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#2012 - Friday, December 24, 2004 - Editor: Jerry

 

 


 

 

Today's ornaments come from the links at http://fusionanomaly.net/TechNode.html.

 

 

 

 


 

 

Aikido

 


Whenever I move, that's Aikido.
                    O Sensei, Morihei Ueshiba

 

Aikido, Japanese martial art that uses a system of holds, throws, and locks as its principal movements. The name comes from the Japanese words ai (union, harmony), ki (vital breath, energy), do (way). The art focuses on controlling one's ki (vital energy within the body that is centered in the abdominal region) to subdue an opponent. Aikido advocates self-defense, emphasizing nerve points that, when pressed, can bring down an adversary without maiming or killing.

 

Aikido depends on two categories of movement: those of control (katame-waza) and those of throwing an opponent (nage-waza). More than 700 movements belong to these two waza. All are derived from the basic kata (forms), which include freeing oneself from grips, throwing an opponent to the ground by exerting pressure on the limbs, and immobilizing the opponent by placing pressure on the joints. These three series of movements are the foundation of all self-defense movements in aikido. Aikido students form pairs, alternating positions of uke (assailant who is thrown) and nage (person who is assaulted). In response to a throw, students use rolling or leaping falls to absorb impact and lessen the chance for injury.

 

...


Aikido is a Japanese martial art developed by Morihei Ueshiba (often referred to by his title 'O Sensei' or 'Great Teacher'). On a purely physical level it is an art involving some throws and joint locks that are derived from jiu-jitsu and some throws and other techniques derived from kenjutsu. Aikido focuses not on punching or kicking opponents, but rather on using their own energy to gain control of them or to throw them away from you. It is not a static art, but places great emphasis on motion and the dynamics of movement.


Upon closer examination, practitioners will find from Aikido what they are looking for, whether it is applicable self-defence technique, spiritual enlightenment, physical health or peace of mind. O Sensei emphasised the moral and spiritual aspects of this art, placing great weight on the development of harmony and peace. "The Way of Harmony of the Spirit" is one way that "Aikido" may be translated into English. This is still true of Aikido today, although different styles emphasise the more spiritual aspects to greater or lesser degrees. Although the idea of a martial discipline striving for peace and harmony may seem paradoxical, it is the most basic tenet of the art.

 

Morihei Ueshiba, founder of Aikido, once pinned an opponent using only a single finger.

 

 


 

 

Chaos  

 

 

chaos, in science, field of study devoted to processes that exhibit complex, apparently random behavior, such as cloud formation or fluctuations of biological populations. Attempts to predict the behavior of these systems led to the development of an interdisciplinary science, NONLINEAR DYNAMICS.

 

Chaos (kâ´òs´), in Greek mythology, the vacant, unfathomable space from which everything arose. In the OLYMPIAN myth GAEA sprang from Chaos and became the mother of all things.

 


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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." - Alan Dean Foster, "To the Vanishing Point":

 


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"Babylonians, Egyptians, and Greeks all acknowledged the primal dragon of Chaos even as the gods of their civilizations felt compelled to tame and organize the beast. Christianity tried to erase the goddess altogether. That is why the Church decided that God created the world ex nihilo, from nothing at all. But you can still smell the briny spew of the primal goddess in the formless, watery void that opens Genesis -- a distinct echo of the older Babylonian myth.

 

"The dragon of Chaos wore a far more honorable face in the East, where it was known as the Tao. For ancient sages like Chuang-Tzu, the subtle order of natural chaos was rich and bountiful compared to the bankrupt legalism and moralistic strictures of Confucian civilization -- which paradoxically produced the very disorder it wanted to suppress. The Taoists felt that only by tearing down the State of things -- including ordinary consciousness -- could we return to the golden age, the mixed-up harmony symbolized by the wonton (which derives from Mr. Hun-tun, Chuang-Tzu's lord of chaos). If these anarchic dreams could not be realized in society -- as Lao Tzu hoped to do -- then at least they could be realized in the body, through spiritual and physical practices which would open up the spontaneous chaos within. "

 


- Erik Davis - _Spiritual Chaos?_

 


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Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
--Henry B. Adams (1838-1918), U.S. historian. The Education of Henry Adams, ch. 16 (1907).

 

To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.
--Samuel Beckett (1906-89), Irish dramatist, novelist. Conversation with John Driver, 1961. Quoted in: Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett, a Biography, ch. 21 (1978).

 

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
--Carl Jung (1875-1961), Swiss psychiatrist. Collected Works, vol. 9, "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious," pt. 1 (1959; ed. by William McGuire).

 

There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music.
--John Keats (1795-1821), English poet. Letter, 13-19 Jan. 1818, to his brothers George and Thomas Keats (published in Letters of John Keats, no. 37, ed. by Frederick Page, 1954).

 

Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
--George Santayana (1863-1952), U.S. philosopher, poet. Dominations and Powers, bk. 1, pt. 1, ch. 1 (1951).

 

 "Chaos is present everywhere in countless ways and forms, while Order remains an unattainable ideal."
--M.C. Escher, 29 December 1947

 


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Feedback is all around us.  Some philosophers and scientists believe that consciousness itself is nothing but feedback; it's the brain thinking about the brain.  Thinking about thinking creates feedback, and that may have been one of the sparks of human consciousness.  That is what is so interesting about seeing a smaller example of a feedback system and be able to, when you look at one of these patterns, to see everything from hurricanes to swastikas, and all kinds of things in between. Some mathematicians to this day, even with chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics, say "How can such complex behavior arise from such a simple system?"  These systems also have meaning in the physical world.  What we have in video feedback is an incredibly simple system that is deterministic in design yet we get incredibly complex output from the system, even if there's no human intervention. When everyone thinks of fractals they think of a digital environment, and here is this totally analog environment which I never understood before producing beautiful, self- referential images.

 

 

 

 

 

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"Everything is sentient." - Pythagoras.

 

A "failure of logic" in a "paranoid democracy", ghost in the machine? Sentient Electronics?  As technology develops also our dependence on that system increases, even fault tolerant computers are vulnerable to overload, no standards have as yet been developed, "software is not predictable".  The nine hour breakdown of AT&T's long distance telephonenetwork in New York dramatizes the vulnerability of complex computer systems everywhere and that chaos is evident in all systems.  Chaos breaks across the line that separates scientific disciplines because it is a science of the global nature of systems.  Science was heading for a crisis of increasing specialization, dramatically that specialization has reversed because of terms of their constituent parts, quarks, chromosomes or neurons, chaos is looking at the whole.  We have to look at chaos. Norbert Wiener, father of cybernetics, defined information as "essentially a negative entropy".  In modern communication theory entropy is equated with noise which causes a waste of information.  According to the second law of thermodynamics "the general direction of physical events is towards decrease of order and organization". Schrodinger was led to postulate the existence of an ego which ultimately "controls the motion of the atoms".  Whatever the theory, something unseen and as yet unknown is at work behind the mechanisms of the world and the universe.  From the beginning of consciousness man has been all too aware of the existence of some mysterious force, and we can see this most obviously reflected in his spirituality. 


    - from the liner notes for the track _NYC Overload_ MP3 by Clock DVA off of _Man-Amplified_ CD on Contempo (1992) 

 

  

 


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In the beginning, according to the Pelasgian mythmakers, there was chaos, which is where most creation stories originate.  To the Pelasgians, however, chaos was not just a great cloud of nothingmess.  Rather, it was dynamic region that contained tremendous potential- a place of great energy but no differentiations to define things as separate or individual.  There were, in short, no dualities.  The grand scheme of creation, in this view, was to impose order on a limitless kernel of possibility.  This idea was passed down through the centuries and has become part and parcel of our very definition of the universe.  'cosmos' is the Greek word for 'order.'

 

 


 

 

Databases

 

 

 

So reality is like a computer database in that the right search word or "incantation" might cause a piece of information  -  a UFO or ghost or other anomaly--to materialize.

 


If you think of [reality] as the software for the universe, all it would take is for someone to change a comma in the program and the chair you are sitting in wouldn't be a chair at all. The major benefit from this model is that it handles anomalies very well. Coincidences would be a normal expectation. If you address a database with a request for anything with the word "pool" you will get ads for sunscreen, lotions, billiard balls and an investment prospectus or two. In parapsychology, gifted subjects may be forcing similar coincidences between separate locations or separate minds. One way of testing the theory, by the way, is to create massive informational anomalies and see what happens when they collapse. You could enhance remote viewing experiments, for instance, by loading the site with large quantities of data about highly unlikely events or situations, then quickly erase that data to collapse the singularity.

- Jacques Vallee    

 

~ ~ ~

 

TRP: Although you never talk about it, when you're talking about these elves singing and creating this is a concept that Australian indigenous peoples have carried within them. Native American people singing the reality into existence over and over, singing creation, and singing life. It's their database, it's their social database is this art form. But to them it's not an art, it's how they communicate, it's how they see reality.

 

TM: Well, the word becoming flesh, singing it into existence. In some profound way that nobody understands, certainly I don't, we are imprisoned by our expectations, and somehow the change never happens until the expectations are deconditioned.

 

- from an interview in The Resonance Project Magazine

 

 


 

 

 

Meme

 

 

"An idea is something you have;
an ideology is something that has you."

 

 --Morris Berman

 


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"I don't entertain, I enter the brain..."


- DJ Spooky - _Degree Zero_ MP3 off of _Riddim Warfare_ CD on Outpost/Asphodel (1998)  

 

 

 

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Coined by zoologist Richard Dawkins in his controversial book _The Selfish Gene (1975) , the 'meme' is the study of ideas which replicate and transmit themselves via the human mind the way a virus does in a biological host.

 

Important early scientific studies were conducted by Daniel C. Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter in the 1980s, before a climate of viral metaphors (Ebola, AIDS) and a rapidly growing hedonistic cyberculture helped popularize the memetics field in the1990s. 


Memetic engineering developed from diverse influences, includingcutting edge physics of consciousness and memetics research, chaos  theory, semiotics, culture jamming, military information warfare, and the viral texts of iconoclasts William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and Genesis P-Orridge.

 

The memetic engineer is able to isolate, study, and subtly manipulate the underlying values systems, symbolic balance and primal atavisms that unconsciously influence the individual psyche and collective identity. A highly educated but susceptible intelligentsia, worldwide travel, and information vectors like the Internet and cable television means that hysterical epidemics and disinformationcampaigns will become more common. This warfare will be conducted using aesthetics, symbols, and doctrines as camouflage that will ultimately influence our cultural meme pool. These contemporary 'life conditions' are explored in books like Carl Sagan's _The Demon Haunted World_, & John Brockman's _The Third Culture_. Fictional descriptions of memetic engineering include Isaac Asimov's seminal _Foundation_ series, G.I. Gurdjieff's _Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson_, Neal Stephenson's _Snow Crash_, and Robert W. Chambers' unearthly _The King In Yellow_ tome. 
  


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Memetics
Synopsys: Meme:  an information pattern, held in an individual's memory, which is capable of being copied to another individual's memory. 
Memetics:  the theoretical and empirical science that studies the replication, spread and evolution of memes
 
Cultural evolution, including the evolution of knowledge, can be modelled through the same basic principles of variation and selection that underly biological evolution. This implies a shift from genes as units of biological information to a new type of units of cultural information: memes.
  
A meme is a cognitive or behavioral pattern that can be transmitted from one individual to another one. Since the individual who transmitted the meme will continue to carry it, the transmission can be interpreted as a replication: a copy of the meme is made in the memory of another individual, making him or her into a carrier of the meme. This process of self-reproduction, leading to spreading over a growing group of individuals, defines the meme as a replicator, similar in that respect to the gene (Dawkins, 1976; Moritz, 1991).

 

For genes to be transmitted, you need a generation. Memes only take minutes to replicate, and thus have potentially much higher fecundity. On the other hand, the copying-fidelity of memes is in general much lower. If a story is spread by being told from person to person, the final version will be very different from the original one. It is this variability or fuzziness that perhaps distinguishes cultural patterns most strikingly from DNA structures: every individual's version of an idea or belief will be in some respect different from the others'. That makes it difficult to analyze or delimit memes. This does not imply that meme evolution cannot be accurately modeled, though. After all, genetics was a well-established science long before the precise DNA structure of genes was discovered.  

 

Examples of memes in the animal world are most bird songs, and certain techniques for hunting or using tools that are passed from parents or the social group to the youngsters (Bonner, 1980). In human society, almost any cultural entity can be seen as a meme: religions, language, fashions, songs, techniques, scientific theories and concepts, conventions, traditions, etc. The defining characteristic of memes as informational patterns, is that they can be replicated in unlimited amounts by communication between individuals, independently of any replication at the level of the genes.

 

Of course, the capacity of the nervous system for learning is the result of evolutionary processes at the genetic level. Yet I will here not go into detail about why that capacity has been selected. The increased fitness resulting from a nervous system that is flexible enough to adapt its behavior to many new situations, seems obvious enough. If a useful type of behavior can be learned directly from another individual by communication or imitation, that seems like a most welcome shortcut for having to discover it by personal trial-and-error. More arguments for why the capacity for meme replication has evolved genetically can be found in most texts about the recently founded domain of memetics (Moritz, 1991).

 

Memetics can be defined as an approach trying to model the evolution of memes. Memes undergo processes of variation (mutation, recombination) of their internal structure. Different variants will compete for the limited memoryspace available in different individuals. The most fit variants will win this competition, and spread most extensively. Different criteria for the fitness of a meme, relative to other memes, can be formulated.

 

Variation, replication and selection on the basis of meme fitness determine a complex dynamics. This dynamics will be influenced by the medium through which memes are communicated, and the copying-fidelity, fecundity and longevity it allows. Perhaps the most powerful medium for meme transmission is the computer network, and this implies some specific characteristics for memes on the net.

 


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As is the case with genes, it is not necessary to know the exact coding or even the exact size or boundaries of a meme in order to discuss its fitness, and thus to make predictions about its further spreading, survival or extinction within the population of competing memes. Such predictions can be empirically tested. For example, a memetic hypothesis might state that simpler memes will spread more quickly. This can be tested by observing the spread (perhaps in a controlled environment) of two memes that are similar in all respects, except that the one is simpler. Theories can also be induced from empirical observation of meme behavior "in the wild". Given the differences in variation and selection mechanisms, it is also possible to make predictions about the competition between memes and genes.

 


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censorship:

 

Any attempt to hinder the spread of a meme by eliminating its vectors. Hence, censorship is analogous to attempts to halt diseases by spraying insecticides. Censorship can never fully kill off an offensive meme, and may actually help to promote the meme's most virulent strain, while killing off milder forms.

 

- Memetic Lexicon

 


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Memetics is vital to the understanding of cults, ideologies, and marketing campaigns of all kinds, and it can help to provide immunity from dangerous information-contagions. You should be aware, for instance, that you just been exposed to the Meta-meme, the meme about memes...

 


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In memetics, ideas are viewed as almost independent creatures in a symbiotic relationship with human minds and cultures.  A meme is a (cognitive) information-structure able to replicate using human hosts and to influence their behavior to promote replication. 

 

 

 


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Host = A host must be able to possess at least the potential capacity to elaborate on the meme and to perform those cognitive tasks connected to the meme that we normally refer to as "understanding". This means that only humans can be hosts (animals can perhaps become hosts for simpler memes, but we will not discuss this here), at least until the development of artificial intelligences reaches further.

 

Vector = A vector is anything that transports the meme between hosts without the capacity to reflect on the meme. Examples are a wall, a voice, an email-program, or a picture. Can a human be a vector? Yes she can, if she lacks the cognitive capacity (or interest) to elaborate on a specific meme. Then she is just a non-reflective carrier of the meme, much the same as a book.  Note though that the human vector is still a potential host - or inactive host (Grant, 1990) - for the meme, should she suddenly choose to analyze the meme (in its widest sense) or achieve the contextual understanding which would make this possible.

 


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Elaboration

 

Something that a host actively thinks about is less likely to be forgotten, and also more likely to influence behavior. Thus memes that encourage thinking or fantasizing about themselves or related concepts have increased chances of survival. Rituals and ceremony are often powerful reminders of the meme.

 


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Storage

 

If a meme is to be spread by a host for a long time, the host must remember the meme. If a host is infected and later forgets the meme and/or stops acting out the new behavior before the host has spread the meme on, the host has not done the meme any more good than if the host had not been infected in the first place. Thus successful memes encourage permanent or long-lasting changes in the host.  Note that it is not necessary for the hosts to remember the meme itself, just change their behaviors in a way that will promote the spread of the (reconstructed) meme.

 


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External storage

 

Since human memory tends to be rather uncertain, external memory aids can also aid memes greatly not just as vectors, but as memory feedback.

 

If a host is infected by a scientific meme-complex he will be encouraged to read books relating to the meme complex. The host becomes likely to learn more and more about the theories rather than forgetting parts of them, and should he forget something relevant he can look it up again, the books can serve as memory feedback loops and also act as vectors for other parts of the meme-complex causing further infection.

 


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Infection Phase

 

After successful decoding the meme becomes part of the host's mental structures, and this is called infection. A person who does not remember a meme at all is not infected. A person that does remember a meme but who's behavior is not affected has thus become a human vector. A person whose behaviour is affected by a meme has been actively infected and can potentially transmit it to other hosts.

 

 


 

 

 

Networks

 


At any given moment in any population of human beings, there will be individuals who have 
reached different stages in the developmental sequence. Each will possess a certain store of 
data and will consequently emit behaviors, which stimulate others who have reached a stage 
appropriate to respond to them. The product of interaction between such individuals will be 
certain typical relationships or attachments.

 

 

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"Because networks of communication may generate feedback loops,  they may acquire the ability to regulate themselves. For example,  a community that maintains an active network of communication will  learn from its mistakes, because the consequences of a mistake will spread through the network and return to the source along feedback loops. Thus the community can correct its mistakes, regulate itself,and organize itself. Indeed, self-organization has emerged as perhaps 'the' central concept in the systems view of life, and like the concepts of feedback and self-regulation, it is linked closely to networks. The pattern of life, we might say, is a network pattern capable of self-organization. This is a simple definition, yet it is based on recent discoveries at the very forefront of science."

 

 - Fritjof Capra - _The Web of Life_

 


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"...what is happening is a tendency toward what I call turning the body inside out.  Through our media and cybernetics, we are actually approaching the point where consciousness can be experienced in a state of disconnection from the body.  We have changed.  We are no longer bipedal monkeys.  We are instead a kind of cybernetic coral reef of organic components and inorganic technological components.  We have become a force that takes unorganized raw material and excretes technical objects; we have transcended the normal definitions of humans.  We are like an enormous collective organism with our data banks, our forecasting agencies, and our computer networks, and the many levels at which we are connected into the universe.  Our self-image is changing; the monkey has been all but left behind and, shortly, will be left behind."


  -Terence Mckenna - _Archaic Revival_ 

 


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"In the old days, evil things spead rapidly, but now good things spread rapidly. If you understand...everything begins to appear wonderful and beautiful, and it naturally makes people stop wasting or stop desiring unnecessary things. This awakening is contagious and it will be transmitted to everybody soon."

 

- Tamo-san

 


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"Like the Irish King Cuchulain who fought the tide with his sword, they lose who would battle waves on the shores of light. The book is slow, the network is quick; the book is many of one, the network is many ones multiplied; the book is dialogic, the network polylogic."

 

- Michael Joyce

 


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The view of living systems as networks provides a novel  perspective on the so-called hierarchies of nature. Since  living systems at all levels are networks, we must visualize  the web of life as living systems (networks) interacting in  network fashion with other systems (networks). For example,  we can picture an ecosystem schematically as a network with a few nodes. Each node represents an organism, which means that each node, when magnified, appears itself as a network. Each node in the new network may represent an organ, which in turnwill appear as a network when magnified, and so on.

 

In other words, the web of life consists of networks within  networks. At each scale, under closer scrutiny, the nodes of  the network reveal themselves as smaller networks. We tend to arrange these systems, all nesting within larger systems, in a  hierarchical scheme by placing the larger systems above the  smaller ones in pyramid fashion. But this is a human projection.


In nature there is no "above" or "below," and there are no  hierarchies. There are only networks nesting within other  networks."

 

  - Fritjof Capra, _The Web of Life_

 


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"In the province of connected minds, what the network believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the network's mind there are no limits."

 

- John C. Lilly

 


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There may exist a vast communication network in the topological nature of things. A network that becomes a fact only for those species or individuals who will but have the intelligence enough to seek this vision. It will by them be found to be persistent in the nature of things. Alchemy thrives in a climate of such ideas. To validate the idea of the worth of the visions of worlds at a distance one must emerge with some idea spawned by the visionary Other but with a utility in the here and now. The wave quantification of the I Ching is the only idea of this sort that I personally have glimpsed in completeness. It took years to elaborate and its relation to the here and now is still elusive. Fragmentary themes abound: symbiosis, saucer-lens vehicles whose possessors navigate the higher topological oceans in our heads. All this could be transference and fantasy. In the classical sense of the word the experimenter with hallucinogens pursues gnosis: privileged knowledge concerning nature and vouchsafed by her in ecstacy.The history of consciousness is the halting exploration of the once irrational images and processes met in dreams and trance. Such images become concepts and discoveries asinformation flows through the multiple-continuum of being seeking equilibrium, yet paradoxically carrying everywhere images of ways the flow towards entropy was locally reversed by this being or that society or  phenomenon. We are immersed in a holographic ocean of places and ideas. We can understand this to whatever depth we are able. The ocean of images and the intricacy of their connections is infinite.
- Terence McKenna - _Open Ending_

 

"In the time of gathering together, make no arbitrary choice of your associates. There are secret forces at work, leading together those who belong together." ~~~I Ching Wisdom  

 

 

 


 

 

Realities 

 



 

 

"there is nothing real outside our perception of reality" 

 

- sample from 604 track _Perception Of Reality_ MP3 by Psy-chaos

 


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reality then becomes a "shared hallucination", meaning that there is a cemented, agreed upon perception of something.  if there was a race of people living on an island who thought that the color green was actually the color pink, are they wrong?  to the majority of the people on this planet, maybe, but to them the notion of "being wrong" about something like that is absurd.  they are simply not sharing in the agreed upon perception, or hallucination.  wars are fought over this kind of difference.  in order for us to stop fighting, and even arguing (a waste of valuable time), we must simply accept that "green" is "pink" to some people. english prime. - @Om* 2/3/2000

 

"'reality' is for people who can't handle drugs..."

 


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The fractal-enhanced  map-point  leaflet announced a giant, illegal party -- a  rave, where thousands of celebrants would take psychedelics, dance to the blips of computer-generated music, and discuss the ways in which reality itself would soon conform to their own hallucinatory projections. No big deal. Bohemians have talked this way for years,  even centuries. Problem is, after a few months in their midst, I started believing them. 


Quantum physicists at the best institutions agree that the tiniest particles making up matter itself have ceased to behave with the predictability of linear equations. Instead, they jump around in a discontinuous fashion, disappearing, reappearing, suddenly gaining and losing energy.

 

Mathematicians, likewise, have decided that the smooth, geometric model of reality they have used since Euclid first drew a triangle on papyrus is obsolete. Instead, using computers, they churn out psychedelic paisley patterns which they claim more accurately reflect the nature of existence. And who appears to be taking all this in first? The kids dancing to electronic music at underground gatherings. And the conclusion they have all seemed to reach is that reality itself is up for grabs. It can be dreamt up.


- Douglas Rushkoff - _Cyberia: Life In The Trenches Of Hyperspace_ (1994) 

 

 

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In Part Two of _The Holographic Universe_, "Mind and Body," Michael Talbot discusses the psychological aspects of the holographic model. According to Bohm, "In a universe in which all things are infinitely interconnected, all consciousnesses are also interconnected. Despite appearances, we are beings without borders. Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one." (p. 60) The holographic theory, according to the author, can explain many psychological phenomena. Some of these include psychic phenomena, the ability to see "auras", psychosis, the power of the mind to heal using visualization techniques, effects of placebos on healing, lucid dreaming and altered states of consciousness. The power of the mind is awesome and remains untapped. The author believes that by understanding the holographic model we can learn to access these powers. "In the implicate order, as in the brain itself, imagination and reality are ultimately indistinguishable, and it should therefore come as no surprise to us that images in the mind can ultimately manifest as realities in the physical body."  (p. 84)  

 

 


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"All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other."

 

- H.P. Lovecraft

 


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"Reality" is a word in the English language which happens to be (a) a noun and (b) singular. Thinking in the English language (and in cognate Indo-European languages) therefore subliminally programs us to conceptualize "reality" as one block-like entity, sort of like a huge New York skyscraper, in which every part is just another "room" within the same building. This linguistic program is so pervasive that most people cannot "think" outside it at all, and when one tries to offer a different perspective they imagine one is talking gibberish.


The notion that "reality" is a noun, a solid thing like a brick or a baseball bat, derives from theevolutionary fact that our nervous systems normally organize the dance of energy into such block-like "things," probably as instant bio-survival cues.

 

Such "things," however, dissolve back into energy dances -- processes or verbs -- when the nervous system is synergized with certain drugs or transmuted by yogic or shamanic exercises or aided by scientific instruments. In both mysticism and physics, there is general agreement that "things" are constructed by our nervous systems and that "realities" (plural) are better described as systems or bundles of energy functions.

 

So much for "reality" as a noun. The notion that "reality" is singular, like a hermetically sealed jar, does not jibe with current scientific findings which, in this century, suggest that "reality" may better be considered as flowing and meandering, like a river, or interacting, like a dance or evolving, like life itself.

 

- Robert Anton Wilson - _Cosmic Trigger_

 

 

By allowing for the unpredictability of simultaneous truths, certain humans start growing more receptive to signals beyond the realm of their own minds. It is here in the Concept-Free Zones where humans can unwrap their high-frequency antennae from self-preoccupation and direct it towards each other.. and down to the planetary entitiy.. on up to the stars and.. beyond.

 

- Antero Alli -_Akashic Record Player_

 


 

 

Silent Communication


 

 

..."Nothing was gradually perfecting the art of silent communication, or perhaps it would be truer to say that the art of silent communication was gradually perfecting Nothing. He had passed through a critical threshold when he learned - or was taught - to converse with any part nature's Kingdom, silently; with plants, trees, rivers, mountains, insects <["bees, in particular"]> and animals, or even with creatures in distant places. <["methocantordusts"]> Once he had passed through this critical threshold, Nothing had discovered that distance itself was not a problem; and then, soon afterwards, that time was not a problem either. So he could quite unselfconsciously converse, in a manner of speaking - but without himself actually uttering even a single word - with other lands and with other times. He had no idea how far distant planets, each of these in their turn would 'speak' silently back to him, or all would join in a silent conversation, all speaking together but in such a way that the conversation of each, and of the whole amalgam, remained perfectly clear. Communication with another age - either backwards or forwards in time as time is normally measured - was just as simple, though it always helped to have at least one definite <["cultural"]> reference point."...

 

- Edward Matchett, page 192, from _The Deepening of Personal Encounter_, "The Core of True Genius"

 


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What pets seem to pick up is intentions.  They pick up when people are about to go away on holiday even before they've started packing.  They pick up when people want to take them to the vet, and will often hide.  Dogs often pick up when they're going to be taken for a walk.  Dogs can be trained to respond not just to words and whistles, but even to silent, mental commands.  Many dogs and cats seem to know when a person they are bonded to has died, even when this happens far away.  They seem to be sensitive to changes in the field that connects them to their people.  This field is affected by the activities, emotions and intentions of their people - whether they're coming back or going away, whether they've died, whether they're in pain or trouble, whether they want to play.  The animals seem to be picking up not specific messages but rather general changes in the tension of the field...

 

Rupert Sheldrake - _The Evolutionary Mind_

 


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Wizards are clear on their intention. They know what it is they really need; what underlies all their many wants and desires. Wizards hold this intention in their mind. And then let go. No attachment to how or when; just a simple openness to whatever may be -- and a silent delight in the synchronicities that come to be.

 

- "How To Be A Wizard" by Peter Russell

 


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In the Durango desert, in Mexico, there's a creepy spot called the Zone of Silence. You can't pick up clear TV or radio signals. And locals say fireballs sometimes appear in the sky.

 


 

 

Strange Attractors


 

 

1. Point attractor, such as a pendulum swinging back and forth and eventually stopping at a point. The Attractor may come as a point, in which case, it gives a steady state where no change is made.

 

2. Periodic attractor, just add a mainspring to the pendulum to compensate for friction and the pendulum now has a limited cycle in its phase space. The periodic attractor portrays processes that repeat themselves.

 

3. Torus attractor, picture walking on a large doughnut, going over, under and around its outside surface area, circling, but never repeating exactly the same path you went before.  The torus attractor depicts processes that stay in a confined area but wander from place to place in that area. (These first three attractors are not associated with Chaos theory because they are fixed attractors.

 

4. Strange attractor, this attractor deals with the three-body problem of stability. The strange attractor shows processes that are stable, confined and yet never do the same thing twice.

 


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The final crop circle formation of 1997, was the "Strange Attractor" fractal at Hackpen Hill .  The term means "an irreducible invariant set that attracts the trajectories of all nearby points." This term was used by Terence McKenna to describe the "Omega Point," which sucks our evolutionary trajectory towards it, like the plughole at the end of time. 

 

 


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STANDING STONES AS STRANGE ATTRACTORS - A Speculation
by Jaq. D. Hawkins

 

The science of chaos is of interest to many magicians. There are several  books in print on the subject, two of which are listed in the sources section at the end of this article.(1)(2) For those who are unfamiliar with the subject, I offer a simplified explanation. In the 1960's and 70's, a few scientists began finding order within the disorder of natural phenomena, such as turbulence in the atmosphere and bodies of water, fluctuations in wildlife population, etc. They were mathematicians, physicists, biologists, chemists, all seeking connections between different types of irregularity.

 

They used computers to create special kinds of graphic images which capture the delicate structure underlying complexity in nature. They found that order arises spontaneously out of chaotic systems, and simple mathmatical equations are used to model systems every bit as violent as a waterfall. Simple deterministic models could produce what looked like random  behaviour.

 

A scientist by the name of Edward Lorenz is credited with the discovery of the 'strange attractor', which is a point in phase space which attracts the movements of molecules into spiral patterns. In chaotic systems, the molecules never follow the same path around the attractor, but create a pattern of folds within folds in the pattern, always staying within a limited  range. This can apply to any types of molecule, fluids, gases, or energy.

 

The original Lorenz attractor moves in a double-spiral pattern around two strange attractors. Other shapes were later created, but the data was always pulled into visible shapes. "Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few."(1)

 

For many centuries, science has been discovering explanations for things once called magic.(3) It seems reasonable to theorize that our ancestors may have found a way to tap into the natural energy of the earth, depicting their mental images of this energy in diagrams. The inner-folding pathways depicted by the Lorenz diagrams brings to mind the labrinth patterns depicted on the Glastonbury Tor and other sites. The patterns twist within themselves, covering every bit of space within a constricted area, yet the paths never cross. Some of the spiral patterns surrounding a single attractor are reminiscent of the spiral patterns carved on ancient monoliths, known as 'cup and ring' markings.

 

 

 

Scientist and archaeologists have been speculating on the purpose of standing stones and stone circles for many years. Some validity can be found for many theories, the most wisely accepted being for astronomical observation. While this theory seems to fit well with the positioning of the stones erected into circles, it does not explain the individual stones found in a wide variety of situations. Some of these stones have been credited as marking stones for old Roman roads, yet others are found standing in fields or other out of the way locations. These stones are often believed by the local population to have healing properties.  Many people have experienced a "tingling" sensation when they touch the stones, and in some cases a violent rocking sensation that seems very powerful.

 

The dowser John Williams, feels a representation of a positive and negative force. A Welsh water diviner, Bill Lewis, and John Taylor, professor of mathematics at Kings College, London, made an attempt to measure electromagnetic force on a stone in Crickhowell in South Wales. They used an instrument called a 'gaussmeter', which is used to measure static magnetic field strength. A young Argentinian physicist, Dr. Eduardo Balanovski, went along to see if there was anything odd about the stone. When he pointed the meter to the stone, the needle shot up to capacity. Not only did the stone have a measurable energy field, but the strength could be measured in bands around the stone. Possibly a spiral?  There has not been enough 'proper' scientific research on this subject to draw any hard conclusions, but the evidence seems to point to these stones somehow acting as amplifiers for natural energy currents within the earth.   There is some evidence that these stones are placed above points where two or more underground streams cross. Water moving through an underground tunnel creates a small electric charge. The charge is stronger  where  these streams cross. Keeping in mind the spiral patterns of turbulence, now measurable by chaos science methods, the theory exists that the stones are charged by this hydroelectric reaction. The molecular structure of quartz is spiral, and quartz seems to be a constituent of every 'active' stone. Coincidence? 

 

Modern man is always eager to believe that our ancestors were primative animals, with nothing more important to think about than their next meal, but the evidence is increasingly pointing to a different picture. One where our ancestors had architectural and building skills, mathematical and astronomical knowledge.   The next obvious step is to discover a way to use this energy spiraling around the stone. What did our ancestors use it for? The answer is yet to be discovered.

 

 


 

 

VALIS
Vast Active Living Intelligence System 

 
VALIS (acronym of Vast Active Living Intelligence System from an American film): A perturbation in the reality field in which a spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic vortex is formed, tending progressively to subsume and incorporate its environment into arrangements of information.  Characterized by quasi-consciousness, purpose, intelligence, growth and an armillary coherence.

 

- Great Soviet Dictionary, Sixth Edition 1992 

 

 


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In the excepts of the Exegesis reworked into the "Tractates Crytptica Scriptura" that close the novel _VALIS_, Philip K. Dick expresses the MIT computer scientist Edward Fredkin's view that the universe is composed of information. The world we experience is a hologram, "a hypostasis of information" that  we, as nodes in the true Mind, process. "We hypostasize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of information. This is the language we have lost the ability to read." With this Adamic code scrambled, both ourselves and the world as we know it are "occluded," cut off from the brimming "Matrix" of cosmic information. Instead, we are under the sway of the "Black Iron Prison," Dick's terms for the demiurgic worldly forces of political tyranny  and oppressive social control. Rome is the eternal paragon of this "Empire," whose archetypal  lineaments the feverish Dick recognized in the Nixon administration.
   
Following this event, Dick experienced a remarkable series of visions, hallucinations, and dreams,  many of which centered around VALIS, a "Vast Active Living Intelligence System" that he defined in his 1980 novel of the same name as a "spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic vortex...tending to progressively subsume and incorporate its environment into arrangements of information." Not a bad definition of the Internet, though Dick experienced this incoming information web far more intensely  than today's online grazers. Sometimes it struck him as a pink beam of esoteric data, or as a compassionate feminine "AI [Artificial Intelligence] voice" speaking to him from outer space. Other times, Dick felt he was in telepathic communication with a first-century christian named Thomas, and  once "the landscape of California, U.S.A. 1974 ebbed out and the landscape of Rome of the first century C.E. ebbed in."  

 

 

 


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PKD says in VALIS that  "We are not individuals. We are stations in the single mind" also........" that Space and Time were revealed as mere mechanisms of separation."

 

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ON OUR NATURE. It is proper to say: we appear to be memory coils (DNA carriers capable of experience) in a computer-like thinking system which, although we have correctly recorded and stored thousands of years of experiential information, and each of us possesses somewhat different deposits from all the other life forms, there is a malfunction - a failure- of memory retrieval. There lies the trouble in our particular subcircuit. "Salvation" through gnosis - more properly anamnesis (the loss of amnesia) - although it has individual significance for each of us - a quantum leap in perception, identity, cognition, understanding, world- and self-experience, including immortality - it has greater and further importance for the system as a whole, inasmuch as these memories are data needed by it and valuable to it, to its overall functioning. Therefore it is in the process of self-repair, which includes: rebuilding our subcircuit via linear and orthogonal time  changes, as well as continual signaling to us to stimulate blocked memory banks within us to fire and hence retrieve what is there.
   
The external informational or gnosis, then, consists of disinhibiting instructions, with the core content actually intrinsic to us - that is, already there (first observed by Plato; viz: that learning is a form of remembering).

 

The ancients possessed techniques (sacraments and rituals) used largely in the Greco-Roman mystery religions, including early Christianity, to induce firing and retrieval, mainly with a sense of its restorative value to the individuals; the Gnostics, however, correctly saw the ontological value to what they called the Godhead Itself, the total entity.

 

Two realms there are, upper and lower. The upper, derived from hyperuniverse I or Yang, Form I or Parmenides, is sentient and volitional.  The lower realm, or Yin, Form II of Parmenides, is mechanical, driven by blind, efficient cause, deterministic and without intelligence, since it emanates from a dead source. In ancient times it was termed "astral determinism." We are trapped, by and large, in the lower realm, but are through the sacraments, by means of the plasmate, extricated. Until astral determinism is broken, we are not even aware of it, so occluded are we. "The Empire never ended."

 

The name of the healthy twin, hyperuniverse I, is Nommo. The name of the sick twin, hyperuniverse II, is Yurugu. These names are known to the Dogon people of western Sudan in Africa. (*Nommo is represented in a fish form, the early Christian fish.)

 

The primordial source of all religions lies with the ancestors of the Dogon Tribe, who got their cosmogony and cosmology directly from the three-eyed invaders who visited long ago. The three-eyed invaders were mute and deaf and telepathic, could not breath our atmosphere, had the elongated misshapen skull of Ikhnaton, and emanated from a planet in the star-system Sirius. Although they had no hands, but had, instead, pincer claws such as a crab has, they were great builders. They covertly influence our history toward a fruitful end.

 

From _VALIS_ by Philip K. Dick

 

 

 

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It all had to do with time.  "Time can be overcome," Micrea Eliade wrote.  That's what it's all about.  The great mystery of Eleusis, of the Orphics, of the early christians, of Sarapis, of the Greco-Roman mystery religions, of Hermes Trismegistos, of the Renaissance Hermetic alchemists, of the Rose Cross Brotherhood, of Apollonius of Tyana, of Simon Magus, of Asklepios, of Paracelsus, of Bruno, consists of the abolition of time.  The techniques are there.  Dante discusses them in the _Comedy_.  It has to do with the loss of amnesia;  when forgetfulness is lost, true memory spreads out backward and forward, into the past and into the future, and also, oddly, into alternate universes;  it is orthogonal as well as linear.


 - Phlip K. Dick - _VALIS_ 

 

 


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excerpts from the Tractates:
  
22. I term the Immortal one a plasmate, because it is a form of energy; it is living information.  It replicates itself - not through information or in information - but as information.

 

31.  We hypostatize information into objects.  Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed.  This is a language which we have lost the ability to read.  We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information.  We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outward once more, now in an altered form.  We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing.

 

36.  In summary; thoughts of the brain are experienced by us as arrangements and rearrangements - change - in a physical universe; but in fact it is really information and information-processing which we substantialize.  We do not merely see its thoughts as objects, but rather as the movement, or, more precisely, the placement of objects: how they become linked to one another.  But we cannot read the patterns of arrangement; we cannot extract the information in it - i.e. it as information, which is what it is.  The linking and relinking of objects by the Brain is actually a language but not a language like ours (since it is addressing itself and not someone or something outside itself).

 

37.  We should be able to hear this information, or rather narrative, as a neutral voice inside us.  But something has gone wrong.  All creation is a language and nothing but a language, which for some inexplicable reason we can't read outside and can't hear inside.  So I say, we have become idiots.  Something has happened to our intelligence.  My reasoning is this: arrangement of parts of the Brain is a language.  We are parts of the Brain; therefore we are language.  Why, then, do we not know this?  We do not even know what we are, let alone what the outer reality is of which we are parts.  The origin of the world "idiot" is the word "private."  Each of us has become private, and no longer shares the common thought of the Brain, except at a subliminal level.  Thus our real life and purpose are conducted below our threshold of consciousness.

 

 

 

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Paperback - 241 pages Reissue edition (July 1991)
Vintage Books; ISBN: 0679734465 ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.70 x 8.00 x 5.23
The first of Dick's three final novels (the others are _Divine Invasion_ and _The Transmigration of Timothy Archer_). Known as science fiction only for lack of a better category, "Valis" takes place in our world and may even be semi-autobiographical. It is a fool's search for god, who turns out to be a virus, a joke, and a mental hologram transmitted from an orbiting satellite.

 

The proponent of the novel, Horselover Fat, is thrust into a theological quest when he receives communion in a burst of pink laser light. From the cancer ward of a bay area hospital to the ranch of a fraudulent charismatic religious figure who turns out to have a direct com link with god, Dick leads us down the twisted paths of Gnostic belief, mixed with his own bizarre and compelling philosophy. Truly an eye opening look at the nature of consciousness and divinity.

 

Synopsis
Valis, the disorienting and eerily funny centerpiece of Philip Dick's final trilogy that includes The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, is part science fiction, part theological detective story--in which god is both missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate crime.

 

 


 

 

Zen Buddhism

 


A Chinese and Japanese school of Mahayana Buddhism that asserts that enlightenment can be attained through meditation, self-contemplation, and intuition rather than through faith and devotion.

 

 

Zen . . . does not confuse spirituality with thinking about god while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
--Alan Watts  (1915-73), British-born U.S. philosopher, author. The Way of Zen, pt. 2, ch. 2 (1957).

 



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This Zen look on consciousness neatly fits in with Susan Blackmore's (author of _The Meme Machine_) views that consciousness is essentially an entity ''telling stories to itself'' : i.e., it's a ''belief'' or ''self-deception''

 


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John Cage was the father of indeterminism, a Zen-inspired aesthetic which expelled all notions of choice from the creative process.

 

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