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Sunday, September 3rd 2000


VICTOR TORRICO:

Hi All,

This is a "Ray of Light" I received today from www.light-mission.org.
They are provided on a daily basis for anyone interested. They are
generally most informative and useful.

Love and affection,

Victor


" Our only concern is to find an immediate answer to our various
problems. But sooner or later the immediate answers are found to be
unsatisfactory because no problem has an answer apart from the problem
itself. But if we can Understand the problem, all the intricacies of it,
then the problem no longer exists. Our Awakening would not allow it to
exist in Understanding it. When we are Seeking to Understand a problem we
tend not to look at the problem itself, but rather at the *resulting
effects* of the problem. And so our *band-aids* and *quick-fixes* lose
their enchantment when we Realize that the problem still exists. The
*solution* to the problem is IN the problem itself, as the Cause of our
Suffering is IN the Suffering. To Understand it is to Realize it's
remedy.

God's Will ? My Will ? Your Will ? Will Rogers ? Why must it
be someone's ? Why must it be one in leu of the other ? What is other ?
Is not Will, Will ? May I offer, that if there is a Will, BE that Will
and pay no mind to *possessing* it or that someone else possesses it.
Will IS, why not let it BE as it IS rather than projecting our own
conditioned notions into/onto it. If Will could be possessed, it would be
bottled and could be purchased in the all-night drugstore -- so have no
fear as long as there are all-night drugstores.

To See our own conditionings and frailties and shortcomings in the
antics of others is indeed looking into The Mirror of Truth. Mirrors of
Truth most often are in the most unlikely of places, yes ? And by Seeing
such conditionings in ourselves and discarding them, we do not necessarily
Save the world but we do Save a bit of it (ourselves). And what happens
when we *empty* ourselves of these beloved conditionings ? Unprotected by
the security-blanket that these conditionings seem to afford us ?
Treading realms that even eagles fear to tread ? Opening our Inner
Darkness to the Inner Light ? Dwelling IN the Eternal Moment ? We Reach
and Touch the Face of God ! We are to 'God' what a wave is to the ocean,
what a branch is to the vine. Each of us is a wave in the Ocean of Life,
a branch of the Vine. And what is the Ocean without waves ? Where is
the vine if not in the branches ? The Ocean is the Reality of every wave,
as the Vine is the Reality of every branch.

May I offer that such Realization is neither happiness or joy, but
rather the Realization of What-IS IS as it IS -- no happiness, no joy, no
depression, no unhappiness, just IS What-IS."


----------------------------------------------------------------------

CHUCK HILLIG:

Dear Friends,
Some of you are aware that I'm the author of a little book called
"Enlightenment for Beginners" (which, by the way, Jerry has
enthusiastically endorsed over the years.) What you don't know, however,
is that a professional film editor in Hollywood has recently created a
13-minute computer-animated, film adaptation of this little "black dot"
book. (It turns out that he had originally read the book 10 years ago in
its earlier incarnation and had always loved it.) Anyway, the Editor took
it upon himself to voluntarily invest about 250 hours of his time in
putting the film together on AVID. We're having the "national premiere"
(he's titled the film "The Meaning of Life in 13 Minutes") on Saturday,
September 23rd at the Spirit Light Expo in Los Angeles (on Venice Blvd. in
Culver City). According to the promotional materials, the Expo is focused
on "Merging Movies, Magic and Metaphysics. Although the Expo runs for the
entire weekend, we'll ONLY be showing the film at 7 P.M. on Saturday,
September 23rd. I'm supposed to talk for about 20 minutes, premiere the
film, do a Q&A and, hopefully, sell some books. If any of you would like
to attend the Expo and/or just want some more info about it, I invite you
to check out the Promoter's website at www.eddieconner.com
With Love and Grace,
Chuck Hillig (www.blackdotpubs.com)


---------------------------------------------------------------------



----------------------------------------------------------------

JOHN METZGER:

"Men are afraid to forget
their own minds,
Fearing to fall thru the void
With nothing to which they can cling.

They do not know
that the void
is not really void
but the real realm
of the Dharma"--

Wow, I thought reading that,
when I start falling
in that inhuman pit
of dizzy death
I'll know ( if
smart enough t'remember )
that all the black
tunnels of hate
or love I'm falling
through, are
really radiant
right eternities
for me

Jack K. Mexico City Blues

John: Wow, Falling thru the floor of my old dilapidated house trailer the
other day gives this chorus a special place in my heart. When Christiana
procures enough money to remove the ads, can we take up a collection for me
toward a small RV? No? Have a good day.


---------------------------------------------------------------


From Wired News, available online at:
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,38466,00.html

Wanted: Contents of Your Brain
by Farhad Manjoo

3:00 a.m. Sep. 1, 2000 PDT

Chris McKinstry doesn't just want to pick your brain. He wants to
harvest it.

With the facts he finds inside you, McKinstry will produce the
"ultimate average person." And then he'll rent out this fellow -- to
do your thinking for you.

If all this sounds more like science fiction than science fact, it
isn't. McKinstry, a computer scientist and an artificial intelligence
expert, has embarked on a groundbreaking artificial intelligence
project that aims to leverage the mind power of millions of Web
surfers to teach a computer to approximate human thought.

The computer is called GAC, which stands for General Artificial
Consciousness. McKinstry's aim is no less than to create an
artificially conscious being -- a computer that can independently
think human thoughts.

GAC (pronounced "Jack"), went online a month ago at McKinstry's
Mindpixel Digital Mind Modeling Project website and is just an infant.


But the computer will learn to act human in the same manner that a
human baby learns, McKinstry said, by examining the world around it.

GAC's world is the World Wide Web. The more people who talk to the
baby at his website, the faster GAC will learn about the world, and
the sooner he'll be able to achieve consciousness.

In other words, GAC needs you. Or, more accurately, he needs your
"mindpixels."

McKinstry coined the term to describe what he calls the "minimum
intelligent signal" of the human mind. Basically, a mindpixel is a
true-false statement that will be answered the same way by all human
beings.

The sky is blue is an example of a basic mindpixel, as most people ill
respond to the statement affirmatively. But mindpixels need not
necessarily be so general, McKinstry said.

Indeed, for GAC to act truly human, it needs to know everything the
average human being knows, and these facts are generally more specific
than the color of the sky.

Some other examples of mindpixels include:

Cows are milk-producing animals. TRUE.

Linux is a computer operating system. TRUE.

Britney Spears is known to be an expert on semiconductor physics.
FALSE.

McKinstry wants real human beings to go to GAC's site and enter in any
mindpixels they can think of. Visitors to the site are also asked to
answer "true" or "false" to mindpixels that others have entered into
the system.

In this fashion, McKinstry said, GAC learns both the basic questions
necessary to human existence, and the consensus answers to those
questions. More simply, GAC learns about the world.

But where, in this soup of true and false statements, will we find
GAC's humanity?
McKinstry thinks that after GAC has accumulated a huge number of
mindpixels, the computer will be able to model human thought.
McKinstry is not sure how many mindpixels GAC needs, but he thinks
it's more than 100 million.

If this artificial intelligence theory sounds fantastical -- if not
downright unbelievable -- McKinstry says there's a simple way of
looking at it. He likens it to a process used everyday in computers:
data compression.

Compressing a large music file into a portable format, like an MP3,
involves approximation and inference. A computer examines the data in
a file, pulls out what's pertinent, and infers the rest based on how
the bits of data compare to each other.

McKinstry thinks that a few hundred million mindpixels will represent
a computerized "compression" of the human mind. And then, just as an
MP3 player plays back the compressed file by approximating the data
that's missing, GAC will approximate human thought by "filling in" the
mindpixels it needs when you ask it to think.

The process is, obviously, more complicated than this.

"The theory is solid, the science is solid -- it's only a matter of
time," McKinstry said.

But Doug Lenat, who runs the long-term AI project Cyc (pronounced
"psych"), was skeptical about the Mindpixel project.

Lenat, who has not specifically researched GAC, said that there are
just too many one-bit, true-false statements in this world to make
even a huge number meaningful.

"Would it also have to have a statement saying that the sky is not
red?" he asked, suggesting that GAC would have to store in its
database a false statement for every color that isn't blue -- an
obviously large number.

"I think he may find there aren't enough atoms in the universe to
store the yes-no questions that might be required even by a
fourth-grader to do a homework problem," Lenat said.

But McKinstry disagreed, saying that with enough mindpixels, GAC will
be able to infer that if the sky is blue, it isn't any other color.

McKinstry also criticized Cyc, saying that its method of accumulating
knowledge (by having knowledge experts enter in common-sense
statements like, "If Abraham Lincoln was at Gettysberg, so was his
leg") was simply inefficient.

McKinstry said that his system, because it uses the huge population of
the Web as its knowledge pool, is a decentralized, "bottom up" system,
and is consequently more efficient.

He even thinks that he has found a way to solve his biggest problem:
jaded Web surfers.

McKinstry's idea is to give away "dot-com dollars." The plan is to
award 20 shares in www.mindpixel.com for each mindpixel entered into
GAC.

And if GAC does indeed learn to think like a human, Mindpixel could be
a very profitable company.

"It's like inventing teleportation," McKinstry said, boasting that GAC
could be as extraordinary as the beam-me-up-Scotty technology that
science has yet to discover. "How could you put a value on that?"

He envisions GAC being used in everyday commercial applications like
Web searching, and also "just to think," he said. He said that GAC
might be rented out to universities, which would use the system to
pursue new areas of thought.

McKinstry's stock scheme seems to be working, as the site has already
attracted thousands of registered users in its short time online.

And while some of Mindpixel's registered users said that they weren't
entirely convinced that GAC would ever achieve human consciousness,
they said that they thought that divulging some of their mindpixels
was an easy way to find out.

"I'd read about Cyc and I thought that was cool, but this is so much
more of a hacker's approach to AI," said Matthew Burns, a Web designer
and AI enthusiast who has entered in more than 100 mindpixels.

"I think it could be famous, if only in a geek way," he said. "And
even then it could get enough people to really give it a good number
of pixels."

And then, as McKinstry said, we'll have the "core of humanity" in a
computer.

Related Wired Links:

Ireland's 'Mad' New Media Lab
Jul. 26, 2000

Religion Grappling With Tech
Jul. 21, 2000

Valley to Bill Joy: 'Zzzzzzz'
Apr. 5, 2000

Debating Humanity's Demise
Apr. 3, 2000

Smart Methods to Spot Fraud
Apr. 3, 2000

Copyright 1994-2000 Wired Digital Inc. All rights reserved.

GLORIA:

OKAY!!! How many nondualists going there will it take to make a
nondualist out of this guy??

Let's get in on that vital early programming while it's still a baby.



GENE POOLE:

Hi Glo,

That was my first thought, too. But upon further reflection, I now
perceive that GAC would end up being the first 'bible' of the
world-dream, nothing but a 'living body of consensus', or in other
words, simply a vast interactive database of opinion.

In this regard, GAC would be the 'worlds biggest asshole', as in;
"Opinions are like assholes; everyone has one, and most of them
stink".

GAC sounds like the sort of cybercrutch that I do not need.


Thanks,

==Gene Poole==



PHIL BURTON:

Impossible. All computers are dualists. 0 1. No computer
is able to count higher than one. This one in particular is
being taught that "the sky is blue and not red" while
everyone knows that the sky is mostly just light which is
all colors at once, and no color.

---------------------------------------------------------------


JAMES BEAN:


Sant Kabir Selected Poems


This union with the guru, O Kabir,
Sets me free; like salt mingled
With flour, I am no more I!

Now I have no caste, no creed,
I am no more what I am!

O dear brother!
By what name would you call me?



When the bride is one
with her lover,
who cares about
the wedding party?



I am not a Hindu,
Nor a Muslim am I!

I am this body, a play
Of five elements; a drama
Of the spirit dancing
With joy and sorrow.



A drop
Melting into the sea,
Everyone can see.
But the sea
Absorped
In a drop--
A rare one
can follow!



I am looking at you,
You at him,
Kabir asks, how to solve
This puzzle--
You, he, and I?



Dying, dying, the world
Is dying only.
But lo! None knows how to die
In such a way
That he dies never again.



-----------------------

A Poem of Kabir

Found in:

"The Kabir Book,"

By Robert Bly,

Beacon Press:


Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.

Jump into experience while you are alive!

Think...and think... while you are alive.

If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten --
that is all fantasy.

What is found now is found then.

If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City
of Death.

If you make love with the Divine now, in the next life
you will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that
does all the work.

Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.


-----------------------


Freedom From Illusion

Both Sant Kabir and Sant Dharam Dass taught that only by hearing the
True Name of God one can be free from maya (illusion). When they speak
of "the Name," they mean much more than a word that can be pronounced
or written. Rather, it is the Word that created the heavens and the
earth "in the beginning;" it is within every living thing, and still
vibrates throughout all the heavens of creation. For them, this Name
can truly be heard mystically/spiritually with the ears of the soul,
and is the way to (Jiva Mukti) enlightenment/liberation and mystic ascension
(Surat Shabda Yoga) back to the Point of Origin, the Source.

The following is an abstract of the teachings of Sant Dharam Dass, a
Master in the Kabir Line, as well as mystic verses of Kabir, from the
book: "Sant Kabir, Mira Bai, Shaikh Farid, Bhikan, and Surdas," by O.P.
Ralhan, Anmol Publications, New Delhi:

Kabir (the Sat Guru) exhorted Dharam Dass to shake off maya (illusion)
and teach to humanity Bhakti (love and devotion), for on him has been
placed the burden of the world [Dharam Dass was to be Kabir's spiritual
successor, the next Sat Guru]. To him also has been entrusted the
touchstone
by means of which crows (jivas, souls) can be converted into swans (hansas,
heavenly birds soaring through the heavens). Through the vehicle of
the Name the shape and color of the soul can be changed.


Dharam Dass taught that without the knowledge of the Name none can safely
cross the ocean of existence. The spoken word is maya; the unutterable
Name alone is true, the Name that pervades all hearts. As clouds obstruct
the rays of the sun, so does illusion withhold from humanity True Knowledge.
That soul alone attains perfection which learns the Secret of the immortal
root (Amar Mul, the Shabad, Current of Inner Sound and Light).

***** ***** ***** *****

Verses from Kabir:

If thou desire the Beloved, play with a Sat Guru;
if unripe oil-seeds be pressed, oil will not be obtained.


Without the Saint who loveth God,
the world is in my opinion a desert.


Association with Saints is obtained by destiny;
By such association the boon of Jiva Mukti is obtained, and the difficult
road to God is not obstructed.


What harm can my weaver caste do me since God dwelleth in my heart?
God hath embraced Kabir, and released him from all his entanglements.


The Sound of the Unstruck Melody is heard
Where the Lord reposeth.
He who fashioned continents and different countries,
The worlds,
Though styled Inaccessible (Agam) and Invisible (Alakh), dwelleth within
the heart.
He shineth in the plantain blossom and in the sunshine,
And hath taken His dwelling in the pollen of the lotus.
God's spell is within the twelve petals of the heart
Where the holy Lord of Lakshmi reposeth.

The great God reacheth from the lower to the upper regions of the heavens;

He illumineth the silent realm,
Where there is neither sun nor moon.
Know that He pervadeth the body as well as the universe;


He who fixeth his attention upon Him and removeth it not, becometh released
from transmigration,

And absorbed in the Infinite.
He who repeateth His Name, becometh as He.


With Divine Knowledge as mine oil and Thy Name (Naam) my wick I have
made a lamp to illumine my body.

I have lit the lamp with the Light of the Lord of the worlds; he who
knoweth how to do this knoweth the Omniscient.

The eternal Sounds of God that dwell in the soul, are my five musical
instruments [the Five Sounds].


My dread of transmigration is at an end
Since Ram (God) displayed His love for me.

The Light hath dawned, the darkness is dispelled;
I have obtained the jewel God by meditation upon Him.

When He conferreth happiness, sorrow fleeth away;
The jewel of my heart is absorbed in God's love.

Whatever occurreth is according to Thy will, O God;
He who understandeth this shall be easily absorbed in Thee.

My soul is absorbed in the Life of the world.


-------------------------------------------------------------


MICHAEL READ:


One is screaming in agony
While another screams in ecstacy.

There, one is harvesting a garden
While another is burying her children.

From this one a blessing
From that one a curse.

In one land a drought
In another land a flood.

Going about with purpose,
Wandering aimlessly,
A spark, a flame, a raging storm
Intense longing
Losing desire
Finding only emptiness
Fulfilled.

This one is a babbler
That one is a poet
The other a scientist
None may know
Purpose and yet survive.

This whispered word
Shouts on thunder's wing.

Stand in an open field
Welcome the talon'd lightening.

From the Awakening Heart - Mu

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