Reclusland

This article was supposed to link together several article on the wisdom inherent in the body.  Kind of a follow up to the Controlling Desire post, I suppose…

From “Subjectively Philosophical”:
“Breath is something that we are born with, something that we use all the time, but for some reason unknown to me, as life goes by, we generally forget how to use it well. We see children, running around, full of energy… and we see adults, coughing, running out of breath, trying to catch up. And catch up they can, quite easily. What we are after here, the thing that distinguishes children from adults, is abdominal breathing – breathing in using the full extent of the lungs, breathing seamlessly and without obstruction.”

Although I’ve mentioned it before, “Alchemically Braindamaged” post on Neo-Reichian body therapy is worth checking out in regards to this as well.

Another article that’s been referenced here before is this piece from Newsweek about a lady who ended up with a knitting needle through the heart (emphasis mine):

It was early Saturday morning, just 12 days after surgeons had delicately removed Ellin Klor’s splinter and stitched her up. Klor had been home for a week, thankful for the attention of her husband and daughter, but she awoke with excruciating chest and back pain. Writhing and struggling to breathe, she had no idea what was happening, and she rushed to the emergency room.

Doctors poked and prodded her. They listened to her heart and lungs. They whispered their greatest fear: perhaps it was a pulmonary embolism, a potentially fatal blood clot in her lungs. They ordered immediate scans along with enough morphine to erase the pain.

When the doctors returned, they shook their heads and seemed confused. The tests were all negative. Her lungs were clear and her heart was healing just fine. So they explained it away as some kind of fleeting discomfort from surgery and gave her more painkillers before sending her home.

The next day, Klor was home alone when the phone rang. A radiologist from Stanford wanted to see her right away. At the hospital, the doctors explained the urgency. On a CT scan, the radiologist had detected a mass under her armpit. It looked like an enlarged lymph node, a telltale sign of breast cancer.

A decade earlier, she had battled the disease on the other side. But this was a brand-new malignancy and not a recurrence of the old tumor, which has lower survival rates. This was like starting from square one, a brand-new battle. Klor felt so lucky that she let out a whoop when the doctor informed her that only one lymph node was implicated and the disease was contained.

The knitting needle through her heart had actually saved her life, her doctors said. If she hadn’t gone to the ER—if she hadn’t been screened with all those machines—the tumor probably wouldn’t have been detected until it had grown and spread. Klor believes she’s one of the luckiest people in the world. I didn’t die from the knitting needle, she remembers thinking, So I’m not going to die from cancer.

What the article never goes back to is what actually caused that excruciating pain, 12 days after her surgery.  They shrugged it off as “fleeting discomfort” from surgery? Yet this is what saved her life, this moment of intense pain that had no apparent cause.  Something must have caused that, but what?

From an article on Parkour:
“It is a means to understand the body as a vehicle of transportation, and to further progress the self, as well as learn the many ways in which the human person can be useful in personal, social, physical, and mental situations. As this understanding is established, the utility of Parkour not only comes from the ability to escape, but the ability to properly use both the body and the mind. The applied focus of the physical practice extends outward, where the physical fitness and intense training for functionality serves a useful purpose, and the meditative pursuit of the mind as a result of training also serves a useful purpose.”

I guess it can all be rather simply put in these word’s from a comment made on one of Tim Boucher’s major posts:
Yes, because your body knows everything it needs to know. There’s a passage in the Tao Te Ching about this, but I leant my copy to someone. He says something about how to know the universe you just need to look at your own workings. It is not mere metaphysical speculation but an active command to master your mind and body.

Why do we try to control, rather than master?  Why force rather than learn?  We know so little about our bodies and how to use them, yet we seem to think that we already know everything, and that anything that stops us from getting what we want is wrong.  But we don’t even know what this “we” is that wants it!

There is so much more knowledge we could gained by just listening…

Just a couple more things I’d like to draw into this:

From Gurdjieff:
In still another mood he recalled to me his chapter which narrates the process by which God created the world, first by emanations from himself, and later the entire work of universe making went on by itself. “Just so,” he said, “I create my world. First, emanations. Then everything happens. But my task more difficult than God’s. God have to destroy nothing first. Nothing existed. He simply created. But I, I must tear down before I can create. Double work. If you want to put new building across the street you must first tear down old one.”

And from William Burroughs (via Gus Van Sant):

Just a quick post for today. Still working on that mega one…

But in the meantime… suicide!

And, it should be no surprise to any of my regular readers that what I’m talking about in this case is quantum suicide.  Check here for an in-depth explanation of quantum suicide, but I’ll try to break down the concept for you briefly.

Basically, you first take the whole Schrödinger’s cat experiment, where a cat placed in a box is either is or is not poisoned based on the measurement of a certain quantum particle (it’s a fancy box). For example, a clockwise spinning electron equals “dead kitty”, while a counter-clockwise spinning electron equals “live kitty”.

Since all quantum particles naturally exist in a state of superposition (which basically means they’re spinning in both directions at the same time, although that’s a bit simplified for the sake of our conversation here) and they stay in superposition until they are observed and measured. And once he’s shut in the our box, our cat pretty quickly achieves a state of superposition (of being both alive and dead) as well.  Remeber, it’s a fancy box.

Until you open the box and look at it.  Then the cat is either alive or dead.

The particle’s existence in a state of superposition is completely dependent on the its not being observed or measured in anyway.  You’d never actually get to see the superimposed cat, since the acting of looking at it (or becoming aware of it) would be an act of observation.  The best I can do is this:

Now get rid of the cat, and put in a person.  And a gun.   Pulling the trigger allows this same “fancy box” to measure that same particle.  Clockwise spin equals “click”, counterclockwise spin equals “bang!”

Repeatedly pulling the trigger would cause a random pattern of observation and after one or two measurements, the person’s pretty much guaranteed to be dead.  Sounds a lot like Russian Roulette, right?  So why all the science?  Why not just use good old fashioned blanks and bullets?

Well, according to the theories of a physicist named Hugh Everett, it’s not quite so easy as pure chance.  What’s actually happening is that the state of superposition, when observed, is showing to the observer one of it’s possible states.  To crib a bit from that earlier link (emphasis mine):

Everett proposed that the entire universe is one giant quantum mechanical system, and that there can be no definite outcome of a measurement within it. Although an individual who is part of the system cannot be aware of more than one result, every possible event can and does take place. Each conscious individual exists in their own world, with an individual perspective on a larger reality.

Because of Everett’s theories, known as the Many World’s interpretation, we can hazard a guess at a different way of viewing reality.  Within this “giant quantum mechanical system” of the universe, all possibilities exist, and our acts of conscious observation simply tune into one or another possibility, depending on which ones are most readily available from within our current state of being.

Every possible outcome happens, according to Many Worlds, but there’ll be no chance for the scientist to know about the ones where he gets killed. All he will ever be aware of is the `click’ and after 10 or so clicks he will be convinced that a reality exists where he can survive this process forever.

This is why concentration and attention are so important, because as long as the focused observer is there, that person in the fancy box, pulling the trigger of the quantum suicide gun, will never him or her self experience that moment of explosive death.  Other people might, but that one person never could.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that all random chance is controllable purely by observation.  Clearly to anyone who’s lost a loved one, or even just lost a lot of money at blackjack, just watching and wishing doesn’t really effect the outcome.  But that’s just our surface thoughts and desires.  What about our deeply held assumptions and beliefs?  What about those thoughts, emotions, and opinions that we hold to be truly self-evident and unquestionable.

These subconscious desires of “that’s just the way the world works” are what motivate our behavior and our actions.  That’s where our true focus and attention are, whether we like admit it or not.  That’s where the observer who’s measuring the quantum superposition rests. It’s not in our surface thoughts or emotions.  If by chance it does happen that we can will our thoughts into existence, it’s the ones that we’re already carrying around with us all the time that are the ones we’re already willing into existence.

What we are failing to take into account are these subroutine beliefs that are going on in the backs of our mind, the patterns of awareness that we’ve held onto and cultivated until they exist on a level where we are no longer conscious of them.  They in no way represent a conscious consistent wish for anything; they’re just a mess of different things we’ve picked up along the way.

This is what the splintered mind does, it’s repressed feelings and unexamined dogmas causing so many problems. These bits of cognitive dissonance that we carry around inside us all the time spread out fractally into reality, along tiny strings of little quantum measurements.  Every decision, every time we pick “this” and not “that”, whether in our actions (do not commit adultery) or our thoughts (do not covet your neighbor’s wife), is a quantum measurement. It is the pulling-into-being of a “thing” out of the numinous quantum superposition which is the universe.  This is the creation of karma, and we are all trapped within it.  It requires our intense focus and attention to cut through it and see what other opportunities are still left to us.  We need to start following those, and through following them, bring still newer and better opportunities into existence. And so on and so on, ad infinitum…

But until we take this karma effect into account, we cannot have any meaningful conversation about whether or not our thoughts have any effect on our realities.  Because if we can do it, then we’re doing it already, and we’re doing it wrong.

That’s all for today.  I’ll leave you with a couple of links and an image:

Is the world economic crisis a prelude to using the WORLD GAME? Hopefully.

You are a point of indeterminate size
Moving through probability space
Participating in a consensual reality
Of combined choice, chance, and circumstance

You are on a line which extends to infinity:
Infinity in either direction

And when you add all the possible values together
For what that line could be
All the positive values extending to infinity
All the negative values extending to infinity
It all balances out (positive x plus negative x equals zero)

Symmetrical no matter where you are on the line
It all sums up as the point of indeterminate size

Everything fits together in the implicate order
Of the zero that we are headed towards:
And the zero from before we began.
Indeterminacy, all possible states, viewed as a singularity

The Omniverse

Well, this is only just making it in as my post-for-the day today, but in my defense, I’ve been working on what’s turning into a very long post on organization, top-down power, and the death drive.  That’ll hopefully be up in a day or two, but in the meantime, here’s a quick little triage post…

This one was going to be about Desire, Love (that’s an earlier version of the Lovers card. See Cupid with his bow? Not sure why he’s aiming at three people though…), and whether or not these are things we should be trying to control.  I did find a lot of links on this, but it going to require a lot of research to bring together anything worth saying.  Besides, I’m not sure if anything could really change my mind on the subject anyway.  It’s called “falling” in love for a reason, and making someone, even yourself, do it is to miss the entire point of the whole adventure…

Eliezer Yudkowsky, from Overcoming Bias, starts things off  by explaining our need for a “Justified Expectation of Pleasant Surprises”, or why sometimes it’s better not to know something in advance:
Imagine living in two possible worlds.  Both worlds are otherwise rich in challenge, novelty, and other aspects of Fun.  In both worlds, you get smarter with age and acquire more abilities over time, so that your life is always getting better. But in one world, the abilities that come with seniority are openly discussed, hence widely known; you know what you have to look forward to. In the other world, anyone older than you will refuse to talk about certain aspects of growing up; you’ll just have to wait and find out. I ask you to contemplate – not just which world you might prefer to live in – but how much you might want to live in the second world, rather than the first.  I would even say that the second world seems more alive; when I imagine living there, my imagined will to live feels stronger.  I’ve got to stay alive to find out what happens next, right?

From Futurismic, a question as to whether continued development or happiness should be considered a primary goal of civilization:
…how will society change when people are free to choose their personalities at a whim? In fact, could that be the solution to the Fermi Paradox? Could it be that all technological civilizations advance to the point where they develop a technique for inducing whatever their alien equivalent of permanent happiness is and then stop developing?

To which I would add, can development, along any lines, ever ephemeralize into a state of permanent happiness?  If it can, then shoud it?  And please, no knee-jerk reactions about “permanent bliss = death!”  It’s a more complicated question than that.  For example, what if there was a way to accomplish this where it didn’t “equal death”?

Things get a little more complicated with help from the ever popular Physorg:
Women with high levels of a key sex hormone are judged more attractive by themselves and others, and may be more inclined to cheat on their partners, according to a study published Wednesday.  University of Texas psychologists Kristina Durante and Norman Li found that women with high concentrations of the hormone oestradiol were likelier to flirt, kiss and have a serious affair outside an established relationship.  In a study published in the British journal Biology Letters, the duo described the behaviour as “opportunistic serial monogamy” and not related to one-night stands.

Does it worry anyone else that this might one day become as easy as popping a pill?  Not that I want to stop people from doing whatever they feel they need to, but still…  What does taking a pill to make oneself more likly to flirt, more attractive to others, and more likely to cheat say about you, and at what point would someone decide to stop taking such a pill?   Would it become addictive?  And what value do you gain by consciously chosing something that is considered by society to be a more instictual choice?

Well, the New York Times has a little something that might work with the above to make things more interesting:
In the new issue of Nature, the neuroscientist Larry Young offers a grand unified theory of love. After analyzing the brain chemistry of mammalian pair bonding — and, not incidentally, explaining humans’ peculiar erotic fascination with breasts — Dr. Young predicts that it won’t be long before an unscrupulous suitor could sneak a pharmaceutical love potion into your drink. That’s the bad news. The not-so-bad news is that you may enjoy this potion if you took it knowingly with the right person. But the really good news, as I see it, is that we might reverse-engineer an anti-love potion, a vaccine preventing you from making an infatuated ass of yourself. Although this love vaccine isn’t mentioned in Dr. Young’s essay, when I raised the prospect he agreed it could also be in the offing.  Could any discovery be more welcome? This is what humans have sought ever since Odysseus ordered his crew to tie him to the mast while sailing past the Sirens. Long before scientists identified neuroreceptors, long before Britney Spears’ quickie Vegas wedding or any of Larry King’s seven marriages, it was clear that love was a dangerous disease.

But again, the bad news is that someone might actually be able to force you to fall in love with them, and the  good news is that we might never have to give in to love again, unless it’s convenient?  I don’t know about you, but the undertones there don’t sit at all well with me…

Because hey, the society that’s going to be using these drugs has a piss-poor understanding of how hormones even work, let alone what they do and don’t help us with.  Again, from Physorg:
Scientists doubted that hormones could even enter the brain until the 1960s, and since then, most have maintained a dogma that they are only involved in reproductive aspects of brain function, McEwen says. On this question, McEwen is a proud heretic. “We know that sex hormones are active in the entire nervous system, both in sexual differentiation and in terms of the activation of neurological, cognitive and emotional processes,” McEwen says.

We’re messing around with something that 50 years ago we didn’t even think really touched us, and yet which we now know is active in the entire nervous system?  Doesn’t that point out that maybe we’re exploring these things in the wrong direction?  To me, it seems like things such as these could really only be used to control things that we should be listening to instead.  Unless that’s the whole point: luring the forcefully lovesick into traps. Then again, maybe it’s something we could use to get better control over the financial industry?

Either way, I think we need more people exploring these things, to find out how they actually do work already, to help us make more informed choices as a species.  People like Meredith Chivers, creator of bonobo pornography.

I didn’t have a chance to post this weekend, and, in examining my feelings of guilt about that, I came to the realization that this site has been taking over too large a percentage of my “to do” list.

I have, apparently, been operating under the assumption that I need to constantly have as many posts up here as possible, and that this perspective on things was only burning me out.

It is frustrating to admit, because there’s a lot of stuff that I want to explore here, but I will have to slow down a bit, in order to maintain a balance of other pursuits.  For example, I haven’t been to the gym in weeks and I dearly miss the endorphins.

At this point, I am aiming for one post every weekday.   We’ll see how that works out.  I need to find a way to convince myself that going all-out on this stuff isn’t going to be sustainable in the long run, and I do like to think that I am here for the long run.

Huh.  Sustainable blogging.

Maybe I’m on to something here…

In the works are the following:
- A response to Speedbird’s question.
- Starbucks:  Not so evil?
- A breakdown of my less-then-perfect understanding of Michael Topper’s work and why I think it could be looked at as overly complicated.
- 6 remaining “Triage” posts (will try to get this out at as additionals, not subject to the new one-post-a-day rule)
- And then perhaps some new stuff, as vaguely promised…

Hey, not that I’ll have a chance to see this, but there’s a green comet passing at it’s lowest point to the earth on Monday, Feb 24th.

The comet’s name is Lulin, and this is the first time ever that it has ever been this the close to the sun (as evidenced by it’s green color).

Scientists say: “Surprises are possible.”

Remember that little series I did on “Surveillance, Identity, and Meaning”, about how the internet and social networking tools would help us all police our own behavior? Well, here’s an example of it playing out in real life.

Anybody out there with a tumblr blog will probably appreciate more than those who don’t, but check out these recent article from the NY Times site:

Enforcing Manners, Tumblr Shuts Down 5 Blogs

Tumblr Lifts Its Ban on Critical Blogs

At the heart of the whole controversy is some woman who’s blog is often “reblogged” by other users, in order to ridicule her.  Classic “troll” behavior, updated slightly for the tumblr platform.

Tumblr responded to the controversy by changing their Terms of Service  and canceling all 5 of the blogs targeting the first blog.

But the dynamics of the situation is what I want to discuss.  We have a woman who constantly blogs about every aspect of her life, and we have the people who consider her lifestyle to be  rather vain, vacuous, and meaningless .

And they’re using the internet to point that out.

They are communicating to this woman that they consider certain aspects of her lifestyle to be  poisonous and empty, and she is free to either try to make her life a little less poisonous, or to ignore those people.  But either way, it’s wide-spread democratic feedback on her actions in real-time (as close as we can get, anyway).

By noticing which of her posts are ridiculed the most, she could learn a thing or two about how her behavior appears to others, when it’s taken out of the daily context of her own life as-lived-by-her.

Tumblr was quickly attacked by the blogosphere (again, real-time feedback in action) and they restored the canceled blogs the next day.  They also added a “block” feature, so that users can control who does and does not “reblog” their content.

This means that this woman who is putting her entire life online can choose to “block” this feedback, like people often do in real life, when they ignore the opinions of other.  But again, through the magic of our extended nervous system that is the internet, we can watch the entire process in action and compare it to the processes in our own life, to help us make better decisions in our own lives.

The self is finally able to study itself in action, with only a slight time delay.  Very important.

Also, and here’s even more horn-tooting, I got in a comment, lucky number 23, on the first article.  And not that it’s any big insight, but I totally called the solution…  ;)

Sometimes, there’s not much at all to these unfinished posts.  This one for example, is just a few links, all about just relaxing and letting the dust settle around you.  Or maybe not…

First off, an article from the NY Times about how it’s good to let babies eat a little dirt.  This apparently trains their immune system, acclimatizing it, so to speak, to its locality.  How cool is it that our instincts are already set up to make this happen for us, and how crazy is it that we seem to think we know better?

The article goes on to explain that the immune system at birth “is like an unprogrammed computer. It needs instruction.” (note that, computer as metaphors for the mindbody system).  And explains that “this does not suggest a return to filth, either. But…bacteria are everywhere: on us, in us and all around us. Most of these micro-organisms cause no problem, and many, like the ones that normally live in the digestive tract and produce life-sustaining nutrients, are essential to good health.”

So, a little dirt is good for us, eh?

And what do the monks have to say about it?

Although it involves neither Shaolin nor the Wu Tang, there is a Zen story that fits in here rather well.

While still a student (or possibly before even entering into the order), Huineng, the sixth zen patriarch (a favorite here at Reclusland) wrote a poem that earned him pretty much instant graduation from the monastery (based on the condition that he went away and never came back):
Fundamentally bodhi is no tree
Nor is the clear mirror a stand.
Since everything is primordially empty,
What is there for dust to cling to?

This was in response to a poem by the senior monk of the monastery:
Our body is the bodhi tree
And our mind a mirror bright.
Carefully we wipe them hour by hour
And let no dust alight.

A little uptight, no?

So Huineng, nowhere near as practiced as that head monk, still managed to surpass him by recognizing that it’s probably best not to worry about every piece of dust.  Buddha-nature’s pure and primordially empty anyway.  If dust can alight on it, it’s not buddha-nature.

Now, from what I know of Zen, things probably didn’t happen exactly like that; to receive that kind of acknowledgment from an abbot doesn’t happen from just a really snappy comeback.  My guess is that the story was maintained in the tradition because it teaches a deeper story than that.  The point being, again, that Buddha’s middle path to enlightenment cannot be followed if one worries about every little thing. Let the little baby buddha’s chow down on some dirt clods.  They’re buddhas; it’s in their nature to do that…

Another reason for which Huineng’s story was so important was that he is considered the founder of the “Sudden Enlightenment” (頓教) Southern Chan school of Buddhism. That is to say, before him, the way to get enlightened was to sit and meditate, study the sutras, and wait a really long time.  Lifetimes.

After Huineng, there was accepted the possibility of suddent enlightenment, enlightenment in a flash, Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus-style.  One way to look at this is a kind of lucky enlightenment.  It all depends on your karma, I suppose, but something prompted Huineng to seize the opportunity of writing up a response to the head monk’s poem when no one else would…

What is it that makes us open to this kind of “lucky enlightenment”?

Ask Prof Robert Wiseman:
“Unlucky people are generally more tense than lucky people, and this anxiety disrupts their ability to notice the unexpected.

As a result, they miss opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and miss other types of jobs.

Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for. My research eventually revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.”

That link is to a short article by Wiseman published in The Times of India.  And it’s not just his opinions, he’s got experimental data to back it up!

A longer article in Newsweek also features Wiseman’s work, but in typical American fashion, they kind of miss the point.  The article’s title is “What It Takes To Survive”, which completely misses the whole “be relaxed and open” part of the equation.  Typical fearmongering to sell magazines, I guess, but it’s still an excellent read.

So the moral of the whole story is: Relax.  Be here now.  It works, but only if you don’t worry about it too damn much!

Ego is a commitment to being an unchanging permanent self-thing.  This causes suffering because everything changes, an ever-flowing-river-sea of information across and through your nervous system.

No commitment is good in such a sea.  No commitment that must be held in place to exist, at least.  No commitment that is supposed to withstand the flow of that sea.  Two boats may connect and move together, but they must be able to move while connected.

A boat clinging to an unmoving rock will just be battered against it by the current until it lets go.

The stronger the current, the more one must flow with it.  Yet must we move entirely at the current’s whim?  Is there no way to control your movements on the current?

There is.  A rudder: a small piece of commitment attached to your boat.

But that small permanence must be able to flow with the boat, and must be used skillfully to guide the already moving boat along with the movement of the current.  Push your rudder too sharply against a strong current, and your boat will capsize!

And a boat with no rudder is useless as well.  It can do little to help its movement along the current.  Although there are times when even the use of the rudder must be abandoned as well.

The key is to figure out how to watch both the rudder and boat’s movement simultaneously.

Perhaps it is better not to be in the boat at all!

This bit of rambling has been brought you by cup #76 at Starbucks:

Oh.  And the cup’s right too. Complete and total commitment in work, in play, in love, is deeply liberating as well.  That is commitment to flow of the river, the “one fortunate attachment”…

Sometimes, one of these unfinished posts is nearly finished, lacking only a kind of a punchline. Other times, I find a lot of cool shit all on one subject, and I kind of mash it together, hoping something good might spontaneously combust into existence.

This is one of the other times, when the combustion never really spontaneated.

And ironically enough (given the lack of combustion) this one is all about the sun. I’m somewhat fascinated by the sun, being that, all religious notions aside, it is scientifically the source of all life in the solar system. It’s closest metaphor for god in the nearby physical universe, and yet there’s so little that we actually know about it.

We know what it looks like:

(awesome gallery of sun pictures)

We also know (through the educated guesswork that is science) a little bit about its insides as well. The interior of the sun in known as the convection zone, and it is a constantly boiling mass of radioactive materials. Occasionally the boiling causes bubbles which rise to the surface and pop.  That’s a solar flare.

All that activity is blasting massive amounts of solar radiation outwards into space.  This radiation is known as the solar wind, and it produces something called the heliosphere, a magnetic bubble that protects the earth (and the entire solar system) from about 90% of interstellar cosmic radiations.

Unfortunately, it seems like that magnetic bubble might be shrinking.

And that’s only one example of what looks to be a general trend of sun-related-things not working “properly”.  Check this article (and it’s sources) from mid-December ’08:
- the interplanetary magnetic field has been low since October 2005.
- the ionosphere has dropped in altitude to unexpected and unexplained low levels.
- our solar cycle is a year late getting started.
- Earth’s magnetic field is ripped open on a regular basis.

Brilliant Noise from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

But don’t despair, the sun’s not necessarily dying just yet!  Perhaps it’s just resting quietly…

That idea is supported by articles from both space.com and physorg, showing that, in early November, the sunspot cycle was actually increasing.  The physorg article even quotes a David Hathaway (of NASA), who is also quoted here saying that this period of minimal solar activity is to right on target with historical data, and that we are simply in sort of a trough between two waves of increased solar activity.

So what happens when the activity increases?

“During Solar Max, huge sunspots and intense solar flares are a daily occurrence. Auroras appear in Florida. Radiation storms knock out satellites.”

And when’s the next one of these due?  2012, of course, when “a perfect space storm” could occur.  Yet another thing to worry about for 2012, as if we needed any more…

What else is tied in with sunspots? According to some studies of the Paraná river in South America, “the flow of (the) river – and thus the rainfall that feeds it – appears to rise and fall with the number of sunspots.” And wikipedia shows that several other effects (such as the growth of wheat and the ozone layer) have been tentatively linked to sunspot activity as well…

To have even more to worry about, extreme weather has been linked to the rise and fall of Empires as far back as the 500′s, with effects reaching around the globe.  And recent studies of cave stalactites in both China and Jerusalem, show that a decrease in rainfall occurred around the collapse of major Chinese dynastic empires as well as the Roman empire…

If nothing else, people don’t like governments that can’t find ways to make the crops grow!  And whether or not these changes were caused by solar activity, if solar activity does effect the weather, and we’re in for some a-typical solar activity, we better watch out!

Either we’re having an increase in solar activity that will knock satellites out of the sky and cause power outages, or we will have a sudden drought with possible food riots and a general slow collapse of civilizations around the world.  Caused by the sun.  Great…

So what’s the good news?  Well, at the end of that list of the “general trend of sun-related-things not working “properly”" was a brief mention of the earth’s magnetosphere being “ripped open” by the sun.  The article I linked to above describes this process, rather negatively, as being “like an octopus wrapping its tentacles around a big clam, (the) solar magnetic fields draped themselves around the magnetosphere and cracked it open”

Well, according to an earlier article on physorg, these things are called “flux transfer events”, and they were not even known of 10 years ago.  The physorg article describes them like this: “On the dayside of Earth (the side closest to the sun), Earth’s magnetic field presses against the sun’s magnetic field. Approximately every eight minutes, the two fields briefly merge or “reconnect,” forming a portal through which particles can flow. The portal takes the form of a magnetic cylinder about as wide as Earth.”

To me, this shows a close, intimate connection between the earth and sun, where the earth naturally opens it’s defenses in order to take in nourishment from the sun. 

And this happens approximately every 8 minutes.

Far from appearing like an octopus opening a clam, the relationship between the sun and magnetosphere is a rather beautiful one, it turns out:

This brings to mind Gurdjieff’s explanation of the cosmos as consisting of different emanations from the “SUN ABSOLUTE” (perhaps a more mythological stand-in for the black holes at the heart of the galaxies..?).  According to Gurdjieff, each sun is sustained by “emanations” from this SUN ABSOLUTE, and in turn, each sun sustains it’s various planets through these same kinds of “emanations”…

And so we finally reach the point where I was hoping something would coalesce and combust from this (larger than expected) grouping of facts.  I sensed ideas about energy passing through these magnetic portals from galactic centers to suns, and from suns to planets. Which perhaps might also shine some light on how exactly gravity works, since the original explanation of gravity’s was that it was “action at a distance”, that there was nothing else connecting the sun, the planets, and the stars…

Perhaps even, when these portals open, things like “evolution” might occur at a faster rate…  We all know our culture’s myths about radiation, right?

Perhaps there is some link between these “flux transfer events” and the way things change on earth, in both a biological, physical, electrical, space-like, yin-like manner, and a psychological, magnetic, time-like, yang-like manner…?

It also makes me wonder how the solar activity cycles would synch up to McKenna’s Time Wave Zero graph…

After all, as people have commented elsewhere on this site “It’s like the Universe is stitched together with electromagnetism…”

Only he who can take his mind and trample it under foot is worthy of seeing the kindgom.  Yet only he who can drape his mind about him as a fine cloth can live in the kindgom…

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May the lights for which you search grow brighter and brighter, until you can do naught but remove the bushel basket and spill them forth over the land.

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The kingdom of the father is spread out over the earth, but men do not see it.  We must teach ourselves to see, and to act within that kingdom.  Men will become confused by our actions, then amazed.  And then they too may turn to seek the kingdom…

During my trip to DC, I took a lot of pictures at the The National Museum of Natural History.  Mostly of skeletons… ;)

Here’s a best-of collection.  They were all taken in really low light, so some might be a bit blurry.

This was more a conglomeration of different articles on death that popped up in my life a few weeks back.  Besides being another opportunity to work one of these tarot cards into a post, it was also going to be a chance for me to work out my thoughts on death.

Although originally a nameless card, the skeleton with a sickle is a pretty obvious stand-in for death.  Yet any good tarot card reader will be quick to point out that this rarely has anything to do with physical death.  It’s more an ending and a rebirth, doors opening and closing.  That often, the death we fear in life is not actually death, it’s the dissolution of some part of our ego that we can’t let go of.  And that, as the gnostics, sufis, and zen buddhists say, you must die in this life in order to fully understand life and death.

I was going to tie this in with a card I’d gotten on my favorite tarot reading site:

It’s the “Ancestors” card from the Voodoo Tarot of New Orleans, a stand-in for Judgement.  It reminds me that we’re each of us the product of two people, the union of two opposites.  If we inherit our genetic history, or if you prefer, our morphic resonance fields, from two people, and our parents inherit theirs from two people, then each of us is the result of centuries of combined opposites.  That’s biology.

And psychologists will tell you the same thing (I noticed it during my own therapy) that our psychological tendencies are a reliving of our parents’ relationship.  The dynamics between Mom and Dad will play themselves out in your own life, and if you don’t pay attention, you might be forced to repeat their history.

The ending scene in “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story” (one of my favorite movies, regardless of whether or not it represents what really happened…) where Bruce fights off his demon to save his son is a good example of this.   If we don’t deal with our problems, the flaws in our morphic resonance fields will be passed onto our children…

And this goes for the good stuff too of course, not just the demons!

But to bring it back to actual death, I also was sent a NY Times article from a friend, about the passing of Richard John Neuhaus, “Episcopal minister in Tarrytown, N.Y., and an admirer of the writer and theologian”.  The heart of the article, to me, was the message Neuhaus had sent out shortly before he died from cancer: “Be assured that I neither fear to die nor refuse to live. If it is to die, all that has been is but a slight intimation of what is to be. If it is to live, there is much I hope to do in the interim.”

This attitude that death is something that gives our life purpose, something toward which we are drawn, resonates pretty powerfully with me.  The acorn dies to become the tree, and when we die, our bodies become food for that tree.  And our energy?  Well, Einstein tells us energy is neither created nor destroyed, so what happens to it?

Our good friend Rob Bryanton had some things to say about this, within a few days of my receiving the NY Times article from my friend.

Oscar Janiger:…My bias is that when the current is shut off, we somehow lose our sense of individuality…that I’m simply shut down in my present state, and that somehow I–which is now a kind of fruitless phrase–am somehow restored to the earth, or to the matrix, or to what the Germans called the urschleim, or the fundamental substrate of all things, the fundamental primitive primordial stuff of which we are constituted. We go back to before the Big Bang. I always remember the Big Bang as the biggest orgasm in history.

Physicists talk about the Big Bang as being the most highly ordered state our universe was ever in. Quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd tells us to think of the Big Bang not as a physical event, but as the first binary yes/no that separates out our universe from all of the other possible universes that could have existed.

this leaves us with one of the most basic ideas from this project: no matter what you are thinking about in the universe, there is a binary viewpoint, and there is a holistic viewpoint. In quantum terms, this relates to the three states for a particle which can then be used in quantum computing: we can call these a “yes” state, a “no” state, and a “simultaneously yes and no” state.

And were does that lead us to, how does this all tie up?

I have no idea. Triage, remember?

Feel free to take this thought stream and run with it, if you want.  But if you do, I’d recommend including something from this essay: George Wald: The Origin of Death.  It’s a really great essay, although a bit long.  My notes on the essay can be found here, if you’re interested in my take on what the good parts version is…

I noticed that most people on tumblr usually just “reblog” stuff from other people’s tumblrs.  I do this myself, on occasion, but I do try to include some new material most of the time.

However, even my “new material” is pulled from elsewhere on teh ‘nets…

I got a new laptop lately, and I’ve been using the opportunity to try an consolidate all the pictures I’ve been storing on various hard disks and CDs since college.  A Lot of this stuff is scanned from books.  I used to work in a library, and spent many long (paid…) hours scanning images I liked.  I had plans to one day use them in some kind of massive hypertext thing.  Well, that’s probably not going to happen, now that I’ve got this site.  But in the interest of adding some fresh information to the tumblr world, I’ve decided to occasional upload large groups of these old scans and images.

The first group of these can be seen in their entirety here. Enjoy!

The day I posted about the the flower sermon I decided to walk part of the way home after work.

I work on 23rd street in Manhatten (right by the Shakespeare Lodge No. 750!) and live way out in Brooklyn, so it’s quite a walk.  The whole way takes me about 3 hours, but generally after work it’s late, dark, and cold, so I’ll only walk down to Wall Street.  That’s about an hour, and after being stuck in an office all day, it’s usually just what I need.  And yes, I do the whole gym thing as well, but sometimes moving around outside is important too.

Going down Broadway by NYU, I saw some graffiti on the wall that struck me as particularly synchronous, given that I’d just posted about the flower sermon, evolution, and the general flowering of the mind as a stage of evolution.  Buddha’s quote on generosity also came to mind (see the sidebar underneath the creative commons license).

Seeing these two within a few feet of each other really made me smile, a little chalk version of the flower sermon just for me.  So I took pictures to share with you as well:

Only a fool thinks the universe will not take care of his needs.

But we’re all fools, in the end.  Or at least schmucks…

Yeah, we can worry about food, water, the economy, other things.  And these are important.  But you’re going to fail at all of them if you don’t reach through them and past them.  The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but look at Dante.  The road to heaven starts on the far side of hell (right out the devil’s backside…)!

Think of Leary’s Semantic Circuits.  Each circuit needs to be activated in order, but if you stay in the lower circuits, you’re short circuiting yourself (so to speak).  The higher is useless without the support of the lower, but the lower is pointless without the higher.

One of my favorite quotes if from Mike Wallace’s interview with Erich Fromm: “I think we got off the track, as many societies do, who follow successfully one aim, and yet are not capable of seeing at what point the pursuit of this aim prevents them from following a more total aim. That is to say, they get into a blind alley.”

More total aims. Maslow’s pyramid of human needs…

If consciousness is to grow, it needs space…

First though, I’m going to steal a page from Cadeveo’s book, over at Waking The Midnight Sun: Burial for Old Projects That Won’t Get Written, and let go of some things that I’ve been sitting on.  I was hoping to tie them together at some point, but they’ll have to be let loose unbound.  Not exactly liberated infostreams. Streamlet seedlings perhaps…

So Darwin’s pretty tight with Christ (or perhaps it’s vice versa?)

And now Buddha’s getting in on the act too…
Paul Ekman, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who has authored an introduction to Expressions of the Emotions, said today at a AAAS press conference that these views are nearly identical to those of Tibetan Buddhists.

“I am now calling myself a Darwininian,” Ekman recalled the Dalai Lama saying, after Ekman read him some passages of Darwin’s work.

But, but if the Dalai Lama’s a Darwininian, I guess that means he doesn’t believe in God, right?  Since according to some people (well, not the Catholic Church, but what do they know?) the theory of evolution goes directly against the existence of any kind higher being creator-type god…

An atheist Dalai Lama?
Well, that’s the teaching of no-self in action right there!

Alan Wallace weighs in on that here… (I follow Alan Wallace’s work on bridging science and contemplative study kind of closely, from here, but I haven’t listened to this interview yet. I haven’t had a free 45 minutes for a while)

And speaking of the meeting of science and religion…

A couple of recent conversations here and on other sites, has lead me to the momentary belief that we, society as a whole, are developing a pretty good grasp of just what it is that makes the universe exist. The search for (blissful) meaning creates attention, the level of consciousness in the universe increases through attention, media/technology is a focusing and shaping of that attention (making the same things happen but faster and more anonymously)…

It’s all designed to make us happy!  If we still can’t get it right, well, that’s our fault.  Pay Attention!  Pay Attention! The Father’s kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it.

Some scattered thoughts…

Evolution, natural selection, is a different facet of divine will… (if you don’t think so, you’re limiting the divine)

Morphic resonance is a description of a wave function of habits that have been crystallized in the unconscious through evolution. (check Overcoming Bias for the evolutionary psychology part of this idea, the morphic resonance is just my spin on it…)

Meditation as a form of Media… but what does it mediate?

Conscious direction of attention as the meaning of life…  Why? Don’t ask me!

I think, or at least sincerely hope, that we, the global society, will have an explosion of “The Meaning of Life” very soon.  A reattachment of ourselves to the gears of the cosmos, so to speak.  Not an imminent eschaton, but perhaps a resurgence of the immanenting variety…

It just depends on what we give our attention to… (hence my gripe with much conspiracy theory)

This will hopefully lead us to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Queer Theory, Stonehenge, more astrology, the internet, the direct experiencing of our movement through time, and possibly to a symbol that Terrence McKenna gave to me in a dream (and I’ve never even taken DMT!).   ;)

All will revealed soon, as best as I can. It’s going to be a busy weekend…

And speaking of Plato’s Cave, if you’re headed there,  be sure to watch out for Dark Kantians…

Found this on Wikipedia.  Pretty damn cool, is all…

Update 2/13/09:  Things have been busy in Reclusland recently, hard times on all fronts, but there are plans of much work being done this weekend (thanks to a wonderful girlfriend who actually wants to spend the weekend painting while I work on my blog!).

In the meantime, enjoy the ever expanding brain, and don’t forget to check out the research links site, as well as my notes page.

Stay tuned…

Check it out, Rome is officially in the evolutionary boat:

Vatican backs Darwin, dumps creationism

Vatican buries the hatchet with Charles Darwin

Now, apparently, the Roman Catholic Church has backed Darwinism for a while (see the comments on the first article), but it’s still news to me!

Finally, I can agree with the Catholic Church on some of their official propaganda.  No wait, I mean dogma!  No wait, I mean beliefs…  ;)

You know, the RCC might be seen as what the falling Roman Empire turned into by absorbing the memes that Jesus taught.  In that way of looking at it, the Dark Ages weren’t necessarily just the result of the fall of Rome, more a sort of cultural chemical reaction between the two belief systems.  Maybe ‘the empire never ended’ after all, eh? It just turned a little more soft and lovey is all.

And now that they’ve absorbed Darwin’s meme of evolution, and equated it with God’s work on the earth, maybe they can start naturally selecting themselves…  I think the acceptance of natural selection is sort of an admission that things almost always work out for the best naturally, if they’re allowed to (ahem!  Did you hear that government?  If they’re allowed to).

Well.  To be fair, things generally work out for the best in the long run.  The short-to-middle ground, admittedly, can be a bit rocky.

Still, it sure beats the hell out of Tennyson’s interpretation of the relationship between God and Nature:
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed

And just in time for his birthday, too… Happy Darwin Day, everybody!

Toward the end of his life, the Buddha took his disciples to a quiet pond for instruction. As they had done so many times before, the Buddha’s followers sat in a small circle around him, and waited for the teaching.

But this time the Buddha had no words. He reached into the muck and pulled up a lotus flower. And he held it silently before them, its roots dripping mud and water.

The disciples were greatly confused. Buddha quietly displayed the lotus to each of them. In turn, the disciples did their best to expound upon the meaning of the flower: what it symbolized, and how it fit into the body of Buddha’s teaching.

When at last the Buddha came to his follower Mahakasyapa, the disciple suddenly understood. He smiled and began to laugh. Buddha handed the lotus to Mahakasyapa and began to speak.

“What can be said I have said to you,” smiled the Buddha, “and what cannot be said, I have given to Mahakashyapa.”

Mahakashyapa became Buddha’s successor from that day forward.

A new University of Florida study based on DNA analysis from living flowering plants shows that the ancestors of most modern trees diversified extremely rapidly 90 million years ago, ultimately leading to the formation of forests that supported similar evolutionary bursts in animals and other plants.

The great chain of being, in action…

The flowering of plants lead to a change in the whole world.  What of the flowering of the mind, where the interior of the “plant” and the exterior of “the world” can interact, where the cross-pollination of thought can occur?

Tat Tvam Asi…

The new post over at the Baptist’s Head has some things-of-relevance to what we’ve been discussing here (mainly to what we’ve been discussing in the comments here and here), so I thought I’d share:

“[2] The Hebrew letter AYIN represents an eye. Perhaps the letter that looks like an ‘I’ is merely a homonym, also pointing to this correspondence. However, AYIN is also the precursor to the Greek letter omicron, or O. In which case our attention may be being drawn to the contrast between the circle, O, and the line, I (Greek: iota, Hebrew: YOD). Proclus: ‘The demiurgic Nous has therefore set up these two principles in himself, the straight and the circular, and produced out of himself two monads, the one acting in a circular fashion to perfect all intelligible essences, the other moving in a straight line to bring all perceptible things to birth. Since the soul is intermediate between sensibles and intelligibles, she moves in a circular fashion insofar as she is aligned to intelligible nature, but insofar as she presides over sensibles, exercises her providence in a straight line. So much regarding the similarity of these concepts to the order of being.’ From: A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements.”

“[10] There is indeed interesting material in Steiner on the theme of gravity. For Steiner, levels of being at the human level and above are characterised by a rising away from the earth. This was discussed in the context of medicine in a lecture given at Dornach on 26th March, 1920. For an angelic being to reverse this process and willingly seek out gravity would indeed seem to be an unusual inversion of this model. On the nature of the cherubim in particular, Maimonides offers the following in his Guide For The Perplexed, Part II: Ch. 6: ‘[T]he Sages reveal to the aware that the imaginative faculty is also called an angel; and the mind is called a cherub. How beautiful this will appear to the sophisticated mind – and how disturbing to the primitive.’ The cherubs, then, are mental forces, but of a relatively lowly kind. Certainly, cherubs are preferable to tripods, but the shouldn’t welcome them as our conquering lords and masters! The warning seems to be that as the aethyrs become more ineffable as we move to the outer rim, there is within them a danger of mental formations becoming reified.”

and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.” - Joseph Campbell

I ran head long into some trouble with this today.  What happens when you’re wrong?  Not wrong about your bliss, but when, while following your bliss, you make a mistake?

The lure of “follow your bliss” is that “doors will open” part.  You build enough momentum, enough belief in your own ability to create open doors of opportunity, and then you hurt yourself when one doesn’t open when you thought it would.

Following your bliss is not a substitute for paying attention, nor for hard work.  It’s just a sign pointing towards those things from which you could benefit, if you were to pay attention to them, and work hard on realizing them.

Thinking that you are “following your bliss” can sometimes make you a little full of yourself, cause you don’t need other people’s opinions if your bliss is telling you everything you need to know.

Joseph Campbell goes on to explain: “that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.”

The problem with thinking that you’re on a pre-destined track, if that you might confuse your idea of what that track is with the actual track.  Then, were the track to turn unexpectedly, you get derailed.

(disclaimer: This is NOT in regards to any conversations held on or about other people’s sites.  This is entirely something I noticed in myself while on the job at the office today.)

(other disclaimer: I understand that the situation I am describing is NOT what Joseph Campbell meant when he told people to follow their bliss.  I am a huge fan of Campbell’s work, and hold him in high regard.  I am just talking about a potential pitfall of using that kind of work ethic.  It’s something I very much need to keep in mind, myself, and so I think it’s worth sharing here as well.)

Found this scroll online somewhere. Thought it deserved cleaning up, so I photoshopped it up a bit. Here’s a close up of each sage. The entire scroll can be found here.

Quite the parade…

I mentioned this already in the comments, but it’s definitely worth bringing up in the main section as well:

From Physorg:
“The slow fluctuation pattern can be compared to a computer screensaver. Though its function is still unclear, the researchers have a number of hypotheses. One possibility is that neurons, like certain philosophers, must “think” in order to be. Survival, therefore, is dependant on a constant state of activity. Another suggestion is that the minimal level of activity enables a quick start when a stimulus eventually presents itself, something like a getaway car with the engine running. Nir: “In the old approach, the senses are ‘turned on’ by the switch of an outside stimulus. This is giving way to a new paradigm in which the brain is constantly active, and stimuli change and shape that activity.”

Of course, they get it a bit wrong, I think.  It’s not that neurons need to “think” in order to be, it’s that we can “be” without the need to “think”.

“cogito ergo sum”, but can you “sum” without the “cogito”?

Yes you can.  How? Turiya.

From “Eat, Pray, Love”, (which my girlfriend is currently reading): “The topic of the retreat, and it’s goal, is the turiya state – the elusive fourth level of human consciousness.  During the typical human expereince, say the Yogis, most of us are always moving between three different levels of consciousness – waking, dreaming, or deep dreamless sleep.  But there is a fourth level, too.  This fourth level is the witness of all the other states, the integral awareness that links the other three levels together.  This is the pure consciousness, an intelligent awareness that can – for example – report your dreams back to you in the morning when you wake up.  You were gone, you were sleeping, but somebody was watching over your dreams while you slept – who was that witness?  And who is the one who is always standing outside the mind’s activity, observing it’s thoughts?  It’s simply God, say the yogis.  And if you can move into that state of witness-consciousness, then you can be present with God all the time.  This constant awareness and expereince of the God-presence within can only happen on the 4th level of human consciousness, which is called turiya.”
(Chapter 66)

Also, see wikipedia’s etymology of the word “God”:
“Both the Philologists Grimm and Max Muller would conclude that the word ‘god’ is probably not related to the word ‘good’, and that they could not trace the word god to any definite root. Others, such as Morgan Peter Kavenaugh, in his book The Origin of Language and Myths, claim that the word god was taken from the Buddha’s family name of Gotama. He further claimed that this title assigned to the Buddha, became many words, such as in English the words, foot, boot, best, better and good. Others have come to a similar conclusion such as the Historian John Campbell who wrote; ” I have shown elsewhere that the English word God, the German Gott, the Persian Bhoda and the Hindustani Khuda are all derived from the same root as that which appears in Celtic Aeddon or Guydion, the Germanin Odin, Woden or Goutan and the Indian Buddha or Gotama””