist, Iona Miller. Their writings on Bio-holography found easily on the Internet, provide for us, a marvelous second look at the work of a man that though his later personal failure has become a tragic footnote in Thelemic history, proves an important step in the reunification of science and religion. Of particular significance is the essay by Iona Miller entitled: The Dodecahedral Universe and the Qabalistic Tree-of-Life. In this essay, Iona Miller notes that Frater Achad’s 3-D projection of the Tree-of-Life “…is a key provided initiates to unlock the more comprehensive geometry of creation.”

Let’s start with Geometry and Frater Achad’s work, The Anatomy of the Body of God. Sharing the process by which he came to build his 3-D projection, he first instructs us to draw a vertical line as if running through the center of the Tree-of-Life and to overlay four concentric circles on it so that the diameters intersect with the central points of the other circles, producing three Vesica Piscis as shown in Figure I below. The four circles would be consistent with the four worlds of the Qabalah and the three Vesica Piscis would be consistent with the three veils on the Tree-of-Life.

However, the consistency of the veils as pertaining to the placement of the three Vesica Pisces is not precise and not consistent with Frater Achad’s model. This is simply an alternate extraction that we can draw from this figure at this point. As shown in Figure II below, the center of the top circle corresponds with Kether; the diameter of the top and subsequent descending circle corresponds with Chokmah and Binah; the center of the third circle corresponds with Tiphareth; the intersecting diameters of the second and third circles gives us Chesed and Geburah; the intersecting diameters of the third and fourth circles gives us Netzach and Hod with the center of the bottom circle corresponding with Yesod and the bottom point of its diameter corresponding with Malkuth.

In order to make this figure work, Frater Achad had to pull Malkuth, which normally hangs pendant to the other Sephiroth, up to a more equidistant relation to the rest of the Tree-of-Life as does Kether on the opposite end. This is consistent with the idea that matter does not represent a ‘fall from grace,’ which is not only a Christist viewpoint, but allows us to see now, the divine nature of matter. This would make more resonant the Qabalistic statement that ‘Kether is in Malkuth as Malkuth is in Kether, but in a different manner.’ And we also then can more clearly see the importance of the work of Mother and Sri Aurobindo (Cf. Liber Immortalitas vel Lucifuge and Liber Vox Viva Voce vel Video) as well as the work of Richard and Iona Miller along with Dr. Harold Aspden.

In examining the Vesica Pisces as formed in Sacred Geometry by two intersecting concentric circles, we find that we can fit two equilateral triangles perfectly in its midst, as shown in Figure III below. The equilateral triangle is of course, the strongest solid shape in architecture as wonderfully demonstrated by R. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome; a real practical use of Sacred Geometry.

When laid out horizontally, the Vesica Piscis’ length and breath also forms a rectangle that may be cut into three equal parts by drawing straight lines parallel to its shorter sides as shown in Figure V below. The rectangles formed from these additional lines also contain each, a Vesica Piscis and two equilateral triangles, replicating the greater whole and clearly suggesting the Millers’ hologram theory, which holds that all parts of any organism are an exact replica of the whole organism; working of course, at the cellular level.

And of course, we can embed these rectangles, triangles and Vesica Piscis to both infinitely small and infinitely large dimensions as per Figure VII below.

The profundity of this clearly seen by Frater Achad as he then writes:

Imagine my overwhelming joy when I discovered that the ancient Qabalistic Tree of Life, with all it wonderful possibilities as a means of mental classification of every idea in the Universe—Natural, Human and Divine—was in its entirety based upon the same fundamental principle of the Vesica Piscis, and was therefore not a fixed design but capable of indefinite progression towards the Infinitely Small or the Infinitely Great. For it can be so drawn that it appears with all its details and properties, repeating themselves indefinitely in every direction of Space to Infinity.

The Vesica Piscis is of course, an important shape in the Sacred Geometry of Thelema (Cf. Sacred Geometry in AL). It also comes to us by way of the East as the Vesica Piscis symbolized the womb, the importance of which can be found in the Sexual Alchemy of Thelema. This is hinted at in Frater Achad’s book in the several pages leading to Figures XVII and XVIII shown below. And it significantly, further validates his bringing Malkuth into a balanced geometrical relation to Kether, giving us a “true proportion” when drawing the Vesica Piscis.

Frater Achad then redraws the Tree-of-Life, removing the traditional interconnecting paths with exception of those lines that directly connect to Tiphareth and through Yesod, down to Malkuth as shown in Figure XX. Tiphareth of course, figures prominently in the Sexual Alchemy of Thelema as per the formula of ON (Cf. Liber Laiad and Liber LH). Liber LH is important in this regard as it hints at the idea of the ‘Golden Child’ for those interested in evolutionary Eugenics, which also seems a closely guarded secret in Thelemic circles.

He then swings this Sephiroth around, maintaining the line lengths, upon the axis of Tiphareth, giving us Figure XXI shown below.

The significance of this seems almost like a prediction in light of recent discoveries on phosphorylation in the DNA as discussed in Liber Vox Viva Voce vel Video and Liber Immortalitas vel Lucifuge. Frater Achad writes:

This suggested to my mind, the idea of One Cell; first in process of Division, and then Divided except for a ray of Influence between the two. In other Words the Supreme Light one with Matter, dividing through Wisdom and Understanding, and becoming the Moon (Yesod) and Sun (Tiphereth). Or, The Sun and Moon uniting and producing the other symbolic ideas—who can say?

"For I am divided for love's sake, for the chance of union." AL I.29

Frater Achad is clearly implying the process of mitosis, which is the division of cells involved in both the creation of a fetus and the maintenance of the body. The work of Mother and Sri Aurbindo was in getting all these separate cells to act in unison with full awareness that Immortality might be achieved. But if one thinks about this very carefully, there is also a further validation of Kenneth Grant’s connecting of Yesod with Da’ath and the subsequently evolving ‘Tunnels of Set’ (Cf. Howling of Liber CCXXXI).

Alternative Metaphysics

Via New Falcon and the ubiquitous Peter Carroll

Philosophy often seems like a dead issue to most people, and even Wittgenstein reportedly quipped that 'philosophy leaves everything as it is', after spending a lifetime on it. Metaphysics, a branch of philosophy that studies 'being' and what we can know in principle, often attracts the greatest derision as mere empty speculation. In theory, metaphysics stands above mere physics (the study of the material world) and thus it structures what we can know through physics. In practice, physics has achieved astonishing things whilst metaphysics has gone nowhere. However I will argue that we have ignored metaphysics only because we have not needed to change it for several centuries but that now we approach a revolution in the subject.

Philo-sophy means word-wisdom in Greek, however very few philosophers have dared to question the assumptions built into the words they use. Words fail to express some types of thoughts, but worse, some words allow invalid concepts to exist. In using words as the units of thought philosophers have overlooked something quite astonishing. What they missed showed up in mathematics. Specifically it showed up in the maths which describe the quantum physics on which this universe runs. Basically this shows that nothing 'is' anything else, and nothing 'is' even itself. It means nothing for example, to say that an electron 'is' a particle or that an electron 'is' a wave The entire category of 'being' has no actual reality at all, it just arises out of poor observation and sloppy thinking. No-'thing' stands still in a state of 'being'. Reality consists of dynamic events only.

Whenever we say that something 'is' anything else, we really mean that an event exhibits a behavior in particular circumstances or frames of reference. In every case a statement of 'is-ness' represents a kind of useful shorthand, although it always conceals a loss of information. We can never actually observe anything in a state of 'being'. Even an apparently immobile object consists of a maelstrom of internal activity and energy exchanges with its environment. Stopping this activity would actually obliterate the event and the 'object' would cease to exist.

Now we pay an enormous price for the convenience of having the verb 'being' in our languages. It makes it too easy to believe things which have no basis in our actual experience. It more or less forces us to believe that we ourselves have a 'being' somehow separate in some way from the body and its doings, or, even more nonsensically, that we 'are a being'. This leads to the silly questions of what happens to 'beings' when they cease to do, (i.e., die), where does 'being' come from, and what about possible 'higher' or more powerful 'beings'? Most traditional occultism depends on the idea that you can interact with the 'being' or 'essence' in all sorts of animate and inanimate phenomena. From a simple fault in language, mighty stupidities have grown to confuse us.

Language though, only accounts for half of the main illusion under which we labour.

Neuroscience can now demonstrate quite simply and convincingly what the philosopher Hume first articulated in the west, what many Buddhists have known for millennia, and what some have seen on heroic doses of LSD. The 'self' of which we think we consist, and which we regard as the font of our 'being' and our thoughts and acts, does not really fulfill such a role at all. We think and act quite automatically on the basis of acquired or innate patterns of thought and behavior (or sometimes just randomly), and then within a measurable fraction of a second of having done so, a particular part of the brain usually identifies with the action and claims responsibility for it. In other words, the 'me' or the 'I' that we subjectively feel that we consist of, does not actually initiate thought or action at all! This sometimes becomes apparent as a result of meditation, but with a few carefully placed electrodes it becomes disturbingly obvious.

Perceptive Buddhists priests have, in the main, kept pretty quiet about the enlightenment of no-self. The doctrine has proved understandably unpopular and tends to lead to widespread unauthorized suicide. Despite that the realisation of the illusory nature of the 'self' forms a core part of the original Buddhist enlightenment, the majority of popular sects have marginalised or disguised this doctrine. Many Buddhist sects even have elaborate doctrines of reincarnation, although the specification of exactly what reincarnates remains suspiciously vague.

So why do virtually all humans have a false but overwhelmingly strong subjective sense of 'self'? Well it has a huge survival value for a start. Few people can hold any sort of a life together without the illusion that they consist of some sort of unity despite the multiplicity and unpredictability of much of their actual thought and behavior. Thus the hardwired neuroprogram of 'self' acts in a very similar way to the software linguistic program of the verb 'being'. Both act as convenient shorthand, but both impose false preconditions upon our understanding of reality. The subjective experience of the 'self' leads all too easily to the theory of the soul, especially when mixed with the concept of 'being'. This opens the floodgates to any desired amount of irreality and wishful thinking.

In discarding the concepts of 'being' and 'self' we also dispose of the theory of spirits and immaterial 'beings' and the Neoplatonic/Animist ideas of 'essence' which underlie so much of religious and occult thought and practice. We also have to abandon the idea of free will. To some people this does not look like a very promising start for a New Magical Paradigm. However, a closer look reveals that it can lead to a much leaner, fitter, meaner, more interesting, and more credible magical paradigm which has acquired the name of Chaos Magic.

If all the gods and spirits and daemons do not exist as the 'gaseous vertebrates' that previous generations seem to have imagined, then the phenomena which they cause must arise from something else instead. We know that the mind consists of many more or less autonomous systems including the 'self' and that in extreme cases it can create multiple personalities with selective amnesia about each other. We also know that parapsychology can occur occasionally. Thus it seems more logical and more fun to conclude the obvious, that humanity has always made its gods and daemons and spirits whilst pretending that it didn't. So from now on we can actually manufacture deities and daemons and spirit servitors to our own designs, tastes and needs, by the requisite investment of belief.

Spiritual Anarchy: Freeing the Soul From Organized Religious Repression

Via Philosophiae Magickae

An important question in today's world has to be: why is such a major focus placed upon the religious affiliation of political candidates or officials? It must be perfectly clear, even to the casual observer, that these individuals - through their blatant lies, underhanded maneuverings and hypocritical glad-handing - do not practice the beliefs they claim to hold so dear. Yet, they insist on inflicting those very same beliefs upon others by making laws which do little more than restrict the rights of the people to choose their own faith in order to guide their daily actions.

When the ideals of religion descend to the level where they are no more than a mantle worn only when convenient, or for show, or to gain power over others - a situation rampant among peoples around the globe - religion must be discarded entirely. No one can stand by and allow those who violate the vows they have taken, bringing tragic harm to others, to dictate the behavior of the masses in the name of some skewed view of righteousness. Each individual must recognize the falsehoods offered by organized groups purporting to have divine authority, and break free to seek the truth which lies in their own hearts.

The various sects may have originated to promote deeper spirituality and personal enlightenment yet, all too soon, they were corrupted by those who seized power and exerted their alleged authority to subdue the masses into complacent conformity by playing upon their irrational fears of change, much less temporal or eternal punishment. By defining supposed infractions, declaring doctrines often based on spurious mythological scriptures, and enforcing them through warfare and subjugation, entire cultures were forced to accept these religions wholesale, losing much of their freedom as a result, and certainly the individuality of their citizens.

This global, stifling dominance crippled humanity over the millennia, to the point where true spiritual advancement completely stalled, with the exception of a scarce few who saw through the hoax and risked persecution in their search for genuine truth. Even the books currently in publication offer lame comfort and bogus security within the framework of accepted religious views, ranging from the countless denominations of Christianity, Judaism and Islam to Paganism to Buddhism and even Satanism.

The very idea one person dares dictate how others must behave or believe is ludicrous in the extreme. That this tradition has been perpetuated and condoned is pathetic. Proof of the inequality within organized religious institutions can be seen in the demands made by these power- hungry figures to bilk the masses of their hard-earned money, under the guise of tithing or returning to a certain deity a portion of the bounty given to them "from above". There is no divine laborer who rains cash upon the adherents of any extant religion from unseen reserves. Those who receive a paycheck deal with daily stress, sweat and toil of their employment, entirely from their own inner strength. To be harassed into donating a portion of those earnings to pay for ornate buildings or the extravagant lifestyle of such authorities is far, far worse than being taxed by local government for the services it provides the community.

It is time for each individual to identify and break free of these chains of religious repression, in all its forms. Humanity has reached the point where it no longer needs to be cajoled and humored in order to be kept docile and obedient, subjected to the will of a divinity which was created from ancient stories meant to explain natural phenomena. No longer can people afford to be guilted into conformity. Every single person must give priority to discovering the true self, facing all aspects of being - whether deemed good or evil by others - and integrating these facets into a whole person.

XI° Per Aftera Ad Astra: Anal Intercourse and the O.T.O.

Via Phil Hine and P.R. Koenig's Ordo Templiu Orientalis Phenomenon

SUMMARY OF CROWLEY’S SEX MAGICK SYSTEM

• VII° Adoration of the phallus as Baphomet, both within and without
• VIII° Interaction with something outside the closed vessels of the vagina and the anus
• IX° Interaction inside the vagina with either the blood or the secretions of a woman when excited
• X° Impregnation + fertilisation of an egg + the act of creation or succession (e.g. election of the OHO)
• XI° Two-folded: i) Isolation in the anus [per vas nefandum] where it is considered unable to interact with anything at all ii) interaction with excrements (one of Crowley’s preferred ingredients) and small amounts of blood (when small wounds occur through the intercourse), mucus and of course the mucous membranes that lead directly into the blood supply, etc., etc. Crowley dreamt of giving birth to a foetus per anum. "... a mass of blood & slime."
  Crowley allegedly wrote a longer piece on the XI° from which only an outline has survived. He explained that "the 'Child' of such a love [XI°] is a third person, a Holy Spirit, so to speak, partaking of both natures, yet boundless and impersonal because it is a bodiless creation of a wholly divine nature." [Note compiled by Cosmos Trelawney]

It seems obvious that there is no final decision as to "what is the XI°" and how "it" is been put "into" the many different O.T.O. systems.

Crowley's 1914 O.T.O. system with 12 degrees:
It has been suggested that the XI° may not be considered in sequence between X° and Crowley's expanded XII° of 1914 but as the position held by the Inner Head of the Order who works privately with the O.H.O. XII°. The title of the XI° is Baphomet. (XII° being similar to the X° National Heads i.e. an administrative degree.) In these circumstances the holder of the XI° would be Spiritual Head of the Order -- the identity of XI° being known only to the XII° and X°'s. Prior membership of O.T.O. is not a requirement for the XI° but presumably a 0° initiation would be conducted first.

Witchcraft Or Wit-Craft: The Role Of Logic In Magick

Via Goat And Candle

Definitions of witchcraft and magick - as found in texts other than dictionaries and encyclopedias - make use of words such as "change", "will", "art" and "science". For some, the idea of magick as and art and a science may seem like an oxymoron. What is being indicated by the latter term, however, is that witchcraft/magick requires an approach not dissimilar to a scientific experiment - thorough planning, meticulous preparation and precise execution. In other words, a logical handling of the spell or ritual is vital to obtaining successful results.

It may seem odd to consider logic a part of magick and Witchcraft. Long translated as "the craft of the wise", Witchcraft often seems more of an art, dealing with emotions, desires, creativity. That is not all there is to being wise, however. Witchcraft is, most definitely, "Wit-craft" - a craft of wits - with experience and wisdom (both elements of logic) guiding the practitioner in his or her actions.

Logic plays a very large role in ritual/spell preparation, as highlighted in Phil Hine's article "Analytic Techniques for Sorcery Interventions" (www.phhine.ndirect.co.uk). Hine recommends a practitioner assess the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) of a situation prior to taking action. It is true that some witches don't see themselves as "logical" people. This is not to say logic cannot be learned. Instead of rushing in and doing a spell when the household budget gets tight, or someone new appeals to a romantic nature, it is wise - "using one's wits" - to stop and think about the consequences of any magickal action. If a tangible action might prove more effective, it is logical and wise to try that first.

Logic is, overall, the thought process by which a magickian or witch determines the need for a specific working. This protects both the subject of any working, and the individual magickian. Once the circle is cast and the practitioner is (logically) protected from any interfering forces, the artistic, creative and other elements can be experienced.

Protecting oneself not only during a magickal working, but often before and after is logical, as well. Cleansing the self and the ritual area is logical; cleaning up any magickal "debris" afterward is also logical. No witch wants unpleasant entities in the circle during a working, nor does he or she want any uncontrolled energies lingering after the circle is open. This is using one's "wits", covering one's back, or however it may be described.

Every magickal act has consequences (every act, for that matter), as summarized by what is commonly known as the "Law of Cause and Effect". Some call this the "Three Fold Law" or "karma", but it amounts to the same premise, "What goes around, comes around." No matter what a person does, he or she is effected by "backlash" or "residual energies" of such actions. Thus, it is wise, or using one's wits, or logical, to think before taking any action which could adversely affect oneself or others.

On Becoming An Autonomous Astronaut

Via AAA

"This man spends his life wonderfully! While still a boy, he reads with interest books and stories on astronomy. With his first earned money he buys an astronomical telescope... the name of his daughter is Astra, the name of his son Mercury. Every thought, every step, manifests his aspiration for interplanetary flight!"
Pravda editorial 1934

24th May 1962: John Glenn, a US Marine Corps pilot, becomes the second American in orbit. He uses up most of the Aurora 7's fuel supply getting into a good position to photograph sunrises. For this he is severely reprimanded by NASA.
To become an Autonomous Astronaut you don't just need to understand the history of independent space exploration and act accordingly. You must also to be something different from the attitudes and values of the society we want to leave behind. We must be ourselves first and foremost - wherever that may take us. The "militant" posturing so adored by so many puritanical political activists is of no use to the AAA. It is a mindset that splits the individual into two, separating people's real individual and social needs - the reasons why they cannot stand life on planet earth, from their actions - their attempts to leave this world behind. If the AAA's programme turns into another job, even for one person, then we will have failed utterly.

The militant as an individual, and political groups as organisations, suffer from a sort of displacement of personality - what they want and how they try to get there are two completely different things. That is why our parties are just as valuable as our texts. That is why we move in several directions at once.

The AAA is not a programme that one puts into practice or makes others put into practice, but a social movement. Those of us who develop and defend the AAA's ideas do not have any advantage over others except a clearer understanding and a more rigorous expression; like everyone who is not especially concerned by theory, we feel the practical need for establishing autonomous communities in outer space.

We are not leaders or experts - and never will be. People who expect everyone involved with the network to be able to know about every aspect of space travel are deluding themselves. We cherish the learning process, the dialogue between interested individuals. That is how all of our ideas have developed, and that is how we will achieve our aims. Our training methods reflect this approach - they are as much about social interaction as they are about acquiring skills. Those who project their hopes and desires onto us must understand that they are involved - they are astronauts too.

There is no point in some kind of "élite" group of autonomous astronauts getting into space, our trajectories must be open to all. We are not proposing some sort of zero gravity hippie drop-out commune that excludes everyone else.

We do not have the future mapped out, waiting to fall off the shelf when the time is right. We only have a limited idea of what communities in outer space will look like at their beginning, let alone after a hundred years. Finding out is often the best bit, the whole point of the games we play. We are concerned with possibilities and experimentation, not with having the "correct line", or being right in retrospect.

The difficulty lies in the need to go beyond traditional notions of space travel while not rejecting relevant concepts. It is not enough to understand that NASA, The ESA and their counterparts in Eastern Europe have nothing in common with what we are trying to achieve. One must also see what has actually changed over the last 60 years, and which aspects of their technology can be adapted in the light of the present situation.

Zero gravity communities are at hand, only the inertia of society prevents them from forming. But their basis is there, and we will develop the propulsion to reach them.

The first step is to consider the issues, to engage in dialogue with like-minded people. The AAA's network of groups is a reflection of this stage. Anyone reading this can contribute. We have been conditioned by the media over the last 60 years to place our hopes and aspirations in outer space, but it is only the AAA that has taken up this challenge seriously. As individuals we are isolated, atomised. But if we can come together and pool our ideas and skills then community-based space travel will become not just a possibility, but a necessity. We have been fooled, conned into letting governments and armies get into space on our behalf. Occasionally they will dangle little tit bits in front of us like "life on Mars" or "ice on the Moon", but nothing really changes. It must be apparent that their interests are not ours. Now is the time for everyone, for all of us here to do it for ourselves - and for each other.

Every man and every woman is an autonomous astronaut.

John Eden
Raido AAA

A Building Of 'Secret Encoded Clues'

Via The Anomalist and The Globe And Mail

Four years ago, Frank Albo was driving past the Manitoba Legislature building when he looked up on its roof and spotted a pair of stone sphinxes that stuck out in the bright blue Prairie sky.

"They are a noted Egyptian motif," recalled the 33-year-old Winnipeg native, who was studying Eastern religions. "I thought: 'What on Earth are Egyptian sphinxes doing flanking a building where laws are enacted in Manitoba?' "

Since then, his tiny discovery has led to an exhaustive investigation into the grand Winnipeg building, which he now calls "the Da Vinci code in stone."

Mr. Albo is convinced that the legislature building, which was designed in 1912 by two English architects, holds "secret encoded clues" that suggest it was built as a talisman to harness energy and ward off evil -- a sort of beacon of the occult.

From the Golden Boy statue, which famously glistens from a dome atop the building, to the pair of large bison statues that guard a massive staircase leading to the legislature, Mr. Albo said the building was constructed to the specifications of the divine blueprints of ancient temples.

He said even the lieutenant-governor's reception room was built exactly to dimensions that match those of King Solomon's inner sanctum.

"I haven't researched every legislative capital in North America, but I doubt that you will find another one that is built to Golden Mean proportions, . . . that has Hermes -- the father of all occult sciences -- on the dome and is in the centre of North America," he said.

While Mr. Albo said he received a small government grant to pursue his research after the Premier's Office was contacted two years ago about his discovery, there is a lot of skepticism about his findings.

"The buffalo is the symbol of Manitoba -- that's why there are buffaloes there," said a senior government official, who didn't want to be identified.

However, he said that the government has no problem with people studying the Winnipeg landmark, which opened to the public in 1920 and is an example of Beaux-Arts architecture. "It's certainly open to a variety of interpretations," he said.

Mr. Albo, who has been known to walk around the building wielding a tape measure, said he knows many people likely don't believe him, but he's not deterred from continuing his investigation.

"Almost every day, I'm uncovering a new clue that is leading me further down this rabbit hole," the University of Winnipeg research fellow said.

"It started as a research paper, but has turned into an Indiana Jones adventure," he said. He has been aided over the years by blueprints, special access to Masonic archives and even a person who could translate hieroglyphics that were eventually found on the two sphinxes that set off his research in the first place.

The young sleuth said that while the bestselling thriller novel The Da Vinci Code "talks about things like the Golden Mean, Masonic architecture, symbolism of secret societies -- those elements, in true proportion, are incorporated in the architecture of this building."

Mr. Albo said he's often asked why this type of symbolism would be secretly encoded in a building constructed in Winnipeg.

The fact that Manitoba's capital city is located almost exactly in the middle of the continent is a likely explanation, he said.

"What greater, more important place, to put the beacon of energy that houses the blueprint of God in divine proportion and has a representation of [the] Holy of Holies?"

Mr. Albo, who wants to write a book about his unusual discovery, is currently concentrating his research on the building's lead architect, Frank Simon, to help him solve the "great mystery" still facing him -- the all-consuming Why?

Claude Levi-Strauss: The Structural Study Of Myth

In case you slept through this class as an undergrad...Via Mary Klages

Claude Levi-Strauss is a French anthropologist, most well-known for his development of structural anthropology. In his book The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Levi-Strauss argued that kinship relations--which are fundamental aspects of any culture's organization--represent a specific kind of structure; you might think of genealogical charts, with their symbols for father and mothers, sisters and brothers, as an example of kinship systems represented as structures. Levi-Strauss is also known for his structural analyses of mythology, in books like The Raw and the Cooked, where he explains how the structures of myths provide basic structures of understanding cultural relations. These relations appear as binary pairs or opposites, as the title of his book implies: what is "raw" is opposed to what is "cooked," and the "raw" is associated with nature while the "cooked" is associated with culture. These oppositions form the basic structure for all ideas and concepts in a culture.

In "The Structural Study of Myth," Levi-Strauss is interested in explaining why myths from different cultures from all over the world seem so similar. Given that myths could contain anything--they aren't bound by rules of accuracy, or probability--why is there an astounding similarity among so many myths from so many widely separated cultures?

He answers this question by looking at the structure of myths, rather than at their content. While the content, the specific characters and events of myths may differ widely, Levi-Strauss argues that their similarities are based on their structural sameness.

To make this argument about the structure of myth, Levi-Strauss insists that myth is language, because myth has to be told in order to exist. It is also a language, with the same structures that Saussure described belonging to any language.

Myth, as language, consists of both "langue" and "parole," both the synchronic, ahistorical structure and the specific diachronic details within the structure. Levi-Strauss adds a new element to Saussure's langue and parole, pointing out that langue belongs to what he calls "reversible time," and parole to "non-reversible time." He means that parole, as a specific instance or example or event, can only exist in linear time, which is unidirectional--you can't turn the clock back; langue, on the other hand, since it is simply the structure itself, can exist in the past, present, or future. Think of this sentence again: "The adjectival noun verbed the direct object adverbially." If you read the sentence, you read from left to right, one word at a time, and it takes time to read the whole sentence--that's non-reversible time. If you don't' read the sentence, but rather think of it as being the structure of English, it exists in a single moment, every moment--yesterday as well as today as well as tomorrow. That's reversible time.

A myth, according to Levi-Strauss, is both historically specific--it's almost always set in some time long ago--and ahistorical, meaning that its story is timeless. As history, myth is parole; as timeless, it's langue.

Levi-Strauss says that myth also exists on a third level, in addition to langue and parole, which also proves that myth is a language of its own, and not just a subset of language (like other literary productions, which are made of language, and which might be thought of as "paroles." Peter Barry gives this explanation in Chapter 2 of Beginning Theory). He explains that level in terms of the story that myth tells. That story is special, because it survives any and all translations. While poetry is that which can't be translated, or paraphrased, Levi-Strauss says that myth can be translated, paraphrased, reduced, expanded, and otherwise manipulated--without losing its basic shape or structure. He doesn't use this term, but we might call that third aspect "malleability."

He thus argues that, while myth as structure looks like language as structure, it's actually something different from language per se--he says it operates on a higher, or more complex level. Myth shares with language the following characteristics:

1. It's made of units that are put together according to certain rules.

2. These units form relations with each other, based on binary pairs or opposites, which provide the basis of the structure.

Myth differs from language (as Saussure describes it) because the basic units of myth are not phonemes (the smallest unit of speech that distinguishes one utterance from another, like a letter), morphemes (the smallest unit of relatively stable meaning that can't be subdivided, like a non-compound word), or sememes (the meaning expressed by a morpheme), or even signifiers and signifieds, but rather are what Levi-Strauss calls "mythemes." His process of analysis differs from Saussure's because Saussure was interested in studying the relations between signs (or signifiers) in the structure of language, whereas Levi-Strauss concentrates on sets of relations, rather than individual relations--or what he calls "bundles of relations."

His example for this is a musical score, consisting of both treble and bass clefs. You can read the music diachronically, left to right, page by page, and you can read it synchronically, looking at the notes in the treble clef and their relation to the bass clef. The connection between the treble and bass clef notes--the "harmony" produced--is what Levi-Strauss calls a "bundle of relations."

Basically, Levi-Strauss' method is this. Take a myth. Reduce it to its smallest component parts--its "mythemes." (Each mytheme is usually one event or position in the story, the narrative, of the myth). Then lay these mythemes out so that they can be read both diachronically and synchronically. The story, or narrative, of the myth exists on the diachronic (left-to-right) axis, in non-reversible time; the structure of the myth exists on the synchronic (up-and-down) axis, in reversible time.

D.I.Y. Semiotic Analysis

Via Daniel Chandler's "Semiotics For Beginners"

Semiotics can be applied to anything which can be seen as signifying something - in other words, to everything which has meaning within a culture. Even within the context of the mass media you can apply semiotic analysis to any media texts (including television and radio programmes, films, cartoons, newspaper and magazine articles, posters and other ads) and to the practices involved in producing and interpreting such texts. Within the Saussurean tradition, the task of the semiotician is to look beyond the specific texts or practices to the systems of functional distinctions operating within them. The primary goal is to establish the underlying conventions, identifying significant differences and oppositions in an attempt to model the system of categories, relations (syntagmatic and paradigmatic), connotations, distinctions and rules of combination employed. For instance, 'What differentiates a polite from an impolite greeting, a fashionable from an unfashionable garment?' (Culler 1985, 93); the investigation of such practices involves trying to make explicit what is usually only implicit.

A 'text' (such as a printed advertisement, an animated cartoon or a radio news bulletin) is in itself a complex sign containing other signs. Your initial analytical task is to identify the signs within the text and the codes within which these signs have meaning (e.g. 'textual codes' such as camerawork or 'social codes' such as body language). Within these codes you need to identify paradigm sets (such as shot size: long shot, mid shot, close up). You also need to identify the structural relationships between the various signifiers (syntagms). Finally you need to discuss the ideological functions of the signs in the text and of the text as a whole. What sort of reality does the text construct and how does it do so? How does it seek to naturalize its own perspectives? What assumptions does it make about its readers?

I strongly recommend detailed comparison and contrast of paired texts dealing with a similar topic: this is a lot easier than trying to analyse a single text. It may also help to use an example of semiotic analysis by an experienced practitioner as a model for your own analysis.

• Identifying the text
  
  • Wherever possible, include a copy of the text with your analysis of it, noting any significant shortcomings of the copy. Where including a copy is not practicable, offer a clear description which would allow someone to recognize the text easily if they encountered it themselves.
    
  • Briefly describe the medium used, the genre to which the text belongs and the context in which it was found.
    
• Consider your purposes in analysing the text. This will affect which questions seem important to you amongst those offered below.
  
  • Why did you choose this text?
    
  • Your purposes may reflect your values: how does the text relate to your own values?
    
• How does the sign vehicle you are examining relate to the type-token distinction?
  
  • Is it one among many copies (e.g. a poster) or virtually unique (e.g. an actual painting)?
    
  • How does this influence your interpretation?
    
• What are the important signifiers and what do they signify?
  
  • What is the system within which these signs make sense?
    
• Modality
  
  • What reality claims are made by the text?
    
  • Does it allude to being fact or fiction?
    
  • What references are made to an everyday experiential world?
    
  • What modality markers are present?
    
  • How do you make use of such markers to make judgements about the relationship between the text and the world?
    
  • Does the text operate within a realist representational code?
    
  • To whom might it appear realistic?
  • 'What does transparency keep obscure?' (Butler 1999, xix)
• Paradigmatic analysis
  
  • To which class of paradigms (medium; genre; theme) does the whole text belong?
    
  • How might a change of medium affect the meanings generated?
    
  • What might the text have been like if it had formed part of a different genre?
    
  • What paradigm sets do each of the signifiers used belong to? For example, in photographic, televisual and filmic media, one paradigm might be shot size.
  • Why do you think each signifier was chosen from the possible alternatives within the same paradigm set? What values does the choice of each particular signifier connote?
    
  • What signifiers from the same paradigm set are noticeably absent?
    
  • What contrasted pairs seem to be involved (e.g. nature/culture)?
    
  • Which of those in each pairing seems to be the 'marked' category?
    
  • Is there a central opposition in the text?
    
  • Apply the commutation test in order to identify distinctive signifiers and to define their significance. This involves an imagined substitution of one signifier for another of your own, and assessing the effect.
    
• What is the syntagmatic structure of the text?
  
  • Identify and describe syntagmatic structures in the text which take forms such as narrative, argument or montage.
    
  • How does one signifier relate to the others used (do some carry more weight than others)?
    
  • How does the sequential or spatial arrangement of the elements influence meaning?
    
  • Are there formulaic features that have shaped the text?
    
  • If you are comparing several texts within a genre look for a shared syntagm.
    
  • How far does identifying the paradigms and syntagms help you to understand the text?
    
• Rhetorical tropes
  
  • · What tropes (e.g. metaphors and metonyms) are involved?
    
  • How are they used to influence the preferred reading?
    
• Intertextuality
  
  • Does it allude to other genres?
    
  • Does it allude to or compare with other texts within the genre?
    
  • How does it compare with treatments of similar themes within other genres?
    
  • Does one code within the text (such as a linguistic caption to an advertisement or news photograph) serve to 'anchor' another (such as an image)? If so, how?
    
• What semiotic codes are used?
  
  • Do the codes have double, single or no articulation?
    
  • Are the codes analogue or digital?
    
  • Which conventions of its genre are most obvious in the text?
    
  • Which codes are specific to the medium?
    
  • Which codes are shared with other media?
    
  • How do the codes involved relate to each other (e.g. words and images)?
    
  • Are the codes broadcast or narrowcast?
    
  • Which codes are notable by their absence?
    
  • What relationships does the text seek to establish with its readers?
    
  • How direct is the mode of address and what is the significance of this?
    
  • How else would you describe the mode of address?
    
  • What cultural assumptions are called upon?
    
  • To whom would these codes be most familiar?
    
  • What seems to be the preferred reading?
    
  • How far does this reflect or depart from dominant cultural values?
    
  • How 'open' to interpretation does the sign seem to be?
    
• Social semiotics
  
  • What does a purely structural analysis of the text downplay or ignore?
    
  • Who created the sign? Try to consider all of those involved in the process.
    
  • Whose realities does it represent and whose does it exclude?
    
  • For whom was it intended? Look carefully at the clues and try to be as detailed as you can.
    
  • How do people differ in their interpretation of the sign? Clearly this needs direct investigation.
    
  • On what do their interpretations seem to depend?
    
  • Illustrate, where possible, dominant, negotiated and oppositional readings.
    
  • How might a change of context influence interpretation?
    
• Benefits of semiotic analysis
  
  • What other contributions have semioticians made that can be applied productively to the text?
    
  • What insights has a semiotic analysis of this text offered?
    
  • What other strategies might you need to employ to balance any shortcomings of your analysis?

Giving God A Facial With Aleister Crowley’s White Stains: Pornographic Occult Poetry As Shadow Confrontation & Cathartic Liberation

Via Nuhad418 and Occult Forums

Pornography has had a tendency to be thought of as marginal, seedy and deviant, yet it can also be seen as a natural result of a collectively repressed sexual shadow. This bifurcated state is similarly present in the Oxford Concise English dictionary definition of pornography in which eroticism and raw sex are separated from notions of beauty and aesthetics. This paper shall look at Aleister Crowley’s pornographic work White Stains as a form of shadow confrontation and psychological catharsis. From the perspective of the theories of analytical psychology, confronting those unconscious aspects of our psyche is a necessary prerequisite for self-development. Part of this confrontation can be accomplished by analysing the seemingly rigid separation of pornography and aesthetics and sex and divinity until they are blurred and ultimately broken. As we shall see, the pornographic poetry contained within this work can be seen as reflective of a process of psycho/spiritual liberation.

Aleister Crowley is an interesting phenomenon. Since his birth in 1875, there has been as much energy invested in attempts to warn the world of his inherent perverted and satanic nature as there has been in proselytizing his role as the Prophet of the New Aeon of the Crowned and Conquering Child. Arguably Crowley’s most balanced biographer, Richard Kaczynski, concisely summarises Crowley in his paper "Taboo and Transformation in the Works of Aleister Crowley" as: "Spiritual polymorph, sexual omnivore, psychedelic pioneer, and unapologetic social misfit, Aleister Crowley cut a scandalous figure in his Edwardian heyday." (Hyatt (ed.) 2000, 171)

We shall unfairly ignore a great deal of autobiographical and biographical data and focus on only two of Crowley’s primary passions: Magick and poetry. Magick, as a system of spiritual development not unlike Eastern systems of Yoga, and poetry were two writhing and interpenetrating forces in Crowley’s life. It is impossible to distinguish which took precedent in his life as one was constantly fecundating the other. His poetry can be seen as a spiritual sacrifice with the philosophy and ritual of Magick as, in a sense, a fluid poetic expression and manifestation of those spiritual passions. Underlying and informing both of these twin pillars of Aleister Crowley were the issues of sexuality, lust and the necessity of destroying the personal repression of these issues. With this mind set we now turn to White Stains.

White Stains was first published in 1898. The poetry, though labeled pornographic by various agencies, falls under the literary aegis of Decadent Poetry. The work was written by Crowley but was attributed to George Archibald Bishop, a pseudonym bearing his uncle’s family name, who is described as "a neuropath of the Second Empire." The poems which comprise the book were written, so Crowley tells us, to refute the findings of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s (1840-1902) 1893 Psychpathia Sexualis (Crowley 1989, 139). The thesis of von Krafft-Ebing’s book was that sexual aberrations were the result of physiological disease.

Crowley was of the opinion that any such aberrations were psychological in nature and turned to artistic expression to make his point. Crowley states: "I therefore invented a poet who went wrong, who began with normal innocent enthusiasms, and gradually developed various vices. He ends by being stricken with disease and madness, culminating in murder. In his poems he describes his downfall, always explaining the psychology of each act." (Crowley 1989, 139) Despite his scientific minded endeavor Crowley soon realised "the most personal relations could be taken by filthy minds as the basis for their malicious imaginations." (Crowley, 1989, 139)

Crowley indicates that he had no biographical inspiration for the poetry. (Kaczynski 2002, 42) With subjects including paedophilia, bestiality and necrophilia we can assume that Crowley was, in fact, approaching the poems as a way to place himself or his perspective, in each of the "poet’s" experiences rather than recounting actual biographical experiences. The poems then can be seen, despite their consciously intended poetic expression, as a means to bring to consciousness the severely repressive childhood Crowley had as a member of the ultra orthodox Plymouth Brethren and the influence of the waning Victorian period. However, Crowley’s shadow content may also be ours and it is this possibility which makes these poems useful. Sexuality, usually of a so-called deviant variety, is not the only subject matter evident within the poems; there are also the seemingly conflicting issues of spiritual and religious liberation.

Crowley’s later teachings, such as found in his opus Magick, emphasize personal liberation from unconscious controlling factors, whatever they may be. Kaczynski’s "Taboo and Transformation" quotes a letter from long time Crowley confidant Gerald Yorke: "Crowley didn’t enjoy his perversions! He performed them to overcome his horror of them." (Hyatt (ed.) 2000, 171) This is not to imply that "perversion" and "enjoyment" are mutually exclusive. He indulged in many "perversions" solely for the sake of pleasure. Yet he also consciously indulged in those "perversions" which he feared rather than attempting to avoid them or repress them. His approach was to embrace and experience that which is naturally repellent. This approach to self-development is not unique to Crowley’s spiritual path and is evident, perhaps with a little less fervor, in various methods of shadow confrontation found within analytical psychology.

However, Crowley disliked psychoanalysis in general and analytical psychology specifically as we see in his "An Improvement on Psychoanalysis":

…we should all study Jung. His final conclusions are in the main correct, even if his rough working is a bit sketchy; and we’ve got to study him, whether we like it or not, for he will soon be recognized as the undoubted Autocrat of the 1917 dinner table. Just ask your pretty neighbour at dinner tonight whether she has introverted her Electra-complex; because it will surely become one of the favorite conversational gambits of the coming social season! (Crowley 1998, 81)

Though Crowley may have found little merit in Jung’s early writings, the Beast is long dead. That being the case a jaunt through White Stains with an eye open for shadow material, in the form of the more deviant forms of sexuality, should be met with a minimal number of witty quips from beyond the grave.

Heavenly Hard-Ons: Ithyphallic Imagery & Sex In Ancient Athens

Via Widdershins

In the last century, when apoplexy claimed portly Victorian gentlemen of untarnished reputation, and their mourning widows got around to sorting through the effects with the children, it was not uncommon to find fine collections of Greek antiquities kept secretly under lock and key.

"Why look, Mummy, what on earth are they doing in the picture on this vase?" Impossible! What had at first glance seemed fine classical pieces, on closer inspection revealed forms and decorations of unspeakable obscenity. Genuine Attic black or red kraters could surely never have depicted men who... vile naked men in a state of... nevertheless, 10 minutes with a hammer could reduce such embarrassments to rubble, leaving the family reputation intact.

And yet, despite much virtuous vandalism through the ages, a handsome body of classical artifacts survives to celebrate the erect penis and its cute little accompanying balls. Classical Greeks clearly didn't mind showing open public appreciation for the "male generative member in its aroused state," technically a "stiffie."

In fact, well-known divinities such as Hermes, Pan and the satyrs of Dionysos were commonly represented in an ithyphallic state (sporting a hard-on). A herm, for example, is a nude statue of Hermes in which only the head, the balls, and the erect cock are carved in detail [Figure 1: "Herm, marble stele from Sifnos"]. In classical times, herms decorated many homes and most crossroads, pointing the way for weary travelers. Depictions of herms also showed up in vase paintings; one such painting shows a bird who has lit on an unusually exaggerated herm, apparently with amorous intent [Figure 2: "Herm, on pelike by Perseus painter"].

Even more impressive are the monumental marble hard-ons that decorate the temple of Dionysos on Delos [Figure 3: "Phallic stone statue from Delos"]. The tiny island of Delos, birthplace of Artemis and Apollo, was an ancient sanctuary and spiritual center that came under Athenian domination.

Today, people's reactions to ithyphallic imagery range from vicarious arousal to affectionate amusement, embarrassed laughter, moral outrage and even horror. In our own culture, it has long been considered less obscene to show a cunt than an erection, presumably because an unclothed woman could be an innocent victim of nakedness whereas an erect cock unambiguously implies arousal.

What was the significance of the ithyphallic gods and archetypes of the ancient world? Were the Greeks more civilized than we, less hung up? What did they think of such images? Such questions have been the subject of much research and debate in recent years, and the results have changed our view of the Greeks considerably.

The notorious French historian Michel Foucault deserves much credit for throwing open this discourse with The Use of Pleasure (Paris 1984, New York 1985), the second volume of his History of Sexuality. Classicists are still taking issue with his views, but at least they are seriously discussing sex in antiquity.

It took a feminist perspective, however, to change the way we look at classical Athens. Eva C. Keuls, in her magnificent book, The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens (1985, University of California 1993), lays bare the very ugly sex-role limitations that underlay that much-idealized culture.

Keuls details how Athenian men divided woman into two categories: breeders, who could not be seen in public, and worker women. Both categories were essentially slaves by our standards, male property. Even the supposedly respectable breeders (wives) possessed no public names. No record of a wife's name comes down to us from classical Athens -- in public documents, they were always identified as so-and-so's daughter or so-and-so's wife.

Keuls also does not flinch from stressing the ugliness of the institution of slavery on which Athenian men's much vaunted leisure depended.

The lascivious sex scenes that we still enjoy [Figures 4: "Hetaera mounting youth, on oenoche by Shuvalov painter" and Figure 5: "Couple, on cup by Wedding painter"] were invariably depictions of men with slaves and prostitutes. Sex with wives was not shown. The prices of common whores were fixed by Draco, Solon and succeeding lawgivers at artificially low ceilings. The elegant intellectual symposia of which the philosophers wrote turn out to have been male gatherings that generally began with eating and fine conversation, then went on to drinking of wine from the elegant crockery that comes down to us and to fucking slaves, courtesans and adolescent boys.

Chenrezig: The Embodiment Of The Sangha

Via Diamond Way Buddhist Center

The basis for the attainment of enlightenment is the bodhisattva promise. This is the commitment a yogi makes to work tirelessly to free all beings from suffering and bring them to the absolute realization and happiness of Buddhahood. This massive undertaking represents the pinnacle of the Mahayana teachings through which skillful compassion and wisdom are put into action. The Diamond Way (Vajrayana) vehicle works directly and quickly through contact with the realized mind of one's Lama and by identification with Buddhahood itself. However, the Vajrayana is supported entirely and never separated from the Mahayana view and its noble bodhisattva aspiration. Chenrezig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, is the embodiment of Sangha, the practicing friends who pull, prod, and inspire us to hold the complete happiness of others without exception as the eventual fruit of our successful practice. Being the third of the "Three Jewels," the Sangha is always portrayed by Chenrezig, who represents all Bodhisattvas and points to the joy-bringing and unselfish motivation that is the foundation of the Mahayana family of practicing friends.

Following his full and complete enlightenment under the Bodhi tree at Bodhgaya in India 2580 years ago, the Buddha gave his first teachings to this world. Lord Buddha's first discourse was on the surprising topic of suffering and its pervasive effect over conditioned existence. Buddha clarified that the nature of reality as it is experienced by unenlightened beings is continually beset by temporary happiness and pain, which are inextricably connected to causality. How beings experience their lives, their personal joys, sorrows and inevitable losses, have as their basis, prior and continued deluded thought, speech, and action from this and all previous lives.

Buddha Shakyamuni pointed out that all beings are motivated by a single common goal; above all else we seek to find happiness and avoid suffering. Having attained complete insight into karma, the causes behind both the good times and bad which all experience, Buddha went on to teach the means by which one may be obtained and the other avoided. Shakyamuni Buddha gave both the causal [Sutra] and fruitional, [Mantrayana] teachings on the practice of Loving Eyes or Chenrezig. Through discourse he taught the slower Mahayana means to accomplish this great bodhisattva's practice. To his yogi friends he directly transmitted the fast acting tantric method to actualize the powerfield of Chenrezig. In this way Buddha gave these and countless other methods to accomplish the complete welfare of both others and ourselves and to transform everything into joy bringing insight.

The Bodhisattva known as Loving Eyes, Chenrezig (Tib.) or Avalokitesvara (Skt.) is the meditational deity of Tibet. His mantra, OM MA NI PE ME HUNG has been incorporated into every aspect of human activity throughout the country. Today the practice of the Buddha of Compassion is fast taking root in the West. There are innumerable different aspects of Chenrezig with 108 recognized forms of the deity. How this bodhisattva originally manifested is the subject of differing historical perspectives.

According to Buddha Shakamunyi himself, as taught in the White Lotus Sutra, Chenrezig was at one point just an ordinary person such as you or I. Eons ago it was said that there was a king named Gyalpo Sergi Mijon who ruled a strong Buddhist country. One of the king's minister's sons at that time attained the state of full enlightenment and was known as Tathagata Rinchen Nyingpo. This Buddha predicted that the king himself would become the Buddha Amitabha. He foretold that the king's elder son would become the Bodhisattva of Compassion, Chenrezig. As forecast, these events did occur and the son, having attained awakened compassion, was reborn in the pure land of the Potala, where he works continuously to liberate beings from the web of samsaric pain and suffering. As a bodhisattava on the highest level, Chenrezig exists within the Dharmakaya, the all-pervading wisdom of space itself. He manifests on the clarity level to those whose realization has awakened.

Another version of the deity's origin, outlined in the text known as the Mani Khabum, describes the advent of Chenrezig in the relative world of phenomena. From his pure land Dewachen, the Buddha Amitabha saw the need to increase his activity toward benefitting others. From his right eye he emitted a beam of white light and from his left a ray of green. From these sprang forth respectively the manifestations of the deities Chenrezig and Tara. Chenrezig took form within the kingdom of a ruler known as Zangpochock, "Sublime Kindness." He was discovered seated on a lotus and lamenting the unbearable suffering of beings. Taking the young boy for his son, the king made inquiries of Amitabha regarding the appearance of the beautiful young man. "The child is an emanation of the activity of all the Buddhas," answered Amitabha. "He is the one who accomplishes the benefit of all beings, the one who makes joyful the heart of all Buddhas, his name is Chenrezig, the noble sovereign."

In the presence of Amitabha himself, Chenrezig took a vow to free beings from suffering, regardless of the realm they were in and bring them to awakening. Should he break this promise he wished that his body be split into a thousand pieces. In deep meditation Chenrezig emitted beams of different colored light to the six realms of suffering, sending emanations of himself to benefit others. Legend has it that three times Loving Eyes was able to empty the three lower realms of their occupants. After kalpas of meditation the great bodhisattva opened his eyes and saw that once again the lower realms were chock full of suffering, and decided the task was beyond even his ability. In accordance with his vow, Chenrezig split into a thousand pieces. Amitabha now set to work reconstructing the broken bodhisattva and aimed to bolster his noble resolve. This time Amitabha endowed him with nine peaceful and one wrathful face crowned with his own head. In addition a thousand arms with a wisdom eye on every palm was bestowed in order to empower the benevolent emissary's activity to the full. Along with the added appendages, Amitabha gave Loving Eyes the mantra, OM MA NI PE ME HUNG, as the means to transmit his transforming power.

The Dalai Lama is considered to be an
incarnation of Chenrezig.

This is his handprint.

Sirius, The God, Dog Star

Via SouledOut

The effect of Sirian energy and influences generated approximately nine years ago the last cycle when Sirius A and B were closest, in 1993/1994, have created renewed interest in this most influential heavenly body. The history books and religions of the world have had much to say about the God/Dog star. This article reflects on our ancestor’s beliefs and inspired insights into a great mystery … the mystery of the Dog Star and its influences on our little corner of the universe.

Sirius was an object of wonder and veneration to all ancient peoples throughout human history. In the ancient Vedas this star was known as the Chieftain's star; in other Hindu writings, it is referred to as Sukra, the Rain God, or Rain Star. The Dog is also described as "he who awakens the gods of the air, and summons them to their office of bringing the rain."

Sirius was revered as the Nile Star, or Star of Isis, by the ancient Egyptians. Its annual appearance just before dawn at the Summer Solstice, June 21, heralded the coming rise of the Nile, upon which Egyptian agriculture depended. This helical rising is referred to in many temple inscriptions, where the star is known as the Divine Sepat, identified as the soul of Isis. In the temple of Isis-Hathor at Dedendrah, Egypt, appears the inscription, "Her majesty Isis shines into the temple on New Year's Day, and she mingles her light with that of her father on the horizon." The Arabic word Al Shi'ra resembles the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian names suggesting a common origin in Sanskrit, in which the name Surya, the Sun God, simply means the "shining one."

For 35 days before, and 35 days after the Sun conjuncts it on July 4, the star Sirius is hidden by the Sun’s glare. The ancient Egyptians refused to bury their dead during the 70 days Sirius was hidden from view, because it was believed Sirius was the doorway to the afterlife, and the doorway was thought to be closed during this yearly period.

Located just below the Dog Star there exists a constellation called Argo, the Ship. Astrologically that area in the sky has been known as the river of stars which is a gateway to the ocean of higher consciousness.

The dog Sirius is one of the watchmen of the Heavens, fixed in one place at the bridge of the Milky Way, keeping guard over the abyss into incarnation. The Dog Star is a symbol of power, will, and steadfastness of purpose, and exemplifies the One who has succeeded in bridging the lower and higher consciousness.

The Chinese knew this place as the bridge between heaven and hell, the bridge of the gatherer, the judge. In the higher mind are gathered the results of the experiences of the personality. Between each life the soul judges its past progress, and the conditions needed to aid its future growth. As long as it is attached to desire, sensation, and needs experiences, it takes a body. The soul cannot pass over the "bridge" until it is perfected.

The association of Sirius with a celestial dog has been consistent throughout the classical world; even in remote China, the star was identified as a heavenly wolf. In ancient Chaldea (present day Iraq) the star was known as the "Dog Star that Leads," or it was called the "Star of the Dog." In Assyria, it was said to be the "Dog of the Sun." In still older Akkadia, it was named the "Dog Star of the Sun."

In Greek times Aratus referred to Canis Major as the guard-dog of Orion, following on the heels of its master, and standing on its hind legs with Sirius carried in its jaws. Manilius called it the "dog with the blazing face." Canis Major (large dog) seems to cross the sky in pursuit of the hare, represented by the constellation Lepus under Orion's feet. The concept of the mind slaying the real can be seen in the tales which relate the dog as the hunter and killer~the hound from hell.

Bodhicaryavatara

Via Metaxu

the enemies such as hatred and craving

have neither arms nor legs,

and are neither courageous nor wise,

how, then, have i been used like a slave by them?

for while they dwell within my mind,

at their pleasure they cause me harm;

yet i patiently endure them without anger

but this is an inappropriate and shameful time for patience.

Chapter 4, verses 28 and 29.

should even all the gods and anti-gods

rise up against me as my enemies,

they could neither lead nor place me

in the roaring fires of deepest hell.

but the mighty foe, these disturbing conceptions,

in a moment, can cast me amidst (those flames),

which when met will cause not even the ashes

of the king of mountains to remain.

Chapter 4, verses 30 and 31.

if i agreeably honor and entrust myself (to others),

they will bring me benefit and happiness;

but if i entrust myself to these disturbing conceptions,

in the future they will bring only misery and harm.

Chapter 4, verse 33.

deluded disturbing conceptions! when forsaken by the wisdom eye

and dispelled from my mind, where will you go?

where will you dwell in order to be able to injure me again?

but, weak-minded, i have been reduced to making no effort.

Chapter 4, verse 46.

having found its fuel of dissatisfaction

in the prevention of what i wish for

and in the doing of what i do not want,

hatred increases and then destroys me.

Chapter 6, verse 7.

even if it were the nature of the childish

to cause harm to other beings,

it would still be incorrect to be angry with them.

for this would be like begrudging fire for having the nature to burn.

Chapter 6, verse 39.

Santideva

Using LSD To Imprint The Tibetan Buddhist Experience

A classic text...via Soulseek.

Using LSD to Imprint the Tibetan Buddhist Experience
by Dr. Timothy Leary, Ph.D.

Having read this preparatory manual one can immediately recognize symptoms and experiences that might otherwise be terrifying, only because of lack of understanding. Recognition is the key word. Recognizing and locating the level of consciousness. This guidebook may also be used to avoid paranoid trips or to regain transcendence if it has been lost. If the experience starts with light, peace, mystic unity, understanding, and continues along this path, then there is no need to remember the manual or have it reread to you. Like a road map, consult it only when lost, or when you wish to change course.

Planning a Session
What is the goal? Classic Hinduism suggests four possibilities:

1. Increased personal power, intellectual understanding, sharpened insight into self and culture, improvement of life situation, accelerated learning, professional growth.
2. Duty, help of others, providing care, rehabilitation, rebirth for fellow men.
3. Fun, sensuous enjoyment, esthetic pleasure, interpersonal closeness, pure experience.
4. Trancendence, liberation from ego and space-time limits; attainment of mystical union.

The manual's primary emphasis on the last goal does not preclude other goals - in fact, it guarantees their attainment because illumination requires that the person be able to step out beyond problems of personality, role, and professional status. The initiate can decide beforehand to devote their psychedelic experience to any of the four goals.

In the extroverted transcendent experience, the self is ecstatically fused with external objects (e.g., flowers, other people). In the introverted state, the self is ecstatically fused with internal life processes (lights, energy waves, bodily events, biological forms, etc.). Either state may be negative rather than positive, depending on the voyager's set and setting. For the extroverted mystic experience, one would bring to the session candles, pictures, books, incense, music, or recorded passages to guide the awareness in the desired direction. An introverted experience requires eliminating all stimulation: no light, no sound, no smell, no movement.

The mode of communication with other participants should also be agreed on beforehand, to avoid misinterpretations during the heightened sensitivity of ego transcendence.
If several people are having a session together, they should at least be aware of each other's goals. Unexpected or undesired manipulations can easily "trap" the other voyagers into paranoid delusions.

Preparation
Psychedelic chemicals are not drugs in the usual sense of the word. There is no specific somatic or psychological reaction. The better the preparation, the more ecstatic and revelatory the session. In initial sessions with unprepared persons, set and setting - particularly the actions of others - are most important. Long-range set refers to personal history, enduring personality, the kind of person you are. Your fears, desires, conflicts, guilts, secret passions, determine how you interpret and manage any psychedelic session. Perhaps more important are the reflex mechanisms, defenses, protective maneuvers, typically employed when dealing with anxiety. Flexibility, basic trust, philosophic faith, human openness, courage, interpersonal warmth, creativity, allow for fun and easy learning. Rigidity, desire to control, distrust, cynicism, narrowness, cowardice, coldness, make any new situation threatening. Most important is insight. The person who has some understanding of his own machinery, who can recognize when he is not functioning as he would wish, is better able to adapt to any challenge - even the sudden collapse of his ego.

Immediate set refers to expectations about the session itself. People naturally tend to impose personal and social perspectives on any new situation. For example, some ill-prepared subjects unconsciously impose a medical model on the experience. They look for symptoms, interpret each new sensation in terms of sickness/health, and, if anxiety develops, demand tranquilizers. Occasionally, ill-planned sessions end in the subject demanding to see a doctor.
Rebellion against convention may motivate some people who take the drug. The naive idea of doing something "far out" or vaguely naughty can cloud the experience.

LSD offers vast possibilities of accelerated learning and scientific- scholarly research, but for initial sessions, intellectual reactions can become traps. "Turn your mind off" is the best advice for novitiates. After you have learned how to move your consciousness around - into ego loss and back, at will - then intellectual exercises can be incorporated into the psychedelic experience. The objective is to free you from your verbal mind for as long as possible.

Religious expectations invite the same advice. Again, the subject in early sessions is best advised to float with the stream, stay "up" as long as possible, and postpone theological interpretations.
Recreational and esthetic expectations are natural. The psychedelic experience provides ecstatic moments that dwarf any personal or cultural game. Pure sensation can capture awareness. Interpersonal intimacy reaches Himalayan heights. Esthetic delights - musical, artistic, botanical, natural - are raised to the millionth power. But ego-game reactions - "I am having this ecstasy. How lucky I am!" - can prevent the subject from reaching pure ego loss.

Some Practical Recommendations
The subject should set aside at least three days: a day before the experience, the session day, and a follow-up day. This scheduling guarantees a reduction in external pressure and a more sober commitment. Talking to others who have taken the voyage is excellent preparation, although the hallucinatory quality of all descriptions should be recognized. Observing a session is another valuable preliminary.

Reading books about mystical experience and of others' experiences is another possibility (Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and Gordon Wasson have written powerful accounts). Meditation is probably the best preparation. Those who have spent time in a solitary attempt to manage the mind, to eliminate thought and reach higher stages of concentration, are the best candidates for a psychedelic session. When the ego loss occurs, they recognize the process as an eagerly awaited end.

The Setting
First and most important, provide a setting removed from one's usual interpersonal games, and as free as possible from unforeseen distractions and intrusions. The voyager should make sure that he will not be disturbed; visitors or a phone call will often jar him into hallucinatory activity. Trust in the surroundings and privacy are necessary.

The day after the session should be set aside to let the experience run its natural course and allow time for reflection and meditation. A too-hasty return to game involvements will blur the clarity and reduce the potential for learning. It is very useful for a group to stay together after the session to share and exchange experiences.

Many people are more comfortable in the evening, and consequently their experiences are deeper and richer. The person should choose the time of day that seems right. Later, he may wish to experience the difference between night and day sessions. Similarly, gardens, beaches, forests, and open country have specific influences that one may or may not wish. The essential thing is to feel as comfortable as possible, whether in one's living room or under the night sky. Familiar surroundings may help one feel confident in hallucinatory periods. If the session is held indoors, music, lighting, the availability of food and drink, should be considered beforehand. Most people report no hunger during the height of the experience, then later on prefer simple ancient foods like bread, cheese, wine, and fresh fruit. The senses are wide open, and the taste and smell of a fresh orange are unforgettable.
In group sessions, people usually will not feel like walking or moving very much for long periods, and either beds or mattresses should be provided. One suggestion is to place the heads of the beds together to form a star pattern. Perhaps one may want to place a few beds together and keep one or two some distance apart for anyone who wishes to remain aside for some time. The availability of an extra room is desirable for someone who wishes to be in seclusion.

The Psychedelic Guide
With the cognitive mind suspended, the subject is in a heightened state of suggestibility. For initial sessions, the guide possesses enormous power to move consciousness with the slightest gesture or reaction.

The key here is the guide's ability to turn off his own ego and social games, power needs, and fears - to be there, relaxed, solid, accepting, secure, to sense all and do nothing except let the subject know his wise presence.

A psychedelic session lasts up to twelve hours and produces moments of intense, intense, INTENSE reactivity. The guide must never be bored, talkative, intellectualizing. He must remain calm during long periods of swirling mindlessness. He is the ground control, always there to receive messages and queries from high-flying aircraft, ready to help negotiate their course and reach their destination. The guide does not impose his own games on the voyager. Pilots who have their own flight plan, their own goals, are reassured to know that an expert is down there, available for help. But if ground control is harboring his own motives, manipulating the plane towards selfish goals, the bond of security and confidence crumbles.

To administer psychedelics without personal experience is unethical and dangerous. Our studies concluded that almost every negative LSD reaction has been caused by the guide's fear, which augmented the transient fear of the subject. When the guide acts to protect himself, he communicates his concern. If momentary discomfort or confusion happens, others present should not be sympathetic or show alarm but stay calm and restrain their "helping games." In particular, the "doctor" role should be avoided.

The guide must remain passively sensitive and intuitively relaxed for several hours - a difficult assignment for most Westerners. The most certain way to maintain a state of alert quietism, poised in ready flexibility, is for the guide to take a low dose of the psychedelic with the subject. Routine procedure is to have one trained person participating in the experience, and one staff member present without psychedelic aid. The knowledge that one experienced guide is "up" and keeping the subject company is of inestimable value: the security of a trained pilot flying at your wingtip; the scuba diver's security in the presence of an expert companion.

The less experienced subject will more likely impose hallucinations. The guide, likely to be in a state of mindless, blissful flow, is then pulled into the subject's hallucinatory field and may have difficulty orienting himself. There are no familiar fixed landmarks, no place to put your foot, no solid concept upon which to base your thinking. All is flux. Decisive action by the subject can structure the guide's flow if he has taken a heavy dose.

The psychedelic guide is literally a neurological liberator, who provides illumination, who frees men from their lifelong internal bondage. To be present at the moment of awakening, to share the ecstatic revelation when the voyager discovers the wonder and awe of the divine life-process, far outstrips earthly game ambitions. Awe and gratitude - rather than pride - are the rewards of this new profession.

The Period of Ego Loss or Non-Game Ecstasy
Success implies very unusual preparation in consciousness expansion, as well as much calm, compassionate game playing (good karma) on the part of the participant. If the participant can see and grasp the idea of the empty mind as soon as the guide reveals it - that is to say, if he has the power to die consciously - and, at the supreme moment of quitting the ego, can recognize the ecstasy that will dawn upon him and become one with it, then all bonds of illusion are broken asunder im