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dianna
18th September 2013, 19:20
I thought I would try and restart a thread for cultural commentary ...

Textophilia

https://www.adbusters.org/sites/default/files/magazine/splash_image/adbusters_109_textophilia_S.jpg


Early on-set textophilia is accompanied with feelings of euphoria, wholeness and exuberant empowerment, soon followed by social and environmental seclusion. Symptoms include an inability to look up, walk with eyes forward, complete full sentences, or engage in uninterrupted physical conversation for bursts longer than 60 seconds.

Without treatment, patients regard texting as more real than flesh-to-flesh communication. This feeling is reinforced by quick dopamine and oxytocin hits to the brain.

In advanced cases (25+ texts per day) life without texting becomes unbearable, empty and meaningless. At this stage, textophiliacs develop an inability to distinguish cognitively between device and existence.

Sudden withdrawal can lead to total collapse of identity and rediscovered freedom.



https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/109/textophilia.html

dianna
18th September 2013, 19:22
http://youtu.be/sBz6FaZ2CKQ

dianna
18th September 2013, 19:26
This hyperindividualism is a relatively new phenomenon in our lives. For most of human history, people have put something else near the center — the tribe, the gods, the natural world. But a consumer society can’t tolerate that, because having something else at the center complicates consumption.

http://slackerhacker.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/narcissus2.jpg


Your mind, a clear mountain stream running burbling through the rocks. Until Pepsi stands up, unzips its billion-dollar ad budget, and takes a leak, staining it forever brown. Your brain, a verdant old-growth forest, until it dies the death of a thousand swooshes. Your soul, filled with the crystal fresh air of early morning, until Philip Morris blows in a cloud of its seductive smoke.

No. Mental environmentalism may be the most important notion of this new century, but the only way to start this discussion is by admitting the analogy is not exact. Whatever the mental environment is, it’s not a pristine wilderness untrammeled by people. It’s not the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the Antarctic biosphere. No, the mental environment has been shaped by culture as long as we’ve been, well, human.

The mind is, among other things, a tool for collecting, storing, weighing images and ideas. Perhaps earlier in our primate evolution our brains worked differently, but for millions of years we have been shaping our own minds and the minds of those around us. Our mental environment is not the Yosemite of John Muir or Ansel Adams. It has always been more like Central Park, a landscaped reflection of human notions. Every generation, every community, has had a mental environment. The culture. The zeitgeist. It is that almost invisible fog of assumptions in which we live our lives, the set of images and ideas we barely notice because they are so common as to be both banal and overwhelming.

What’s more, this is not the first moment that our mental environment has been polluted. We’ve seen all kinds of toxins poured into the infostream. Check out a Leni Riefenstahl movie if you want to see what I mean. Try to imagine life during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The state, the church have time and again become mentally oppressive until eventually a resistance emerged — a resistance that, from Martin Luther to Vaclav Havel, said at least in part: “We want our minds back.” Not all the way back: We’ve never owned our minds entirely. But more of our minds, in better shape. [...]


We are the first few generations to receive most of our sense of the world mediated rather than direct, to have it arrive through one screen or another instead of from contact with other human beings or with nature.

If the mental environment we live in has a single distinctive feature, the way that oxygen defines our atmosphere, it is self-absorption. That’s what a mental environment gone awry has produced; that is the toxic outcome of our era’s unique pollution. Some years ago, working on a book, I watched every word and image that came across the largest cable system in the world in a 24-hour period — more than 2,000 hours of ads and infomercials, music videos and sitcoms. If you boiled this stew down to its basic ingredient, this is what you found, repeated ad infinitum: You are the most important thing on Earth, the heaviest object in the universe. From the fawning flattery of the programming to the mind-messing nastiness of the commercials, it continually posited a world of extreme individualism. Even more than, say, violence, that’s the message that flows out the coaxial cable. Characters on television may turn violent to get what they want now, but it’s the what-they-want-now that lies nearer the heart of the problem.

This hyperindividualism is a relatively new phenomenon in our lives. For most of human history, people have put something else near the center — the tribe, the gods, the natural world. But a consumer society can’t tolerate that, because having something else at the center complicates consumption.

This appeal to us as individual fragments grows ever more powerful and precise. Most of the new technologies premise their appeal (especially to advertisers) on their ability to target with frightening accuracy our locations and our psyches.

So far, the assaults on our mental environment have been mainly from the outside, but we are seeing sorties on the inside too. Already we see psychopharmacology rampant, the ranks of people who need such medicine swelled by a creeping malaise: a gradual redefinition of our foibles, of our tiny personal tragedies. There are pills for the camera-shy, for “shopper’s remorse,” for the stresses of personal bankruptcy — it’s getting crowded in the collective bummer tent. Before long, genetic engineers may well be able to literally tweak the brains of our children, offering them “extra intelligence” or perhaps docility, upgraded memory at the price of downgraded meaning. Improved individuals, at the price of whatever individuality should mean in its sweetest sense.

But. The human mind and heart are not dead yet; indeed there are signs that we’ve reached the moment of resistance, that a million Vaclav Havels, albeit often tongue-tied and unsure precisely of their mission, are rising from different corners to challenge this assault. If you ask me what I remember from the WTO battle in Seattle, it is not the sting of rubber bullets or the choke of gas; it is a jaunty balloon rising above the melee with this message painted on its side: “Wake Up Muggles.” If you’ve read Harry Potter, then you know: Muggles are all of us, living in a world of magic but unable to see it, focused as we are on television and mall. But we are waking, in sufficient numbers to ensure there will be the same kind of fight for the mental environment as there has been for the physical one. And, of course, the fights will overlap.

Mental environmentalists may well lose, just like their colleagues working in the physical world. Global warming may be too much to overcome, and so may genetic engineering or push media or the simple warm-bath skill of those designers and marketers who would sap our lives for their own advancement. But the fight itself holds tremendous possibility. The liberation from self-absorption comes most of all in the battle to help others and in the vision of a world that makes sense to our minds, a world where no single idea (“buy”) holds sway.

Forget monoculture, in our fields or in our heads; imagine instead a thousand different communities, adapted to the physical places they inhabit, sharing insight and difference, appreciating small scale and large heart. Where no musician sells 10 million copies, but 10 million musicians sing each night. Where we are freed from consumer identity and idolatry to be much more ourselves. Where we have our heads back.

Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature, The Age of Missing Information, and is the pioneer behind the 350.org movement. His latest book is Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.


https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/90/mckibben-environmental-movement-mind.html

modwiz
18th September 2013, 19:28
Thanks for restarting this thread, Dianna. The textophilia post is too true. The Matrix has found another tube to put into people. This tube does have a flaw. It allows for subversive anti-matrix programming. However, most texters are saying nothing about nothing. Emotional body gibberish, mostly.

The need for face to face interaction and discussion has never been more important. I only have friends and acquaintances who are not addicted to phone usage.

This thread is off to a great start.

dianna
18th September 2013, 21:02
Alan Moore's fascinating description of Artist as Magician



http://youtu.be/OdNbocU6wKc

dianna
18th September 2013, 21:04
I like the term he uses "Scribe Gods"



http://youtu.be/vw1Sv04YQS4

dianna
20th September 2013, 16:53
From "Dinner With Andre"


http://youtu.be/g_mivWFkSKU

dianna
21st September 2013, 14:27
A friendly reminder from Robert Anton Wilson



http://youtu.be/zTLkiJUX05A

dianna
1st October 2013, 10:30
http://youtu.be/gnp3q3rH9GQ



http://www.zengardner.com/files/jiddu_krishnamurti-profoundly_sick_society.jpg

777
1st October 2013, 11:56
Thanks for restarting this thread, Dianna.

Here here Wizard. Dianna you are a real warrior of truth, ever realistic and never cowaring from the har****ies that must be faced, amended and eventually transmuted to attain the final alchemy of spirit on this planet. It is a serious role and one that is impreitive to complete.

I salute you sister, this thread is a gem.

dianna
1st October 2013, 13:53
Slavoj Zizek On “They Live”


Slovenian Marxist philosopher Zizek on John Carpenter’s campy sci-fi classic They Live and our entrapment as “subjects of pleasure”


http://youtu.be/F4WAXQJyxCo

dianna
1st October 2013, 15:17
Allen Ginsberg reads America


http://youtu.be/Orar-V3y5Sk

dianna
1st October 2013, 15:26
Strindberg and Helium in Absinthe and Women


http://youtu.be/dt3vYWZFxK0

dianna
15th November 2013, 12:59
Love, Reality, and the Time of Transition



Remarkable treatise on consciousness and social transition. Take it for what it’s worth to you, but there’s a lot of terrific food for thought in this well done piece. – Zen Gardner

http://www.zengardner.com/files/Love-Reality-and-the-time-of-Transition.jpg



http://youtu.be/UrAgb1-UKQ8


This video sheds light into the nature of love, relationships, the "New Age" movement, reality-creation, quantum physics, objectivity vs. subjectivity and how it all relates to the topics of "conspiracy theories", psychopathy, and the importance of esoteric self-work.
http://veilofreality.com/
"Love, Reality, and the Time of Transition" has been selected as the #1 film 2011-2012 of the "Top 100 Global Development Movies".
"The best positive, inspirational, thought-provoking movie of our times."
- RYB TV

Written, narrated and audio editing by Bernhard Guenther
Visuals and video editing by Humberto Braga

dianna
5th February 2014, 11:58
304
(Yorick fighting an “icchantika”)

There seems to be very little scientific study about the “genesis” of evil on this planet. Philosophy and Theology have addressed the problem of evil from ethical and moralistic viewpoints, and has even given us solutions that can be worked with using a basic “agreed upon” conception of humanity. The problem, however, is that human atrocity and neurosis never seems to get any better no matter how many brilliant minds work on the problem. This begs the question: what if evil does not come about because of misguidance, lack of love or correctable character flaws?

Lets take a “tour of another reality” and consider for a moment that, hiding in plain sight, is another species that looks normal in every way, but is completely vacuous of any quality connected with spirit, like an empty container that lives to fill itself with all that is antithetical to the general population. It is imperative that we consider the probability of “interspecies predators” as “an idea whose time has come”.


“A considerable percentage of the people we meet on the street are people who are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead. It is fortunate for us that we do not see and do not know it. If we knew what a number of people are actually dead and what a number of these dead people govern our lives, we should go mad with horror.” (G.I. Gurdjieff)

There are a handful of researchers that address this issue. A most interesting analysis comes to us from Andrzej Lobaczewski, whose work helps to uncover the true nature of what he deems the “essential psychopath” and its ribbon of destruction on a macrosocial level. In his book Political Ponorology, this type of being is discussed as a biological aberration, although small in number, who have a “quality” of difference such that it is capable of affecting millions of people in negative ways. His research tells us that they also “learn to recognize each other in a crowd as early as childhood, and they develop an awareness of the existence of other individuals similar to them.” They are experts in human weakness and prey upon it without the slightest guilt or remorse. Void of any moral compass whatsoever, this being lives for its own amusement and survival. Their propensity is “naturally” towards aggression in all forms.

Hervey Clerkley, brings the idea of the psychopath to the level of “daily life” in his book The Mask of Sanity. He observes that in all ways this being appears normal, but is hiding its true nature. Cleckley tells us that “we are dealing here … with something that suggests a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly.” Martha Stout, sums up the psychopath in her work The Sociopath Next Door when she asks us to imagine having no conscience. A psychopath has no feelings at all. Can we imagine a complete lack of concern for the well-being of others, no guilt or shame, no matter the immorality of your deeds? The actual “concept” of responsible action is completely foreign to its paradigm. Void of emotion, coupled with the ability to hide this defect (because everyone simply assumes morality is a basic human quality) allows for serious danger to cut a path across society. And, we also have Robert Hare’s Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopath. Again, we feel his alarm while describing the psychopath as “callous and remorseless … profoundly lacking in empathy … a person who functions without the restraints of conscience.” He understands why people would doubt the existence of such a being because even he admits its like a “dark mystery with staggering implications for society … finally beginning to reveal itself.”

It is amazing, that once you accept the idea of an “interspecies predator”, you realize that this is not a new concept, but has been expressed by the mythology of ancient cultures. The “archons” of the early Christian Nag Hamadi Codices are beings, although human in appearance, who come about by mistake. They are void of the divine spark, and live to imitate and control God’s true children. The Buddist Mahaparinirvana Sutra talks about “icchantikas”, a species, deeply evil, who take pride in a twisted worldview, only wishing to do harm to others. They hide themselves, living contrary to Buddist precepts. They are labeled the “incurable ones” and the “spiritual dead” as they have no capacity for true dharma — attaining Buddahood is impossible for them. In Native American indigenous cultures there is also the idea of “weitiko”. A human being with this “virus” is a “predator” and a “cannibal.” Because they are not in touch with their own humanity, they are blind to humanity in others. They have a need to dominate, and an essential nature geared towards destruction.

Again, this may be an “idea whose time has come” in the current Kali Yuga, or “age of revealing”. As the old saying goes, awareness of a problem is the first step in solving it. Understanding that actual biological entities, as opposed to supernatural forces, that we can only guess at, is at the root of “evil” on the planet may be a difficult pill to swallow. We need to put aside our current ideology that all humans are basically the same, and allow ourselves to consider that we may be dealing with beings that cannot be reasoned with and are essentially unredeemable. It seems imperative to accept this if we are to have a chance to evolve out of the neurotic chaos that is currently running the world.

Dianna

Eelco
5th February 2014, 12:26
It is amazing, that once you accept the idea of an “interspecies predator”, you realize that this is not a new concept, but has been expressed by the mythology of ancient cultures. The “archons” of the early Christian Nag Hamadi Codices are beings, although human in appearance, who come about by mistake. They are void of the divine spark, and live to imitate and control God’s true children. The Buddist Mahaparinirvana Sutra talks about “icchantikas”, a species, deeply evil, who take pride in a twisted worldview, only wishing to do harm to others. They hide themselves, living contrary to Buddist precepts. They are labeled the “incurable ones” and the “spiritual dead” as they have no capacity for true dharma — attaining Buddahood is impossible for them. In Native American indigenous cultures there is also the idea of “weitiko”. A human being with this “virus” is a “predator” and a “cannibal.” Because they are not in touch with their own humanity, they are blind to humanity in others. They have a need to dominate, and an essential nature geared towards destruction.


Thank you. I was wondering the last few days how Buddha and buddhism was tainted by archon interference. (sort of naively hoped that it would have escaped it entirely)
I found an english version of the sutta you mentioned and will read it.

http://www.nirvanasutra.net/convenient/Mahaparinirvana_Sutra_Yamamoto_Page_2007.pdf

That said. Over the years I have slowly opened my eyes to the psychopatic people in charge on this planet.
Movies like fishhead. books like saints and psychopaths and of course the unveiling of the rothchildes, bilderbergers etc etc.

What still buggs me though is that we label them as ont human, lacking capabilities that make the rest of us human.
And there is where I am at a loss wheter to feel deeply sorry for them. Or that I should mimic them and cold-heartedly wish them an eternal grave.

They were born in human form on this planet. They are alive. Does that not suply enough reason to love, cherish and help them as best we can?
I have met diagnosed psychopaths when working in psychiatric wards. Amazing how they subdue/sweettalk other patients and get on the nerves of the staff.

A special kind of human indeed.

With Love
Eelco
my spelling mistake "ont human" means "to de-humanize" in dutch.
It wasn't what i meant to write, but there it is.
Suggesting they were human but that it was taken away........?

Eelco
5th February 2014, 14:16
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.16.1-6.vaji.html

A slightly deeper search reveals that like the bible, suttra's get changed as well.
The Pali canon is supposed to be the closest to the buddha's teaching.
Here's the pali version. it differs somewhat to the mahayana or tibetan translation.

WIth Love
Eelco

dianna
5th February 2014, 14:22
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.16.1-6.vaji.html

A slightly deeper search reveals that like the bible, suttra's get changed as well.
The Pali canon is supposed to be the closest to the buddha's teaching.
Here's the pali version. it differs somewhat to the mahayana or tibetan translation.

WIth Love
Eelco

Thanks Eelco, I will definitely have a look at that and maybe a comment later

modwiz
5th February 2014, 15:47
Thank you, Dianna, for restarting this thread. I will post some thoughts after some coffee and tobacco. With 8+ inches of snow outside, the tobacco part should prove interesting. I have to locate the boots I wear when talking to muggles.:ha:

Oh, forgot I had 12+ inches of snow to shovel.:fpalm:

modwiz
6th February 2014, 03:13
Culture and community two interrelated personal interests of mine, so having a thread for culture is a treat.

Culture is an organizer. Culture is a word with rich connected meanings. Being in a culture can make the culture almost invisible because it is ubiquitous, hence something to filter out in most daily applications. Appreciating a big picture of culture reveals the coherence and organization, or dysfunction, of the system represented by a culture. Since a culture is also a system it needs an energy medium to sustain itself. Ecosystems are analogous to a culture. Organs in our bodies are 'cultures'. If one wanted to 'grow' a liver one would start by culturing liver cells.

Another aspect of cultures is common or shared DNA. With bacterial cultures this approaches 100%. Chinese and Japanese culture share some commonalities as does their DNA but they have bifurcated into separate distinct cultures. There is creativity in this.

All major cultures will have some kind of sub-cultural manifestation even when the dominant culture seeks to prohibit it. A healthy 'parent' culture would create symbiotic or benign sub-cultures that would compliment the whole. The dominant culture prohibition is a sign of dysfunction at some level of the (new word coming) morpho-matrix. In this case matrix being the lattice of a system stored in the cultures 'morpho' field, This field is dynamic and in a constant real time exchange in an 'upload' and 'download' fashion.

Humanity can choose what constitutes 'common DNA'. The macro level is all humanity. From this creativity, and philos/agape, a blossoming of human variety could burst forth like wildflowers in a meadow.

I will close with that thought.

Eelco
6th February 2014, 03:30
Mission acclompished is a historical and study of the Maha-parinibbana Sutta. It also tries to compare the different versions pali/sanskrit/chinese. to get a feel for this text

excerpt:
As far back as 1912 Winternitz remarked: “It is by
comparing the Pali text minutely with the Sanskrit in which
fragments of a Parinirvana Sutra have come down to us
with the Tibetan and Chinese translations that we can discern
which parts of the Sutta are ancient and genuine”.1
Nevertheless, by analyzing the text I have shown that
even in the Pali recension itself there are evolutionary
tendencies related to the early phase of Buddhism and
ecclesiastical history.

http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/mission-accomplished.pdf

with Love
Eelco

dianna
6th February 2014, 10:20
Oh, forgot I had 12+ inches of snow to shovel.:fpalm:

Yea, I heard … my sister lives in your area and she said the snow was crazy yesterday!

OH, and someone caught a picture of you after shovelling …

http://www.nwf.org/~/media/Content/NWM/Outdoors/snowbunny_225x290_photolibrarycom.ashx?w=225&h=290&as=1

dianna
6th February 2014, 10:34
Mission acclompished is a historical and study of the Maha-parinibbana Sutta. It also tries to compare the different versions pali/sanskrit/chinese. to get a feel for this text

excerpt:
As far back as 1912 Winternitz remarked: “It is by
comparing the Pali text minutely with the Sanskrit in which
fragments of a Parinirvana Sutra have come down to us
with the Tibetan and Chinese translations that we can discern
which parts of the Sutta are ancient and genuine”.1
Nevertheless, by analyzing the text I have shown that
even in the Pali recension itself there are evolutionary
tendencies related to the early phase of Buddhism and
ecclesiastical history.



with Love
Eelco

This might keep me busy over the weekend … thanks
Did you read the whole thing? Is the idea of the “icchantikas” discussed?

dianna
6th February 2014, 10:40
All major cultures will have some kind of sub-cultural manifestation even when the dominant culture seeks to prohibit it. A healthy 'parent' culture would create symbiotic or benign sub-cultures that would compliment the whole. The dominant culture prohibition is a sign of dysfunction at some level of the (new word coming) morpho-matrix. In this case matrix being the lattice of a system stored in the cultures 'morpho' field, This field is dynamic and in a constant real time exchange in an 'upload' and 'download' fashion.



I will close with that thought.

"morpho matrix" interesting …

Eelco
6th February 2014, 10:41
Not yet.

Slowly working my way through.
I have found a digital copy of the long discourses translated by bhikku bodhi.
So working through the mahaparinibbana first. then i'll look at the commentaries.

May take some time though. working, lots of children and tot are distracting me from sitting and reading.

With Love
Eelco

What struck me as a main difference though is the language used in the sanskrit vs the pali version. Where the sanskrit start with exaggerations of the numbers of bhikkus that were present. The pali does not mention any numbers in the first 2 chapters.

To me that indicates the writer of the sanskrit version felt compelled to add a bit of extra fluf or awe into the texts.
Could be wrong about that though.

With Love
Eelco

A quick search through it with the acrabat search function yields 0 results.
Could be the spelling though as pali and sanskrit differ somewhat

john parslow
6th February 2014, 11:01
I think I must be the only person I know with textaphobia - like many I have a mobile phone (for emergencies only!) but fortunately that eventuality has not yet arisen. I am often chided by friends and my children, for having missed texts which they have sent, this is usually for the very good reason that unless I am on a motoring trip my mobile is usually off!

Is it just me, or have people genuinely forgotten how to communicate in the good old-fashioned way of oral or written language? I know I am now an old git and expected to be miserable - I am really not. But the times I have been walked into by 'texter's' pushing a shopping trolly without a word of apology in case they miss a smiley or a LOL is beyond count. Another pet hate of mine is mindless idiots who shop shouting into their mobile phones like they are totally alone ... Dianna thank you so much for this informative thread. JP

Altaira
6th February 2014, 13:06
I only do text messages to send something that needs to be cleared or address or phone number John. I am a bit like you in times, keep forgetting my mobile phone in my bag or somewhere else. :) Unfortunately thanks to the technology many have forgotten to communicate verbally without the aid of a device. How many times people go to a restaurant to have a meal and prefer company of their tablet or mobile phone instead of chatting to those who they are with.

http://www.bajiroo.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/funny-people-texting-on-dining-table.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tv3KpjcXPSo/T8QuCINtoUI/AAAAAAAAEJM/m7u6nbpERmE/s1600/texting%2Bwhile%2Beating.jpg

Well but this seems is not enough and today consumerist monster is growing and growing generating more and more so called convenient gadjets to please the consumer for which we pay with withdrawal from each other. Our kids will lose any social skills and will feel more familiar communicating with machines than with humans. Soon the waiters at the restourants will be only serving the dinner as everything else is going to be replaced by the newest gadgets which are shown in this video. http://live.wsj.com/video/restaurants-add-ipads-to-the-menu/E1C44E16-3565-48F5-89E1-5D00FCDE81C4.html#!E1C44E16-3565-48F5-89E1-5D00FCDE81C4

PurpleLama
6th February 2014, 13:15
It is with great humor I observe the common sentiment that texting is necessarily detrimental to one's cognitive processes. Kids these days may be more or less educated or articulate, as various as it ever was, but although texting tends to be condensed communication, and is utilized more extensively by progressivey younger age groups, it is less of an impediment than one might venture to guess, no more so than the limitations we find in communicating in text on boards such as these. The fact that so much more communication occurs that has ever been possible in the past, it outweighs the specific limitations of the given medium, just the fact that so many utilizing text messaging would not have been inspired to communicate in any manner beyond whats verbal, so as bad as their grammar must be at least the brain is getting some exercise, even as painful as it is for us to read. All this social media can likewise be seen as the below reflection of what is widesperead psychic connectivity, above. Perhaps such would account for the phenomenon of haunted threads.

Some of this is surely a subconscious attempt at self defense, given that I and another totter tend to exchange thousands of text messages in a given month. I won't identify which one of the many posters on this forum that this other person might be.

Eelco
6th February 2014, 13:31
I am thankful for text devices.
That said though it comes down to BALANCE. I do detest the fact that (even though I do this myself at many occasion) that a conversation is neigh impossible to have these days because your conversation partner has to read just one more txt mesage. Or has the need to whats-app or tweet just this point you were making etc etc.

In that sense it disrupts restful and relaxed conversation, where pauzes used to be part of that conversation in which a sense of bonding and thoughtful reflexion would occur.

That said maybe in times such as these calm abiding is overrated and are our minds evolving to swift on the spot decision making and are the tools we use a mirror for our inner development. I for one notice though that my thought processes are disrupted by incomming messages.
On the surface at least, because my best and insigtfull thoughts and writings are made on the go so to speak.

With Love
Eelco

Altaira
6th February 2014, 13:38
I would speculate here that by losing our ability to communicate verbally we might develop a new one to communicate in a soul level.

modwiz
6th February 2014, 15:40
I think I must be the only person I know with textaphobia - like many I have a mobile phone (for emergencies only!) but fortunately that eventuality has not yet arisen. I am often chided by friends and my children, for having missed texts which they have sent, this is usually for the very good reason that unless I am on a motoring trip my mobile is usually off!

Is it just me, or have people genuinely forgotten how to communicate in the good old-fashioned way of oral or written language? I know I am now an old git and expected to be miserable - I am really not. But the times I have been walked into by 'texter's' pushing a shopping trolly without a word of apology in case they miss a smiley or a LOL is beyond count. Another pet hate of mine is mindless idiots who shop shouting into their mobile phones like they are totally alone ... Dianna thank you so much for this informative thread. JP

I have never texted and do not have it enabled on my phone.

Not so much a judgment as a reality I prefer.

dianna
7th February 2014, 17:10
The Hallucination of Cultural Programming

http://leejosephpublicity.com/uploads/0000/2257/LaLuz_Reger_all_for_one_exerpt_sm.jpg


There is one truth that nobody can debate, and that is that we physically die at some point within the near future, relative to the life spans of everything else in the universe. However, it seems that many forget this fact of life and dedicate great amounts of time and energy towards icons, personalities, and ideas that are unconnected to their own day-to-day lives and do not matter in the grand scheme of things.

The intense (and sometimes violent) passion that sports fans experience as well as the immersion of oneself into the “sleazy” world of celebrities are some ways in which cultures and societies divert our thoughts away from things in life that matter the most. Things which directly affect us and make lasting impressions upon our beings. By creating illusory focus points within reality for the masses to lock their awareness into, culture and those who have enough power to dictate or influence it becomes a hindrance to one’s own personal self-growth and self-actualization.

Think about the massive quantities of time that people spend on these things which have no direct connection to their lives…all that time which could have been dedicated towards something a bit more constructive or positive in experiential existence.

Our culture is an artificially-created box in which a seemingly-endless number of things exist which attempt to entice an individual towards giving away massive amounts of his or her conscious lives towards the focusing in on trivialities or things which have no direct influence on his or her life and self-actualization. Terrence McKenna had mused on the same thought-form, which is that humanity seems to be imprisoned by its cultural programming. This programming is so intense and strong, that it seems to be the most imprisoning factor within our lives. Culture does indeed appear to be a mass hallucination.

There are numerous boundaries that exist within culture have been erected by groups or individuals within society that (either knowingly or unknowingly) helped hinder any progress being made in peoples’ self-growth, self-actualization, and/or Self-realization. Things such as sports rivalries, clothes styles and various types of class systems are just a few of the boundaries that had hardly had any useful place in reality because they did not exist prior to us creating them.

Only by complete boundary dissolution can we revert to a more pure form of experiential existence, where the focus of one’s self was on one’s personal growth and of others’. Boundary dissolution refers to deconstruction and dissolving of boundaries that have been created by humans and which have existed as long as the ego has influenced humanity.

The purpose of boundary dissolution is to do away with these falsehoods that separate humanity rather than uniting it. Societal boundaries and other boundaries based on the self-ish nature of the ego can be said to be the cause of many of society’s ills and problems.

With a good system come good results, and the results and outcomes of boundary dissolution indeed are many. You can try for yourself to see this as being a reality. Instead of giving into cultures’ aspects that are unhelpful in shifting your consciousness to a higher level, have the idea of oneness within your mind and immerse yourself in things that unite, rather than divide.

By doing away with the constructs that separate you from others or create any bit of hostility, hatred, or animosity between you and someone else and by letting go of the fear that hinders you from taking these actions, you will be freed from the overbearing grip of the ego. When you dissolve the boundaries that divide and separate you from others, you will have the ability to transform your world into one of serenity, tranquility, and peace. Oneness will not be just a philosophical or utopian concept but a reality that will be experienced by the totality of the human race.

We must always have hope that this will become a reality because the future is yet to be determined. Possibilities are endless.


http://www.zengardner.com/hallucination-cultural-programming/

dianna
7th February 2014, 20:04
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSURD

http://somaticsurrealist.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/uburoi21.gif


The present age is, in a profound sense, an age of absurdity. Poets and dramatists, painters and sculptors proclaim and depict the world as a disjointed chaos, and man as a dehumanized fragment of that chaos. Politics, whetherof the right, the left, or the center, can no longer be viewed as anything but an expedient whereby universal disorder is given, for the moment, a faint semblance of order; pacifists and militant crusaders are united in an absurd faith in the feeble powers of man to remedy an intolerable situation by means which can only make it worse. Philosophers and other supposedly responsible men in governmental, academic, and ecclesiastical circles, when they do not retreat behind the impersonal and irresponsible facade of specialization or bureaucracy, usually do no more than rationalize the incoherent state of contemporary man and his world, and counsel a futile “commitment” to a discredited humanist optimism, to a hopeless stoicism, to blind experimentation and irrationalism, or to “commitment” itself, a suicidal faith in “faith.”

But art, politics, and philosophy today are only reflections of life, and if they have become absurd it is because, in large measure, life has become so.

[T]he world has by no means passed out of the age of absurdity [...] , but rather into a more advanced — though temporarily quieter — stage of the same disease … in its shadow men stand paralyzed, between the extremes of an external power and an internal powerlessness equally without precedent. … The whole world, it almost seems, is divided into those who lead meaningless, futile lives without being aware of it, and those who, being aware of it, are driven to madness …

It is unnecessary to multiply examples of a phenomenon of which everyone is aware. Suffice it to say that these examples are typical, and even the most extreme of them are but advanced forms of the disorder which surrounds every one of us today and which, if we know not how to combat it, takes up residence in our hearts. Ours is an age of absurdity, in which the totally irreconcilable exists side by side, even in the same soul; where nothing seems to any purpose; where things fall apart because they have no center to hold them together. It is true, of course, that the business of daily life seems to proceed as usual — though at a suspiciously feverish pace — men manage to “get along,” to live from day to day. But that is because they do not, or will not think; and one can hardly blame them for that, for the realities of the present day are not pleasant ones. Still, it is only the person who does think, who does ask what, beneath the distractions of daily life, is really happening in the world — it is only such a person who can feel even remotely “at home” in the strange world we live in today, or can feel that this age is, after all, “normal.”

It is not a “normal” age in which we live; whatever their exaggerations and errors, however false their explanations, however contrived their world-view, the “advanced” poets, artists, and thinkers of the age are at least right in one respect: there is something frightfully wrong with the contemporary world. This is the first lesson we may learn from absurdism.

For absurdism is a profound symptom of the spiritual state of contemporary man, and if we know how to read it correctly we may learn much of that state. But this brings us to the most important of the initial difficulties to be disposed of before we can speak of the absurd. Can it be understood at all? The absurd is, by its very nature, a subject that lends itself to careless or sophistical treatment; and such treatment has indeed been given it, not only bythe artists who are carried away by it, but by the supposedly serious thinkers and critics who attempt to explain or justify it. In most of the works on contemporary “existentialism,” and in the apologies for modern art and drama, it would seem that intelligence has been totally abandoned, and critical standards are replaced by a vague “sympathy” or “involvement,” and by extra-logical if not illogical arguments that cite the “spirit of the age” or some vague “creative” impulse or an indeterminate “awareness”; but these are not arguments, they are at best rationalizations, at worst mere jargon. If we follow that path we may end with a greater “appreciation” of absurdist art, but hardly with any profounder understanding of it. Absurdism, indeed, may not be understood at all in its own terms; for understanding is coherence, and that is the very opposite of absurdity. If we are to understand the absurd at all, it must be from a standpoint outside absurdity, a standpoint from which a word like “understanding” has a meaning; only thus may we cut through the intellectual fog within which absurdism conceals itself, discouraging coherent and rational attack by its own assault on reason and coherence.

http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/YfQUIy7TNIk/hqdefault.jpg

The philosophy of the absurd is, indeed, nothing original in itself; it is entirely negation, and its character is determined, absolutely and entirely, by that which it attempts to negate. The absurd could not even be conceived except in relation to something considered not to be absurd; the fact that the world fails to make sense could occur only to men who have once believed, and have good reason to believe, that it does not make sense.

No competent thinker, surely, can be tempted to take seriously any absurdist claim to truth; no matter from which side one approaches it, absurdist philosophy is nothing but self-contradiction. To proclaim ultimate meaninglessness, one must believe that this phrase has a meaning, and thus one denies it in affirming it; to assert that “there is no truth,” one must believe in the truth of this statement, and so again affirm what one denies. Absurdist philosophy, it is clear, is not to be taken seriously as philosophy; all its objective statements must be reinterpreted imaginatively, and often subjectively. Absurdism, in fact — as we shall see — is not a product of the intellect at all, but of the will.

The philosophy of the absurd, while implicit in a large number of contemporary works of art, is fortunately quite explicit — if we know how to interpret it — in the writings of Nietzsche; for his nihilism is precisely the root from whichthe tree of absurdity has grown. In Nietzsche we may read the philosophy of the absurd; in his older contemporary Dostoevsky we may see described the sinister implications which Nietzsche … failed to see. In these two writers, living at the dividing point between two worlds, when the world of coherence … was being shattered and the world of the absurd based on its denial was coming into being, we may find almost everything there is of importance to know about the absurd.

The absurdist revelation, after a long period of underground germination, bursts into the open in the two striking phrases of Nietzsche so often quoted: “God is dead” means simply, that faith in God is dead in the hearts of modern men; and “there is no truth” means that men have abandoned the truth revealed by God upon which all European thought and institutions once were based. … And even over that ever-decreasing minority who still believe, inwardly as well as outwardly, for whom the other world is more real than this world — even over these the shadow of the “death of God” has fallen and made the world a different and a strange place.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Bh-aQA0Ri2Y/Ub5Ks8neJSI/AAAAAAAABiE/Wu1QBu38kJk/s1600/Nietzshe%2Band%2BSeize%2Bthe%2BAbsurd.jpg

Nietzsche, in the Will to Power, comments very succinctly on the meaning of nihilism:

What does nihilism mean? — That the highest values are losing their value. There is no goal. There is no answer to the question: “Why?”

Everything, in short, has become questionable. … [C]ertainty and faith that once held society and the world and man himself together, are now gone, and the questions for which men once had learned to find the answers in God, now have — for most men — no answers.



“God is dead,” “there is no truth”: the two phrases have precisely the same meaning; they are alike a revelation of the absolute absurdity of a world whose center is no longer God, but — nothing. … This may be seen in theabsurdist affirmation of a void at the center of things, and in the implication present in all absurdists to a greater or lesser degree, that it would be better if man and his world did not exist at all. But this attempt at nihilization, this affirmation of the Abyss, that lies at the very heart of absurdism, takes its most concrete form in the atmosphere that pervades absurdist works of art. In the art of those whom one might call commonplace atheists — men like Hemmingway, Camus, and the vast numbers of artists whose insight does not go beyond the futility of the human situation as men imagine it today, and whose aspiration does not look beyond a kind of stoicism, a facing of theinevitable — in the art of such men the atmosphere of the void is communicated by boredom, by a despair that is yet tolerable, and in general by the feeling that “nothing ever happens.” But there is a second, and more revealing, kind of absurdist art, which unites to the mood of futility an element of the unknown, a kind of eerie expectancy, the feeling that in an absurd world, where, generally, “nothing ever happens,” it is also true that “anything is possible.” In this art, reality becomes a nightmare and the world becomes an alien planet wherein men wander not so much in hopelessness as in perplexity, uncertain of where they are, of what they may find, of their own identity — ofeverything except the absence of God. This is the strange world of Kafka, of the plays of Ionesco and — less strikingly — of Beckett, of a few avant-garde films like “Last Year at Marienbad,” of electronic and other “experimental” music, of surrealism in all the arts, and of the most recent painting and sculpture — and particularly that with a supposedly “religious” content — in which man is depicted as a subhuman or demonic creature emerging from some unknown depths. It was the world, too, of Hitler, whose reign was the most perfect political incarnation we have yet seen of the philosophy of the absurd.

This strange atmosphere is the “death of God” made tangible. It is significant that Nietzsche, in the very passage (in the Joyful Wisdom) where he first proclaims the “death of God” — a message he puts in the mouth of a madman — describes the very atmosphere of this absurdist art.

We have killed him (God), you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker?

Such, in fact, is the landscape of the absurd, a landscape in which there is neither up nor down, right nor wrong, true nor false, because there is no longer any commonly accepted point of orientation.

http://www.savagechickens.com/images/chickenabsurd.jpg

[I]t is impossible not to sympathize with some at least of the artists of the absurd, seeing in them an agonized awareness and sincere depiction of [the] world … let us not lose sight of the fact that their art is so successful in striking a responsive chord in many precisely because they share the errors, the blindness and ignorance, and the perverted will of the age whose emptiness they depict. To transcend the absurdity of the contemporary world requires, unfortunately, a great deal more than even the best intentions, the most agonized suffering, and the greatest artistic “genius”. The way beyond the absurd lies in truth alone; and this is precisely what is lacking as much in thecontemporary artist as in his world, it is what is actively rejected as definitely by the self-conscious absurdist as it is by those who live the absurd life without being aware of it.

For it is quite clear that absurdists are not happy about the absurdity of the universe; they believe in it, but they cannot reconcile themselves to it, and their art and thought are attempts, after all, to transcend it. As Ionesco has said (and here he speaks, probably, for all absurdists): “To attack absurdity is a way of stating the possibility of non-absurdity,” and he sees himself as engaged in “the constant search for an opening, a revelation.” Thus we return to thesense of expectancy we have already noted in certain absurdist works of art; it is but a reflection of the situation of our times, wherein men, disillusioned and desolate, yet hope in something unknown, uncertain, yet to be revealed, which will somehow restore meaning and pupose to life. Men cannot live without hope, even in the midst of despair, even when all cause for hope has been, supposedly, “disproved.”

But this is only to say that nothingness, the apparent center of the absurdist universe, is not the real heart of the disease, but only its most striking symptom. The real faith of absurdism is in something hoped for but not yet fully manifest, a “Godot” that is the always implicit but not yet defined subject of absurdist art, a mysterious something that, if understood, would give life some kind of meaning once more.


From the essay “The Kingdom of Man and the Kingdom of God” by Eugene Rose
http://www.desertwisdom.org/dttw/rebellion/philosophy-absurd.html

modwiz
7th February 2014, 20:11
I am so glad this thread is eking out an existence. The non-participation is striking, IMO. The formation of a planet encompassing uber-culture is breathtaking to contemplate. It is the new home we need to create to live in.

My recent meditations on issues around culture have taken me "way out there". Huge amounts of data/information/inspiration. Putting into words verbally would not challenge me to much. Typing it would be masochistic.

I will bring what I can when things 'settle in' a little. Dianna might appreciate it.

BabaRa
7th February 2014, 20:20
dianna from post #33
Ours is an age of absurdity, in which the totally irreconcilable exists side by side, even in the same soul; where nothing seems to any purpose; where things fall apart because they have no center to hold them together. It is true, of course, that the business of daily life seems to proceed as usual — though at a suspiciously feverish pace — men manage to “get along,” to live from day to day. But that is because they do not, or will not think; and one can hardly blame them for that, for the realities of the present day are not pleasant ones. Still, it is only the person who does think, who does ask what, beneath the distractions of daily life, is really happening in the world — it is only such a person who can feel even remotely “at home” in the strange world we live in today, or can feel that this age is, after all, “normal.”


I have often felt this is because we actually do have split minds. On the one hand we believe this 3D is real and everything in it is solid. Conversely, we belief what our scientists have shown us through microscopes, that everything we see is made up of molecules which are in constant motion, rotating at phenomenal speed and there is much space between them.
So, we look at a table and say it is stationary and solid - and at the same time believe it is mostly space made up of tiny particles in motion.

dianna
7th February 2014, 20:20
Dianna might appreciate it.

Dianna appreciates anyone who even gets her … LOL LOL

PurpleLama
7th February 2014, 20:52
Speaking of Absurdity, all I can say is "Hail, Eris!", which in itself is not absurd.

dianna
8th February 2014, 12:58
I love the way the artist describes his subjects as "biblical" …


Big City Life: Homeless in NY


Published on Feb 2, 2014

There are around 1,750,000 homeless people in the USA today. According to the 2013 Annual Homeless Assessment Report, nearly 64,000 people, including 22,000 children, are homeless in New York City. Through an artist who paints New York vagrants, RT relays the life stories of people who live on the edge, learns how they came to the streets and how to survive there. We also meet some of the dedicated volunteers who do what they can to help.


http://youtu.be/JIKVULiB5qk

dianna
9th February 2014, 17:53
Report: It All Some Kind Of Sick Joke

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Media/Pix/pictures/2008/04/04/onion460.jpg


PRINCETON, NJ—According to a new report published this week, researchers at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study have definitively concluded that it—all of it—is some kind of sick joke.

The comprehensive study, which carefully analyzed fields as varied as physics, theology, history, economics, sociology, and philosophy, is said to have found overwhelming evidence that it is all just one big sham specifically designed to humiliate us and cause us as much misery as possible.

"The results are clear and irrefutable: Everything from the unfathomable expanses of the universe to our own continuously deteriorating bodies is apparently nothing more than an elaborate and perverse joke that's being perpetrated on us repeatedly and entirely against our will," said Faisal Ahmed, a quantum physicist and lead author of the paper. "Furthermore, research suggests there's not a single goddamned thing we can do about it."

"It is important to note as well that the more one contemplates what a spiteful and deceptive set-up it all is, the crueler and sicker the joke becomes," Ahmed continued. "That's how truly sadistic it all is."

Researchers confirmed every attempt so far to assign meaning to any of it has not worked, with scholars' embarrassing failures having served only to provide further evidence that it is all just a twisted ruse crafted by an uncaring cosmos that looks down upon the hapless human race with a mixture of amusement and utter indifference.

According to Ahmed, the grand malicious joke encompasses every conceivable facet of the universe, including matter, time, gravity, the Krebs cycle, subatomic particles, evolution, photosynthesis, human society, marriage, friendship, life itself, continental drift, infectious disease, reproduction, the totality of history, free will, and both general and special relativity.

Ahmed reported that the study itself was also part of the joke, stating that the laugh was on the study's readers, for not realizing before that they were mere pawns in some sort of endless, dizzying maze without end or meaning—and also on the researchers themselves, for spending much of their careers deducing this simple fact of existence.

"The question we're ultimately left with is what kind of a savage and twisted god would find this funny?" theological scholar Meredith Hemphill said. "Unfortunately, the only thing we can say for sure is that we're not dealing with a benevolent deity or even a detached and unfeeling maker, but apparently some unknowable force that takes a perverted, I would argue psychopathic, pleasure in watching its creations struggle and fail."

"That is, if there is even anything out there watching us at all, and we're not simply acting out our painful and meaningless lives in front of no one but ourselves," Hemphill added. "The joke would quite certainly be on us in that case."

According to the report, the fact that humans occasionally experience positive emotions such as happiness, accomplishment, and hope appeared to be the most diabolical aspect of the joke. In repeated testing, scientists found that such feelings were invariably dashed regardless of circumstances, often in an extremely and needlessly cruel manner, and that this is an immutable fact they now regard as a fundamental constant of the universe.

Based on the results of their study, researchers have urged individuals not to waste their time trying to find answers to why it's all such a ****ed-up charade, questioning whether it has some higher purpose, or attempting to devise some way to avoid it—such efforts being futile gestures that would only "play right into" the universe's trap.

"There appears to be no escaping the feelings of humiliation, emptiness, and despair this barbaric joke exacts on everyone," said Nobel laureate and professor emeritus of psychology Daniel Kahneman. "However, trial studies show humankind is far better off when we push it all into the back of our heads, try not to think about it, and just trudge mindlessly toward death."

"And let me remind everyone that the joke does indeed have an ending, one which generally occurs much, much sooner than we expect," Kahneman added.


http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-it-all-some-kind-of-sick-joke,26592/

Seikou-Kishi
10th February 2014, 22:50
I have often felt this is because we actually do have split minds. On the one hand we believe this 3D is real and everything in it is solid. Conversely, we belief what our scientists have shown us through microscopes, that everything we see is made up of molecules which are in constant motion, rotating at phenomenal speed and there is much space between them.
So, we look at a table and say it is stationary and solid - and at the same time believe it is mostly space made up of tiny particles in motion.

The atoms have so much space between them? Yes, they do. They also have so much space within them. Also, the building blocks of atoms are themselves mostly space, and they are built upon nothingness moving. So we have a moving nothingness cloaked in several layers of nothingness and we call this stuff!

ronin
10th February 2014, 23:01
The atoms have so much space between them? Yes, they do. They also have so much space within them. Also, the building blocks of atoms are themselves mostly space, and they are built upon nothingness moving. So we have a moving nothingness cloaked in several layers of nothingness and we call this stuff!

could it be dark matter and this is the invisible energy that holds everything together?

modwiz
10th February 2014, 23:32
could it be dark matter and this is the invisible energy that holds everything together?

:hmm:Maybe dark matter has a culture to do just that.:scrhd:

:back to topic:

dianna
22nd February 2014, 22:30
Enter Through the Image
L. Caruana

http://www.lcaruana.com/webmedia/omega.media/L_Caruana_Enter_Through_the_Image_cover_120dpi.167 x267jpg

“Truth did not come into the world naked, it came in types and images” Gospel of Philip


What is it that modern society really knows about its identity or origin? And, who or what is God? Today, we can swim in an ocean of theology, philosophy, gurus, books and bloggers to try and remedy humanities fundamental ignorance regarding itself. Or, we can start at the beginning, before our “age of prose” and follow the “iconologic” of L. Caruana in his new book “Enter Through the Image.”

The idea of iconologic or an “image language” is not new. Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, two of our cultures great “mytho poets”, spent their lifetimes seeking out this lost manner of thinking as a way for humans to have a better, more coherent way of understanding themselves. What is new is the way these ideas are presented by Caruana; a fresh, more accessible spin for a wider audience.

The reader is taken on a quest for truth and self-knowledge, as Caruana leads you through a labyrinth of cultures and imagery, ancient and modern, showing how patterns, which can only come from a collective unconscious, have been with humanity since the beginning of time; patterns from divinity that seeks to be known and know itself. He tells us “whenever we stand in silent awe before a sacred image, we find ourselves, caught unawares, before a hallowed threshold.” It is our job, we are told, to cross this threshold, and enter through the image.

Symbols, for Caruana, are reflections of our inherent transcendent reality, and though artists have expressed them in various ways, are ineffable and inscrutable. Myth and symbol hold our mind to truth, but are not themselves the truth; they are simply borrowed time and gain through-out the ages. And certainly, this book is about encouraging us; Caruana instructs the reader on ways to take these empty playthings of God and use them as tools of exploration and gnosis, of themselves, the cosmos and the core divinity that unites us all.

Does Caruana succeed at his instruction in iconologic? Not always. One bizarre section has him interpreting the dreams of Baudelaire and Descartes, which seems unnecessary and overly lengthy, but is amusing none the less. In fact, much of his discussion on dream symbology and analysis, although important as a point, becomes a bit redundant, unless the reader has never heard of such a thing. A further critique to consider, is the way certain chapters start very clear and exciting; and certainly end that way. But somehow in the middle seem to become bogged down as though the author is holding court with himself, and has forgotten he has an audience at all.

That being said, Enter Through the Image is a unique discussion on comparative mythology. A solid and thorough backbone of academic research enriched by the visionary insight of a well noted artist, makes it appealing to the conventional, more serious students of human origins, as easily as the esoteric artistic psyche. Sophistication would be the ground rule for either crowd, however, as it not a simple read. From eastern mysticism, to Dali; Gnostic christians, Egypt, LSD research, Tibet and Dante (to name just a few), Caruana is skilled in his connections of it all.

With L. Caruana’s Enter Through the Image, we are offered a certain type of book that allows us to escape what can become a mundane conventional existence, into a world rich and vibrant, full of an excitement that comes from uncovering secrets and opening gifts. A book so full of self discovery, that the reader risks missing a bit of the party if read only once. A rare book that will be dog eared and thread bare by the time all of its treasure is sifted.

Excerpt of book review, D. Khouri
Symbols in and of themselves are vacuous; nobody owns them.

Altaira
22nd February 2014, 23:06
A very interesting book dianna, I had a look on the amazon's preview and read a few pages. What grabbed my attention was the very intriguing analogy between the myths and dreams, the alternative way of seeing and interpreting dreams. I think this is very important point of view because as I perceive it our other dimensional existence communicates to a great extend through a vivid and vibrant images. This is what we see while exploring other worlds in meditation state or while project our consciousness beyond the 3D reality.

dianna
24th February 2014, 11:16
An Introduction to Landscape Theology
David Titterington


http://originalart.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Starry-Night.jpg


Landscapes play a prominent role in our lives and myth-histories, and yet they are rarely acknowledged as actors. Geographers tell us that the landscape is an inert stage where historical individuals act. However, the story I want to tell is how places are “agentic.” Landscapes enable, inspire and constrain our activities. We are literally moved by them, and landscape elements such as trees, rivers, mountains and fields attract us to their surfaces and they shape societies. For example, archaeologist Christopher Tilley (2004) argues that our prehistoric social identities were created, reproduced, and transformed by stone outcroppings. Rock forms were landmarks and social sites, and viewing rock art was an important process by which we could tap into ancestral powers at specific locations. It also helped us anchor identity in those powers and locations.

Landscapes fill our lives with time and space. People pilgrimage through them as a form of their religious and everyday lives, and through time-space routines of movement we know where we are in relation to familiar places and objects and “how to go on” in the world.

Space is not homogenous; some spaces are “wiser” and more sacred than others. Theologian Belden Lane (2001) says sacred space is a “storied place” because certain locales come to be recognized as sacred through the stories told about them. However, chthonic forces are also at work in the complex process of sacralization. Geological features inspire specific stories, and only then can the sacred place hold and transmit culture across time. This is one reason why anthropologist Keith Basso (1996) assures us that “wisdom sits in places.”

In 1836, Emerson declared “every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.” Harvard Divinity School’s foremost Talmudic Scholar, Jon Levenson, makes a similar observation: “Geography is simply a visible form of theology.” Mircea Eliade points out the large, cosmic mountain that permeates many world religions as “axis mundi,” and we read in scripture again and again that “God is our rock.” Landscapes are situated inside people as people are situated inside landcapes. Feminist and semiotic Theologian, Sally McFague, puts it well: “the interior landscape is influenced by the exterior.”

The geographical center of the Islamic faith is an enshrined black stone, the Kaaba. The oldest known Buddhist temple, just recently unearthed in Nepal, is organized around an ancient tree. Today, people travel from all over the world to visit waterfalls, caves, and trees in national parks, and the recent United States government shutdown highlighted how economically and culturally valuable these spaces truly are.

A horizon becomes a metaphor for the limits of our knowledge. Land and sky become metaphors for the body and mind, and they affect how we experience both. Spinoza regards human emotions such as love, hatred, anger, envy, pride, pity, “and other agitations of the mind not as vices of human nature but as properties pertaining to it in the same way as heat, cold, storm, thunder, and such pertain to the nature of the atmosphere." Lane: "There is an unaccountable solace that fierce landscapes offer to the soul. They heal, as well as mirror, the brokeness we find within." Sky mind, ocean mind, desert mind, landscape mind.

The distinction of inside awareness from outside stimulus is only a convention. Merleau-Ponty describes the sky: “As I contemplate the blue of the sky I am not set over against it as a non-cosmic subject; I do not possess it in thought, or spread out toward it some idea of blue...I abandon myself to it and plunge into this mystery, it thinks itself in me.”

A vast, uncluttered place operates on the human mind to give rise to a singularity of vision. There is healing power in mountain silence and desert indifference. Landscapes point out “what matters” or what, as a material substrate for the meta-system of culture, remains. Like our genes, they are more permanent than we are, and thus the landscape becomes a symbol for the eternal (Eliade’s “eternal return”). In our myths, the prophetic vision always occurs outside the city and in the landscape. Moses leaves the walls of Egypt and finds God in the desert; Buddha leaves his tribe and finds God under a tree; Joseph Smith leaves his organized religion and finds God in the forest; Carlos Castaneda leaves the modern city and finds God in the jungle. As we move into the wilderness, the lights of civilization recede and then disappear. The landscape gets bigger, and the stars can speak to one of vast reaches of cosmic time; stones murmur stories from deep time; rivers, winds and rains tell stories of ethereal, fleeting time where nothing lasts long enough to even exist. This quality of the landscape is reflected in the Japanese Buddhist ukiyo-e “floating world” pictures which flatten sky, mountain and sea into 2-D patterns on semi-transparent paper. These oriental visions, the mirror opposite of the solid, eternal landscapes in occidental spirituality, attracted impressionist painters like Monet to fill in the area between the tree branches with thick, solid paint, foregrounding space.

In the final years of his life, Cezanne painted over sixty images this way of the same scene; a view over fields to Mont Saint-Victoire. Vincent Van Gogh left his job as a preacher to study God more directly through “the language of nature.” Landscape painters explore ways in which humans and landscapes are involved with each other, intertwined, tied together, depend on each other. They show how the lines between imagination and our material reality are blurring.

http://www.paul-cezanne.org/Road-Near-Mont-Sainte-Victoire.jpg

Now it is widely accepted within the humanities and sciences that subject and object, mind and matter, human and landscape co-constitute each other. The seemingly irretrievable Cartesian wedge between the material world and the human mind is finally being dissolved. The reciprocity of imagination and landscape, of mind-bodies and worlds, of art and life implies that mythic narratives are not merely poetic descriptions of a certain world, but material performances of one as well.

Words and basic experiences are lifted from the objective world, and because they become the substantive base from which all our thoughts and mythic narratives appear, we can conclude there is a material landscape from which the mythic archetypes are formed. These archetypes do not have real, breathing, itching, leaking bodies, but they are always generated by bodies which are situated within material landscapes.

What is objective and universal may be called transpersonal, or ‘archetypal,’ in the Jungian sense; it is that more-than-human place we share with others, that “earthly ground of rock and soil that we share with the other animals and the plants” (Abram 1996: 281). Merleau-Ponty: “My body is made of the same flesh as the world.” Therefore, if we wish to look for the “real archetypes,” we may want to pay attention to landscapes and their elements.

This review of the cultural and material power of landscape serves as a reminder that there are geological conditions that, operating in conjunctions with sociocultural dynamics, make possible the rise of consciousness, language, myth, and a sense of the sacred.

This is the first part in a series. Stay tuned here and at the Landscape Theology blog.
http://realitysandwich.com/217132/introduction-to-landscape-theology/

dianna
17th January 2015, 17:18
https://offtherailzblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/faces-in-fire.jpg

Relationship anarchy questions the conventions of love relationships and the idea that “love” is only real when two people exclude others in its expression. It presents a paradigm where love towards one does not diminish love towards another, and that there are many definitions to this concept.

When it comes to the idea of “love” “sex” and “relationships” we, as a species, are truly sleepwalking. We spin our wheels in a repressive social structure of eros, but it seems, when looking around, that the lack of visionary freedom most people allow themselves has led to a wasteland of apocalyptical ruin between the sexes.

It seems like the sexual revolution was something “the people” were not ready to embrace. Or maybe the actual problem lies in the idea that we do not need cultural “revolution” as much as we need spiritual “revelation”. Revolutions are still hidden behind masks, dogmas and institutions. Revelations come directly from our divine source; a source that has unimaginable expressions of itself.

Everywhere evident, after some time, relationships will either “break apart” or “lose their spark”. If love is not wrong, then it should be considered that our social standards are flawed. We need to seriously rethink our outdated idea of “fidelity” and how it exiles us from what might be necessary for our soul, our sense of wholeness; exiles us from so many interesting and beautiful people we may want to experience, past conventional rules. The universe is dynamic; it does not keep itself on a choke-chain to maintain its status quo. If humanity wants to release it full potential, then it will have to liberate and acknowledge its tremendous sexual drive.

The “liberation” of eros will never happen until we get rid of contracts, vows and bans. There can be no more bargaining. The idea of “love” cannot depend on the condition that desire for others must be completely snuffed out. Renouncing the pleasure and company of others, to show devotion to one, is farcical, if not an extremely masochistic concept. Love is either built on trust and truth, or perishes because it is built on sand.

Relationship anarchy allows for expressions of love in an atmosphere of general lawlessness, like the definition of anarchy suggests, without common standards or purpose. Love’s “secret requirements” need to be replaced with the thrill of the unknown; a mirror for divine reflection. Relationship anarchy allows the true genius of the universe, and its extraordinary, infinite expressions of love to surprise us.

modwiz
17th January 2015, 17:27
Very thoughtful article above. There is much for people to look at in relationships but, we would be better served to understand ourselves as a stand alone model. Knowing who we really are would allow us to bring this being into our relationships. Insecurity is not a relationship dynamic. It is a personal one.

It is good to have you posting again, Dianna.

dianna
17th January 2015, 18:22
The following is excerpted from Meaning in Absurdity: What Bizarre Phenomena Can Tell Us About the Nature Of Reality (Bernardo Kastrup)

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41dH6BX5VXL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

"The Formless Speaks"
http://realitysandwich.com/241298/the-formless-speaks/


We are incessantly, relentlessly, tirelessly telling ourselves stories; constantly attempting to categorize and match everything we experience against some (coherent) storyline playing out in our minds. Well, at least I am like that, and I seem to observe others doing the same. That is why certain forms of meditation prove so challenging: there, the idea is to stop the story-telling. It turns out many of us require instruction, the learning of techniques developed over centuries or millennia, and years of training to have a chance to momentarily pause the story-telling; so inborn it seems to be. Some people even feel they need to isolate themselves completely, in mountains or monasteries, for years at a time, to stop telling themselves what is or might be going on.

http://berkeleysciencereview.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/storytelling.gif

So it is no wonder we are prisoners of the consensus meta-reality we build, to the point that many of us – cruelly, often the most intellectually critical – believe there is nothing else. We become prisoners of our own stories and we forget we are telling them ourselves. If we are lucky, we sometimes succeed – by trial or chance – to relax the constraints of the story, so the absurd may emerge in archetypal forms and speak to us. This is, by any measure, a great and significant achievement. But as liberated from the straitjacket of logic, physics, and all that is entailed by consensus meta-reality as it may be, the absurd is still a story. These meaningful, living metaphors from the unconscious reveal deeper secrets about the nature of our condition as living beings, but they are still self-created myths.

http://www.galleryad.com/current/glimmer2011/RunningWild.jpg

When one finally, and precariously, succeeds in shutting out the story-telling perhaps for a brief moment, that is when one ‘jumps out of the system,’ as Hofstadter put it. One then has a chance to survey the process of story-telling standing outside it. The idea is to go beyond the absurd, and into the Formless: the part of being that is pure potential, undifferentiated into any myth or storyline. What insights might that perspective entail? What might the Formless have to tell us?

http://formless.info/formless%20button.jpg

Once one intellectually buys into the worldview we have been articulating, it becomes impossible not to attempt a certain active-imagination exercise: to imagine what the perspective of the Formless might entail. As I have discovered, there is something liberating about it, so I will share my attempt with you for what it is worth. Naturally, in order to communicate my imagined message of the Formless through language, I have no alternative but to make a story out of it. This defeats the point somewhat, but hopefully not completely. The story form I chose is that of an imaginary letter sent to me by ‘the Formless.’ It goes like this…


Rejoice, for I am from a world beyond the farthest reaches of your rational modeling. In my home, a subject is merely a moving viewpoint in a maelstrom of perceptions, feelings, and ideas; like a sliding pair of eyes trained at the inside of the body that is Creation. From here, your logic, your science, but also your conceptions of life, death, and soul, are but cartoons: flattened, simple, infantile stories conjured up by a sweet childhood of thought in a desperate search for closure. A gaping abyss stretches out between the images they evoke and the recursive, self-referential landscapes I watch unfold as I drift along the stream of qualia that I am.

Your life is a patchwork of projected concepts; a thin conceptual crust around an unfathomable core of the amorphous substance of existence. Logic – which you create by channeling and constricting the flow of this substance – exists only in the crust. Lifting the rug of logic can take you closer to the secret behind what you call reality: the self-referential nature of all conscious experience. He who cracks this secret witnesses in awe the shattering of consensus reality into a million pieces. As these pieces fall to the ground, like a broken mirror, he is confronted with the unspeakable: the most alien and yet most familiar of all realizations.

http://www.beinghuman.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/broken%20mirror.jpg

But this is a realization you have not yet reached; just glimpsed from a ludicrously long distance. So immersed are you still in conceptual patchworks, so submerged in the manifested stream of your being, that you cannot see that which you have always known but forget every time you awake to the sleep of life. Still, this is how it should be. Your condition is the epitome of life, for you are going to die, and I am not. Rejoice, for I am you, yet I transcend you.

It is a saddle of your condition that you think only in terms of references and categories you are comfortable with, even when you intuit the existence of that which transcends these references and categories. Anguished by your mortality, you ponder about the survival of awareness beyond bodily death. You conceptualize a ghost-like ‘soul,’ existing in time and space, which ‘leaves’ the locus of the physical body upon death as if it were circumscribed by this physical body. You intuitively recognize the cartoonish naďveté of these models, and try to justify them to yourself by postulating ‘subtle energies’ and other ill-defined physical metaphors that help you hide your ignorance from yourself. Yes, these metaphors have their place, and some may even be the closest you can come to the truth with your limited language. But they are as literal and space-time-bound as the conceptual constructs they supposedly transcend. The aspects of being that ‘survive’ death and transcend physical existence are as alien to the references and categories of your waking life as your waking life is alien to the references and categories of your dreams. Your attempts to define the transcendent are as hopeless as a dreaming man’s attempt to define his physical body as an entity within his dream. Alas, the body is outside the dream and cannot be thought of in terms of the circumstances of the dream! In the same way, that which is transcendent and eternal in you escape the references and categories of your conceptual reality and cannot be conceived as a construct within it.

https://38.media.tumblr.com/66dceebb9c75df9914f5653a176e0989/tumblr_n48mbqLiCS1sry77ao1_500.gif

Yet your life is itself a dream. The problem is that you got it the wrong way around: the dream is not in the body; it is the body that is in the dream. All metaphors, all cartoons of explanation and closure, exist only in the dream. When you sleep, you partially awake. But ‘Who is It who dreams?’ I hear you ask. This question is itself a reflection of your myopia; your infantile need to conceive of everything as being produced by something else. You see, the Dreamer is Itself the dream. The dream is the eternal unfolding and expression of the Dreamer to Itself. And it encompasses countless, perhaps unending viewpoints within it; viewpoints which the Dreamer assumes, and which entail amnesia from all other perspectives.

http://www.hapsitus.com/fluid/files/mf1/QZiZcJJjmars1.jpg

Yes, every realm in the unfathomable dream of existence rests on layers upon layers of amnesia. Without identifying with a viewpoint, and forgetting who you really are, you could not taste from the many cups of experience. What finality or limitation could you know were it not for your forgetfulness? What weight could your actions carry? What significance could your achievements or failures hold? Rejoice for your ability to forget, for it endows you with the colors of life. But bear this in mind: you will once again remember. And when you do, you will again be home. In the interim, live out your myths – imaginatively.

mjk9
17th January 2015, 18:52
http://youtu.be/sBz6FaZ2CKQ

Amazing. So glad I saw this thread / post. Thanks for sharing that video, dianna!

Calabash
17th January 2015, 23:57
[IMG]

Relationship anarchy questions the conventions of love relationships and the idea that “love” is only real when two people exclude others in its expression. It presents a paradigm where love towards one does not diminish love towards another, and that there are many definitions to this concept.

When it comes to the idea of “love” “sex” and “relationships” we, as a species, are truly sleepwalking. We spin our wheels in a repressive social structure of eros, but it seems, when looking around, that the lack of visionary freedom most people allow themselves has led to a wasteland of apocalyptical ruin between the sexes.

It seems like the sexual revolution was something “the people” were not ready to embrace. Or maybe the actual problem lies in the idea that we do not need cultural “revolution” as much as we need spiritual “revelation”. Revolutions are still hidden behind masks, dogmas and institutions. Revelations come directly from our divine source; a source that has unimaginable expressions of itself.

Everywhere evident, after some time, relationships will either “break apart” or “lose their spark”. If love is not wrong, then it should be considered that our social standards are flawed. We need to seriously rethink our outdated idea of “fidelity” and how it exiles us from what might be necessary for our soul, our sense of wholeness; exiles us from so many interesting and beautiful people we may want to experience, past conventional rules. The universe is dynamic; it does not keep itself on a choke-chain to maintain its status quo. If humanity wants to release it full potential, then it will have to liberate and acknowledge its tremendous sexual drive.

The “liberation” of eros will never happen until we get rid of contracts, vows and bans. There can be no more bargaining. The idea of “love” cannot depend on the condition that desire for others must be completely snuffed out. Renouncing the pleasure and company of others, to show devotion to one, is farcical, if not an extremely masochistic concept. Love is either built on trust and truth, or perishes because it is built on sand.

Relationship anarchy allows for expressions of love in an atmosphere of general lawlessness, like the definition of anarchy suggests, without common standards or purpose. Love’s “secret requirements” need to be replaced with the thrill of the unknown; a mirror for divine reflection. Relationship anarchy allows the true genius of the universe, and its extraordinary, infinite expressions of love to surprise us.

We often see discussions about sex without love and love without sex. Nothing wrong with that. But there's no mention of intimacy, which forms the basis of every relationship and the catalyst that drives/carries either love or sex to the next level.

dianna
2nd February 2015, 21:59
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-egVZkct_Mc4/U00WvU6JDGI/AAAAAAAAMUs/dototZlFl7E/s1600/empaths.jpg

Psychopath vs. Empath: The War Between Truth and Deception

Excerpts from:
http://truthstreammedia.com/psychopath-vs-empath-the-war-between-truth-and-deception/



“The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.” – Baruch Spinoza

Are you fighting for your servitude as if for your salvation? Then you have been well-deceived. […] Your thoughts are not your own. Your actions are not your own. You are in all ways a conditioned puppet who is under the delusion that it is free, and the psychopaths of the world are your uncompromising puppet masters. The questions you need to be asking yourself are these:


“Am I willing to do what it takes to become free? Am I ready for the uncomfortableness of undeceiving myself? Would I rather be slapped by the truth or kissed with a lie? Am I willing to sacrifice my comfortable lie for the uncomfortable truth? Am I strong enough to fall from the “grace” of my delusion onto the hard and unforgiving ground of truth? And most of all: do I have the courage to disobey?”

In order to answer these questions effectively, indeed in order to come up with better questions, we must be able to transform our would-be psychopathology into a courageous in-the-now empathology.


…..

We have lost the ability to communicate with each other as natural human beings. We have lost the ability to communicate with nature in a healthy way. These unconscious acts of unlearning are systemic and passed down from unhealthy generation to unhealthy generation. It’s time to break apart the parochial chain of our outdated value system. It’s time to un**** ourselves out of this unhealthy and unsustainable debacle. Like R.D. Laing said:


“We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.”

http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1303260725l/496585.jpg

The simplest way is to be the change we wish to see in the world so that we can be a force of nature powerful enough to also change the world. But another way is to undeceive ourselves, to become compassionate and empathic to the plight of others, and to sprinkle bits of truth over the mass deception like seeds that will eventually grow into a force to be reckoned with.

As it stands, mankind is caught in the cycle of fear, apathy and hatred. A society based upon fear, apathy and hatred sets up a system which is fundamentally incapable of producing health and happiness and thereby represses human development. And here we are: living in a world where human development is being repressed, at the detriment of our individual health and the health of the ecosystem. However, our escape from this unhealthy pattern lies not only in rebellion, but also in the cultivation of a personal freedom and a relinquishing of all forms of anesthesia and self-deception.

Indeed, while authentic freedom is not easily attained, its deficiency is evident in the devastation to both the individual and the greater culture, as the myopic conformists seek to victimize each other and repeatedly inflict violence upon the world in order to maintain the illusion of comfort and power that is being protected by the banner of their deception. Like Arno Gruen said:


“If people base their identity on identifying with authority, freedom causes anxiety. They must then conceal the victim in themselves by resorting to violence against others.”

http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1394405910l/927581.jpg

Understand: the world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one in which you are free; whether that world be your family, your country, your religion, or your politics. Escape any world that doesn’t allow you to be free. A clear sign that you are not free is that you are being deceived. The question is: are you okay with being deceived?

As Chris Hedges warns, “We live in imaginary, virtual worlds created by corporations that profit from our deception,” It is precisely these virtual worlds that we need to turn the tables on. Virtual worlds are tools. We need to go from being irresponsible tools succumbing to a deceptive system, to using our tools responsibly and empathically so as to transform the system into a healthier version of itself.

http://www.bigfishink.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/1aquote-capitalism-hedges.jpg

There is a war going on between manipulative liars and compassionate truth tellers, between psychopaths and empaths. Which side are you on? This also begs the question: are you lying to yourself, which happens to be one of the most difficult questions to answer honestly, but ask it you must, lest you fall too easily into the hands of the nearest con artist or snake-oil salesman. Beware the tyranny of habit. Be not inflexible. The more elastic and fluid you are, the more you’ll stay afloat when the crushing waters of vicissitude come crashing through, and the more you’ll be prepared to be a beacon of hope for others. Change is not easy, it never has been. But change is inevitable. We either wreck ourselves and the world trying to prevent it, or we adapt and overcome in order to evolve with it.

[..]

“If you would be a real seeker after truth,” wrote Rene Descartes, “it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.”

http://www.wordsonimages.com/pics/56536-o.jpg

And so I did exactly that. I decided to undeceive myself, using a ruthless self-interrogation process and a humor of the most high to reveal the truth hidden behind the smoke and mirrors of mass deception. What I learned rocked my world, as it has many others. But my liberation was my salvation. The pain that came from knowledge was exceptionally more rewarding than the bliss that came from ignorance. My fall was profound, but when I hit the ground, I relearned how to fall in love.

Like Sogyal Rinpoche said:


“Each time the losses and deceptions of life teach us about impermanence, they bring us closer to the truth. When you fall from a great height, there is only one possible place to land: on the ground — the ground of truth. And if you have the understanding that comes from spiritual practice, then falling is in no way a disaster, but the discovery of an inner refuge.”

The only way that deception is moral is through the artistic process. Like Marco Tempest said, “Art is a deception that creates real emotions — a lie that creates a truth. And when you give yourself over to that deception, it becomes magic.” We need more of this magic, especially in a world more and more devoid of magic. It is magic precisely because it transforms deception into truth, and so has the power to transform psychopaths into empaths, by planting seeds like tiny, packaged beacons of hope.

[A]rt can literally change the world. Our audacious art is like swordplay in the brain, proving that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword. With it we can cut the yoke of deception that has been passed down from an unethical power structure made up of psychopathic men hell-bent on maintaining their power to the extent that it is destroying the world.

Like Arno Gruen said, “No matter how much lip service those committed to power (psychopaths) may pay to the principle of equality (empaths), they can never approach their fellow human beings on an equal footing; their relationships with others are defined solely in terms of power and weakness. Therefore, they must accumulate as much power as possible, with the aim of becoming invulnerable and proving this invulnerability.” It is the duty of artistic empaths the world over to meet this false invulnerability with the truer power of absolute vulnerability, and art will be our vehicle. Courage is not being invulnerable, like a machine. Courage is not an unwavering hardness, like a tank. It is a soft plasticity, like water. I beseech you, you who would dare greatly, look not for what’s solid within you, look instead for what is soft and malleable. The courage will come.

Like Bruce Lee pouring water in and out of a cup, saying “Be water, my friend,” your softness will take shape and assume the form of empathy which has the power to crush all forms of psychopathology, and its shape will be an adventure of the most high.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/cc/8c/f5/cc8cf5a3da2ca7c0a95923adb5398a79.jpg

dianna
7th February 2015, 14:46
33 First-World Anarchists Who Don’t Care About Your Rules

http://www.boredpanda.com/funny-first-world-anarchists-rebels/

http://i.imgur.com/ArDPRa3.jpg

http://uploads.neatorama.com/images/posts/386/70/70386/1395224341-2.jpg

http://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/first-world-anarchists-funny-rebels-32.jpg

http://www.whudat.de/images/First_World_Anarchists_02.jpg

http://stasiademarco.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/first-world-anarchists-funny-rebels-14.jpg

http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/236x/0e/fc/b9/0efcb9b6436c0df619dde226f52fd59f.jpg

http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/2d/0f/eb/2d0feb06f483ccef4428869f3b71d37f.jpg


https://occupypowderkeg.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/dont_spread_anarchy.jpg

The rest here:
http://www.boredpanda.com/funny-first-world-anarchists-rebels/

dianna
27th February 2015, 16:55
Leonard Nimoy, 'Star Trek's' Spock, dead at 83

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/150227121757-restricted-leonard-nimoy-exlarge-169.jpg



Leonard Nimoy, whose portrayal of "Star Trek's" logic-driven, half-human science officer Spock made him an iconic figure to generations, died Friday. He was 83.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/27/entertainment/feat-obit-leonard-nimoy-spock/index.html

dianna
27th February 2015, 22:13
Reclaiming Art

http://realitysandwich.com/266261/reclaiming-art-an-interview-with-j-f-martel/


J.F. Martel’s new book, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, a Critique, and Call to Action (Evolver Editions/North Atlantic Books), is a powerful invocation to return to what is arguably art’s central purpose, “to call us back to the source.” Disrupt what we take for granted to be true, and put us in contact with something greater, truer – something numinous.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51H-sHHDaML._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Between us and the Mystery of all mysteries is the imagination, which is powerful enough to take us into the Otherworld, or other worlds, in daytime revery, vivid dreams, psychedelic experiences or other altered states. In our interview. J.F. describes how art can become a portal into the Otherworld, serving to disrupt the onslaught of “spiritual exhaustion” caused by the technological commodification of human culture and consciousness. You can read an excerpt from Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice here.



J: Your book’s subtitle refers to it as a “call to action.” What do you hope to inspire people to do?



JF: We’re inundated today with media that’s been carefully crafted to steer our emotions and the thoughts that follow from them. I’m thinking here of everything from advertising and political spectacle to software and product design. Reclaiming Art proposes that we make a conscious effort, if not to liberate ourselves entirely from this kind of media (which may well be impossible), then at least to recognize the value of aesthetic experiences that deepen our connection to the real instead of locking us up in an ideology. For artists who read the book, there’s a more concrete exhortation to heed their inner visions rather than sacrificing them to market forces or moral imperatives.

Why do we need to “reclaim art?” What is it that needs to be reclaimed?

The title of the book appears to say that art is something humans “had” at one point in history and need to find again. And there is a limited sense in which it does say that. On the other hand, I doubt we could point to a past society that didn’t try to appropriate and redirect art and artists in some way. This is because the real power of the work of art necessarily manifests in the field of direct experience. Society, by contrast, is almost exclusively concerned with mediating experience, thereby rendering it indirect. To put it differently, art is about unveiling the real while society exists as a kind of enclosure to protect us from the real. My hope is that by the end of the book, the reader will see that it’s in each of our lives that the reclamation of art needs to happen. Everyone has had at least one artistic encounter that changed them profoundly. This book is about recognizing the value of such experiences and exploring what they’re made of.



…..


In your book, you say that humans didn’t invent art, but rather art invented humanity. How do you mean?

The earliest examples of art, which go back some forty thousand years, are almost devoid of human figures. There are a few exceptions, most notably the famous Venus figurines found across Eurasia. But even these, with their exaggerated features and lack of a face, are only vaguely human. Clearly, representing human beings wasn’t a priority for our earliest ancestors. That’s extremely peculiar when you think about it. What I take from it is that the birth of the artistic imagination preceded the development of any kind of differentiated self-awareness in the species—anything that could be called “humanity.” The artistic imagination, which I believe lies not only behind art as such but also behind shamanism, magic and religion, had to be there as a sort of mirror in which we could gradually make out our reflection.

What is the difference between art and artifice, and why does it matter?

Artifice denotes the use of aesthetics to manipulate the emotions in a predetermined manner. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce calls it “improper art” and defines it as art that presents its content in such a way as to induce a state of attraction or repulsion. There are therefore two kinds of artifice. Examples of the first kind include porn videos, advertisements and generic pop songs. All of these are, at bottom, pornographic. The second kind includes traditional propaganda films and shock art, but also any work specifically designed to push a political or social message: slick PSAs, moral fables and concept art that does nothing but voice an artist’s opinion.

What Joyce calls “proper art,” on the other hand, uses the aesthetic to reveal things in their original, preconceptual “suchness.” That is, it doesn’t reduce its content to some instrumental end. In doing this, artists end up producing symbols, beacons that point to those vast regions of reality which psychoanalysts call the unconscious. In other words, art doesn’t belong to the conscious world. It belongs on the same plane as dreams, visions and synchronicity. By its nature it calls us out of the trance states that artifice instills.

A society without art would be a totally artificial society in which people would lack the most effective means to envision realities beyond the ideological horizon. Yet in its zeal to reduce, tag, measure and quantify everything, contemporary culture is actively eliminating any distinction between art and artifice. Many if not most people today have bought into the idea that art is a cultural construct that’s completely subjective and devoid of intrinsic value. They are aware of artifice but dismiss art as a romantic delusion. This isn’t surprising, since capitalism will not become universal until it has gained absolute control of the human imagination.

Do the subjects of works of art need to be overtly spiritual, mystical, psychedelic, etc. to be any of those things? Does calling something Visionary Art make it visionary?

No. In fact works of art designed specifically to communicate spiritual ideas tend to lose the affective power that makes art what it is. This is something Gilles Deleuze develops in his philosophy. Art, he says, has nothing to do with concepts, opinions or ideas in the conventional sense. Rather, it inheres in the creation of sensations, either completely new sensations or sensations stripped of the clichés and assumptions that reduce them to stock feelings in normal reality. Art reveals the world before the development of concepts, including spiritual concepts.

The real power of a work of art doesn’t lie in its subject matter but in the style in which that subject matter is delivered. It’s in an artist’s style, in her unique perspective, that mystery is disclosed and forces that transcend the human world are revealed. This doesn’t mean that overtly mystical works can’t be visionary. It means that whatever visionary quality they have won’t come from the message they’re trying to communicate.

Take a gothic cathedral, for instance. Its affective power doesn’t depend on your understanding the meaning of every shape, angle, statue or picture. It comes from the aesthetic arrangement of the whole. You could be completely ignorant of Christian doctrine, even an atheist, and still feel the aura of sacredness that the place exudes. This is in part because the sacred has nothing to do with Christianity itself. You could get a similar experience in a mosque or a concert hall. All great works of art have a quality that exceeds their conceptual signification. This excessive quality, which explains how a thirteenth century building could be as meaningful today as it was when it was built, is what I attribute to the Imaginal in the book.

What is the “Imaginal” and how is it important for creating art? Is it any different than the human imagination?

In the book I use the term “imaginal” loosely in the sense that the French scholar Henri Corbin did in his study of Islamic mysticism. Corbin describes the imaginal world as an intermediary between Heaven and Earth, man and God. It’s the place of dreams, daimons and archetypes—what Carl Jung referred to as the collective unconscious. Having said that, I don’t believe that reality is actually divided into levels or realms. So when I speak of the Imaginal or the “otherworld” in my book, I’m talking about this world seen through a particular lens, or perhaps no lens at all. I equate the Imaginal with what Jung, at the end of his career, called the Unus Mundus, the “one world” that exists beyond the brain’s division of it into outer and inner, psyche and matter, past and future, and so on.


…..

The Swedish occultist Thomas Karlsson speaks of “fatigue” as the most prevalent disease of our times. What he means by this is a spiritual exhaustion that comes from being perpetually immersed conceptual environments and media. Think of the listlessness you feel after watching TV or scrolling down your Facebook timeline for a couple of hours. I think spiritual fatigue is most definitely an impediment to soulful expression. Karlsson recommends regular contact with nature, which is free of concepts. I agree and include art in the things that qualify as nature. You don’t come back from a great play or a concert drained. You come back energized and refreshed, as if you went for a walk in the woods.


…..

How can art make a political and social difference today? Or in other words: how can we create art that actively combats the commodification of human consciousness?

Art is in itself a form of resistance to the commodification of consciousness. Every bit of time and energy spent creating or experiencing works of art escapes the grasp of those forces that would reduce us all to a quantity or algorithm.

In a sense, asking what art should do to improve society is like asking what the heart should do to improve the health of the body. The heart can only do one thing: beat. It’s up to the body to live in such a way as to allow it to keep beating. Similarly, the only thing art can do is reveal the non-human forces that shape the world. It oxygenates society by infusing it with a more expansive reality than its preconceptions, opinions or beliefs allow for. Art is the heartbeat of a civilization. For that reason, it’s not up to artists to produce works that will change the world. It’s up to the world to organize itself in such a way that artists are able to make the art they’re called to make. While this doesn’t absolve artists of their civil responsibilities as members of society, it does mean that when they practice their art, they ought to have the freedom to be guided by powers that exceed our understanding. True works of art are powerful symbolic constructs, genuine oracles that can give society access to what’s going on below the threshold of collective consciousness. But they won’t do that if artists feel a need to impose a moral or message on the material. For the magic to happen, vision must lead the way.

dianna
9th March 2015, 13:46
"I came here to learn not look pretty"
Cici Chase


http://youtu.be/dvJNSj4tuEo

dianna
9th March 2015, 23:33
Lovely, Danke …


http://youtu.be/cU-O39hALss

dianna
11th March 2015, 14:25
https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2015/03/10/the-coming-revolution/

The Coming Revolution
by Jon Rappoport


http://en.ozonweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/char4j.jpg




“Down through history, people have been oh so sure the gods they were inventing were real. And they talk about excessive pride when others elevate the potential of humans. I’m afraid not. The hubris is with the god-inventors. They’re the ones who take art and turn it into something weirder than weird. They’re the ones who claim they have infallible knowledge. They’re the ones who know God so well they can say what his rules are. They’re the ones who try to envelop the whole world in their proclamations. And they’re the one who claim they don’t understand imagination, when in fact they’re trying to bludgeon humankind with it, with their foreshortened version of it.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

The revolution isn’t visible yet, but it’s coming, it’s emerging, and there is no way to stop it.

Civilization is organization. In its advanced stages, it’s super-organization.

Planners and analysts and major profit makers and manipulators are devoted to systems, which require populations to confirm those systems by fitting into them.

Devise a plan with a few billion slots, and those slots ask for occupants.

The occupants must comply. What was once voluntary becomes mandatory. It’s the way of top-down organization.

This is the madness that drives late-stage civilization.

People, left alone, aren’t androids or robots, but in case you hadn’t noticed, people are not being left alone. They are being shaped and tailored to conform to operating schemes and blueprints.


“There is nothing important about you except your ability to reconfigure yourselves, in order to operate as elements of a system, designated pieces of a structure.”

“Your impulses, your brains are off-key. They require tuning. It must happen. The patterns of the plan demand it.”

This is the stage play. This is the precondition for the revolution.

The revolution is the escape.

I’m not talking about the chaos, the violence, or some new brand of opportunism. Nor am I talking about “beneficent deliverance” dished out by the universe.

Behind all that is a much larger wave that is building. It could take a very long time for the wave to become conscious of itself.

And that consciousness does not function like some contagious germ. It comes out of hiding for individuals, by individuals.

Super-organization of life will fracture, and that fracture will come about through the resurrection of spontaneous thought, invention, and action. Because the one quality that has been buried in thousands of systems is spontaneity.

I’m not talking about aimless thrashing about. I’m talking about what happens to structures and edifices of consciousness when spontaneity and improvisation come to the foreground, when the natural replaces the synthetic.

This process is already underway, because Life wants to live. It doesn’t want to become a machine. It accepts being a machine for only so long, and then it revolts.

What will emerge is the artist, along all avenues.

This is not yet another form of passive “miracle.” This is individuals, more and more of them, throwing off the frozen and universally accepted expectations and habits of organization.

In short, the future will not look like the present. It will be radically different. It will be open, not unified.

Those who ask When this future will come, those who hope for Soon, who demand Now, or who deny that any root revolution can happen are simply wishing for deliverance independent of their own actions, their own struggle, their own involvement.

We are all artists, whether we like it or not. Each one of us. And not as some fictitious group. Each one of us has his own studio. It can remain closed, dark, and empty, or it can come alive.

Nothing gives us “permission” to invent, create, imagine, improvise. This is not about “deserving” anything. This isn’t about “rights”.

The revolution does not produce One Collective Mind. What the world will look like after the revolution has proceeded with velocity is entirely unpredictable, because it will not look like One Thing.

It will not demonstrate yet another simplistic version of harmony and symmetry. If that were the case, we would see the rise of another era of organization and perfectible slavery.

The entire purpose of operant conditioning and mind control is planting seeds that will cause an individual to accept the substitution of one system for another.

The success of this deception explains the rise and fall and rise of similarly built civilizations, one after another.

But through the course of that history, because artists have made their case, a consciousness has gradually arisen that rejects all overall plans, all final structures, all pre-set systems.

Artists have also exposed the method of projecting gods who then rule us; exposed it as an act of freezing imagination and art in mid-course.

“This is a brilliant poem. Let’s cut it off right here and form a religion around it and organize the churches…”


So now there is an opening. The wave of the revolution is free imagination, and artists who know they are creating, instead of imprisoning themselves and everyone else in their creations.

This revolution is not organized. It never will be. But it will eventually supersede all other revolts.

None of this, of course, prevents people from remaining asleep in whatever kind of sleep they prefer.

And in case there is any misunderstanding, the revolution is not a subconscious process by which we all strive toward making “one grand painting” we share together.

That is the sloganeering of all civilizations (organizations) that fail.

Another failure: the walled-off isolation people feel inside those great organizations. People will connect, in ways they can only dream of now.

One creator to another.

Spontaneously.

Jon Rappoport

dianna
3rd April 2015, 12:04
Invisible People
https://www.youtube.com/user/invisiblepeopletv/featured


Since its launch in November 2008, Invisible People has leveraged the power of video and the massive reach of social media to share the compelling, gritty, and unfiltered stories of homeless people from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. The vlog (video blog) gets up close and personal with veterans, mothers, children, layoff victims and others who have been forced onto the streets by a variety of circumstances. Each week, they're on Invisible People and high traffic sites such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, proving to a global audience that while they may often be ignored, they are far from invisible.

Invisible People goes beyond the rhetoric, statistics, political debates, and limitations of social services to examine poverty in America via a medium that audiences of all ages can understand, and can't ignore. The vlog puts into context one of our nation's most troubling and prevalent issues through personal stories captured by the lens of Mark Horvath - its founder - and brings into focus the pain, hardship and hopelessness that millions face each day. One story at a time, videos posted on Invisible People shatter the stereotypes of America's homeless, force shifts in perception and deliver a call to action that is being answered by national brands, nonprofit organizations and everyday citizens now committed to opening their eyes and their hearts to those too often forgotten.

This short video is the trailer of @home, a documentary that tells the story of modern U.S. homelessness and one man's fierce commitment to end it. Mark Horvath and Invisible People travel around North America using social media to fight homelessness.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r246GKo9QFI

dianna
11th April 2015, 19:20
"We are the shamans of the wasteland … the shamans for here and now" Gabriel Roberts


Gabriel D. Roberts is a theological scholar, researcher and public speaker that specializes in discussions about the nature of perception and belief. After 27 years of passionate searching and study, Gabriel stepped away from his long held Christian faith into a more expansive and fluid worldview. His latest book, The Quest For Gnosis explores the roots of belief, the power of the ecstatic state in one’s spiritual life and the means by which a deeply satisfying spiritual life may be achieved outside of the bonds of dogma.

http://www.gabrieldroberts.com


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F99dJLGfgnw

dianna
29th April 2015, 10:59
A wonderful map created by William Samari, Ray Yamartino, and Rafaan Anvari of DogHouseDiares illustrates what every country does better than every other country.



http://www.businessinsider.com/what-countries-are-best-at-2014-1
http://thedoghousediaries.com

http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/52cfe22169beddbe3c6aed5a-1200-600/map-119.jpg

Dreamtimer
29th April 2015, 15:08
"Relationship Anarchy." Hmm..... sounds like the new polyamory.

Also recently heard of anarcho-capitalism. Not sure why anarchy's the new thing. I get that TPTB suck, but anarchy lasts about three seconds. Then the warlords come in. There has to be a structure of rules for there to be any capitalism at all.

Back to relationships. I've been married 23 years. My husband and I don't cheat on each other. We also still have sex frequently. In fact, there's no better medicine for stress or depression for my husband than love-making with me.

My parents taught me that sex was best between two people who love each other. For me, they were right.

I have many friendships with men who are not my husband. I can often be found hanging out with them when he's not around. They don't push themselves on me, or treat me with disrespect. If some among them are attracted to me, they don't let that get in the way with friendship. Men eventually relax around me and act naturally (for the most part). They are more crude when amongst only themselves as I occasionally witness when they slip, forgetting a woman is nearby. I'm not that way and I don't try to be 'one of the guys'. They'll never look at me that way anyway. But friendship and closeness is still possible and doesn't cause any trouble with my marriage. That's because I also treat it with respect.

Respect goes a long way. As does truth.

So I do expand my relationships and interactions. Verbal interactions, especially face to face, can be fantastically stimulating.

The people I know who don't marry or have families do so out of choice. They know themselves well enough to know the kind of relationships that will work. And the kind that won't.

dianna
15th May 2015, 22:16
Philosophy of Hope
Jean-Marie Guyau 1895

http://img.makeupalley.com/9/5/8/5/860594.JPG


When we hope for something grand, we draw from the beauty of the goal the courage to brave all obstacles. If the chance of reaching it diminishes, the desire grows proportionally. The farther from reality lies the goal, the more desirable it is, and since desire is the supreme force it has the greatest amount of force at its service. The vulgar goods of life are so small a thing that in comparison the ideal conceived must appear immense: all of our petty joys are shattered before that of realizing an elevated idea. This idea, even if it amounts to almost nothing in the realm of nature and even of science can, in relation to us, be everything: it’s the offering of the poor. To seek the truth: this act offers nothing of the conditional, the doubtful, the fragile. We have something in our hands, not the truth perhaps (who will ever hold it?), but at least the spirit that wants to discover it. When you stubbornly halt before some too narrow doctrine, it’s a chimera that flees from your fingers; but carry on, keep seeking, keep hoping: this alone is not a chimera. The truth is found in movement, in hope, and it is with reason that we have proposed as a complement to positive morality a “philosophy of hope.” A child saw a butterfly poised on a blade of grass; the butterfly had been made numb by the north wind. The child plucked the blade of grass, and the living flower that was at its tip, still numb, remained attached. He returned home, holding his find in his hand. A ray of sunlight broke through, striking the butterfly’s wing, and suddenly, revived and light, the living flower flew away into the glare. All of us, scholars and workers, we are like the butterfly: our strength is made of a ray of light. Not even: of the hope of a ray. One must thus know how to hope; hope is what carries us higher and farther. “But it’s an illusion!” What do you know of this? Should we not take a step for fear that one day the earth will slide away from under our feet? Looking far into the past or the future is not the only thing; one must look into oneself. One must see there the living forces that demand to be expended, and we must act.

dianna
1st June 2015, 12:25
Cosmic Orgasm: An Enlightening Story of the Great Mystery of Existence
Zen Gardiner
http://www.zengardner.com/cosmic-orgasm-enlightening-story-great-mystery-existence/

http://www.zengardner.com/wp-content/uploads/eyes-1024x737.jpg


There’s a certain feeling—a feeling that’s also kind of an experience and an idea and a way of seeing. This feeling is central to my perspective and my shifting identity, my perpetual becoming. And I always want to articulate it, but I can never seem to find the necessary words.

Everything is happening. This is all actually here.

That almost gets at it. I mean, it works for me. Contains the meaning I wish to convey. I could say it that way and it could be that simple … if language weren’t so subjective and flat and insufficient.

The problem is that most people would read those eight words and see something banal or uninspired or even meaningless and would move on to another something in milliseconds.

When really I suspect that those eight words constitute the most astounding and un-process-able and soul-shivering and speechlessness-inducing fact, when seen from a certain non-default perspective—an almost out-of-body, all-encompassing perspective, the perspective of an infant or a god, a perspective which, as Emerson wrote, “see[s] the miraculous in the common.”

http://1.hiexistence.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/11312891_10152821472790824_3361433131172143999_o.j pg

Heaven in a Wild Flower

But the only people who would read those words and feel The Fact in that way are the ones who are already in on the secret, the un-swallow-able monolith of a truth—that this is all really existing right now.

The problem is that language can only conjure in your brain an understanding based on what you have consciously or probably more often unconsciously determined certain words to mean. You assume you’re absorbing someone else’s ideas when you read, but much of what you’re doing is constructing your own interpretation of what the author may or may not have tried to contain within the arrangement of words. And there is necessarily a fathomless gulf between your interpretation and the real, raw subjectivity that the author tried and failed to transpose precisely onto blank whiteness. I would argue that this remains largely true even in the context of “non-fiction” or “scientific” writing which purports to deal in objectivity, but that’s a discussion for another day.

In short, language does not and cannot transmit the meaning that a particular arrangement of words actually had for the person who generated and arranged the words. Language is always, to a great extent, a mirror.

http://3.hiexistence.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/11041903_10152821472860824_4461358098769961783_o.j pg

Bark-Clad Earth-Claw

Everything is happening. This is all actually here.

Things exist. We—instantiated, tangible, intricate beings—are weaving and roaming about on something we call “planet”—a rock that is both large and small—in an endlessly spacious hollow of existence in which innumerable objects are hurtling through eternity at incomprehensible speeds. Paradoxically, we seem at once to be individual, separate creatures and also attributes of a single process, a great sea of absoluteness that we probably cannot know objectively and from which we cannot be extricated.

http://3.hiexistence.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/11270602_10152821729690824_6958838100425074869_o.j pg

Location: The Void

You can’t fathom this. I can’t fathom this. Maybe you and I, if we’re brave, can begin to imagine this picture of things, begin to pull back from our personal narratives and self-interested modi operandi to glimpse beyond the veil of egotism, to feel one iota of the terror and awe and ecstasy that this seamless magnitude would surely excite in any who could become somehow a stranger to it and then be re-introduced, who could receive the knowledge of its existence for the first time. To be alive! To live! My God! All is here! All is here!


.....

For many, though, I fear that these words would seem only a feathery description of normalcy, of “life,” a state of affairs long ago accepted as the foundational factoid, the same old, the unquestioned aquarium. Yeah, life’s a thing and it’s pretty wild, whatever, everybody knows that, shut the **** up.

No, bro, no. See, I don’t think you get it. I think if we all really got it, really knew the what-the-****-ness of this mystery in our bedrock, we would all simultaneously stop—stop chattering, stop complaining, stop politicking, stop attention-seeking, stop consuming, stop rushing down the streets to our made-up jobs and imaginary Very Important Tasks—and for maybe like six or seven hours just peer around, baffled, startled, repulsed, euphoric, mortified. Maybe we’d start sniffing each other or making out sporadically or kneeling before the fat, yawning sky weeping tears of overflowing and indeterminate pathos.

http://1.hiexistence.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/11119856_10152821729705824_3078653806658065518_o.j pg

Where are we?

I don’t know what would happen. Eventually we would of course have to get back to doing something because of certain biological imperatives represented metaphorically by the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy. Things would roll onward, yes, sure, I guess. I suppose they must. And maybe they wouldn’t be all that different. But maybe the consequences wouldn’t be the point. Maybe that moment of collective awe would be the zenith—the universe’s climactic soaring sighing orgasm of self-celebration and self-realization after untold millennia spent employing biological mechanisms to gain self-awareness and eventually maybe touch itself under the covers at night a little bit. Maybe all events after that fated, impossible moment would be unpredictable. Maybe reality would collapse in on itself, finally liberated to the point of being able to transform into something entirely different and inconceivable. Maybe we’d all start laughing and then derive further humor-tinder from the shared joke, igniting and elevating our collective guffaw to the level of spasm and convulsion, everyone on Earth writhing on the ground in unison, shrieking uncontrollably at the unbearable absurdity of embodiment and the ridiculous unknowable aeons it has thus far entailed.

I don’t know. I suppose we probably would get back to doing our necessary and idiosyncratic human somethings. But maybe we’d get back to doing our necessary somethings a little differently. Maybe we’d all move a bit slower, take unplanned detours. Maybe we’d all actually see more of the people we brush past or briefly interact with in the theatre of the day-to-day. Maybe there’d be a sudden widespread surge of desire to live in quaint, remote cabins complete with bonfires, ample libraries, starry nights, loving cat- and dog-friends.

http://3.hiexistence.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/11312711_10152821861575824_6565971276212119727_o.j pg

Love (+ a Cabin) is All You Need

Everything is happening. This is all actually here.

Maybe we’d all dispense with most of our possessions and give all superfluous wealth to the global poor. Maybe everyone would feel irresistibly compelled to phone their parents and profess profound basic gut-level love as tears gushed deterministically, geyser-like. Maybe we’d become way more interested in trying to see things through other individuals’ reality tunnels, realizing that each perspective might have something unique, interesting, and/or nourishing to add to our understanding of that which cannot be understood. Maybe we’d all become much more empathetic, kind even, realizing every other feeling, thinking animal is grappling with this same existence and the inevitable suffering it entails.

dianna
21st June 2015, 22:55
Third Density Embrace – Are the Gods Jealous?
by Julian Rose
http://www.zengardner.com/third-density-embrace-gods-jealous/

http://www.zengardner.com/wp-content/uploads/Phoenix-Julian.jpg



Is sexuality to be dispensed with – as the price for spiritual emancipation?

What if I posited that "third density" is where the wandering ethereal spirits of the cosmos most want to be..

That it is within third density existence that the setting for a final and full awakening is to be manifest.

That spiritual aspiration which seeks to evolve as an ‘out of body’ state, is a form of elaborate escape mechanism..

An escape mechanism for those who have given-up on the integration of body, mind and spirit within the temple of the human condition.

Well, are not these valid posits?

So let us explore just why we devote so much time trying to be something other than what we are.


.....

The integration of spirit and the flesh seems like a pretty profound challenge for struggling homo sapiens. So often these two natural allies seem to negate each other – one appearing to revel in a sense of liberation when freed from the other. Indeed, much of Christianity has for centuries extolled the virtue of recognising the superiority of the spiritual over the corporeal – and has recommended living a life moderated according to this dictum.

Many Eastern spiritual teachings recommend long periods of largely corporeally static meditation in order to make contact with the divine in one’s self and come closer to that same power in the beyond. Well, it may work, but you will probably end up with a body like the laughing Budha – however at least he saw the joke..

It has also been suggested that long term devotion to spirit uplifting and mind expanding techniques will cause the human physique to undergo a steady physical evolution. One in which the head becomes the dominant feature and the body shrinks into a mere slither of its former self.

It is thought, in these circles, that aspiration for unity with Source requires much exercising of the pineal gland and other neglected regions of the neocortex. So that other bodily organs get steadily receding levels of attention and stimulation, until they eventuality shrink into almost nothing.

We have probably all seen those pictures of supposedly "advanced" humans, with huge triangular shaped heads, bulging dilated eyes and tiny waif-like bodies tapering into skinny and strangely prehistoric looking legs and feet. Well, would you like to end up looking like this?

The first thing that strikes me is how sexless these beings appear. They seem to be neutered; and that is expressed also in their pinched facial expression and small straight-set mouths. Altogether a very unsavoury mix!

Whether this is actually "an alien" (as in Roswell incident) or an evolved human does not matter that much, because there exists a school of spiritual thinking which believes that is where we are headed anyway. It is a school which tends to debase sexuality, seeing it not as a source of profound richness – but as something of a persistent problem.

Which raises the question: is sexuality to be dispensed with – as the price for spiritual emancipation?

Persistent denial of the tactile subtleties of the physical senses, in favour of a pure spirituality, would no doubt lead we humans to lose our sensual proclivity and physical human beauty. Just as indulging in over-the-top hedonistic excesses produces a distorted and unbalanced physique and the loss of our ability to develop higher levels of conscious awareness. We are looking for something which is neither of these extremes.

Catch for a moment in your mind’s eye Michael Angelo’s superbly sculptured statue of David in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria. David’s fine torso, so delicately balanced between male and female, is sublimely expressive of the beauty of the human physique. An expressiveness which would not be so resonant if it did not also suggest both a spiritual dimension and intellectual curiosity. Its sexual resonance is not pronounced, but finely nuanced.

Now cut to that futuristic and supposedly advanced/evolved sexless being I have already described earlier. Shock!

Now to be fair, this ‘E.T’ like creature (should it exist) might well be the nicest of beings and possibly even very clever – so I must not pour scorn on it just because of the way it looks. However, the way things look usually reflects, in varying degrees, the way things are. Or at least, has a tendency to express a realised emotional condition or an unrealised emotional condition. And this looks to me to be a distinctly unrealised condition.

Other worldly states exist; and have their unique adaptations to the conditions in which they manifest.

However, I believe it likely that most of those reading this essay, made the decision to come (back) to planet Earth. So one should ask ones-self: why?

Maybe because we retained a memory of some much better time here. A time in which we were more expressed and shared in a life that was generally joyous. Or, it might be that we deeply sensed that the joyous human state could yet be lit-up here on Earth; in ways that are unique, imaginative and expressive of an inherent state of genius.

We were all, in different ways, drawn back to this extraordinary place, sensing, as we grew up, that we had a mission – a great task to which we needed and longed to commit.

The confusion that we found, after reaching a certain state of objective awareness, drove some of us to commit to a life in which we attempted (are attempting) to establish a deeper order and manifestation of that which strikes us as ‘true’.

This commitment has a certain price. A constraining affect on our natural inclination to express and explore deeply felt needs and emotional awakenings. To more fully indulge and share the beauty and bounty of the human condition. But in a world torn apart by dissident beliefs and irrational desires – none of us can afford to indulge for long in such luxuries. We have to commit – or die.

However, the reward for those traveling "the committed path" is that there are often powerful glimpses of the world to come along the way; glimpses of the ecstatic. Windows that briefly blow open but then slam closed again. Fragments of a life that ‘could be’ – if the current order of values was reversed – and humanity started flowering according to the same current that causes plants to break into radiant flower and trees into glorious blossom.

Do trees and flowers long to be that which they are not?

It is my contention that our third density state, far from being something to continuously strive to get beyond, is exactly where we want and need to be. A place which acts as a magnet towards which great ethereal cosmic entities/energies are powerfully drawn. They are already deeply curious about the magnetic strength of Earth and the beauty of her seas, forests and mountains – her abundant flora and fauna.

But most of all, they wonder about us.

They sense that there is something truly special about our embrace; our acts of congress; our moments of ecstacy. Yet it is something they cannot directly experience. They both want – and don’t want – to be transformed into that particular state of sensuality which takes place in the dimension we call third density. Joys which we humans are so privileged to be able to experience.

I tell you, we have hardly begun to experience the wealth that we have at our fingertips in our quest to unite body, mind and spirit. But united they must be.

No wonder the gods are jealous. Some, out of frustration, even try to persuade us that it is they who hold the secret of enlightenment! Ha! But who can really blame them for the odd gripe – after aeons of existence as free roaming etheric pulses of ‘the now’, maybe it’s difficult to have to admit that you are not, after all, the be and end all of great aspiration – and that what you really want is to finally experience a bit of gravity based solidity?

OK, so we have it – and we are indeed most fortunate for that. But so as to utilise our time on Earth
to the full, we had better make sure that we keep our heads in proper proportion to our bodies – and our bodies themselves in a properly fit condition. For it is a very fine and wondrous thing that the unsullied proportions of the male and female physique are so well defined and so pleasingly balanced.

Witness the subtle athleticism that emerges in the art of the dance; the uniquely proud stance of the Kenyan Massai; the almost hypnotic beauty of practised exponents of Tai Chi; the simple body-sweep of the scythe as performed by the World’s humble peasant farmers … and so on. These are not ‘head led’ exigencies, but emanate from the area of the solar plexus.

When in doubt about where the centre of the universe lies, go to the solar plexus. It is from here that energies radiate out in every direction, feeding all the organs of the body. Mankind will not develop a swollen head and waif-like body so long as the main point of equilibrium remains in the solar region. The point of balance for the human physique as well as the human esprit. Start again from here – and all will fall into place quite naturally.

I find that I have been describing manifestations which are all moving in the direction of what we call art. And it this ‘art’ that is our essentially human tool for creating ‘heaven on Earth’. The artist is not bent upon raising his or her vibratory level to ever higher states, as the spiritualist is, but is more intent upon pulling down unto himself that which gives fuel to his creativity.

There is, in this route to fulfillment, a tacit acceptance of the dimension (density) in which we find ourselves. Not an attempt to escape from it. The trick is to get the spirit to become engaged in the Earthly creative process. To harness it to the need to take action. To bring creative equilibrium into life on Earth and to bring down the darkly domineering oppressors of humanity.

That is the missing ingredient of the purely spiritual aspirant, where a kind of built-in passivity shuns taking action; preferring to remain closed-off to the nitty gritty of life.

Our great guide throughout all, however, is "intuition". The one force that is common to both art and spirit. Spirit and intuition are like lovers, they intertwine, and at moments – are one.

An artisan will take this intuitive receptivity and turn it into a creative action. That is the art of living. Not as ‘art for art’s sake’ but for the socio-economic and spiritual emancipation of humanity. This is the fuel upon which the new society is to be built. No uniquely spiritual agenda will ever achieve the transformative movement of true change.

Never mind that the gods are jealous. We must all turn our attention to fully embracing our third density roles and goals – for their seams are unimaginably rich and as yet, barely touched.

dianna
29th June 2015, 21:55
I like to concentrate on those among us who are not usually concentrated on ... the ones who don't care about being right, paypal, or followers ... the treasure among "convention's trash" ... and, I am sure, more wisdom in a single conversation ...

Always moving: A transient way of life
By Allison Love
Photographs: Michael Joseph
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/150628185403-cnnphotos-joseph-head-restricted-large-169.jpeg



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urOmuWEvWbI


Tattoos cover their faces and bodies -- marks of permanence to contrast their transient lifestyle. Some wear their hair in dreadlocks; others wear worn bandanas around their necks.

They are travelers -- hopping freight trains, hitching rides, always in motion.

Michael Joseph first photographed a traveler while in Las Vegas working on a street project in 2011. He spotted a man trying to hitch a ride, and he asked his cabdriver to pull over so he could take the man's picture.


"He had an interesting anchor tattoo on his face and he had a very distinct look about him for a hitchhiker," Joseph said. "He gave me 20 to 30 minutes but I never got his story."

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After returning home from his trip, the photo of the hitchhiker stood out among Joseph's other images. He continued his street photography, and in Portland, Maine, he met a traveler who recognized the man with the anchor tattoo.

"I thought, 'How is it possible that you know this guy,' " Joseph said. "He told me that (the man's) name was Dickie and that he was on Facebook."

In New Orleans, Joseph met another traveler who knew Dickie, who by then had started going by Knuckles.

It was in New Orleans that Joseph learned about this culture of travelers who ride trains, form friendships, separate, and find each other again. It prompted his portrait series "Lost and Found."

Three years after Joseph first met Knuckles, the two ran into each other again at a train station in Chicago. Joseph instantly recognized Knuckles by his anchor tattoo. He then learned more about Knuckles' life, and when they saw each other again in New York, Joseph was introduced to more travelers.

A sort of wanderlust, Joseph said, drives all of the travelers he has photographed. Yet their stories vary. Some are running away from painful pasts, while others are just looking to find people they fit in with. And though some might look rough, Joseph said, they are some of the kindest and most intelligent people he has ever met.

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"One girl was a valedictorian," Joseph said. "She told me: 'I had no friends until I started traveling. No one understood me. I was always bored with everything everybody else wanted to do. I didn't want to go shopping. I wanted to go out into the woods and hike, and nobody understood that.' She thinks she'll go to college eventually and become a teacher."

Freight-train hopping is illegal and very dangerous. Many of the travelers Joseph has met describe it as a high and life on the road as an addiction. One traveler likened the experience to "magic."

"They're discovering new places all the time," Joseph said. "They've seen parts of the country that we'll never see. Going to new places and meeting new people is like a high for them. There's a freedom attached to it."

Joseph said the travelers live very much by an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. "If you treat everyone with kindness, they'll treat you exactly the same," he said.

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/150622143120-05-cnnphotos-hitchhiker-portraits-restricted-super-169.jpg

Going to new places and meeting new people is like a high for them. There's a freedom attached to it.


Because Joseph has built up a vast network of travelers, and because they all know one another, meeting new travelers is easier.

"They know they can be comfortable with me," he said. "In general, they're very open people. It's unexpected."

Joseph's portraits feel timeless. They are shot in black and white with the traveler standing before a simple background.

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"There's something about it that doesn't distract the eye and makes it more about the person," he said. "I want the viewer to see the face and the person. They have this aged look, this worn look, and black and white accentuates that a little more."

Life on the road comes with a cost. With the freedom it allows, there is the opportunity to experiment with drugs and alcohol. Many travelers are young and leaving home for the first time. Traveling becomes so entwined with their identity that some feel lost when they finally stop.

"There are some people who weren't lost in the beginning (of their journey) who might be lost at the end," Joseph said.

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Others, however, are much happier away from the conventions of modern society.

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"They are not to be pitied nor romanticized by the viewer," Joseph said. "You want to see and feel the person who lies somewhere in between."