Reclusland

“The concept of the unconscious posits nothing; it designates only my unknowing.”

(from a letter to Pastor Max Frischkeit dated 8 February 1946.)

The more a man studies the obstacles and deceptions which lie in wait for him at every step in this realm, the more convinced he becomes that it is impossible to travel the path of self-development on the chance instructions of chance people, or the kind of information culled from reading and casual talk.

At the same time he gradually sees more clearly—first a feeble glimmer, then the clear light of truth which has illumined mankind throughout the ages. The beginnings of initiation are lost in the darkness of time, where the long chain of epochs unfolds. Great cultures and civilizations loom up, dimly arising from cults and mysteries, ever changing, disappearing and reappearing.

The Great Knowledge is handed on in succession from age to age, from people to people, from race to race. The great centers of initiation in India, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, illumine the world with a bright light. The revered names of the great initiates, the living bearers of the truth, are handed on reverently from generation to generation. Truth is fixed by means of symbolical writings and legends and is transmitted to the mass of people for preservation in the form of customs and ceremonies, in oral traditions, in memorials, in sacred art through the invisible quality in dance, music, sculpture and various rituals. It is communicated openly after a definite trial to those who seek it and is preserved by oral transmission in the chain of those who know. After a certain time has elapsed, the centers of initiation die out one after another, and the ancient knowledge departs through underground channels into the deep, hiding from the eyes of the seekers.

The bearers of this knowledge also hide, becoming unknown to those around them, but they do not cease to exist. From time to time separate streams break through to the surface, showing that somewhere deep down in the interior, even in our day, there flows the powerful ancient stream of true knowledge of being.

To break through to this stream, to find it—this is the task and the aim of the search; for, having found it, a man can entrust himself boldly to the way by which he intends to go; then there only remains “to know” in order “to be” and “to do.” On this way a man will not be entirely alone; at difficult moments he will receive support and guidance, for all who follow this way are connected by an uninterrupted chain.

(full quote can be found here)

J. Krishnamurti in Krishnamurti to Himself: His Last Journal (March 18th, 1983)

Several overlapping quotes today:

“Human beings, without their conscious minds knowing it, were putting themselves into situation after situation the real function of which was to make each individual meet and contend with, and in some measure overcome the very things in himself that blocked the way to his real being and proper consciousness” – Jean Toomer

“The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.” – Carl Jung

“Cravings are the natural inclination in response to primary dukkha.” – Marguerite Manteau-Rao

(Contemplation) is a vivid realization of the fact that “life” and “being” in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source. Contemplation is, above all, an awareness of the reality of that Source.

What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.

At the end of the talk someone from the audience asked the Dalai Lama “Why didn’t you fight back against the Chinese?”

The Dalai Lama looked down, swung his feet just a bit, then looked back up at us and said with a gentle smile, “Well, war is obsolete, you know.”

Then, after a few moments, his face grave, he said, “Of course the mind can rationalize fighting back… but the heart, the heart would never understand.  Then you would be divided in yourself, the heart and the mind, and the war would be inside you.”

“deconstruction n. not what you think: the experience of the impossible: what remains to be thought: a logic of destabilization always already on the move in ‘things themselves’: what makes every identity at once itself and different from itself: a logic of spectrality: a theoretical and practical parasitism or virology: what is happening today in what is called society, politics, diplomacy, economics, historical reality, and so on: the opening of the future itself.”

“By nature, we do not perceive ourselves or others accurately. We magnify the importance of ourselves and diminish that of others. In the beauty of a clear night, however, we look at the stars and feel ourselves small, unimportant, and at peace. On an objective scale, we sense our insignificance. Somehow the realization comforts us. The return of the illusion hurts us, takes our peace away, allows us to magnify slights, rejections, and humiliations as others challenge the illusion of our self-importance with theirs. It is in our human nature that this be so; it is our task to transcend it.”

Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder, wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, gasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, rumbling, rambling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding grinding grinding away at yourself.  Stop it, and just DO!

“At the still point, there the dance is.”

• In interviews with the press, Edward Scolnick, Merck’s research director, laid out his battle plan to restore the firm to preeminence. Key to his strategy was expanding the company’s reach into the antidepressant market, where Merck had lagged while competitors like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline created some of the best-selling drugs in the world. “To remain dominant in the future,” he told Forbes, “we need to dominate the central nervous system.” His plan hinged on the success of an experimental antidepressant codenamed MK-869.

• Behind the scenes, however, MK-869 was starting to unravel. True, many test subjects treated with the medication felt their hopelessness and anxiety lift. But so did nearly the same number who took a placebo, a look-alike pill made of milk sugar or another inert substance given to groups of volunteers in clinical trials to gauge how much more effective the real drug is by comparison.

• In subsequent tests, MK-869 turned out to be no more effective than a placebo. In the jargon of the industry, the trials crossed the futility boundary. (the FUTILITY boundary?)

• From 2001 to 2006, the percentage of new products cut from development after Phase II clinical trials, when drugs are first tested against placebo, rose by 20 percent.

• It’s not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests.

• It’s not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It’s as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.

• drugmakers are realizing they need to fully understand the mechanisms behind it so they can design trials that differentiate more clearly between the beneficial effects of their products and the body’s innate ability to heal itself.

• Assumption number one was that if a trial were managed correctly, a medication would perform as well or badly in a Phoenix hospital as in a Bangalore clinic. Potter discovered, however, that geographic location alone could determine whether a drug bested placebo or crossed the futility boundary.

• Convinced that what Lilly was facing was too complex for any one pharmaceutical house to unravel on its own, he came up with a plan to break down the firewalls between researchers across the industry, enabling them to share data in “pre-competitive space.”

• Potter’s ambitious plan for a collaborative approach to the problem eventually ran into its own futility boundary: No one would pay for it. And drug companies don’t share data, they hoard it.

• “The placebo effect was considered little more than a nuisance,” he recalls. “Drug companies, physicians, and clinicians were not interested in understanding its mechanisms. They were concerned only with figuring out whether their drugs worked better.”

• Part of the problem was that response to placebo was considered a psychological trait related to neurosis and gullibility rather than a physiological phenomenon that could be scrutinized in the lab and manipulated for therapeutic benefit.

• US scientists had found that a drug called naloxone blocks the pain-relieving power of placebo treatments. The brain produces its own analgesic compounds called opioids, released under conditions of stress, and naloxone blocks the action of these natural painkillers and their synthetic analogs.

• Placebo-activated opioids, for example, not only relieve pain; they also modulate heart rate and respiration. The neurotransmitter dopamine, when released by placebo treatment, helps improve motor function in Parkinson’s patients. Mechanisms like these can elevate mood, sharpen cognitive ability, alleviate digestive disorders, relieve insomnia, and limit the secretion of stress-related hormones like insulin and cortisol.

• Healthy volunteers feel the benefit of medication plus a placebo boost. Patients who are unable to formulate ideas about the future because of cortical deficits, however, feel only the effect of the drug itself. The experiment suggests that because Alzheimer’s patients don’t get the benefits of anticipating the treatment, they require higher doses of painkillers to experience normal levels of relief.

• Like any other internal network, the placebo response has limits. It can ease the discomfort of chemotherapy, but it won’t stop the growth of tumors. It also works in reverse to produce the placebo’s evil twin, the nocebo effect. For example, men taking a commonly prescribed prostate drug who were informed that the medication may cause sexual dysfunction were twice as likely to become impotent.

• “Expectations about pain and pain relief work in a similar way. Placebo treatments tap into this system and orchestrate the responses in your brain and body accordingly.” In other words, one way that placebo aids recovery is by hacking the mind’s ability to predict the future.

• In a study last year, Harvard Medical School researcher Ted Kaptchuk devised a clever strategy for testing his volunteers’ response to varying levels of therapeutic ritual.

• One group was simply put on a waiting list; researchers know that some patients get better just because they sign up for a trial. Another group received placebo treatment from a clinician who declined to engage in small talk. Volunteers in the third group got the same sham treatment from a clinician who asked them questions about symptoms, outlined the causes of IBS, and displayed optimism about their condition.

• Not surprisingly, the health of those in the third group improved most. In fact, just by participating in the trial, volunteers in this high-interaction group got as much relief as did people taking the two leading prescription drugs for IBS. And the benefits of their bogus treatment persisted for weeks afterward, contrary to the belief—widespread in the pharmaceutical industry—that the placebo response is short-lived.

• the geographic variations in trial outcome that Potter uncovered begin to make sense in light of discoveries that the placebo response is highly sensitive to cultural differences. Anthropologist Daniel Moerman found that Germans are high placebo reactors in trials of ulcer drugs but low in trials of drugs for hypertension—an undertreated condition in Germany, where many people pop pills for herzinsuffizienz, or low blood pressure.

• But why would the placebo effect seem to be getting stronger worldwide? Part of the answer may be found in the drug industry’s own success in marketing its products.

• “Before I routinely prescribed antidepressants, I would do more psychotherapy for mildly depressed patients,” says the veteran of hundreds of drug trials. “Today we would say I was trying to engage components of the placebo response—and those patients got better. To really do the best for your patients, you want the best placebo response plus the best drug response.”

(go read the whole article at Wired)

Attainment does not come at the moment when we are making a conscious effort to attain, because at that time we have uddhacca-kukkucca, ‘distraction and worry’, but rather at the unexpected moment when we relax after an apparently fruitless effort.

(via here)

The process of writing cannot be juggled with another occupation. The job of creating cannot be compartmentalized with certain hours devoted to one kind of creation and other hours set aside for still another. Writing is a demanding profession and a selfish one. And because it is selfish and demanding, because it is compulsive and exacting, I didn’t embrace it. I succumbed to it.

(via conorh))

• Thunderbird is an allegory; his conflicts with other forces in nature are then an attempt to allegorize relationships observed in the natural order, such as the changing of the weather. Like other Thunder Beings, he is essentially an attempt to represent the patterns of activity of a powerful, mysterious force in a way that can be understood simply and easily – sort of the way in which a weather map functions today.

• Because the Thunderbird in particular represented this mysterious dual aspect of nature, manifest through the primordial power of thunderstorms, it is not surprising that his representatives were the heyoka or sacred clowns, who displayed wisdom through seemingly foolhardy action. Western thinking has prevented us from seeing the reasons why Indians perceived this connection. Few anthropologists have sought to locate how Thunderbird may have been mythologically linked to Trickster.

• They describe the Thunderbird as a spiritual, not just physical, being. It is not seen as just a large, fearsome predatory bird that people tell stories about. Rather, it’s an integral part of Plains Indians religion and ritual. Only by ignoring this fact could we put our Western ethnocentric biases into effect, and reduce it to a zoological curiosity. The Thunderbird is much more than that; the Indian attitude toward it comes from more than just the mere fact that it is supposed to be really big.

• The heyoka were different in three primary ways from the other sorts of clowns. They were truly unpredictable, and could do the unexpected or tasteless even during the most solemn of occasions. Moreso than other clowns, they really seemed to be insane. Also, they were thought to be more inspired by trans-human supernatural forces (as individuals driven by spirits rather than group conventions), and to have a closer link to wakan or power than other clowns. And lastly, they kept their role for life – it was a sacred calling which could not be given up without performing an agonizing ritual of expiation. Not surprisingly, these unique differences were seen as the result of their having visions of Thunderbird, a unique and transforming experience.

• Black Elk: “When a vision comes from the thunder beings of the West, it comes with terror like a thunder storm; but when the storm of vision has passed, the world is greener and happier; for wherever the truth of vision comes upon the world, it is like a rain. The world, you see, is happier after the terror of the storm… you have noticed that truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering, and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laughing or weeping. When people are already in despair, maybe the laughing is better for them; and when they feel too good and are too sure of being safe, maybe the weeping face is better. And so I think this is what the heyoka ceremony is for … the dog had to be killed quickly and without making any scar, as lightning kills, for it is the power of lightning that heyokas have.”

• Today, of course, Western physicists describe the dual nature of electricity. An object can carry a positive or negative electric charge. The electron is simultaneously a wave and a particle. Electricity and magnetism are thought to be aspects of the same force, and as is well know with magnetism, it comes in polarities, with opposite poles (north and south) attracting.

• It was believed among the Lakota and other tribes that if you had a dream or vision of birds, you were destined to be a medicine man; but if you had a vision of Thunderbird, it was your destiny to become something else; heyoka, or sacred clown. Like Thunderbird, the heyoka were at once feared and held in reverence. They were supposed to startle easily at the first sound ofthunder or first sight of lightning. Thunderbird supposedly inspired the “contrariness” of the heyoka through his own contrary nature. He alternates strong winds with calm ones. While all things in nature move clockwise, Thunderbird is said to move counterclockwise. Thunderbird is said to have sharp teeth, but no mouth; sharp claws, but no limbs; huge wings, but no body.

• While clown societies were found throughout the Plains, the heyoka, or sacred clowns, were usually few in number, but were found in almost every clan. Heyoka were contraries, often speaking and walking backwards. They acted in ridiculous, obscene, and comical ways, especially during sacred ceremonies. They were thought to be fearless and painless, able to seize a piece of meat out of a pot of boiling water. They often dressed in a bizarre and ludicrous manner, wearing conical hats, red paint, a bladder over the head (to simulate baldness), and bark earrings. The heyoka was thought to usually carry various sacred items – a deer hoof rattle, a colored bow, a flute, or drum.

• Like the flash of lightning, the heyoka’s sudden outbursts and disturbances were thought to be the keys to enlightenment – much like the absurd acts of Zen masters in Japan.

• Part of the link between heyoka and Thunderbird comes from Iktomi, the Trickster figure. Iktomi is said to be heyoka because he has seen and talked with Thunderbird. Iktomi is the first-born son of Inyan (rock), and is said to speak with rocks and stones.

• Jung, following his lead, claims the Trickster as an archetypal part of the collective unconscious; and his “crazy wisdom” as emblematic of humankind’s earlier, undivided, unindividuated consciousness. Iktomi and other tricksters seem to be at the constant mercy of their desires; yet their blind luck always seems to protect them from the consequences of their missteps. He is dangerous primarily because he is so powerful, yet so rarely has the forethought or good judgment to use his power wisely.

• For the Plains Indians, thunder and lightning symbolized the vast, uncontrollable energy of nature. It’s not surprising, then, that the Thunderbird is connected with the strange, uncontrollable force of the Trickster figure, and his avatar, the heyoka.

• Clowns and contraries in Plains societies do not just come out once a year, however. They are permanent parts of the society, and are seen as continual reminders of the contingency and arbitrariness of the social order. Long before French theorists came on the scene, the heyoka was reminding his own people about the social construction of reality. By doing everything backwards, the heyoka in a way is carrying out a constant experiment in ethnomethodology, showing people how their own expectations limit their behavior. Like a good performance artist, the shocking behavior of the heyoka is supposed to confront people and make them reconsider what they may have arbitrarily accepted as normal.

• John (Fire) Lame Deer: “These Thunderbirds are part of the Great Spirit. Theirs is about the greatest power in the whole universe. It is the power of the hot and the cold clashing above the clouds. It is blue lightning from the sun. It is like atomic power. Thethunder power protects and destroys. It is good and bad; the great winged power. We draw the lightning as a forked zigzag, because lightning branches out into a good and bad part… In our Indian belief, the clown has a power which comes from thethunder beings, not from the animals or the Earth. He has more power than the atom bomb, he could blow off the dome of the Capitol. Being a clown gives you honor, but also shame. It brings you power, but you have to pay for it.”

(via jacksta @ deltafoxtrot)

“We pass our time and our lives in contemplating what we have already contemplated, and by this we are most insidiously imprisoned. This redundancy constructs our habitat, we construct by analogy and by resemblance, it is our architecture. Those who perceive, or build differently, or elsewhere, are our hereditary enemies.”

- from Negative Horizon (translated by M. Degener)

(via fuckyeahphilosophy)

“One cannot go contrary to nature. Nature is stronger than the strongest man. It is to our own interest to be on good terms with her.”

(via clothedinsky)

“Relax into your intrinsic nature with neither abandon nor control – Mind with no objective is Mahamudra”

(via clothedinsky)

• A key challenge in observing quantum behavior in a small mechanical system is suppressing interactions between the system and its noisy environment — i.e., the surrounding material supporting the system or any other external contact. The random thermal vibrations of the system’s surroundings, for example, can be transferred to the mechanical object and destroy its fragile quantum properties.

• To address this issue, a number of groups worldwide have begun to use cryogenic setups in which the immediate environment is cooled down to a very low temperature to reduce the magnitude of these random vibrations.

• The Caltech team suggests a fundamentally different approach: using the forces imparted by intense beams of light to “levitate” the entire mechanical object, thereby freeing it from external contact and material supports. This approach, the researchers show, can dramatically reduce environmental noise, to the point where diverse manifestations of quantum behavior should be observable even when the environment is at room temperature.

• The system proposed by the Caltech team consists of a small sphere made out of a highly transparent material such as fused silica. When the sphere comes into contact with a laser beam, optical forces naturally push the sphere toward the point where the intensity of light is greatest, trapping the sphere at that point. The sphere typically spans about 100 nm in diameter, or roughly a thousandth the width of a human hair. Because of its small size, the sphere’s remaining interactions with the environment — any that don’t involve direct contact with another material, because the sphere is levitating — are sufficiently weak that quantum behavior should easily emerge.

• For such behavior to appear, however, the sphere must also be placed inside an optical cavity, which is formed by two mirrors located on either side of the trapped sphere. The light that bounces back and forth between the mirrors both senses the motion of the sphere and is used to manipulate that motion at a quantum-mechanical level.

• The researchers describe how this interaction can be used to remove energy from, or cool, the mechanical motion until it reaches its quantum ground state — the lowest energy allowable by quantum mechanics.

• The proposed scheme consists of sending a pair of initially entangled beams of light into two separate cavities, each containing a levitated sphere. Through a process known as quantum-state transfer, all of the properties of the light —in particular, the entanglement and its associated correlations — can be mapped onto the motion of the two spheres.

“The scholars were interested in drunkenness because intoxication, as other social-science experiments have shown, doesn’t fuzz up judgment so much as cause the drinker to overly focus on the most prominent cue in his environment.” (from here.)

Really interesting, I had no idea.  Certainly matches my experience though…

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

What would happen if you swapped out the bank executives, the generals, the billionaires? Nothing. It doesn’t matter who you plug into the role of dog catcher — the dog catcher still has to catch dogs, and every role in a domination system must channel domination. Ultimately there is no boss. At the top of the pyramid sits the logic of the pyramid itself. And that logic is basically a big fire that consumes everything and finally burns out.

It is said that the elite want a global government. They would also like to fart strawberries. If you think the elite get everything they want, stop pretending to oppose them and admit that you worship them as gods.

- Ran Prieur

“For it is one thing to know, and another to love; one thing to understand, and another to will. I don’t deny that [Aristotle] teaches us the nature of virtue. But reading him offers us none of those exhortations, or only a very few, that goad and inflame our minds to love virtue and hate vice […] What good is there in knowing what virtue is, if this knowledge doesn’t make us love it? What point is there in knowing vice, if this knowledge doesn’t make us shun it? By heaven, if the will is corrupt, an idle and irresolute mind will take the wrong path when it discovers the difficulty of the virtues and the alluring ease of the vices.”

- Francesco Petrarca: De sui ipsius et multorum aliorum ignorantia

“What you do is what the whole universe is doing, at the place you call here and now”