PROFILE---RESUME ---FILM FANATIX--- RED PILL--- ZORROS
......BLUE/RED PILL.....
a message from civilizations long gone, to one soon to be forgotten....!!
DANCE/TRANCE - MIND BENDING - 2012 MAYA - HOLOGRAPHIC PARADIGM - TIME
CRYSTALS - HOLLYWOULDNT - DARK SIDE
in our temporary autonomous zone "earth"
The Right To Party
Flash Mobs
Swarming & The Future Of Protesting
Network Coordinated Spontaneous Theatre
The Enigma Of The Flash Mob
That Was Quick. Flashmobs Already Turning Political As Security Guards Beat Up & Detain Participants
FlashMobs Morph Into Action Squads
Desert Camp & Prison Break At Woomera
Ghettobox TAZ Via Open Source
Black Market Restaurants
Best Italian Food Is Illegal And Served On Abandoned Bus
WTF?
"Whatever you have thought about the world before, forget it, now you are in this one."TMcKenna
aka something is happening here but you dont know what it is do you Mr jones?(Bob Dylan)
trance
trance (tràns) noun
1.A hypnotic, cataleptic, or ecstatic state.
2.Detachment from one's physical surroundings, as in contemplation or day dreaming.
3.A semiconscious state, as between sleeping and waking; a daze.
verb, transitive
tranced, trancing, trances
To put into a trance; entrance.
[Middle English traunce, from Old French transe, passage, fear, vision, from transir, to die, be numb with fear, from Latin trânsìre, to go over or across. Transient.]
- trance´like´ adjective
And that's the paradox of the techno-freak. As we hurtle into the 21st century, these transient refugees from the First World have poached the info tech that's speeding up the march of progress and made an abrupt about-face towards the archaic. Technology is mobile, so they drag it to the rocks and jungles. Technology loves connection, so they sync it with the ancient wheel of the heavens. Technology simulates, so they make it mimic the fear and splendor of shamanic trance. The Goan beaches that spawned this ecstatic digital primitivism may be lost to media hype and packaged tours, but the hardcore technofreaks will just lose themselves in the porous Third World landscape.
After all, the full moon follows you everywhere you go.
- Erik Davis - Sampling Paradise
Dance, Music and Human Culture
Dance can be art, ritual, or recreation. It serves many functions: to express emotions, moods, or ideas; to tell a story; to serve religious, political, economic, or social needs; or simply to be an experience that is pleasurable, exciting, or aesthetically valuable.
The two main kinds of dance are those for participation, which do not need spectators, and those for presentation, which are designed for an audience. The primary elements of dance include the use of four things: space, such as floor patterns and the shapes of the moving body; time, such as tempo and rhythmic variations; the body's weight in relation to gravity; and energy flow, such as tense or freely flowing motion.
Dancing, besides giving physical pleasure, can have psychological effects. Feelings and ideas can be expressed and communicated; sharing rhythms and movements can make a group feel unified. In some cultures, shamans dance in trance in order to heal others. The modern field of dance therapy developed as a means to help people express themselves and relate to others. In some societies, dancing often leads to trance or other xaltered states of consciousness. These altered states of consciousnenss may be sought as a means to emotional release, or can be interpreted as signaling possession by spirits. A trance state may enable people to perform remarkable feats of strength, endurance, or to better sennse their universal spirit.
History
Prehistoric cave paintings depict figures in animal costumes who seem to be dancing, possibly in hunting or fertility rituals, or perhaps for education or entertainment. In ancient Egypt, dancing was essential to agricultural and religious festivals. Warrior or pyrrhic dances were part of military training in ancient Greece, and religious dances are believed to be the origin of dance in Greek drama. Variations of peasant dances originating in the Middle Ages (5th century to 15th century) continue today as folk dances, which are usually group forms that are passed from one generation to another.
Ballet originated in the courts of Italy and France during the Renaissance (14th century to 17th century), becoming primarily a professional discipline. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, reaction against ballet's traditional forms led American dancers Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, Swiss educator Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Hungarian dancer Rudolf von Laban, and German dancer Mary Wigman to develop forms of modern dance.
Popular and social dances, which are recreational forms, resemble folk dances in that they are for participation, are relatively easy to learn, and generally originate from the people rather than from a choreographer. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, the waltz and polka, originally peasant dances, evolved into social dances. In the United States various immigrant dances merged into new forms, such as tap dance.
Popularized by American dancers Irene and Vernon Castle, ballroom dances swept Europe and America in the early 20th century. The syncopations and movements of African-American dance evolved into forms such as the Charleston and the jitterbug, eventually merging with rock-and-roll dances. Such stars as American dancers Fred Astaire and internal linkGinger Rogers popularized dance in motion pictures. The groundbreaking dance sequences in Oklahoma! (1943), with choreography by American Agnes de Mille, inspired a larger role for dance in musicals.
Frequently relying on symbolic gestures, masks or elaborate makeup, and magnificent costumes, Asian dances often narrate stories based on mythology, historical events, and legends. In Indian dance, classical dance forms have been revived on the basis of old manuscript descriptions and temple carvings. Japan, rich in folk dances, also has two major forms of dance-drama: no, a slow-paced dance and opera form, and kabuki, a form using theatrical devices. With its spectacular acrobatics, Peking opera is the best-known genre of Chinese dance-drama. In Indonesian dance, especially that in Java, female dancers formerly entertained royalty; in Bali, masked dramas and spirit-possession dances remain a part of village life.
Sub-Saharan African societies use masked dance when members imitate or are possessed by spirits. Dancing at rites of passage is also common. Oceanian dances, such as the Hawaiian hula, are often associated with storytelling or poetry. In New Guinea, dances are frequently performed in connection with warfare. North America's native peoples, rich in dance tradition, have developed pan-tribal social dances for performance at intertribal powwows. In Latin America, dances for religious and secular purposes remain a living tradition among many Native American tribes. Other Latin American dances borrow from African dance movements or combine Spanish movements with elements of Native American dances.
Native Americans engaged in a variety of rituals. As a person passed through the stages of the life cycle- obtaining a name after birth, seeking a guardian spirit at puberty, setting off at death for the journey to the afterlife- rituals marked the passages. In prayer, Native Americans used gestures and words as well as songs and dances to communicate with the spirits. Ceremonial observances of prayer and thanksgiving took place at critical points in the agricultural or hunting season- for example, upon the return of the first salmon from the ocean to the rivers; at the times of planting, ripening, and harvest; upon the appearance of sap in the maple trees; or at the summer and winter solstices.
New religious movements among Native Americans have at times taken on the character of crisis cults, which respond to cultural threat with emotional rituals. In the late 1800s some Native Americans believed that if they conducted a ceremony known as the Ghost Dance, depleted animal populations and deceased relatives would be restored. For several years, many indigenous peoples in the western part of North America performed the ceremony, even after United States Army troops massacred Sioux ghost dancers at Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1890.
The Ghost Dance of the 1880s spread among a number of tribes that were all undergoing similar upheavals, and indigenous peoples of the Great Plains shared in each other's Sun Dances. The preeminent pan-Native American religious development, however, has been Peyotism, a religious movement centering on the sacramental ingestion of peyote, a mildly hallucinogenic cactus. In 1918 Peyotism was formally incorporated as the Native American Church. The group's status as a religious organization enabled members to seek legal protection for the ritual use of peyote. In the mid-1990s membership in the Native American Church was estimated to be 250,000.
Between the l880s and l930s, U.S. authorities attempted to ban Native American religious rituals, including the Ghost Dance, Sun Dance, and peyote cult. In Canada the same restrictive tendencies prevailed. In more recent years, however, governmental authorities have adopted a more supportive attitude toward the practice of native spirituality. In 1978 the Congress of the United States passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, an official expression of good will toward Native American spirituality.
As an organizer of images experienced in trance, the occultist reflects back to the archaic idea of creation by idealistic aesthetics. He suspends authorship in the materialistic sense (similar to the conceptions of Marcel Duchamp or Andy Warhol), whilst re-organizing what has already been created through visions received in trance; and in this way "old" traditions are welded together into a new entirety.
- P.R. Koenig - _Ecstatic Creation Of Culture_
Old Rituals For New Space
Trance music in Morocco is magical in origin and purpose, concerned with the evocation and control of spiritual forces. In Morocco musicians are magicians. Gnauoa music is used to drive out evil spirits. The music of Jajouka evokes the God Pan, God of Panic, representing the real magical forces that sweep away the spurious. It is to be remembered that the origin of all arts -- music, painting, and writing -- is magical and evocative, and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result. - W. S. Burroughs
Q: You've said that you don't consider yourself a shaman just because shamans cure and you don't cure anyone. Also you write a lot about the re-emergence of the shamanic institution. What do you think of its re-emergence in the modern world - how can it's integrity be preserved, if at all, and how must it evolve?
TM: The music. And the trance-dance drug-taking situation is the establishment of a ritual space outside the conventions of ordinary society, that is the new shamanism. And that's again what makes it so suspect in the eyes of the establishment. They sense that this is something they can't get a handle on and control, or that it takes them some time to get a handle on - they have to figure out how to co-opt each generation in a new way. My generation was co-opted in a very crude way, with money. Your generation... The Establishment's not interested in that, they'd rather keep the money for themselves. I'm hoping that the new trance-dance culture has enough integrity to resist being folded into commercialism and ordinary mass cultural entertainment. But we shall see.
- Terence McKenna
Terence McKenna - the force will be with you...always
African Music in Society
Professional musicians served as historians in the African kingdoms that developed from the 10th century to the 20th century. Among the Mande people of western Africa, professional bards still recount the histories of powerful families and advise contemporary rulers. Music in African societies is a medium for the transmission of knowledge and values and for celebrating communal and personal events. Accordingly, important stages of an African person's life are often marked with music. There are lullabies, children's game songs, and music for adolescent initiation rites, weddings, title-taking ceremonies, funerals, and ceremonies for ancestors.
In many African religions, sound is thought to be one of the primary means by which deities and humans impose order on the universe. In West Africa, drummers play a crucial role in possession-trance ceremonies, in which the gods enter the bodies of devotees. A drummer must know specific rhythms for particular gods and be able to regulate the flow of supernatural power in ritual contexts. Music is also used to organize work activities. The pygmy societies of the central rain forest use singing and vocal cries to coordinate during hunting.
Sundance
sun dance (sùn dàns) noun
A religious ceremony widely practiced among Native American peoples of the Great Plains, typically marked by several days of fasting and group dancing and sometimes including ritual self-torture, as in penance or to induce a trance or vision.
glossolalia (glô´se-lâ´lê-e, glòs´e-) noun
Fabricated and nonmeaningful speech, especially such speech associated with a trance state or certain schizophrenic syndromes.
[New Latin : Greek glossa, internal linktongue + Greek lalein, to babble.]
"samadhi"
Achieving samâdhi liberates the self from the illusions of sense and the contradictions of reason, leading to an inner illumination.
The Dreamtime
According to his researches in North Africa, writer and composer Paul Bowles found that, in Morocco: "Music, literature, and even certain aspects of architecture have evolved with cannabis-directed appreciation in mind." This was the holy grail pursued by Brian Jones, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Ornette Coleman and Bill Laswell in the Rif Mountains, where the musicians of Jajouka smoked kif and played their swirling trance music from dusk to dawn.Clandestine lines of influence run from trance cults through to current music. Laswell's Axiom label has released recordings of the Jajouka musicians and the Gnawa brotherhood of Marrakesh, and on his own tracks he is making links between trance musics, dub and ambient.
-- David Toop, "Dope Beats" - The Face
Trance States & Inner Rhythms
Techno beats, new tribes forming with new codes and languages, out of zeros and ones, and electronic pattern forming devices. Edutainment, inner peace through pounding club systems and sensory deprivation, within concrete mazes. You're in an altered state, you've relinquished control of something and it feels great. You don't have to feel bad about life, just responsible for making the future a more enjoyable place to be, and you're not the only human that feels the same way. The collective feeling of the trance state is probably akin to Colin Wilson's description of early societies; the ability for individuals to think and act as one in the same way that a flock of birds move in-formation. The mechanics of this shift in modern times are known to most clubbers or festival goers; drums/repetitive beats, lights/colors (to feel our photovore brains) to sleep deprivation and food choice - by which I mean anything we choose to imbibe. If enough minds and bodies agree to do the same thing, the collective reality of those involved can be changed, or a new one created. It has been argued that everyone is in one form of trance state or another, and many of us are imprisoned in types of repetitive behavior and thought, that if we had the option, we would escape from it. Cleaning out the cobwebs/breaking down the barriers between people every so often is pretty essential to our well being. When we are in a euphoric state, we wonder - how is it possible for us to all feel so different and isolated at one point and yet connected the next?
The four major brainwave cycles measured are
* Delta - 1-4 cycles per second (deep sleep).
* Theta 4-8 (hypnagogic state)
* Alpha x8-13 (altered states of consciousness/meditation)
* Beta 13-26 (mental concentration/also stress, anxiety).
Sharply focused mental activity means brainwaves of all frequencies (desynchronised activity). Non-focused mental attention leads to an increase in Alpha wave activity. This is what causes the interesting trancey stuff and releases us from the bombarded ego that is Western adulthood. If you've taken a substance which is making all your neurons fire, keeping simple time to a 4-4 beat will be a mirror of this Alpha state.
If you want a natural effect listen to polyrhythms: drum circles, African rhythms, Tibetan and Moroccan music. The chaotic quality of the shifting natural patterns confuses the brain - as it tries to find the "correct" timing - we decipher our own "beat" within it, the action of doing this forms the non-fucsed, attentive mental state which stimulates Alpha wave activity.
The other "turn-on" with sound is frequency. This is where the "chakra" idea comes into it. Bass most strongly affects the lower nerve centers - sexual organs and the stomach. Midrange affects the chest - particularly the heart rate - fastert kick drums can affect the heart and thus manipulate adrenaline levels. Top end and white noise has most effect on the head/brain - as do piercing acid squeals. And the rest of it - melody, chord progressions, scales, the human voice? These are what influence our more subtle emotional responses which we are highly varied. To mis-quote Terence McKenna, "we have more words to describe narcotics than we do our emotions", and they seem to be one of the key areas of development of our species.
Any move to a permanent higher consciousness would require greater emotional capacity and understanding of inner rhythms via biofeedback techniques. These techniques enable conscious manipulation of brainwave and body function. This is why people are exploring group trance states in time and space at this period in human evolution."
Clive Austin - 1998 Sources "Alpha waves" on the net, writings of Terence McKenna, talk by Colin Wilson - from _Dream Creation_ magazine
So, from a practical point of view, the trance theory model says that there is a trance generating loop which consisting of repeating cognitive objects. This loop creates a dissociated trance plane in which various cognitive functions are disabled. And depending on the order that these cognitive functions are disabled as well as which specific ones are disabled and which are not, you have different trance states.
Let's look at some more examples of trance so that you can understand how to further apply this model.
Music consists of repeating rhythms and melodies. From a trance theory point of view, music consists of multiple trances, one for each repeating rhythm or melody. Most of these musical loops repeat only a few times and there is a minimum number of repetitions needed before a dissociated trance plane will be created. Musical trance can be described as the creation of multiple trances followed by their collapse. However, another cognitive loop is precisely this repeated creation and collapsing of dissociated trance planes.
Certain types of music are more trance-inducing, generally, than others. Musical loops which are sustained, such as in shamanistic or so-called trance-drumming, have at least the critical element of high repetition. Thus, the high repetition of the musical loop is more likely to produce a single dissociated trance plane. Religious and military marching music also has a higher likelihood of inducing trance because of the high repetition of the musical loop.
Certain sports such as jogging, swimming, basketball, etc. require repetition of action and therefore a repetition of cognitive objects. These sports all create dissociated trance planes and therefore trance.
Watching television or a movie also generates trance because of the attention loop between the viewer and the images viewed. This cognitive loop is very short and simple. You look, you integrate the image, you look again. The processing of the content of the images takes place in the dissociated trance plane in which a variety of cognitive functions are disabled.
All forms of meditation practice involve the repetition of cognitive objects of varying degrees of complexity. The relatively simple meditation of watching the breath will induce a meditation trance. More complex forms such as are practiced by Tibetan Buddhists or Sufis may consist of combinations of meditation and hypnotic trance. Visualizations and physical movements can be combined with mantra yoga to produce multiple dissociated trance planes.
ANCIENT ACOUSTICAL ENGINEERING
Chamber
The Newgrange chamber, with acoustical internal linknodes and antinodes. Antinode occur at the chamber's stone walls.
R.G. Jahn et al have taken sound generators and meters into the chambers of six ancient structures and measured their acoustical properties. The sites selected were: Wayland's Smithy, Chun Quoit, and Cairn Euny, all in the U.K.; Newgrange, and Cairns L and I, Carbane West, all in Ireland. All of these sites date back to about 3,500 BC. The chambers were all bounded by roughly hewn stones, but they had very different configurations. Newgrange was cruciform (see sketch); others were rectangular, beehive, and petalshaped. Quoting the abstract from the Princeton report, here is what the acoustical surveys found:
"Rudimentary acoustical measurements performed inside six diverse Neolithic and Iron Age structures revealed that each sustained a strong resonance at a frequency between 95 and 120 Hz (wavelength about 3m). Despite major differences in chamber shapes and sizes, the resonant modal patterns all featured strong antinodes at the outer walls, with appropriately configured nodes and antinodes interspersed toward the central source. In some cases, internal and exterior rock drawings resembled these acoustical patterns. Since the resonant frequencies are well within the adult male voice range, one may speculate that some forms of human chanting, enhanced by the cavity resonance, were invoked for ritual purpose."
SONIC HOMEOPATHY
Frequency and rhythm activates the chemistry in the psychosomatic body/mind. Deep images, sensations and memories are re-ignited. These dance rituals are about the gestalt of the body, releasing regenerative, primitive, psychosexual energies, which we as 'civilised', mind driven, westerners, are convoluted about, with our awkward, retentive, neurotic, social programming. The DANCE CATHEXIS -- a group cathartic psychodrama -- on tribal, techno, beats, offers a potent temenos (sacred space) for reintegration of disconnected parts of the Self., which becomes a therapeutic SONIC HOMEOPATHY of sorts. So techno tunes are like tinctures, and when we dance to them they activate cellular memory, in our metabolism, like electronic enzymes. Combining this with PSYCHOTROPIC DRUGS creates a powerful catabolic, biochemical reaction.
-Ray Castle
NATIVE HUMANS ?
powwow
powwow (pou´wou´) noun
1.A council or meeting with or of Native Americans.
2.a. A Native American shaman. b. A ceremony conducted by a shaman, as in the performance of healing or hunting rituals.
3.Informal. A conference or gathering.
verb, intransitive
powwowed, powwowing, powwows
Informal.
To hold a powwow.
[Narragansett powwaw, shaman.]
Word History: Because trances were so important to the Native American shaman as a means of getting in touch with spiritual forces beyond the ken of the normal person, the title powwaw, literally meaning "one who has visions," was accorded him. One of the occurrences of this word in an early piece of propaganda designed to bring more settlers to New England represents fairly well the Puritan attitudes to the religion of the native inhabitants of the New World: "The office and dutie of the Powah is to be exercised principally in calling upon the Devil; and curing diseases of the sicke or wounded." The word whose spelling was eventually settled in English as powwow was also used as the name for ceremonies and councils, probably because of the important role played by the shaman in both. After the native peoples had been dealt with and the fear of devil worship was somewhat diminished, the newcomers decided that they could have powwows too, the first reference to one of these being recorded in the Salem, Massachusetts, Gazette of 1812: "The Warriors of the Democratic Tribe will hold a powwow at Agawam on Tuesday next." The verb powwow, "to confer," was recorded even earlier, in 1780.
powwow (noun)
conference: conference, colloquy, conversations, talks, pourparler, parley, powwow, palaver
Kachinas
kachina (ke-chê´ne), among PUEBLO peoples, the spirit of the life forces. Elaborately costumed tribesmen, impersonating kachinas, visit Pueblo villages early in the year. They dance, sing, and give gifts to children. Dolls that the Hopi and ZUÑI carve and dress like the dancers are also called kachinas.
kachina
kachina (ke-chê´ne) noun
1. Any of numerous deified ancestral spirits of the Pueblo peoples, believed to reside in the pueblo for part of each year.
2. A masked dancer believed to embody a particular spirit during a religious ceremony.
3. A carved doll in the costume of a particular spirit, usually presented as a gift to a child.
[Hopi katsina, supernatural being, masked impersonator of a supernatural being.]
The end of all Hopi ceremonialism will come when a "Kachina" removes his mask during a dance in the plaza before uninitiated children [the general public]. For a while there will be no more ceremonies, no more faith. Then Oraibi will be rejuvenated with its faith and ceremonies, marking the start of a new cycle of Hopi life.
- The Hopi Prophecies
The very same kachina doll sits today on the mantle in Oscar Janiger's living room, under a particularly stunning framed pair of before-and-after renderings of it. Painted by Fortune illustrator Frank Murdoch, the picture on the left is of draftsmanlike quality, a perfect "representational" image. Its acid-inspired twin couldn't be more different - awhirl with color and asplash with motion, its planes and curves lurching in multiple directions. But it is recognizably the same kachina doll. And if anything, its colors more accurately capture the doll's brilliant hues. (Janiger has saved all the pieces from the study, consistently declining offers from the artists to buy back their work. Several years ago, he mounted a successful gallery exhibition of the acid art.)
- John Whalen - Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies
The Hopi believe Kachinas (Kat'sinas) are the spirits of nature and the messengers and teachers sent by the Great Spirit. TheSumerians believed KAT.SI.NA were righteous ones sent of God.
KIVA
The southwest's most intriguing natives, the Hopi, have always claimed that their sipapu (place of emergence from the underworld) is in the Grand Canyon. They say their ancestors went underground to live with "the ant people" when the great flood wiped out the last world. Later, they emerged through the sipapu to begin their lives and migrations in the present world. The many circular kivas found in Anasazi ruins are said to be symbolic of this emergence, i.e. underground ceremonial chambers with a roof entrance/exit, still called the sipapu.
The KIVA represents the unbroken circle of the Earth. It is the meeting place of peoples who love the Earth. It is the church within her womb. The KIVA can take many forms. It can be a sweatlodge, a teepee during a peyote ceremony, the arbor of a sun dance, an ayahuasca ceremony under the canopy of the rainforest, a simple hole in the ground with a ladder protruding out of it, or the darkly lit chamber of a musician's studio. Anyplace where indigenous and modern people gather to worship in communion with the Earth, that is a KIVA. During the making of this album, Ron participated in several traditional ceremonies, and with permission from the elders of each, he brought back rare source recordings that are the basis for its structure. Although it is unusual for recordings of this nature to be made public, all of the parties who participated agreed on one thing, that it is time to share the special nature of what occurs within these ceremonies. There are four ceremonies explored on this album. In East KIVA, "Calling in the Midnight Water" initiated by Michael Stearns, is the Peyote ceremony. Peyote is a hallucinogenic cactus found in the Southwestern United States and Mexico. Here it is taken in a prayer ceremony as a sacrament for a healing.
In the South KIVA, "Mother Ayahuasca" initiated by Ron Sunsinger, is an Ayahuasca ceremony. Ayahuasca is made from the bark of a hallucinogenic jungle vine from South America. It is taken here in ceremony to seek visions within the deeper self. In the West KIVA, "Sacrifice, Prayer, and Visions" initiated by Steve Roach, is a Sundance. The Sundance is a high ceremony of the Native Americans of the central plains. It is a ceremony of renewal with the spirit world in which the core participants seek visions to become holy men.In the North KIVA, "Trust and Remember" is an Earth ceremony created by Steve, Michael, and Ron. It is three non-traditional people co-creating in a cave in Northern New Mexico with the energies of the moment.
- Steve Roach, Michael Stearns, Ron Sunsinger - ethnic_Kiva_ on Fathom (1995)
CROP CIRCLE CON-S-PIRACY
It is my belief that crop circles are merely the 21st Century extension of the Agent Orange Campaign . That which is rapt in groovy symbols will lead the people to assume the symbol is the essence? The destruction of crops would lead to mass starvation and global control and not to mention the war on plants of pleasure and psychoactives! Get a couple of experienced boffins to put the technology to work undercover of cosmic symbology, then use the huge global sattelite network and infared analysis softwares and you could go about wiping out every plant of a specific nature. So Charlie dont surf if Charlie dont smoke and Charlie dont fight if Charlie dont eat. Cheaper and more effective than paying of the Columbian Generals who are corrupt any way, or the Hezbollah Hashish, or the Taliban Opium flooding our cities. Am I making sense?
Nic Touches Clouds
Maya Cosmogenesis 2012
: The True Meaning of the Maya Calendar End-Date
by John Major Jenkins, Terence McKenna
Paperback - 423 pages (June 1998)
Bear & Co; ISBN: 1879181487
Reviews
Spirit of Change, November-December 1998
Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 is an involving well-research and in-depth perspective on the evolution of the Mesoamerican calendar. According to the Mayan peoples, we are now living in "end time." Decoding the mythological explanation of their long-known "astronomical facts," Jenkins explains how the Galactic center at the central bulge of the Milky Way was understood by the ancients as the pregnant point in the heavens that gave birth to the world. This point coincides with what is just now being discovered by today's scientists to be a black hole. An impending alignment of the sun at that very point, according to Mayan calculations, culminates at the winter solstice, December 21, 2012.
The Mayan interpretation of this as an "end point' of our time is said to signify "a World Age shift" indicating a cataclysmic transformation seen as a "prelude for global renewal."
The ever-spiritual perspectives of the Toltecs and Mayans on this upcoming cosmic alignment reflect a belief in "the cyclic renewal of the earth and the spiritual unfoldment of humanity." A fascinating and engaging read, Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 offers us a solidly researched invitation to "recognize our place in the great chain of creation."
Nexus Magazine, October-November 1998
Why did the Maya choose the date of 21 December 2012 to mark the end-time of their long-count calendar? And why mark the (northern) winter solstice?
Studying the star charts, independent scholar/author John Major Jenkins noted that a very rare alignment in the precessional cycle will occur on the December solstice in 2012, when the sun conjuncts the centre of our Milky Way galaxy. Seasonal alignments occur once every 6,450 years, but this December solstice of 2012 occurs once every 25,800 years! Jenkins surmised that the Maya, like many other ancient cultures, were aware of precessional cycles, but it was no coincidence that they marked this date. Indeed, as he discovered, it was central to their cosmology, mythology and calendrics, as was the idea of galactic centre as the source of life. The Maya even had a glyph to present the black hole at galactic centre--the existence of which has only recently been confirmed by astronomers.
In his expansive new book, Maya Cosmogenesis 2012, Jenkins explains how the Maya revered the end-time as a zero point, entered through galactic centre and involving an energy field-effect reversal and rebirth into a new World Age. In explaining his thesis, he takes us on a heady trip through Maya shamanic rites, the origin and development of the long-count calendar at the sacred site of Izapan, the galactic geometry and symbolism of the ball court, and much more. Jenkins' finds not only extend our understanding of Maya cosmology; they have great significance for humanity at the evolutionary crossroads.
Library Booknotes, July 1998
Is Earth approaching cosmogenesis, and does ancient Maya science and religion hold messages to aid us in this era of transformation? Author John Major Jenkins believes that indeed the precession of the equinoxes, as it was understood by the Maya, will be the formative influence of evolving life on Earth: "Being the culmination of an ages-long quest for understanding the nature of time, Maya cosmological insights are reminding us that the Zero Time is upon us."
Jenkins beings his thorough and comprehensible account of Maya cosmology by delving back 13,000 years into human history to the origins of Mesoamerican civilization. Logically he progresses through this Mesoamerican timeline to reach Maya civilization at its height of power and wisdom.
Interpreting the 2012 end-date of the Maya calendar proved to be an irresistible challenge for John Major Jenkins. It is apparent that his journey toward enlightenment was undertaken with pleasure and an enthusiasm which communicates itself to the reader.
This is an authoritative and at the same time exciting voyage of discovery into the past, a return to an ancient understanding of the cosmos that gives meaning to our place in the chain of creation.
"It is initially strange to think that Maya Creation occurs on what we are calling the 'end date'. But Maya concepts of weaving, birthing, and dawning declare that Creation (birth) occurs at the end of a time cycle. The birth of a child occurs at the end of the nine-month period of human gestation. Furthermore, the Maya utilized 'end naming,' such that periods of time were named after their last day."
"Also, the Pyramid of Kukulcan at Chichen Itza has ninety-one steps on each of its four sides, making a total of 364 'base' steps. The 365th step -or 'day'- is at the very top of the pyramid, in the zenith position. Now imagine turning this metaphor upside-down, so that the zenith is the first day -New Year's Day- and one descends the pyramid by spiraling down the remaining 364 steps, or days."
"In one Popul Vuh episode, the Black Road speaks to the Hero Twins, suggesting that the Black Road (the dark rift) either has or is a mouth. This makes sense when we remember that the dark-rift is the Road to the Underworld, and the mouths of jaguars and snakes were also recognized as Underworld portals. As a result, when we look at Maya carvings and see Maya lords being birthed from the mouths of snakes, toads, or jaguar deities, we should suspect that they are being born from the dark-rift -appropriately enough, since the Milky Way is the Great Mother and the dark-rift is her birth canal."
"The Maya equate the four-cornered celestial dome with a house for other reasons. Houses 'belong' to women. When a Maya woman marries and becomes a mother, she 'owns' the family house. Symbolically, she is the house. In fact, in the Yucatec internal linklanguage and elsewhere, 'na' means both house and mother. As a result, if we expand these ideas to the level of the cosmos at large, the cosmos is a house, the house is the mother; in other words, the cosmos is the Great Mother. The Milky Way itself is the arched frame of the Cosmos-Mother, and her birth canal would thus be the dark-rift -the 'hole' at the deepest center of the night sky- that is, the Underworld."
"The Hapaycan snake's mouth refers, by sound inversion, to the concept of a deity-ruler's throne. (The serpent's mouth is the portal to the Otherworld and is the place where Maya kings are reborn upon taking their throne of office.)"
The Grand Portal
"In this image, again we see the crossroads near the cosmic birth portal. All of these mythic images attest that the dark-rift in the Milky Way was imaged in many ways and appears in many different forms of Mesoamerican myth. But they all indicate that the dark-rift was conceived of as a place of magical conception and celestial rebirth. The parallel image of birthplace and crossroads relates to the oldest universal ideas about celestial rebirth, the laying out of the four directions, and World Age Creation. The crossroads and the birth portal: the cross and the cup. These two powerful metaphors work together and provide a compellingly clear map to the true astronomical place of Maya Creation."
"It is a fact of astronomy that the December solstice sun will be in conjuction with the great bulge of the Galactic Center in the years around A.D. 2012. Astro-physicists now believe that a Black Hole -a hyperdense object from which even light cannot escape- exists at the center of our Galaxy."
"On 13.0.0.0.0, December 21, 2012, the December solstice sun is dead center in the 'xibalba be', right at the crossing point of Creation in Sagittarius. The December solstice sun is First Father and the Milky Way is Cosmic Mother. Mythologically speaking, on this date First Father and Cosmic Mother are joined. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that Cosmic Mother rebirths Cosmic Father, our star, the sun. Here we see a reflection of a very ancient cosmogonic Creation myth, attributable to a substratum of history prior to patriarchal overlay: The Cosmic Mother is the head point of a trinity involving the birth of a male deity who is also her mate. This Trinity Principle involves the dynamic between mother, father, and child, and shares with many Old World traditions the idea that the Great Mother, as the first principle of Creation, must give birth to her mate, First Father, and only then can engender the multiplicity of created beings. On the cosmic level, the astronomical trinity is Galactic Center, solstice sun, and humanity."
The Mayan Psychedelic Galaxy
could anybody find me a copy of "ah pook is here" by william s burroughs I'm specifically intrested in the illustrated version.
The Mayan Factor : Path Beyond Technology
byJose Arguelles, Brian Swimme
Paperback - 221 pages (August 1987)
Bear & Co; ISBN: 0939680386
Mr. Argulles gives a concise and easy-to-understand analysis of the Mayan Calendar, and then proceeds to leap into unique and interestingly odd interpretations of this calendar and what it means for humanity (based on his interpretation). Although I question his New Age terminology, the ideas as presented are certainly worth having a look at if you're interested in this subject and have a tolerance for the mathematical complexity that this calendar can present. Argulles has apparently amassed quite a little following by charging people for "further information," but this book really is all one needs to understand his bizarre interpretations of Mayan spirituality.
"Then, as if a switch were being thrown, a great voltage will race through this finally synchronized and integrated circuit called humanity. The Earth itself will be illumined. A current charging both poles will race across the skies, connecting the polar auroras in a single brilliant flash. Like an iridescent rainbow, this circumpolar energy uniting the planetary antipodes will be instantaneously understood as the external projection of the unification of the collective mind of humanity. In that moment of understanding, we shall be collectively projected into an evolutionary domain that is presently inconceivable."
The Mayan Factor_ pp. 195-196.
Nearly 36 billion years ago, almost twice as long as the age that modern astrophysics supposes to be the age of the universe, the set of mutually reflective relations that constitute the paired universe of matter and antimatter began to enter and, thereby, define three-dimensional space. Following a major shift of epochs, hydrogen began to appear spontaneously near the center of the spatial topology. Denser atomic materials followed in due course; first helium, via the Critchfield formula for H-Hfusion, which can proceed in pur hydrogen. All of these material entities spring at their point of origin from the same source as the topological manifold of space, that is, from a higher spatial dimension. Why a higher spatial dimension is ingressing at an ever-accelerating rate into space-time we shall perhaps not understand until we achieve, through a concrescence of time, a return to the higher topological dimension. "We" in this case means the interspecies' network of DNA shared by all life. As in Jonas's myth, deity thus achieves a redefining and clarifying of the nature of itself through the efficacy of its works. Whatever the reasons energy entered space-time, each expression of itself in time has taken the form of a further sophistication of organization. The path of return sought by evolution on all levels is through antientropic organization. The original particles, which began entering the space-time continuum some 36 billion years ago, had, by 12 billion years ago, given rise to the epoch of the primal aggregate of the Big Bang theory, although the great majority of stars are less than 5 billion years old. This wave-hierarchy theory of time manages to avoid some of the dualisms inherent in the Steady State of Big Bang schools of cosmological theory, since it offers a mechanism by which an entire universe can spring into existence and yet not violate any physical laws by doing so. In its general outlines, the cosmology that our theory has built into it is in accord with recent ideas put forth by Edward Tryon. Both his model and ours predict a universe that is homogeneous, isotropic and closed and consists equally of matter and antimatter. All of these contentions are consistent with, and supported by, the present state of astrophysics.
Terence McKenna...the force will be with you, always...
We have proposed that quantum-mechanical phenomena organize matter at every level; Tryon (1973) suggests that the universe itself is a very large instance of a quantum-mechanical phenomenon that is common-place when of brief duration. Tryon points out that universes can spring from nothing without violations of physical law so long as they have specific properties. Chief among these is the requirement that such a universe must have a zero net value for all conserved quantities. The quantities that physics considers conserved fall into two categories, continuous and discrete. It is the discrete quantities that characterize the elementary particles: spin, strangeness,electric charge, and so on. These quantities have equal magnitude, but opposed signs, in the case of particles and antiparticles. All that the laws of discrete conservation imply, therefore, is that if a universe appears from nowhere, it must consist equally of matter and antimatter. It is very possible that we live in a universe that possesses zero net values for all of its conserved quantities. Such a universe could well have sprung from nothing.."
- _The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens and the I Ching - Terence & Dennis McKenna
"The "energy" field emanates from the Galactic Center and includes the entire electromagnetic/photon field in which our planet exists. There aredimensions of subtlety within this field -the telluric or astral realms- extending beyond the physical forces of science to include spiritual planes of being. If we imagine this field as being similar to the lines of force surrounding a magnet, we can understand that our changing orientation to this field has immediate consequences, and little to do with cause-and-effect transmission of energy between us and the Galactic center. We are, instead in a relationship of resonance with our source, one that connects us deeply within to each other. and, in fact, to all other beings in this galaxy. Based upon these considerations, I would like to emphasize that the Galactic equator-the precise edge of our spiraling galaxy-is the Zero Point location of the turn about moment in the cycle of internal linkprecession. This World Age shift occurs when the solstice sun crosses over the galactic equator, and thus the Galactic Alignment in 2012 is about a field-effect energy reversal."
from: A review of John Major Jenkin's book: Maya Cosmogenesis 2012
By:Willard Van De Bogart
_Maya Cosmogenesis 2012_ is based upon my realization, in 1993, that the end-date of the Long Count Calendar in 2012 pinpoints a rare alignment in a vast cycle of time called the precession of the equinoxes. Wanting to establish evidence for this, and to ascertain how and where the ancient skywatchers discovered and mapped this cycle, I devoted myself to an in depth study of Mesoamerican astronomy, cosmology, culture, and ethnography. I sought the answers to key questions, and pieced together- primarily from academic literature - my progressive interpretation of Mesoamerican history and cosmology. The exciting thing to consider is that this knowledge reemerges at a time when we really need it, for the 2012 end-date looms before us.
- John Major Jenkins
Alchemy
What is happening to our world is ingression of novelty toward what Whitehead called "concrescence", a tightening gyre. Everything is flowing together. The "autopoetic lapis", the alchemical stone at the end of time, coalesces when everything flows together. When the laws of physics are obviated, the universe disappears, and what is left is the tightly bound plenum, the monad, able to express itself for itself, rather than only able to cast a shadow into physis as its reflection. I come very close here to classical millenarian and apocalyptic thought in my view of the rate at which change is accelerating. From the way the gyre is tightening, I predict that concrescence will occur soon - around 2012 A.D. It will be the entry of our species into hyperspace, but it will appear to be the end of physical laws accompanied by the release of the mind into the imagination.
Terence McKenna - _New Maps Of internal linkHyperspace_
Our planet is on a collision course with something that we, at our present state of knowledge, don't have a word for. A black hole is simply a gravitationally massive object, so massive that no light can leave it. What I'm talking about is something like that, except that it isn't so much gravitationally massive as temporally massive. We are soon to be sucked into the body of eternity. My model points to 11:18 am, Greenwich Mean Time, December 21, 2012 AD.
- Terence McKenna -_Timewave Zero And Language_
I've thought of many, many ways of expressing this that would make it less catastrophically radical. A very simple way that makes everybody feel a little better is to suppose that what happens on December 21, 2012, is that physicists who've been laboring for some time toward the technology of time travel, actually succeed. Suddenly the timewave is fulfilled, and yet the heavens do not fall, and angels don't appear to lift us into paradise. The reason history ends at that date is because after the invention of time travel the notion of a seriality of events ceases to have any meaning. Everybody agrees history ended yesterday. We then experience life in a post-historical atemporal bubble where you not only tell where you live, but when you live.
- Terence McKenna - _The Evolutionary Mind_
I guess I'm a soft Dark Ager. I think there will be a mild Dark Age. I don't think it will be anything like the Dark Ages which lasted a thousand years -- I think it will last more like five years -- and will be a time of economic retraction, religious fundamentalism, retreat into closed communities by certain segments of the society, feudal warfare among minor states, and this sort of thing. I think it will give way in the late '90s to the actual global future that we're all yearning for. Then there will be basically a 15-year period where all these things are drawn together with progressively greater and greater sophistication, much in the way that modern science, and philosophy has grown with greater and greater sophistication in a single direction since the Renaissance. Sometime around the end of 2012, all of this will be boiled down into a kind of alchemical distillation of the historical experience that will be a doorway into the life of the imagination.
- Terence McKenna - interview in _High Times Magazine_, April 1992
i would have to agree. this whole war on terrorism bullshit, the Bush dynasty soap opera, the christian crusade revival - it's all a sign of the a minor dark age before the shift... it's so ridiculously silly, it's no longer scary. sit tight, watch the sit-com unfold, and in a half hour you can turn off your tv. afterall, we've all been trained the last few decades to do just that... - @Om* 1/30/02
Final X-FILES 2012
The Truth At the Mount Weather Complex at Bluemont, Virginia, a helicopter lands. Several men in suits exit the helicopter, including Fox Mulder. The men board a bus that takes them through a doorway into an underground complex. Inside, US Marine Corps officers meet them, but Mulder slips away. Using an electronic key card, he penetrates deeper and deeper into secure areas. In one room he activates a computer console and enters a password. The screen shows the text "December 22, 2012...Date for the mobilization of alien....." ...
Mulder ends up in jail, and following a trial, is sentenced to death by lethal injection... it seems he discovered the ultimate secret. There is a jail-break, and Scully & Mulder eventually arrive at an ancient Anasazi pueblo, to see the person who had sent him the keys to the Marine Base, "The Keeper of Truth", who turns out to be the Cigarette-Smoking Man...
...He says that Mulder now knows the truth, which he found in the Marine base, but Mulder refuses to speak it, even though it could save his life. Indian wise men hid in this pueblo as their own culture was destroyed by the aliens. The pueblo contains magnetite, which makes it safe against the aliens. Those wise men were the first “shadow government.” The Cigarette Smoking Man wants to tell Scully his story - a story that has terrified every President since Truman. The Mayans were so afraid that their calendar stops on the date of the final alien invasion, December 22, 2012. Mulder saw the date at Mount Weather where our own secret government will be hiding when the invasion happens...
...If this is the truth he has been looking for, what else is to believe, she asks. He replies that he wants to believe that the dead are not lost to us, and if we listen to them they can give us the power to save ourselves. Scully says, “we believe the same thing.” Mulder moves to the bed and they hold each other. “Maybe there’s hope,” he says as the episode and the TV series ends.
#@#%$^&*%^%$#
Following on from Charlie Sabatino's letter concerning Salvia divinorum,, a person by the web-name of Damaeus replied, with Salvia-inspired precognitive insights about 2012, posting his reply at the 2012-Theories discussion group. Here is Damaeus' reply (posted 12 May 2002):
Concerning salvia divinorum and 2012, I gather from my experiences with salvia that none of us will ever see the destruction of the earth. We will hear the calling before it ever happens and our consciousness/spirit/soul will simply float away, leaving our physical bodies to be destroyed with the worldwide earthquakes or whatever other disasters nature has in store.
This awakening process will indeed feel like a "waking up process". One might wonder why we can't do it now, permanently, even with the use of psychoactive or psychedelic herbs. I think it's because these alignments aren't right yet. We can't ascend because it just isn't time yet. I think when the time comes, we will awaken and all will seem so easy and natural that we won't even care that we were unable to do it before.
All we can really do now is know these things intellectually, and somewhat in practice through the use of salvia divinorum. Luckily I have enough to last me through the next ten years, should it ever become illegal. Salvia is not an herb I'm driven to use on a daily basis. In fact, I haven't used any of it in at least a couple of months. But I still have 110 grams of it.
Anyway, I get the impression that all the preparation we're going through is all for naught. I think the beer drinking, womanizing party animals are going to awaken just like everyone else, though I do suppose that if one has some background study in these issues, when the event happens it might make a little more sense, or the transition might be a little smoother. I figure the calling might intensify between now and 2012, so that by the time 2012 arrives, the world will be at peace and people will be expecting it. My roommate has always been fond of saying that when we finally have world peace, it will be the end of the world. Plus, I think I've seen Biblical references to the idea that those who have eyes to see and ears to hear will be able to sense the "coming of the Lord". The only wrench in the gears is the part that says nobody knows the hour or the day, but then who says the Bible is in fallible? I certainly don't.
I would have posted this sooner, but Damaeus closed with a comment; "I wonder if a rapture or Jesus fits into the Mayan 2012 timeline",
"anyway I dont believe it I think its a bunch of bullshit" jim morrison
MIND BENDING + SCI FACTS
"To fathom or soar angelic, you'll need a pinch of psychedelic." - Humphrey Osmond, who coined the term "psychedelic" with this phrase.
The terminology used to describe the LSD experience in the scientific literature did not sit well with Humphrey Osmond. Words like 'hallucination' and 'psychosis' were loaded; they implied negative states of mind. The psychiatric jargon reflected a pathological orientation, whereas a truly objective science would not impose value judgments on chemicals that produced unusual or altered states of consciousness. Aldous Huxley also felt that the language of pathology was inadequate. He and Osmond agreed that a new word had to be invented to encompass the full range of effects of these drugs.
The two men had been close friends ever since Huxley's initial mescaline experience, and they carried on a lively correspondence. At first Huxley proposed the word phanerothyme, which derived from roots relating to "spirit" or "soul." A letter to Osmond included the following couplet:
To make this trivial world sublime,
Take half a Gramme of phanerothyme.
To which Osmond responded:
"To fathom hell or soar angelic
Just take a pinch of psychedelic."
People say, "Where then do psychedelic drugs fit into all of this?" or "Do they fit into it?" Of course they fit into it, because the felt presence of experience -- the reclaiming of the body -- that's the critical political battleground. Your mind is now your own, in some sense. It was a mistake; it wasn't supposed to happen that way. But the acceleration of psychedelic use in the Twentieth Century, the explosive spread of the Internet... in some sense it's as though we have broken from the slave's quarters and are already milling in the streets. But we don't yet have the power or the understanding to know where the centers of power are, and how it is that they disempower and manipulate us. That's because we haven't focused on the body. (This is, I suppose, the thing which gives the Eros thing cogency.)
Terence McKenna - _Live at Wetlands Preserve, NYC July 28, 1998_
Internet Terence McKenna - the force will be with you...always
pic by alex grey
As a culture, we like to laugh at primitive tribes - for example, those who are shown photographs of themselves and cannot recognize them. But Alexander Marshak (in _The Roots of Civilization_) tells us that in 1876 a French scientist fell by accident into one of the paleolithic caves. Later, in his diary, he wrote that there seemed to be some scribbles on the wall. He could not see that it was art, he was just as blind as the pygmy who is blind to the photograph. Suddenly, a few decades later, people could see it as art. What allowed T. S. Eliot to say that ever since Lascaux, Western art had taken "a tumble down the staircase"? (dégringolade, a lovely word!). What allowed Picasso suddenly to see African masks, the French expressionists to see Japanese art, the hippies in the '60s to hear Indian music?
For the British colonialists in India, this music was like "the whining of the mosquitoes - how can they stand it?" The Brits could not hear it as music. My parents' generation could never hear Indian music as music: "What's that buzzing noise? Are you kids stoned again?" That is what I call a paradigm shift of cognition. At the very moment when entheogenesis - that is, the birth of the Divine Within - reappears in the West, with the late Romantics as a subculture, as 'occult history,' the conditions were being set up for this paradigm shift, which we are still basically undergoing. The only thing that could even pretend to suppress this shift of consciousness would be the Law, as in the War on Drugs. But our law is a machine law, a gridwork, clockwork law, and it is obviously unable to contain the fluidity of the organic. That is why the War On Drugs will never ever work. You might as well declare war on every plant, every weed in the ditch. So public discourse is approaching breakdown over the question of consciousness.
- Peter Lamborn Wilson - _The Neurospace_
I have been spiritually awakened by this most beautiful.............. time and time again experiences
I did it at burning man . It's common for people to burn something of theirs so I threw my clothes in the fire and danced around naked. I did it because it kinda symbolic of refusing to be mainstream. So I danced threw the crowd. I wanted to go really deep so I started dancing kinda like who the indians dance around a fire. I started going to other realms and stuff. At one point I opened my eyes turned to the first person their I felt full of brotherly love for all people I hugged the person and in that moment all of existence crashed down into a single point of light in a void. I had a revelation "this is what people refer to as god" I had a second revelation "god is love". Then the single point of light burst around me recreating the whole world. At this point I had the realization that 90% what I was taught about god as a child is garbrage. I continued dancing. When I closed my eyes I would go to the familiar psychadelic realms. I lost track of time because I was dancing around a humungous fire I grew scared that I might accidentaly fall in so I opened my eyes to look. When I opened my eyes I was in the middle of the fire dancing naked. I jumped out of their as quick as I ******* well could. Even though I wasn't burned by the fire I wasn't planning on waiting until I was. I was afraid of going into the fire again but I go deeper when I close my eyes and I wanted to go deeper so I closed my eyes again. I ended up going into the fire quite a few times. One time I almost tripped on some peice of metal from the burning man. Another time their was this lady sitting next to the fire staring into it intensly then right in front of here face I stomp on this big flaming log. So she's sitting their lost in thought then boom this foot steps on the red hot log in front of you sending sparks flying every where. She looks up and its some naked hippie and he smiles and dances off into the fire. Her eyes almost popped out of her head. At some point I also stepped through someones stomach. I felt everything that was happening in his stomach. Poor guy probably doesn't even know what hit him.
Television
Grasshopper says to O'Leary "why did the road cross the chicken?" O'Leary replies "to be sure to be sure!"
PHILLIP K DICK
Phillip K. Dick, in one of his last novels, Valis_, discusses the long hibernation of the Logos. A creature of pure information, it was buried in the ground at Nag Hammadi, along with the burying of the Chenoboskion Library circa 370 A.D. As static information, it existed there until 1947, when the texts were translated and read. As soon as people had the information in their minds, the symbiote came alive, for, like the mushroom consciousness, Dick imagined it to be a thing of pure information. The mushroom consciousness is the consciousness of the Other in hyperspace, which means in dream and in the psilocybin trance, at the quantum foundation of being, in the human future, and after death. All of these places that were thought to be discrete and separate are seen to be part of a single continuum. History is the dash over ten to fifteen thousand years from nomadism to flying saucer, hopefully without ripping the envelope of the planet so badly that the birth is aborted and fails, and we remain brutish prisoners of matter.
...the noosphere...no longer served as a mere passive repository of human information (the "Seas of Knowledge" which ancient Sumer believed in) but, due to the incredible surge of charge from our electronic signals and information-rich material therein, we have given it power to cross a vast threshold; we have, so to speak, resurrected what Philo and other ancients called Logos. Information has, then, become alive..."
Philip K. Dick - Man, Android & Machine
Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment. Philip K. Dick (1928-82), U.S. science fiction writer. A Scanner Darkly, "Author's Note" (1977).
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. Philip K. Dick (1928-82), U.S. science fiction writer. I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon, Introduction, "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" (1986).
Within the armor is the butterfly and within the butterfly is the signal from another star. - Philip K. Dick
Like Thomas Pynchon, Dick was obsessed with the second law of thermodynamics, and he coined words like kipple and gubble to denotes the corrosive power of entropy and its ability to render form into formlessness. Along with Norbert Wiener, Dick viewed entropy metaphysically, casting it in some tales as evil incarnate or as the sign of some cosmic Fall. In contrast to this, Dick later came to laud the positive and "negentropic" (or anti-entropic) power of VALIS's restorative information. This makes good human sense: as finite, far-from-equilibrium organisms, we are whirlpools of order and information whipped together for a time against the steady downstream drift of entropy.
Erik Davis - Philp K. Dick's Divine Interference_
With our thoughts, we
make the world." — Buddha
sorcerer, wise man, seer, soothsayer, Chaldean, sortileger, diviner
astrologer, alchemist, occultist
Druid, Druidess
magus, mage, Magian, the Magi
thaumaturgist, wonder-worker, miracle-worker, miracle-working
shaman, witchdoctor, medicine man, fetishist, idolater
obi-man, voodooist, hoodooist, spirit-raiser, occultist
conjuror, exorcist
charmer, snake-charmer
juggler, illusionist, conjuror
spellbinder, enchanter, wizard, warlock
magician, theurgist
necromancer, diabolist
familiar, imp, evil spirit, devil
sorcerer's apprentice
Merlin, Prospero, Gandalf
Faust, Pied Piper
Other Forms
alterer: magician, sorcerer
sage: wizard, shaman, witch doctor, sorcerer
oracle: soothsayer, sorcerer
conjuror: magician, necromancer, sorcerer
doctor: witch doctor, medicine man, sorcerer
prodigy: miracle-worker, thaumaturge, wizard, witch, fairy godmother, sorcerer
mythical being: Merlin, sorcerer
occultist: alchemist, sorcerer
bogart the blu pill (....swallow)
Excerpted from WordOrigins.org:
"Several people have emailed me asking how Humphrey Bogart's name became associated with a term meaning selfishness. Ah, how soon we forget the intricacies of '60s drug culture. The selfish connotation comes from hogging a marijuana cigarette. Someone who kept the joint in their mouth, hanging from their lip like Bogey, would be bogarting the joint. Instead of bogarting, one should pass it on to another. The term can be used for hoarding items other than pot."
||||The Holographic Paradigm||||
In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science. Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing.
The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations. University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.
To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears. The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole. The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order.
For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts. A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes. This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.
To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration. Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side. As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them. When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case. This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment.
According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality. Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram. In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.
The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky. Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web. In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order.
At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past. What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is." Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development".
Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality. Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain. In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage.
Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram. Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica). Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage--simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.
Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through some gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly. Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with ever other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system. The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions. An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.
Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability. Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism. Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support. It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected. Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part dependent on what are now called "cosmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions. But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.
We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram. This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature. Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm. In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level. It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual 'A' to that of individual 'B' at a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolved puzzles in psychology.
In particular, Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness. In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species's anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head. What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal. The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate.
Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations. In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual's consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations "transpersonal experiences", and in the late '60s he helped found a branch of psychology called "transpersonal psychology" devoted entirely to their study.
Although Grof's newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm. As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange. The holographic paradigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain -- as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical.
Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body. Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because, in the holographic domain of thought, images are ultimately as real as "reality". Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book "Gifts of Unknown Things," biologist Lyall Watson describes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then "click" off again and on again several times in succession. Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if "hard" reality is only a holographic projection.
Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there" because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected. If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality. What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams. Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry. Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect's findings "indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality".
It's an Illusion
Time May not Exist
Not to mention the question of which way it goes...
by Tim Folger
No one keeps track of time better than Ferenc Krausz. In his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, he has clocked the shortest time intervals ever observed. Krausz uses ultraviolet laser pulses to track the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms. The events he probes last for about 100 attoseconds, or 100 quintillionths of a second. For a little perspective, 100 attoseconds is to one second as a second is to 300 million years.
But even Krausz works far from the frontier of time. There is a temporal realm called the Planck scale, where even attoseconds drag by like eons. It marks the edge of known physics, a region where distances and intervals are so short that the very concepts of time and space start to break down. Planck time—the smallest unit of time that has any physical meaning—is 10-43 second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. Beyond that? Tempus incognito. At least for now.
Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? “The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,” says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.”
The trouble with time started a century ago, when Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity demolished the idea of time as a universal constant. One consequence is that the past, present, and future are not absolutes. Einstein’s theories also opened a rift in physics because the rules of general relativity (which describe gravity and the large-scale structure of the cosmos) seem incompatible with those of quantum physics (which govern the realm of the tiny). Some four decades ago, the renowned physicist John Wheeler, then at Princeton, and the late Bryce DeWitt, then at the University of North Carolina, developed an extraordinary equation that provides a possible framework for unifying relativity and quantum mechanics. But the Wheeler-DeWitt equation has always been controversial, in part because it adds yet another, even more baffling twist to our understanding of time.
“One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation,” says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France. “It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time—that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless.”
No one has yet succeeded in using the Wheeler-DeWitt equation to integrate quantum theory with general relativity. Nevertheless, a sizable minority of physicists, Rovelli included, believe that any successful merger of the two great masterpieces of 20th-century physics will inevitably describe a universe in which, ultimately, there is no time.
The possibility that time may not exist is known among physicists as the “problem of time.” It may be the biggest, but it is far from the only temporal conundrum. Vying for second place is this strange fact: The laws of physics don’t explain why time always points to the future. All the laws—whether Newton’s, Einstein’s, or the quirky quantum rules—would work equally well if time ran backward. As far as we can tell, though, time is a one-way process; it never reverses, even though no laws restrict it.
“It’s quite mysterious why we have such an obvious arrow of time,” says Seth Lloyd, a quantum mechanical engineer at MIT. (When I ask him what time it is, he answers, “Beats me. Are we done?”) “The usual explanation of this is that in order to specify what happens to a system, you not only have to specify the physical laws, but you have to specify some initial or final condition.”
The mother of all initial conditions, Lloyd says, was the Big Bang. Physicists believe that the universe started as a very simple, extremely compact ball of energy. Although the laws of physics themselves don’t provide for an arrow of time, the ongoing expansion of the universe does. As the universe expands, it becomes ever more complex and disorderly. The growing disorder—physicists call it an increase in entropy—is driven by the expansion of the universe, which may be the origin of what we think of as the ceaseless forward march of time.
Time, in this view, is not something that exists apart from the universe. There is no clock ticking outside the cosmos. Most of us tend to think of time the way Newton did: “Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably, without regard to anything external.” But as Einstein proved, time is part of the fabric of the universe. Contrary to what Newton believed, our ordinary clocks don’t measure something that’s independent of the universe. In fact, says Lloyd, clocks don’t really measure time at all.
“I recently went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder,” says Lloyd. (NIST is the government lab that houses the atomic clock that standardizes time for the nation.) “I said something like, ‘Your clocks measure time very accurately.’ They told me, ‘Our clocks do not measure time.’ I thought, Wow, that’s very humble of these guys. But they said, ‘No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure.’ Which is true. They define the time standards for the globe: Time is defined by the number of clicks of their clocks.”
Rovelli, the advocate of a timeless universe, says the NIST timekeepers have it right. Moreover, their point of view is consistent with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. “We never really see time,” he says. “We see only clocks. If you say this object moves, what you really mean is that this object is here when the hand of your clock is here, and so on. We say we measure time with clocks, but we see only the hands of the clocks, not time itself. And the hands of a clock are a physical variable like any other. So in a sense we cheat because what we really observe are physical variables as a function of other physical variables, but we represent that as if everything is evolving in time.
“What happens with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is that we have to stop playing this game. Instead of introducing this fictitious variable—time, which itself is not observable—we should just describe how the variables are related to one another. The question is, Is time a fundamental property of reality or just the macroscopic appearance of things? I would say it’s only a macroscopic effect. It’s something that emerges only for big things.”
The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. By “big things,” Rovelli means anything that exists much above the mysterious Planck scale. As of now there is no physical theory that completely describes what the universe is like below the Planck scale. One possibility is that if physicists ever manage to unify quantum theory and general relativity, space and time will be described by some modified version of quantum mechanics. In such a theory, space and time would no longer be smooth and continuous. Rather, they would consist of discrete fragments—quanta, in the argot of physics—just as light is composed of individual bundles of energy called photons. These would be the building blocks of space and time. It’s not easy to imagine space and time being made of something else. Where would the components of space and time exist, if not in space and time?
As Rovelli explains it, in quantum mechanics all particles of matter and energy can also be described as waves. And waves have an unusual property: An infinite number of them can exist in the same location. If time and space are one day shown to consist of quanta, the quanta could all exist piled together in a single dimensionless point. “Space and time in some sense melt in this picture,” says Rovelli. “There is no space anymore. There are just quanta kind of living on top of one another without being immersed in a space.”
Rovelli has been working with one of the world’s leading mathematicians, Alain Connes of the College of France in Paris, on this notion. Together they have developed a framework to show how the thing we experience as time might emerge from a more fundamental, timeless reality. As Rovelli describes it, “Time may be an approximate concept that emerges at large scales—a bit like the concept of ‘surface of the water,’ which makes sense macroscopically but which loses a precise sense at the level of the atoms.”
Realizing that his explanation may only be deepening the mystery of time, Rovelli says that much of the knowledge that we now take for granted was once considered equally perplexing. “I realize that the picture is not intuitive. But this is what fundamental physics is about: finding new ways of thinking about the world and proposing them and seeing if they work. I think that when Galileo said that the Earth was spinning crazily around, it was utterly incomprehensible in the same manner. Space for Copernicus was not the same as space for Newton, and space for Newton was not the same as space for Einstein. We always learn a little bit more.”
Einstein, for one, found solace in his revolutionary sense of time. In March 1955, when his lifelong friend Michele Besso died, he wrote a letter consoling Besso’s family: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Rovelli senses another temporal breakthrough just around the corner. “Einstein’s 1905 paper came out and suddenly changed people’s thinking about space-time. We’re again in the middle of something like that,” he says. When the dust settles, time—whatever it may be—could turn out to be even stranger and more illusory than even Einstein could.......
...imagine.
Messenger Particles
According to the standard model, just as the internal linkphoton is the smallest contituent of an internal linkelectromagnetic field, the strong and the weak internal linkforce fields have smallest constituents as well. The smallest bundles of the strong force are known as gluons and those of the weak force are known as weak gauge bosons (or more precisely, the W and Z bosons). The standard model instructs us to think of these force particles as having no internal structure - in this framework they are every it as elementary as the particles in the three families of matter.
The photons, gluons, and weak gauge bosons provide the microscopic mechanism for transmitting the forces they constitute. For example, whe one internal linkelectrically charged particle repels another of like charge, you can think of it roughly in terms of each particle being surrounded by an electric field - a "cloud" or "mist" of "electric-essence" - and the force each particle feels arises from the repulsion between their respective force fields. The more precise microscopic description of how they repel each other, though, is somewhat different. An electromagnetic field is composed of a swarm of photons; the interaction between two charged particles actually arises from their "shooting" photons back and forth between themselves. In rough analogy to the way in which you can affect a fellow ice-skater's motion and your own by hurling of barrage of bowling balls at him or her, two electrically charged particles influenced each other by exchanging these smalles bundles of internal linklight.
An important failing of the ice-skater analogy is that the exchange of bowling balls is always "repulsive" - it always drives the skaters apart. On the contrary, two oppositely charged particles also interact through the exchange of photons, although the resulting electromagnetic force is attractive. It's as if the photon is not so much the transmitter of the force per se, but rather the transmitter of a message of how the recipient must respond to the force in question. For like-charged particles, the photon carries the message "move apart," while for oppositely charged particles it carries the message "come together." For this reason the photon is sometimes referred to as the messenger particle for the electromagnetic force. Similarly, the gluons and weak gauge bosons are the messenger particles for the strong and weak nuclear forces. The strong force, which keeps internal linkquarks locked up inside of protons and neutrons, arises from individual quarks exchanging gluons. The gluons, so to speak, provide the "glue" that keeps these subatomic particles stuck together. The weak force, which is responsible for certain kinds of particle transmutations involved in radioactive decay, is mediated by the weak gauge bosons.
- _The Elegant Universe_ by Brian Greene p.123
What are crystals?
Quartz has been used for the longest of times for spiritual expression, metaphysical growth and as an object of power for creating and manifesting reality. The power of quartz may not appeal to everybody, admittedly, but it will be of great interest to many.
There is a tremendous amount of information coming out about crystals and some of it is valuable. But for every piece of valuable information, there are 3 to 4 times that of misinformation. So it is important for you to have the knowledge to discern the truth of metaphysics so you don't have to be wondering who is telling the truth, you will know.
If I just talk about the metaphysical properties without first spending time on the physical properties, crystals will be a bit hard to appreciate and understand. Grounded in the knowledge of the physical properties, you will be able to determine the true metaphysical capabilities of crystals for yourself.
What are the physical properties of crystals?
99% of the earth's crust is made up of eight elements or chemicals: (most to least): oxygen, silica, aluminum, iron, magnesium, calcium, sodium and potassium Quartz crystal is a combination of two oxygen atoms and one silica atom. Silica-Dioxide. Oxygen and silica are the first and second most common elements. What are atoms? Atoms are comprised of a nucleus or central core. Around this core travel electrons. They travel in layers or shells looking much like our solar system. The Sun being the central core, then Mercury one shell, then Venus with the next shell, Earth, Mars and so on. On the Outer shell, there are not enough electrons so they connect by drawing an electron from another atom to form a molecule. So, two oxygen and one silica atom combine and lock together by the outer shell of each getting filled up with theirs and each other's electrons creating a molecule. That molecule connects with other molecules creating a lattice similar to how tinker toys connect. This lattice or helix spirals at a 60 degree angle taking six turns to complete the spiral...and then again and again. This looks very much like strands of DNA and similar to how blood flows through our veins. This movement creates the natural 6-sided shape of a quartz crystal (60 degree angle with six turns) Now, there is some interesting energy that is associated with quartz. There is energy outside, there is energy inside and combining in a synergy, there is the energy of the whole. When you strike, stress or squeeze a quartz crystal, when you do that electrons pop off the surface of a crystal. When you do this, it lights. This has been commonly observed in a laboratory. You can see a burst of light or an electrical charge because of this release of electrons. This is called Piezio-electric energy. When you stop striking it, the crystal recollects electrons...repeats and repeats. This is the basic principle of a phonograph needle striking the edge of a record groove. The quartz needle is running in a curved groove and the needle is moving straight so it is constantly bumping back and forth on the edge of the groove, releasing an electric charge that is mechanically amplified into sound. That is the Piezo-electric energy that runs on the surface of the crystal. Now, if you put light into a crystal, it will puff up and shrink back, expanding and contracting or vibrating. This is the principle behind the quartz watch. Quartz crystal vibrates at a certain frequency or a particular number of vibrations for each second, minute, hour. Again, this is an example of the Piezo-electric energy running on the surface of a crystal.
What about the energy inside? The energy on the inside is a spiral energy... It is caused by the spiraling lattice of its' molecular structure. 60 degree turns, 6 turns to complete a circle. A circle is 360 degrees divided by 6 equal 60 degrees. This is the same spiral as DNA or the flow of blood in your body. It resembles the look of a ladder that has been turned. This turn in the crystal is a very powerful turn because it is an amplifying turn. So a crystal has energy on the inside that functions differently than the energy on the outside. Both energies function together to cause a third energy, a radiant energy. Because as the energy is flowing on the inside it is putting pressure on the outside. This creates another piezo-electric effect whether you are squeezing it or not. The synergy of the inside energy and the outside energy allow it to function all by itself. That is why just being in the presence of a crystal can have an effect on you. OK, three energies that can be used for your spiritual growth, as a metaphysical tool and a power object to create and manifest your reality.
First, just a few words about Silica, the second most common element on the planet. Remember crystals are made up of silica and oxygen. Silica, there are tremendous amounts of it in your brain essentially creating liquid crystals, oxygen and silica. This is constantly forming and reforming in your brain. Silica is called a semi-conductor, a somewhat confusing word. Copper is a conductor and many electrical wires have it as their core carrying electricity. Rubber does not conduct electricity and it acts as an insulator creating protection from an electrical charge. Silica is a semi-conductor, meaning that sometimes it carries an electrical charge and sometimes it doesn't. That is a very important feature because it allows you to store an electric charge in it. You can store a charge in some silica and not store a charge in other silica. Yes, no, yes, no, on, off, on, off, 1,0,1,0. This is the binary system that creates the whole mechanism that ultimately is your PC, MAC, cell phone or any other electronic device. They are all based on this fact that certain silica chips are charged, others are not, semi-conductor. It is the ability of silica to store a charge that makes it all possible. What does that have to do with crystals? That means a crystal, Silica-Dioxide, two parts oxygen and one part silica, can store a charge. Then, if it can store a charge, it stores energy. If it stores energy it store thought. In fact, that is how you can pack it with knowledge, binary knowledge. 1,0,1,0 etc. This is much like your brain, which is made of lots of silica. You store information in your brain. Some of you realize that because you remember things. When you can store a charge in your brain it actually releases light and energy, just like a crystal, but you can't see it because it is nicely encased in your cranium. For protection. Silica is in crystals and it is in you. Obviously, you are not a crystal and a crystal is not a person but you are both consciousnesses in different physical forms. A mineral consciousness and a human consciousness and I would suggest that you can communicate. If in no other way, Morphogenically, which is the transfer of energy, from one to the other. Those are the physical properties of crystals.
Now, on to the good stuff, the Metaphysical qualities of crystals. There are seven.
First of all, crystals have the ability to balance and harmonize. This is based on the physical law of resonance. When a frequency of a vibration is encounters another vibration that is different, ultimately, those two vibrations will become the same. If one vibration is faster than another, the faster will slow down or the slower will speed up or they will both move toward equalization at the same frequency. So, when you have a crystal vibrating at the same frequency, always constant, always the same and you stand with it, you hold it, it is not going to change, you are. Some may have to sit with it a very, very, very, long time but nonetheless, you will change. Absolutely, you will change. Many of you will find that you cannot be around crystals without feeling a bit more serene. You will feel balanced and a sense of harmony. The worst problems can't seem to hold your attention when you are around crystals. Crystals can be used to balance and harmonize charkas, auric fields, temporal lobes, the mind, and virtually any part of the body. Admittedly, you can pull it down, too. If you try. If you only hold it feeling anger, rage, martyr, self-pity and horrible, rotten, scared and refuse to let go. But the vibration is there, it will change me...if I hold it properly, it will change me.
Crystals can gather and store information, knowledge, understanding and realization. Because of the properties of silica, It can store information, because of the spiral and the field of piezoelectric energy of its' surface ?it can gather and store knowledge ?many people bring crystals to workshops for just that reason. Because they can gather and store knowledge that you can later access at home. OH C'MON, SURE THEY CAN! Absolutely. IE ?Woman who had a meeting, very concerned and put the information in each of the facets and released it as needed. If you sit around the house in a foul mood, it will gather it up.
Crystals can amplify, direct and project energy. Yes, though the spiral they can direct and amplify energy through the spiral as it moves. You can influence it and you can aim it. If you want to direct an energy to a specific place at a specific time, this is the energy to use.
Crystals can transmute, transform and transcend energy. If you want to transform something about yourself. Perhaps, there is an aspect of you that you just don't like and want to eliminate. Maybe fear. If you have done your homework, worked it the best you can, then you can sit down with a crystal and transform it. It is just energy that you are remapping. After all, what is the difference between laughing and crying, not much. You can use the crystal to transform, transmute and transcend energy. This is not a shortcut. If you just refuse to work on it, to process, to look at, to deal with or refuse to even own it and expect the crystal to transform, it not going to work. But if you have done the work, a crystal can transform energy magically. I had someone ask me if they could transform their boyfriend. I said, yea, it is called go get a new boyfriend. You can't change others.
Crystals can condense and focus energy of your desire or design just like a laser. This is the energy that is commonly used for healing specific things or places in the body.
Crystals can and do communicate with each other. They do it all the time. The egocentricity that only humans can communicate is, well, hopefully waning. Crystals are not limited by time and space. That is why a crystal that you hold can pick up information from anywhere; anywhere there are other crystals. Now, admittedly, you have to have a sensitivity to be able to do so, but you can communicate with them and through them.
Crystals can work very clearly to protect and heal. Shield of energy, wall of energy to protect you from so many things, including your own negative ego. They can protect you from anything that you desire protection. It can be used as a tool to facilitate spiritual, mental-emotional and physical healing. They don't heal on their own, they a tool from which your energy can provide healing.
Esoteric qualities of crystals
Crystals can be of service, not in service. They are not servants they are not slaves. Treat them as such and they will eventually get the upper hand.
They can be focal points for you, they can be allies of you. They can be focal point and allies of choice, to help you with the mystical and mysterious of choice, to be a focal point and ally in the making of choice and thus decision.
They can be focal point and ally of you attention and your intention. Crystals can work with you as focal point as allies in bringing you attention to gather in, hold it, release it, amplify it, direct it, project it, to use your attention to transmute, transform, transcend, to condense and to focus energy. Of your intent it can hold and release your intent to work with you.
Crystals can work to calibrate and balance. Balance an harmony of resonance it can work to calibrate and balance. To coordinate and generate cooperation of your senses, of your chakras, of your brain temporal lobe sensitivity limbic brain activity ventricle activity and your mind that which is beyond your conscious self. Yes the crystals you guardian the crystals you keep can work, can serve you can work as focal points can work as allies to calibrate your temporal lobes, to calibrate your senses, your chakras, your mind, your brain, to balance move beyond the familiar senses to move beyond the familiar levels into the unfamiliar of your senses into the depth of your chakra centers. To balance your brain left and right hemispheres and the various components their of. To balance your mind.
Crystals can work with you to reprogram your subconscious and repattern your unconscious mind. In their very energies of transmutation, transformation and transcendent to reprogram and repattern the subconscious ad unconscious.
Crystals can be tremendous allies in the energy medicine. The medicine of the future. The medicine you are told now is complementary to (the real medicine) to allopathy. Well someday alopathy will be complementary to energy medicine and crystals can play a large roll as ally in the working of energy medicine’s.
Crystals can be focal point and ally in your action and in your image so critical to move beyond the tascid acceptance and passive participation. To become actively consciously participating in the creation of your future, in the creation of the future, in the creation of that positive future now destined to be the new world.
Focal point and ally of remembering and for reuniting. They can be allies on your journey now a journey coming home.
Crystals can produce or be doorways and gateways to the future, to the possible, to they unknown, to the imaginal. Crystals can be gateways to the mystical other(faerie realms are included in the mystical other). They can afford you a gateway to what you have lost of yourself, to that of lemuria, to what you have forgotten of your self, to that of atlantis. Crystals can afford you gateways to that which is missing from your heritage, celtic tradition or from wherever else from among the myriad of lifetimes called past. Gateways to what has been lost of you to what has been forgotten to what is missing. They can be gateways to discovering more of who you truly are. As well crystals can serve as gateways to the confluence of magic. What is the common denominator between the magic of you the magician of your current age or the magic of you of your tradition? Often the common denominator can be crystals. You from the many lifetimes other can put your magic into a crystal as can you of this life time and their a gateway to the confluence of these many magic’s. Likewise crystals can act as gateways for the complexity of consciousness from your times, from times past, from your set, from other sets, from your world and the world of other that share your planet earth. Where you can bring the diversity of your consciousness and the others can bring the diversity of their consciousness together in a complexity to integrate without losing identity.
Most information about crystals says they are just rocks, ordinary rocks. Fascinating, but just rocks. At the other end of the spectrum, there are those that give crystals some powers that are ridiculous. The crystal told me the winning numbers of the lottery... In fact, crystals are consciousness. In fact, all things have consciousness, plants, animals and minerals included. Crystals are a rarefied and highly evolved consciousness within the mineral kingdom. You do not own crystals, rather, you are in charge of the care and guardianship of it for what length of time it is in your possession...it is a living consciousness, cannot own it, anymore than you can own a person or an animal. Crystals are immensely powerful and immensely vulnerable.
The information on this above comes from the Lazaris audiotape presented by Concept: Synergy, Crystals: The Power and Use and Crystals: Tools to Co-Creation , Copyright NPN Publishing, Inc., 1985. Concept: Synergy, PO Box 691867, Orlando, Florida 32869. 1-800-678-2356
THE DARK SIDE
a random search at the deep end of rave culture
subjects which have not been represented in Hollywood and Western Film generally.
No films about asylum seekers being abused by the Labour Partys asylum system.
No films about the torture and sexual abuse of Iraqi Prisoners by USA and UK forces.
No Films about the devastation of Iraqi society by war and occupation
No Films about the fact that UK/USA mercenaries are allowed to kill in Iraq with out ant scrutiny or laws governing their conduct.Private Contractors now outnumber the number of USA forces in Iraq
No Films about the 500,000 who died during the UK/USA inspired UN sanctions
No films about the unreported air war still being waged by the US in Iraq
No films about the thousands of maimed and traumatised Iraqi civilians
No films about the maimed and traumatised UK/USA soldiers
No films about how the intelligence was fixed around the policy in the USA and UK and who fixed it.
No films which depict the murder of Iraqi civilians by UK and USA troops
No films which explain that Saddam was a client of the USA
No Films which explain how the UK,USA,Germany,France and others armed Iraq and helped with his attempts at the development of Biological,Chemical and Nuclear Weapons in the 1980s.
No Film about the War between Iraq and Iran during which the UK and USA backed and supported the Iraqis
No Films depict the fact that Iranian and Iraqi Democratic regimes were both overthrown by the UK/USA
No Films show that the UK is arming and re-arming a dictatorial regime that is a source of Jihadists and anti western propaganda. One that denies woman rights and that routinely tortures its critics, its called Saudi Arabia
and now from MICKEY MOUSE leader of the GANG
Trying to stop suiciders --which we're doing a pretty good job of on occasion-- is difficult to do. And what the Iraqis are going to have to eventually do is convince those who are conducting suiciders who are not inspired by Al Qaeda, for example, to realize there's a peaceful tomorrow.
--George w. Bush
Washington, DC
05/24/2006
We hold dear what our Declaration of Independence says, that all have got uninalienable rights, endowed by a Creator.
--George w. Bush
We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories ... And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them.
--George w. Bush
Washington, DC
05/29/2003
in an interview with Polish television
One of the things I've used on the Google is to pull up maps.
--George W. Bush
10/24/2006
'm gonna talk about the ideal world, Chris. I've read -- I understand reality. If you're asking me as the president, would I understand reality, I do.
--George W. Bush
05/31/2000
I want to thank you for taking time out of your day to come and witness my hanging.
--George W. Bush
Austin, TX
01/04/2002
Nearly 200,000 U.S.-supplied rifles and pistols meant for Iraqi security forces are unaccounted for in Iraq, according 
Loose record-keeping caused the Pentagon and the U.S. command in Iraq to lose track of about 110,000 AK-47 rifles and 80,000 pistols provided to the new Iraqi national police and army, the Government Accountability Office told Congress.
The report, issued July 31, follows an October accounting by the Defense Department's special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, which put the number of weapons missing at close to 500,000.
Auditors were unable to determine whether the weapons -- which included heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers -- were stolen, being used by insurgents or still in the hands of Iraqi units.
the United States has provided $19.2 billion to develop the Iraqi security forces
Hometown security 1
PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania -- Isaac Diaz walks through the toughest parts of North Philadelphia each day on his way to and from high school. But what really scares the 18-year-old senior is lying in his own bed at night.
He can hear the gunshots then "Last year it wasn't so often. Now it's as often as every night,"
"I'm afraid every day.
"
Philadelphia is just one of the nation's cities trying to deal with a murder spike.
Nationally, violent crime is spiking, too. Guns plentiful The spike loosely organized into street gangs and crews.
several factors, including poverty and drugs. But by far the biggest catalyst, they say, is the availability of guns.
Young men who grow up angry with few opportunities use guns to win status on the streets,
"In the 70s, I mean, if somebody came up and they had a zip gun -- which was a homemade gun -- that was big time," he said. "Now if, if you don't have an AK-47 or a sawed-off shotgun or a 9 mm, even if you pull out a .38, they laugh at you because, 'Is that all you've got?' That is their mentality when now people are carrying automatic handguns.
Hometown security 2
WEST PALM BEACH, Florida -- The war on the streets is escalating. As gangs and other criminals pack more firepower, police departments say they find themselves in an arms race.The officers say they need to level the playing field to survive. Bullets sailed at 3,200 feet per second through paper targets set up a football field's length away."It's not nice we have to arm ourselves like the soldiers in Iraq,"
now certified to carry a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle on the job. It's the civilian version of the military's M-16 used by U.S. soldiers in Iraq."We are like soldiers. It is a war, "
Across the country, at least 62 police officers have been gunned down this year -- a record pace "We're having more than one officer shot and killed a week. It's just outrageous that officers are being targeted," he said. "It's something I think all Americans should be outraged about."
He lays the blame squarely on lawmakers who allowed the assault weapons ban to expire in 2004 . "The streets of South Florida are being flooded by AK-47s and assault weapons from old Soviet bloc countries. It's driven the price down, making the availability greater,"
Designed to be fired from the hip, assault rifles such as the AK-47 can spray at a rate of up to 600 rounds a minute in full automatic mode. It is the weapon of choice for guerillas and gangsters. Cops prefer to squeeze off single shots in semiautomatic mode because it makes for more accurate shooting.
Authorities estimate there are about 160 gangs who boast around 7000 members. "They don't have .38s anymore. They have AK-47s. ...They have automatic weapons now,"
"They don't get out and run from us anymore. They stop, and they're shooting at us."
AUSTRALIANA-hey-hey-goodbye
Paul Keating called it perfectly way back in 1995 when he labeled Costello a "low-altitude flyer" (i.e. COWARD), Downer the "idiot son of the establishment" and Howard a "mangy maggot" and the "greatest job destroyer".....cowards and self-serving paranhas of conservative politics....now we see just how prophetic these observations really were.
And well done greens for helping labor into goverment. The dark cloud has lifted.
Now we can see the Emporers new clothes, welcome Comrade Krudd, why wont you say anything controversial?
Could it be you were elected because you looked like another Howard and promised to sell us out to the State capitalists of the World, keep the coal and uranium flowing, keep on chopping the old growth, pretend to care about those in poverty while patronising them into drip feed welfare????? Friend of the developers and speculators who will not stop until the earth is a dysfunctional real estate and its people pulp for reality TV consumption. Who amongst you has the courage of their convictions to be more than an empty vessel for the mere survival of your comfort zone???
AND LATEST BREAKING MINDZINE
hello from the ether, devil ether
"makes you like the village idiot" Dr H.S. Thompson.
Peter Carroll, in discussing the theoretical underpinnings of modern Chaos Hail Eris! magic', raises the concept of ether from its dusty grave in order to address the problem of instantaneous (faster-than-light)information transmission. According to this view, ether is a dimension which is 'orthogonal' to that of time, or is 'a kind of shadow substance', wherein patterns of probability affect material events. It must be pointed out that this is different to the classical concept of ether as a transmissive physical substance, which was postulated in order to explain the propagation of light waves through a vacuum. The Michaelson-Morley experiment in 1887 supposedly dismissed the notion of ether's physical existence, paving the way for Einstein's special theory of relativity (Zukav, 1978). For Carroll, although ether has a real existence, it is not a physical substance, while still affecting physical events simultaneously across space. This phenomenon is important to conceptions of magic, which have magicians causing things to occur across space and time without any physical internal linkcontact between their conjurations and the resulting phenomena.
Carroll points out that his conception of ether is merely a model to explain existing phenomena, and should not be thought of as necessarily having an independent existence outside of this conception, just as physicists make models to explain events in physical interactions. According to the magical model, ether 'acts as though it were a form of information emitted by matter that is instantaneously available everywhere and has some power to shape the behaviour of other matter' (Carroll, p21). This vision of a fundamentally interconnected, dynamic universe is in a sense a return to an ancient, Aristotelian vision of an organic, interconnected cosmos; it is also a concept of reality which is particularly apt in terms of chaos theory, with its fractal maps of infinite space.
Recapitulating, we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether. According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense. But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the quality characteristic of ponderable media, as consisting of parts which may be tracked through time. The idea of motion may not be applied to it."
From "Ether and the Theory of Relativity" an address delivered on May 5th, 1920, in the University of Leyden by Albert Einstein.
"Darwinism stresses conflict and competition; that doesn't square with the evidence. A lot of organisms that survive are in no sense superior to those that have gone extinct. It's not a question of being "better than"; it's simply a matter of finding a place where you can be yourself. That's what evolution is about. That's why you can see it as a dance. It's not going anywhere, it's simply exploring a space of possibilities." - Brian Goodwi
Fibonacci
The sequence of numbers, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, . . . , in which each successive number is equal to the sum of the two preceding numbers.
[After Leonardo Fibonacci (died c. 1250), Italian mathematician.]
Fibonacci, Leonardo (fêbonät´chê), ; b. c.1170, d. after 1240; Italian mathematician, known also as Leonardo da Pisa. The Fibonacci SEQUENCE 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, … , in which each term is the sum of the two preceding terms, occurs in higher mathematics in various connections.
Fibonacci numbers
Fibonacci numbers (fib-e-nä'chê num`berz) noun
In mathematics, an infinite series in which each successive integer is the sum of the two that precede it- for example, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34.... Fibonacci numbers are named for the thirteenth-century mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci. In computing, Fibonacci numbers are used to speed binary searches by repeatedly dividing a set of data into groups in accordance with successively smaller pairs of numbers in the Fibonacci sequence. For example, a data set of 34 items would be divided into one group of 21 and another of 13. If the item being sought were in the group of 13, the group of 21 would be discarded, and the group of 13 would be divided into 5 and 8; the search would continue until the item was located. The ratio of two successive terms in the Fibonacci sequence converges on the Golden Ratio, a "magic number" that seems to represent the proportions of an ideal rectangle. The number describes many things, from the curve of a nautilus shell to the proportions of playing cards or, intentionally, the Parthenon, in Athens, Greece.
Fibonacci, Leonardo
Fibonacci, Leonardo or Leonardo of Pisa (1170?-1240?), Italian mathematician, who compiled and supplemented the mathematical knowledge of classical, Arabic, and Indian cultures, and contributed to algebra and number theory. Born in Pisa, Fibonacci was about 20 when he went to Algeria, where he began to learn Indian numerals and Arabic calculating methods. Fibonacci used this experience to improve on the commercial computing techniques he knew and to extend the work of classical mathematical writers, such as Greek mathematicians Diophantus and Euclid. His writings on recreational mathematics became classic mental challenges and often involved the summation of recurrent series, such as the Fibonacci series.
Science, 1202
Liber Abaci by Italian traveler-mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci (Leonardo da Pisa) introduces Europe to Arabic numerals from North Africa and the zero from India, making calculation much easier than with Roman numerals.
First off, the system we use is not the Arabic system as many of us like to believe. It is the Hindu system. We refer to it as Arabic because Europe got the numerals from the Islamic world, which it sweepingly referred to as Arabic.
The switch took place in the Middle Ages, propelled by a book by the mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci in which
he discusses the merits of the Hindu numeral system. What you need to remember is that Islam was a more powerful culture, one that was more scientifically advanced than European civilizations after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Hindu numeral system promised the ability to understand Islamic mathematics.
The Hindus also invented the number zero. This was one of the greatest achievements in mathematical history.
Leonardo of Pisa or Leonardo Pisano (c. 1175 - 1250), also known as Fibonacci, was an Italian mathematician and is best known for the invention of the Fibonacci numbers and his role in the introduction of the modern positional base-10 system for writing numbers to Europe.
Leonardo's father Guilielmo (William) was nicknamed Bonacci ('good natured' or 'simple'). Leonardo was posthumously given the nickname Fibonacci (for filius Bonacci, son of Bonacci). William directed a trading post (by some accounts he was the consul for Pisa) in Bugia, North Africa (now Bejaia, Algeria), and as a young boy Leonardo traveled there to help him. There he learnt from the Arabic numeral system.
Perceiving the superiority of these Arabic numerals, Fibonacci travelled throughout the Mediterranean world to study under the leading Arab mathematicians of the time, returning around 1200. In 1202, at age 27, he published what he had learned in Liber Abaci, or Book of Calculation. This book showed the practical importance of the new number system by applying it to commercial bookkeeping, conversion of weights and measures, the calculation of interests, money-changing, and numerous other applications. The book was enthusiastically received throughout educated Europe and had a profound impact on European thought.
Leonardo became a guest of the Emperor Frederick II, who enjoyed mathematics and science. In 1240 the Republic of Pisa honoured Leonardo, under his alternative name of Leonardo Bigollo, by granting him a salary.
SHAMANISM
permanently morphing...
shaman
shaman (shä´men, shâ´-) noun
A member of certain tribal societies who acts as a medium between the visible world and an invisible spirit world and who practices magic or sorcery for purposes of healing, divination, and control over natural events.
[Russian, fromkTungus šaman, Buddhist monk, shaman, from Tocharian samâne, from Prakrit samaNa, from Sanskrit sramaNah, from srámah, religious exercise.]
- shaman´ic (she-màn´îk) adjective
shaman
shaman (shä´men), among tribal peoples, a magician, medium, or healer who owes his powers to mystical communion with the spirit world. Shamanism is based on ANIMISM; the shaman shields humans from destructive spirits by rendering the spirits harmless. He receives his power from a spirit who selects him and whom he cannot refuse. Characteristically, he goes into auto-hypnotic trances, during which he is said to be in contact with spirits. He occupies a position of great power and prestige in his tribe. Noted especially among Siberians, shamans are also found among the Eskimos, some Native American tribes, in SE Asia, and in Oceania.
"The tragedy of our cultural situation is that we have no shamanic tradition. Shamanism is primarily techniques, not ritual. It is a set of techniques that have been worked out over millenia that make it possible, though perhaps not for everyone, to explore these areas. People of predilection are noticed and encouraged. "
"In archaic societies where shamanism is a thriving institution, the signs are fairly easy to recognize: oddness or uniqueness in an individual. Epilepsy is often a signature in preliterate societies, or survival of an unusual ordeal in an unexpected way. For instance, people who are struck by internal linklightning and live are thought to make excellent shamans. People who nearly die of a disease and fight their way back to health after weeks and weeks in an indeterminate zone are thought to have strength and soul. Among aspiring shamans there must be some sign of inner strength or a hypersensitivity to trance states. In traveling around the world and dealing with shamans, I find the distinguishing characteristic is an extraordinary centeredness. Usually the shaman is an intellectual and is alienated from society. A good shaman sees exactly who you are and says, "Ah, here's somebody to have a conversation with." The anthropological literature always presents shamans as embedded in a tradition, but once one gets to know them they are always very sophisticated about what they are doing. They are the true phenomenologists of this world; they know plant chemistry, yet they call these energy fields "spirits." We hear the word "spirits" through a series of narrowing declensions of meaning that are worse almost than not understanding. Shamans speak of "spirit" the way a quantum physicist might speak of "charm"; it is a technical gloss for a very complicated concept."
Terence McKenna - the force will be with you...always The Archaic Revival by Terence McKenna
(for Lesley Blood)
"One of the things we were saying in _The Invisible Landscape_ is that there are avenues of understanding in the human body that have not been followed because of epistemological bias; for instance, using voice to effect physiological change in one's own nervous system. The sounds on one level preposterous, but on the other hand, it is simply a formalized way of noting the fact that sound is energy, that energy can be transduced in a number of ways, and that when it is directed toward the body it obviously does make changes. Chanting and singing are world wide shamanic practices. The shamanic singers navigate through a space with which we have lost touch as a society."
"I think in a sense it signals the rebirth of the institution of shamansim in the context of modern society. Anthropologists have always made the point about shamans that they were very important social catalysts in their groups, but they were always peripheral to them - peripheral to the political power and, actually, usually physically peripheral, living some distance from the villages. I think the electronic shaman - the person who pursues the exploration of these spaces - exists to return to tell the rest of us about it."
Terence McKenna - Archaic Revival_
Of prime importance here is the initiatory ritual of death and resurrection. A shaman enters his vocation in one of several ways, usually through inheritance or through a spontaneous 'call'. This often takes the form of an initiatory sickness, which may be an illness, an accidental brush with death (e.g. being struck by lightning) or a general breakdown.
"The Tungus tribesmen of Siberia say that when the shaman goes into his trance and raves incoherent syllables, he learns the entire language of Nature."
"The Language of Nature."
"Yes, sir. The Sukuma people of Africa say that the language is kinaturu, the tongue of the ancestors of all magicians, who are thought to have descended from one particular tribe."
"What causes it?"
"If mystical explanations are ruled out, then it seems that glossolalia comes from structures buried deep within the brain, common to all people."
Snow Crash_by Neal Stephenson
Bedouin Shamanism
Luna
Shamanism is an aspect of desert mysticism. It consists also of meditative, mystical and magical practices which were taught from father to son by the oral tradition, this teachings can be regarded as an esoteric offshoot of the old teachings of the prophet Idres (Hermes). The bedouin shaman made use of the eclipse of the moon because he knew that earth forces in someway could be used for 'magical' purposes. It is conceivable that the shaman was somehow able to unite the forces of his own mind with those of the earth at such times, and perhaps even transmit the power straight along the ley lines, as a modern engineer could transmit an electric current along a cable.
Electrical generators
book _Angel Tech: A Modern Shaman's Guide To Reality Selection_ by Antero Alli
"A modern shaman is a shaman in the 21st century...code name: Cyber Shaman. From the Greek, Cyber is a pilot. A modern shaman is an individual of power interacting with "spirits," triggering Knowledge, Vision, Technology and Advanced Fun.
When we reach for a good solid model for the function of psychedelics within a larger culture, we immediately face the shaman. The shaman is a very romanticized image, very "overwritten" as the academics like to say, meaning that the term now means many different things, including scores of things totally outside of its original ethnographic context. I’m not going to go into any specifics about particular shamanic cultures, but I would like to draw sort of a general picture that relates to the question about contemporary psychedelic culture.
One thing you can say about the shaman or witch is that she lives on the edge of cultural maps. The shaman acts as a kind of interface between the specific culture of a particular tribal group and the world outside, a world that we can think of not only as nature, of course, but as the cosmic, the abstract, the alien. The witch lives at the edge of the village; in her zone, we start to move into the wild. And that’s a very potent image for being a transfer point between the outside and the inside of human culture. One of the interesting paradoxes of shamanism is that, on the one hand, it is very technological, very savvy, full of knowledges in almost a modern sense of the term, like scientific knowledge. And yet the worlds that are being produced, sustained, and performed by the shaman are extremely cultural, spiritual, mythological. Look at a healing ceremony, and think about what exactly is happening there. Let’s say that healing is occuring through the use of quartz crystals being pulled out of the body. What’s happening there? What’s really going on?
One way of looking at it is to say that the shaman is playing a two-fold game. On the one hand, he knows perfectly well what he’s actually doing, that he’s pirated a little quartz crystal in his palm, that he’s using very specific plants which have very specific properties which can produce effects, both specifically related to health and to more general psychoactive goals as well. There’s a tremendous amount of knowledge there. And yet, what does the shaman do in the actual situation of the healing? She performs. And what she performs is a whole cultural web, the glue that embeds those knowledges in lived human life. Our doctors do that too, but the package is pretty one dimensional – "take this pill, it’ll work out for you." Their knowledge is kept on the inside. What the sick person perceives is a cultural story,a cosmic metaphor, an image of the illness being removed from the body. So it’s not that the shaman is a manipulative trickster just playing games with quartz crystals. It’s that the shaman understands the technology of packaging knowledge within the cultural matrix of transformation, and performs this packaged knowledge as if it were one thing, one process of body and mind. Even a skeptic must recognize that the placebo effect plays a tremendous role in healing of all sorts, and that the art of producing the placebo effect is incredibly valuable.
Within this performance, the shaman plays a liminal role, mediating between knowledge and performance the way he mediates between outside and inside. Liminality is an anthropological concept that describes, again, a place on the edge of cultural maps, a zone between the wild and the culture, between hot and cold, between different villages. In the ancient world, crossroads were places of tremendous liminal power. People from different villages, different cultures would encounter each other there. So there’s a whole mythology of trickster figures –Hermes, Coyote, Legba, often associated with communication – who model this relationship between inside and out. The concept of liminality is crucial to understand what function and what role psychedelics play in the larger culture.
Today, many people attempting to create models for modern psychedelic use have looked to the image of shaman healer. Of course we should be wary of abusing this poor old character for our own purposes. There’s also one very important distinction, I believe, between the world view of the traditional shaman healer and what we are faced with, which is that we do not have a coherent, contained world view. We no longer have a specific cultural story that can be performed in that mythological sense. We’re at this very strange juncture in history when cultures are smashing together and flattening out. We have globalization, we have fragmentation, it’s a very open-ended situation. If there is a central error in the shamanic interpretation of modern psychedelic culture, it lies in a romantic nostalgia that wants to reconstruct or re-embody some fully coherent mythological world view.
I don’t want to say that in a way that undercuts the power of traditional myths, not to mention traditional practices and knowledges. Moreover, modern psychedelic culture has largely been defined by a relationship to non-European knowledges and cultures, and the reception of those stories and practices from the world over inform the evolving picture or cultural story about what psychedelic people are trying to do in the world. But I think that we often find a misplaced desire or tendency to want that story to be fully complete and realized, so that we then know that what we’re doing is engaging the mind of the planet, or that nature herself is telling us something. Those are valuable perceptions, but their attempt to escape the Western model can sometimes be Western transcendence – not to mention Western consumerism --- in new disguise. I think it’s very important to recognize that, at the moment, we are still intimately embedded in this tremendous, bizarre, horrible and fascinating process of technological modernity. We can see its horrible claws, its profound lacks, and there’s a desire to overcome these things quickly and fully, to chuck that framework and enter into a different kind of re-enchanted world. The desire to re-enchant our experience of the world is a profound thing that we’re all feeling. It’s incredibly legitimate. And yet, I think that the way in which we move forward with that is not by reconstructing a kind of mythological world view in the name of ancient wisdom. The psychedelic eye sees that things are already enchanted, just the way they are, fragmented and integral at once. In this sense, it is important to see psychedelic culture not as a resistence to modernity, but its own fractal edge.
- Erik Davis - _Psychedelic Culture: One Or Many?_
Shaman Names
the word shaman came from healers in Siberia, and was then adopted to refer to all native healers that practiced in a certain way. Some healing traditions prefer not to be referred to as a shaman, because they wish to retain the integrity of their healing by retaining their traditional name. Also there are certain names that are cultures often apply to their shamanic healers, such as words that mean "the dreamer", "the traveler", or "of the spirits."
Angakok - Inuit Shaman, The Iglulik may be the word for Initiation.
Fugara - The Bedouin form of Shamanism
Baksylyk - a Muslim Declination of Shamanism" (in ISIM NEWSLETTER, December 1999 (No.4) )
Sahir-þairls - Shamans in Turkey the other wordw in connection with this were Kyrgyz Kazakh baksýs, baksý, kam, ozan, Oguz, ozans
Kopuz - a musical instrument, somehow connected with shamanism
Dagara Tribe - West African Tribe with Shaman Healers
Kontomblé - West African word for helping spirits.
Txiv Neeb - Shaman of the Hmong, the shaman translates to "father/master of the spirits."
Mondang - Korean Shaman, most Korean Shamans are women
Nae-Rim-Kut - Korean Shamanic Initiation
Huna - Hawaiian form of shamanism.
Babalawo - shamans of the Yoruba people of Nigeria, West Africa meaning "Father of the Mysteries" or "Father of the Spirits" .
Wulla-mullung - Wiradjuri Tribe- Southeast Australia it seems that is the name their Shamans are called, and their helping spirits are called Budian.
Dukun - Shaman of Indonesia
Voelva/Volva/Vala/Seidhkona - Female Shaman of Norse Mythology
Baal Shem - Translates in Hebrew as "Master of the Name" possibly a Jewish Shaman
Wakan Tanka - Term for Spirit that Resides in Everything in Lakota
Sheripiari - term of the Campa of eastern Perú
Znakharka - term for female shaman in the Ukraine.
Tang-ki - the Chinese name for a shaman (also fu-chi which seems to relate to a mediumship involving writing.)
What do shamans do?
Shamans work with the spirit or the soul. They heal illness at the soul level. They gain knowledge and insight from working with the spirits of nature such as rocks and trees, the land, and they gain knowledge from working with spirits of animals and humans such as their ancestors. For the shaman everything is alive and carries information, you can call this spirit, energy, or consciousness.
In order to communicate with the spirit or consciousness of these things, the shaman will shift his or her own state of awareness. Shamans can do this through various means, such as meditation, repetitive sounds such as that of the drum or rattle, or through the help of plants. The shaman will then "see" through a new set of eyes, they will see what is going on with you on a spiritual level. The shaman's practice is also characterized by the soul flight. The shift of consciousness that the shaman makes, which allows the free part of his or her soul to leave the body. The shaman can then go retrieve information for your healing and growth. They can retrieve healing power, or things that you have lost along the way in living your life. During the soul flight the shaman is both in the room, and going on this "journey" so that he or she has an awareness of both at the same time. More about the soul flight or journey.
The shaman sees illness as a lack of power because it was lost somewhere in your life. In order to heal you the shaman returns your power to you. She or he may perform a power animal retrieval, see link for more details. A power animal is a protector, similar to a guardian angel, which protects you from harm and helps you with your spiritual growth by lending its power to you.
The shaman also removes misplaced energy. The negative emotions you may feel, or the negative emotions that another can send at you are seen by the shaman to be stuck or stored in various parts of the body. This can be seen with the example such as how stress causes ulcers or back pains. The shaman will re-empower you by removing the energy that does not belong within your body. This is called a shamanic extraction, other healing modalities in addition to shamanism practice this in various forms. This energy is not bad, it is just misplaced. Because it does not belong in your body, it is seen as causing illness that then shows itself in a physical way through pain, sickness or emotional difficulties.
In the shamanic system part of the soul is free to leave the body, so therefore it is also believed that soul parts of each individual will leave the body in order to protect itself from trauma. This is considered a positive protection mechanism. For instance, if someone were to be in a car accident, part of the soul would leave the body to protect itself from the trauma of the impact. The soul does not always know how to return, however, and if it has not returned for whatever reason this is referred to as soul loss. That is when the shaman would become involved, in order to assist with returning this missing piece of yourself. The healer would perform a soul retrieval, see link for more information. In indigenous cultures this was performed quite regularly. In these modern times, a person may go a long time feeling like a part of him or herself has been missing.
Soul loss would be comparable to the psychological concept of disassociation.
Other activities which shamans have traditionally performed, in addition to healing people, also involved healing the land. For centuries, shamans for centuries have been involved with earth healing by using their ability to communicate with the consciousness of land, bodies of water and other such natural features of their landscape. Whether it by determining why crops would not grow in a certain location, or reasons for draught; working with growing things, the weather, and the land has been a traditional activity for the shaman. They would also communicate with nature to find plants to heal illness. Many South American shamans are responsible for discovering the healing property of certain plants, which later formed the basis for specific medicines we use in the western health system today.
In most cultures, even in current times, a particular shaman will be gifted in working with one or another shamanic activity. A shaman may be more called to do soul retrieval, extraction, to work with death and dying, or to work with the land to name a few. Some will specialize in one particular activity, some will be gifted in several areas.
The effectiveness of a shaman is generally measured by the results he or she is able to achieve. It is believed that unless the shaman is able to call power animals and spiritual aid to help her, she will not be effective. Indeed that individual could not be called a shaman. The teaching of detachment, and letting go of one's ego is a central lesson for the shaman. If the individual cannot let go of pride and self interest, he or she are not considered to be a good healer, and may not be able to enlist the spiritual aid considered necessary for effective healing. There is a concept that the spirits must take pity on the healer and the one being healed. If the shaman cannot evoke compassion from those that would aid her or him, but instead offends with his or her pride - no assistance will be given to that person for the healing work.
Most of the techniques of a shaman are particular to the individual or culture. Whether a rattle or a drum is used is not considered an essential difference for effectiveness. The shaman must do what ever he or she finds effective to call forth the energy for healing. Whatever the shaman does to shift his consciousness, must only achieve the results of shifting consciousness. The trappings of what the shaman does is comparable to how a star athlete prepares for a game, whether they do calisthenics to prepare, or simply rub their lucky sock, these preparations are just the trappings around the work itself. Once again it is the results that measure the skill level.
Therefore there can be a wide variety of tools and techniques used by shamans, although certain tools/techniques appear frequently. Percussion instruments such as rattles or drums, plants, water, stones, fires, and singing often accompany shamanic work - but what is specifically used will vary with the shaman, who must achieve the shift of consciousness, receive information being communicated, and be able to direct the healing by whatever means are most effective for him or her. The same applies to whether the shaman uses hawk medicine or bear medicine, although all of these things may change the texture or feel of the shamanic work, one is not better than another.
There are certain techniques or perhaps skills that are considered essentially different in shamanic work. Shapeshifting, merging, journeying, and seeing are some of the skills a shaman may or may not posses, the ability to work over a long distance.
article from www.shamanlinks.net
Ayahuasca, shamanism, and curanderismo in the Andes
by
Steve Mizrach
Introduction
The term ayahuasca comes from the Quechua, meaning literally "the vine of souls," although it is also called "the visionary vine" or the "vine of death." The folk term refers to the botanical species of liana known as Banisteriopsis caapi , which is also known as Yagé among the Indians of Brazil. For simple ease of writing, I will generally refer to it as Yagé throughout the paper. Yagé is used in conjunction with several other psychoactive compounds in Andean ceremony, including tobacco, epena or yopo snuff (made from Psychotria viridis), and coca. It contains several neurally active alkaloids, of which perhaps the most significant are the beta-carbolines (MAO inhibitors), and the most important of those being harmine and harmaline. When the caapi vine is used (as it often is) in conjunction with another subspecies of Banisteriopsis, whose active compound is dimethyltryptamine (DMT), the synergistic effect creates a powerful psychedelic experience in the user (Villoldo 1990).
Due to the activity of Western ethnobotanists, chemists, and anthropologists in the late 20th century, the Western world has become quite interested in yage. William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg were convinced it might hold the cure "junky" addiction to "hard drugs" like heroin (Burroughs 1963). Research scientists were so impressed with the plant's ability to heighten mental sensitivity that they were sure it conferred extrasensory perceptions and dubbed it telepathine. The experience that the Yagé plant confers on Western users is so similar to accounts of the Near-Death Experience (NDE) (as noted by would-be shamans such as Alberto Villoldo, Michael Harner, and Terrence McKenna) that some are sure it's practically a gateway to the spirit world. Many psychotherapists (like Claudio Naranjo), working on the somewhat verboten practice of using psychedelics in therapy still experiment with Yagé, claiming that it produces the catharsis necessary for some dramatic cures of alcoholism and neurosis (Naranjo 1974).
Yage is used throughout the Amazon, particularly in Brazil and Colombia, in addition to Peru. In this paper, I am of course focusing primarily on its usage among indigenous Andean tribes such as the Cashinahua, and particularly on its use in healing and divination rituals. Much has already been written about the use of Yagé in Peruvian curanderismo, especially the sort of pseudo-New Age-spiritual tourist cults that seem to have grown around its use in urban areas. In this paper, I am trying to argue three significant points that have not been paid much attention to in the study of Peruvian shamanism. One, that ayahuasca trance is often accompanied by a critical acoustic component involving the use of rattles and whistles. Two, that the shamanic trance may make use of the peculiar lines that line the Peruvian sierra (the ceques) which link together its many sacred places (huacas). Third, that Yagé use is part of an important cosmological culture-complex involving a fascinating ethnoastronomy on the part of its users. And also that the way in which Yagé healing is performed has been changing in urban areas.
Shamanism, one of the perennial fascinations of anthropology, may represent one of the most archaic forms of religious consciousness on the planet. Mircea Eliade calls it an "archaic technique of ecstasy" and suggests that in most cultures, the shaman serves multiple roles, the most important perhaps being his mediation between the temporal and spiritual realms (Eliade 1964). R. Gordon Wasson thinks that American shamanism, and perhaps other forms, derive from a Siberian-Altaic circumpolar culture-complex that developed around Amanita muscaria (Fly Agaric/Soma) mushroom use some 100,000 years ago, and which spread with Asiatic migrants across the Bering strait (Wasson 1986). In almost every culture, the shaman is thought to be able in his visionary state to climb the 'world pillar' of the 'world navel' (omphalos) which links the underworld, middle world, and the heavenly realm of the Polestar. To some, the shaman is merely a schizophrenic, psychotic individual indulged by other members of his tribe; to New Age romantics, he is the figure of the "wounded healer," a mystical guru par excellence.
In Peru, I would argue, shamanism primarily revolves around healing (curanderismo) and that today, it has Indian and mestizo practicioners (one of the most famous in the lattery category being Eduardo Calderón). Much, though not all, of the ceremony involves the use of Yagé, and today such rituals can be found in urban, montane, and jungle areas. Not surprisingly, the content of Yagé visions in the Andean context is strongly influenced by the cultural set and setting. Users of Yagé frequently report hallucinations of jaguars, the souls of the ancestors, and out-of-body type experiences. It is important to realize that the particular kind of Altered State of Consciousness (ASC) created by Yagé use is affected by other concomittants, and thus researchers may not fully understand the Peruvian shamanic experience without taking those into account. However, we also need to look, to some degree, at what is happening with Yagé at a basic neurological level.
Background: preparation, physiology, context, cross-cultural effects
While many Andeans are familiar with the preparation of Yagé, it is commonly utilized in ritual settings by vegetalistas , shamans who are known for their specialization in ethnobotanical knowledge (Luna 1986). The typical procedure is to scrape the bark from the woody vine and boil it in water, creating an intoxicating tea. Other plant materials will then be added, resulting in a unusually bitter concoction. Users drinking this tea typically have extreme feelings of nausea and intestinal discomfort, resulting in diarrhea and vomiting. For this reason, Yagé is frequently known as la purga (purge), and users are strongly counselled to undergo a period of severe fasting and abstinence prior to using the substance. The plant contains a number of physiologically active chemicals in addition to harmine, harmaline, and DMT, and these can create other symptoms of physical discomfort, which makes some people feel like they are dying - slowing of the pulse, chills, numbness, and the blurring or fading of sensory stimuli from the external world (Lamb 1985).
I emphasize this fact, because in many of the cross-cultural studies of "Yagé," harmine extract has been used without many of the allied compounds found in the plant. Naranjo and other therapists claim they do this for the benefit of patients, and rightfully so, but it should be emphasized that for shamans who take the "heroic dose" of Yagé for their initiations, this deathlike crisis is part and parcel of the experience. The purgate is thought to remove toxic substances from the body, and the crisis is thought to liberate the shaman's soul to allow for "spirit flight," and to be an important trial preparing him for his work with the spiritual world. "Bad trips" with Yagé do occur, where the shaman is tormented by demonic beings, attacked by serpents, or imprisoned underground, but these are culturally rationalized and understood as part of the experience. It is the shaman confronting what is thought to be sorcery and freeing himself from attachments to his previous life. Thus, when harmine is used in a Western context, not only is the cultural rationale not present, but the "total package" physiological experience is not there either.
In the native context, Yagé is commonly used to divine the causes of illness and effect cures. Anthropologists believe it is most commonly used in the case of culture-bound syndromes (CBSes) (what are sometimes clumsily called "psychosomatic illnesses" by Western medicine), such as the condition of susto or soul loss. However, sorcerers are also known to employ it in witchcraft for the causing of illness as well, by summoning "spirit darts" that will attack their enemies. It is also used for divining the future and the whereabouts of missing persons and things; for contacting and controlling spirit beings; for the "spirit flight" of the shaman; and for facilitating intergroup harmony and sociability. Ethnographers report that the most common elements of Yagé visions are: 1) the feeling of separation of the soul from the body, and taking flight 2) visions of jaguars (interpreted as positive), and snakes and other predatory animals (usually thought to be negative) 3) a sense of contact with supernatural agencies (Andean demons and divinities) 4) visions of distant cities and landscapes (thought to be clairvoyance) and 5) detailed re-enactments of previous events (thought to be retrocognition.) (Villoldo 1990).
Visual elements of the Yagé trance in the native context inevitably involve: brightly colored, large snakes; jaguars, ocelots, and other jungle cats; spirits of ancestors and others; large, falling trees; lakes, often filled with alligators or other predators; and villages and gardens of other Indians. These visions are usually preceded initially by swirling, moving geometric patterns, bright visual flashes (phosphenes), sensations and sounds of rushing water, and sudden, descending darkness that seems to swallow the individual. (Harner 1980). These share some commonalities with the hallucinogenic experiences of shamans using psychedelics in other Native American cultures. But in order to understand the "bottom line" neurological effect of Yagé, it's worthwhile to look at the effects it causes in Westerners. Naranjo reports that urban, elite Chileans using harmaline in a clinical, experimental setting reported the following experiences: feelings of being transformed into a "ball of energy" and rushing rapidly through the sky; becoming a winged being and flying; visions of Negroes or black people; religious (Catholic) imagery; sensations of turning or swirling violently; and malicious dwarves. (Naranjo 1974).
Like the Indians, his Chilean subjects reported seeing ferocious cats (usually tigers or panthers), reptiles (not always snakes; usually, lizards or dragons), predatory animals, deep lakes and abysses, and previous events which had happened either to themselves or close personal friends. Naranjo insists that any possible "contamination" from suggestions or guidance on the part of he and his aides was carefully controlled, so perhaps we do have with Yagé a certain cross-cultural "rock bottom" experience involving disembodiment/soul flight and visionary patterns. It's hard to tell; the Chileans may have been familiar with Indian legends and stories. Various researchers suggest the effects of harmaline may be due to the presence of an indole ring which is chemically very similar to serotonin, a naturally produced neurotransmitter in the brain. The alkaloids in Yagé are isotropically close to those found in mescaline, psilocybin, and lysergic acid diethlamide (LSD), and may interact with the neurotransmitter inhibition system in the brain. There is much evidence to believe that the "locks" for psychedelic "keys" such as harmaline are "built" into the brain, by close coevolution... as Wasson suggests, mushroom use may be millennia old. (McKenna 1993). I consider it somewhat significant that cross-culturally, Yagé appears to cause the sensations of near-death experience and 'soul flight'. There are researchers who feel this is a particularly powerful hallucination common to the use of many psychedelic compounds, and it may be the basis for many cross-cultural ideas and complexes in humanity's religious imagination, such as the belief in a transcendent soul. This may be the case; however, those who use the drug do not always report heavenly palaces or hellish abysses. Many claim their "soul flight" takes them to familiar locations which are close-by, and that they navigate among landscapes using recognizable landmarks. I am not here suggesting that this constitutes a "real" or "objective" Out-of-Body-Experience (OOBE), in any scientific, verifiable sense. But the Indians certainly do believe that during this "soul flight" they can view distant places and find missing objects. Further, I will argue that even if this is purely a symbolic, imaginal journey, shamans at least use imagined elements of the Andean landscape and cosmos to navigate on their "journeys." And that it is thought to allow for interactions with the dead and the spiritual realm that coexist with us. (For the Jivaro Indians, indeed, these interactions are more real than our earthly ones.)
Curanderismo: urban ayahuasquero healing
In her work with urban healers in Iquitos, Dobkin de Rios discovered that the majority of them were cholos or mestizos who used Yagé in their curing sessions, usually with patients who were mestizos that dwelled in urban slums (De Rios 1972). Usually, the healer would take a circle of clients into the forests outside Iquitos, and there administer the Yagé to both himself and the patient (he would work with each one individually). A careful pre-screening process would select out people the healer thought were suffering from severe organic illness (they would unashamedly refer such patients to biomedical physicians in Iquitos) or psychosis. Usually, the healer would choose to work with patients believed to be suffering from what might be called Culture-Bound Syndromes - illnesses understandable and 'treatable' within an Andean cultural context. These included:
Susto: The condition of "soul loss", whose symptoms often include alteration of metabolism, nervous disorders, feelings of fear, and a loss of appetite and energy. Yage is thought to help the healer discover the whereabouts of the missing soul.
Daño: Daño is thought to occur when someone harbors feelings of envy or vengeance toward a person. The symptoms of Daño include hemorrhaging, muscular pain, fatigue, suffocation, tumors, and consistent bad luck (known as saladera). It is a magical illness, which may have been caused by a Yagé-using sorceror who has slipped the person a noxious potion, or has thrown a chonta or evil magic thorn. Thus it requires magical treatment.
Pulsario: Pulsario is sometimes described as a ball at the top of the stomach which blocks ordinary digestion. Mainly diagnosed in women, pulsario's symptoms include restlessness, hyperactivity, anxiety, and irritability. The healer often proclaims this ball to be crystallized (repressed) pain, sorrow, or anger, thus requiring Yage divination to find the proximate emotional cause.
Mal de Ojo: The symptoms of the "evil eye" were varied, but included such manifestations as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, fever, weight loss, insomnia, and depression. It can result from an improper glance from a person, which is not always maliciously intended. Mothers often seek to protect their children from the evil eye through amulets or tobacco smoke. A healer is thought to be able to discover who cast the glance.
As a form of magical healing, the action of a ayahuasquero is thought traditionally not only to discover the sorceror, spirit, or other being of ill will who caused the illness, but also to expel the bad sorcery and return it to that person. The shaman attempts to locate the sorceror's tsentsak or spirit darts within the body of the victim (these are then removed in the form of needles or other objects "sucked" out of the patient) and return them to their conjuror. What has happened is that in the urban setting these beliefs have been moralized (Christianized) and naturalized. (Chaumeil 1992). The mestizo healer usually tries to locate the source of the suffering of the patient in some kind of moral or interpersonal transgression on the part of the urban dweller, and thus in divination discloses to the client what acts of prayer, penitence, restitution, and apology are necessary for a complete cure. This will often also be accompanied by some type of physical regimen, including recommended changes in diet; hydrotherapy, herbalism, or similar naturopathic 'treatments'; and even recourse to Western biomedicine. (Joralemon 1993).
The curandero's clients often consult him because they either do not trust, cannot afford, or have had no successes with Western medicine. This may be due to the presence of such culture-bound illnesses. Thus, it can be seen that the urban healer works as a sort of psychotherapist and social worker as well. Urban dwellers in Iquitos often face severe stresses in their lives (prominently, annual flooding of their homes, nonexistent sanitation, and lack of steady employment) which often leads to sharp intra-familial conflict. In locating the sources of their illnesses in conflicts that they must resolve, Dobkin de Rios suggests the healer is not all that different from a psychoanalyst 'uncovering' repressed memories and trauma. However, unlike Western psychoanalysis, transference occurs from the healer to the client, as the client must recover through internalizing the healer's vision of what steps are necessary for recovering spiritual 'balance' and health. This may be a novel use of Yagé, different from its original usages in aboriginal Andean shamanism; but it is not altogether dissimilar from the way Western therapists are using harmaline and other psychoactive substances in treating their patients today.
The acoustic component: the "Whistling Bottles"
In a short article published in 1971, "Hallucinogenic Music", Marlene Dobkin de Rios and Fred Katz attempt to argue that there is an important acoustical component to the Yagé ceremony. (Katz and Dobkin de Rios 1971). Certainly, others had noted the shaman's use of a schacapa or rattle to mark important points in the ceremony. And other ethnographers have noted that in other cultures, the use of drums or other percussive instruments is part and parcel of the ceremony, creating conditions of "sonic driving" which may help entrain brainwaves. But de Rios points out that one of the most important parts of the Yagé folk music performed by the shaman was whistling - the use of certain precise tones at different parts of the ceremony. What significance did this have? She mentions the ancient Pythagorean belief of musical effects on consciousness, with musical progressions linked to states of mind, and the synaesthetic experience that some hallucinogen users report between musical tones and color perceptions or emotional experiences. And admits that even today, knowledge of psychoacoustics (the neurological effects of music on the brain) is in its infancy.
So while it could purely be a cultural component - i.e. the melody creates certain folk associations on the part of the listener, providing content for the visionary experience - she questions whether a more direct effect might not be involved. The shaman would whistle, she noted, to help bring a 'client' out of a 'bad trip' or negative experience, or to assist the person with some transitional point in the psychedelic visions. Certain tonic progressions would coincide precisely with these transitions. She suggests, "...the preponderance of the tone G could be viewed as the dominant tone away from the tonic C. Perhaps this contrastive situation potentiates the activation of the ayahuasca alkaloids...". Dobkin de Rios seems to suggest that mostly oral (i.e. non-instrumentally augmented) whistling was involved in the ceremonies she saw, but this may not be universally the case. And this musical component of the ceremony (the need to generate specific whistling tones) may provide the clue to some mysterious Moche artefacts - the so-called "whistling bottles".
These ceramics were made by pre-Columbian peoples living along the coast of Peru between 500 BC and up until the Spanish Conquest. They were made primarily by the Moche craftsmen, but can also be found in Chimu and other cultures. The vessels are generally dual-chambered: one chamber is the "inside" of some type of effigy figure, and the other chamber contains a spout. The two chambers are linked on the exterior by a bridge handle which contains a whistling cavity, and an inner cavity. Most archaeologists assume they are drinking vessels, with their whistle being used as "an amusing vent to facilitate the passage of air when pouring and filling with liquid". However, there is some reason to believe that these curious artefacts were used for more than just imbibing beverages. Daniel Statnekov, an amateur collector, reported that when he blew into one of these whistling vessels, it generated an eerie, high-pitched tone, and he had a sudden feeling of perceiving himself as a moving luminescence rushing rapidly through space, before he confronted an inky black cloud that chilled him "like death" and suddenly forced him to snap out of his vision. He had not used any drug prior to this experience - but it was extraordinarily similar to that reported by Yagé users (Statnekov 1987)!
Statnekov set out to prove scientifically that these "whistling bottles" were not used primarily for drinking. He and acoustic physicist Steven Garrett tested about seventy of the bottles, from different cultures and time periods, using the following analysis: pressurized air was sent through the bottles in an anechoic chamber, and the resulting sound passed through a spectrum analyzer. Often as many as seven partials, harmonics of the fundamental frequency, could be detected. They found that the average frequency of the Moche/Huari bottles was around 1320 Hz, whereas the Chimu/Chancay bottles averaged a tone of about 2670 Hz. The earlier cultures tended to produce "enclosed-type" dual-tone low-frequency whistles, where the second tone could be achieved by halving the blowing pressure, creating a tone about 0.65 of the original frequency. They concluded, "The frequencies of a bottle produced by a specific set of cultures tend on average to be within +/- 14% of the average frequency. On the basis of the small octave range... we are reasonably sure they were not used as musical instruments... however, the clustering of frequencies... in the range of the ear's greatest sensitivity... and the high sound levels produced by the whistles when blown orally... suggest they were produced as whistles..." (Garrett and Statnekov 1987).
So, they're not used as musical instruments, and people very likely didn't hear very much when drinking from them, so they probably weren't useful as ritual beverage containers either. What were they? I suspect Statnekov's experience holds the key. The whistling bottles may have peculiar psychoacoustic effects on their own when blown orally. But more likely, as Dobkin de Rios suggested, such whistles may have been used to potentiate and synergistically amplify the Yagé experience. They may have been used by Moche shamans to generate the specific tonal sequences thought to be necessary for guiding the Yagé 'trip'. After the conquest, shamans may have resorted to purely oral, non-amplified or instrumentalized whistling as an alternative, which is why Dobkin de Rios didn't find such things in use among her subjects. However, the manufacture of such vessels may not have stopped with the Spanish Conquest; I suspect careful examination by ethnographers may turn up their continued use in Yage ceremonies in the Andes today. Their effects on consciousness require some more psychophysical study.
The Mystery Lines: shamanism and ceques
For a long time, anthropologists have pondered the mysteries of the ceques or lines which cross the Andean sierra. Many originally thought them to be paths or roads for trade and travel. This seems unlikely, however, as many of them are extremely narrow (about 2 cm in width), and they tend to terminate in rather undesirable destinations, such as cliffs and chasms, rather than other villages. The ceques which surround Cuzco are thought to radiate out from the capital, symbolizing the extent of the Inca "Sun King's" power. Ethnographers have found that other ceques are used to demarcate the boundaries of different ayllus ' territory, representing the extent of their authority as well. It is quite apparent that the ceques definitely link the many huacas (sacred spots) of the countryside, where pilgrims will often leave stones and other offerings for the resident divinities. And that some ceques have an ethnoastronomical significance, terminating at a point on the horizon where the setting or rising of a particular celestial body can be observed on a specific day of the year (Hadingham 1988).
But what about that other mystery of the Andes, the Nazca markings? While much ink has been spilt over discussion of the enormous landscape figures found on the Nazca plain, representing flora and fauna that are visible only from high above the ground, few have mentioned the network of lines that cross the figures. These lines cross them somewhat haphazardly, almost as if to suggest they preceded the figures. In any case, they are definitely too narrow to be spaceship runways, so what are they? Maria Reiche and Paul Kosok provided an initial suggestion when they claimed to have found significant lunar, solar, and stellar alignments. However, when Gerald S. Hawkins rechecked their work, he found little of verifiable significance (Hawkins 1973). I suspect that Anthony Aveni may provide a better idea when he suggests that the lines may be "a ritual writ large". Many of the lines originated from Cahuachi, a prominent Nazca ceremonial centre (Aveni and Silverman, 1991).
Aveni found that many of the Nazca lines paralleled water concourses, and that they terminated on the promontories of mountaintops from which water would flow following seasonal downpours. However, they are not irrigation channels. Rather, they serve a ceremonial and symbolic function. Aveni found that even today many people perform ceremonies at endpoints of the lines for the purposes of summoning water. And he found a link with the ceques; Aveni also observed that many ayllus would place sacred offerings in streams that bent alongside ceques in order to maintain the flow of the water. Aveni points out, "...the ceques were more than mundane property boundaries, since water was a gift of ancestors residing in the underworld... the geometric connection we found between the lines and water, together with the analogy of the ceques, suggests the lines may have played some part in ceremonies designed to summon water from its sources underground or high in the mountains." But Aveni doesn't suggest what kind of ceremonies these were. And what does this all have to do with Yage and shamanism?
Two authors, Paul Devereux and Tony Morrison, may hold the key. Devereux originally studied a similar system of lines (he called them leys ) crisscrossing the British countryside. He found the leys would often connect sacred spots such as stone crosses, megaliths, churches built atop earlier Celtic holy places, holy wells, and landscape figures. Further, the leys (called the "old straight track" by Alfred Watkins) would often parallel underground streams and end at points where one could find blind springs. Devereux was fascinating by myths which told of Druids who would fly following the leys in stone chariots. British legends tell of spirits that walk the lines on saints' days, and how dowsers use them to find underground water. He became convinced that these stories of aerial travel were not literally true, but might have been describing the use of the ley lines for the sort of 'spirit flight' found in indigenous American shamanism. Devereux travelled to South America, and discovered that there were stories there also of how shamans would use the ceques to navigate using their 'spirit body' (Devereux 1994).
Morrison observes that in the Andes, the dead are also thought to walk on the ceques during certain days (Morrison 1978). It hit me like a thunderbolt. Two of the functions that the Andean shaman uses Yage, "the vine of souls", for are to contact the dead and to divine the location of water. The ancestors' spirits residing within the huacas are thought to guard underground water. Perhaps one of the "ceremonial" uses of the lines are for the shaman to travel during his "spirit journey", guiding him like a magnet to the places of the dead where he can bargain for water. Indeed, during their "soul flights", shamans typically report that they are "guided" on their journey by "spirit paths" that lead them to the appropriate destination. One of the ayllus' main responsibilities are water rights, and they maintain this role through their link to the ancestors who guard the water for their descendants (Lamadrid 1993). This may not be a (meta)physical journey, per se, but the shaman at least uses the lines as a symbolic , imaginal path for the journey to the places of the dead.
Certainly this does not solve all the riddles of the ceques. On the Nazca pampa, the Indians still quite physically travel the lines from huaca to huaca, leaving offerings on a "round" or circuit of visits which seems to be timed coincidentally with important seasonal periods (esp. climactic changes, such as the onset of heavy rainfall). While Morrison at first argues that Reiche and Kosok were wrong about their "Stonehenge-type clock/computer" hypothesis for the Nazca markings, he later admits weakly that the Great Rectangle's eastern extremity apparently did align with the setting of the Pleiades around 525 AD, during the Nazca period, and that some other lunar alignments may be present (Ibid., 1978). He leaves the possibility open that the timing of the visits to places along the ceques may have been based on important points during the year marked by the setting or rising of the sun, moon, or other stellar bodies, now culturally remembered as saints' days or the mortuary dates of key ancestors. Which of course leads us on our next 'journey' if you will, into ethnoastronomy.
The cosmological component: the Milky Way as road of souls
Morrison admits that Aymara star-lore was "extensive," and that they worshipped the moon, noting its complex 18-year cycle. The quipus , he notes, might have been used to record astronomical data. The Indians' words for "east" and "west" were derived from positions of the sun, they were able to fix the solstices through watching the sun over key geographic points, and east was a key ceremonial direction toward which many monuments were faced. The evening star (Venus, Ururi in Aymara and Quechua) was thought to be particularly important. While Andean ethnoastronomy might not have been as sophisticated as that of the Maya, they still had made significant calendrical and other achievements. He suggests that Aymara and Quechua people had similar beliefs concerning constellations and asterisms such as the Pleiades and the Magellanic Clouds. Perhaps most importantly, they both referred to the Milky Way as the "way of Santiago" (St. James), a Christianization which coverred up its earlier names - the "river of stars," "the road of souls," or the "way to infinity..." (Ibid., 1978).
As I suggested earlier, in many cultures' shamanic traditions of tripartite cosmology, one place the shaman journeys during 'spirit flight' is into the underworld (the nagual in the Andes) to commune with spirits, find water, and locate lost souls. However, he is also thought to be able to climb the "world tree" into the sky. In many societies in the northern hemisphere, the "world tree" (also often thought to be a mountain or mill) is believed to stretch from the "world navel" to the Pole Star, the one body in the heavens around which all the others spin in deference. Santillana feels that many ancient peoples were aware of the precession of the equinoxes, which causes the Earth's axis to point toward a different pole star every two millennia or so. They would represent the "falling" of the pole star below the horizon (and its eventual replacement by another star - even faithful Polaris will give up his throne eventually) as a cosmic flood or cataclysm. Their shamans would need to find new routes to climb up into the heavens. (Santillana 1969.)
However, in the southern hemisphere, the Pole Star is hardly that prominent, and hangs in a somewhat low position on the horizon - hardly as spectacular as it might be for someone living in, say, the Arctic. Indeed, in the native ethnoastronomy, it's hardly mentioned at all. However, the Milky Way is quite visible, and it arcs brilliantly across the vault of the southern sky. We might expect the Milky Way to be an alternate route for the shaman seeking to climb the sky. And indeed it is - to reach the celestial spirits (as opposed to those that live in the underworld), Jivaro and other South American shamans claim that they climb the Milky Way. They are explicit about the use of Yagé in doing so. In their visions, the "vine of souls" stretches out to become a milky serpent, becoming the Milky Way, "the road of souls"which they use as a rope to climb into the heavens. But are such beliefs found among the indigenous peoples of the Andes?
Schultes reports that indigenous shamans using Yagé in the Andes claim to feel a "rushing wind" pushing upwards which then they realize is the torrent of "water" forcing them up the Milky Way (Schultes 1992). After ascending the Milky Way, they are then able to talk with those ancestors who were also able to ascend to the "celestial Paradise". As a mortal, however, the shaman cannot remain, but while in his 'spirit body' he may ask questions of the heavenly beings, who may know antidotes for sorcery he has not otherwise been able to counteract. There seems to be the mythic belief that rainbows and the Milky Way are diurnally related phenomena. A shaman trapped in the underworld may not be able to return unless he can find the "rope" of the Milky Way. So it seems somewhat clear that this ethnoastronomical understanding is an important component of the visionary experience of using Yagé in the Andes.
Conclusion
It is clear that Yagé works cross-culturally because it has evident biochemical effects on the brain. It does effect healing for indigenous and mestizo people in the Andes, and may be useful in this way for Westerners as well. However, anthropologists wishing to study Yagé or even recommend it as a panacea for ills in their own societies have perhaps once again been suffering from one of their common delusional maladies: failure to note complete context. Yagé may work for people in the West, and it may well lead to positive experiences. However, Westerners using Yagé not only fail to create the Andean "set and setting" in which Yagé is used; they also lack the important concomitants for the experience of the drug - consensual understandings of the nature of health and illness; acoustic accompaniments; symbolic connections to alignments in the natural landscape; and cultural conceptions of the cosmos. Perhaps only the second variable can easily be remedied; certainly the technology for generating precise sonic tones exists today, and is even used already in so-called "mind machines".
And, as I noted earlier, the problem is further compounded by Western insistence on using chemical extracts rather than natural plants. This may reduce side-effects, but also results in different physiological results. It is like the difference between coca and cocaine. This is not to say that therapists like Naranjo might not be able to obtain beneficial results. But certainly administering one isolate compound, harmaline, from the plant, in a clinical medical setting, is likely to produce ones radically different from those seen in a "native" Andean context. The fact that there are similarities at all raises interesting questions, for which we have no answers. Why should Westerners also see cats and reptiles? It might be the Jungian archetypes, or the fact that these were predators with which the early hallucinogenic-discovering Cro-Magnons had to deal with. Who knows? I would repeat that the facts that both "control groups" make reference to sensations of dying and 'soul flight' are significant.
The fact that harmaline and DMT create such powerful religious feelings in people cross-culturally is likely not to be coincidental. In dealing with these substances, we may be on the verge of obtaining fundamental insights about the biological-chemical nature of consciousness. It is clear that they and other hallucinogens do not merely cause temporary 'psychoses' in people or 'mere hallucinations' (in the traditional unreflective sense of "things that aren't there and should be ignored") but instead work with existing, adaptive, well-evolved mechanisms in the brain for generating ASCs. The Andean shaman is not a maladjusted, indulged individual, but instead one who uses Yagé to allow him to fulfill the multiple responsibilities to the community that his role requires. We will not understand fully how Yagé is used in the Andes, or what human potentialities it might unlock in other contexts, unless researchers are allowed to experiment with the drug in their own laboratories and cultural settings. Due to the abuse of hallucinogens in most Western countries, mainly stemming from the lack of a cultural/ritual tradition of controlled use, overreaching legal structures prevent such experimentation. But progress will not be made unless such barriers to researchers are removed.
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"You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself."
Alan Alda
"May you enter favored, and leave beloved."
Ancient Egyptian Prayer
"When people go to work, they shouldn't have to leave their hearts at home."
Betty Bender
I walk with beauty all around me
As I walk my life the Beauty Way.
-The Beauty Way
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Buddha
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Joseph Campbell
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Carlos Castenada
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White Eagle
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Shakti Gawain
"Mountains cannot be surmounted except by winding paths."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“…the beautiful path is patient,
always waiting for you to come back,
that path that is so familiar to you,
and so faithful.
It knows you will come back one day,
And it will welcome you back.
The path will be as fresh and as beautiful as the first time.
Love never says that this is the last time.”
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James Hillman
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Dena Kaye
"How do geese know when to fly to the sun? Who tells them the seasons? How do we, humans know when it is time to move on? As with the migrant birds, so surely with us, there is a voice within if only we would listen to it, that tells us certainly when to go forth into the unknown."
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
"Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey."
Cynthia Ozick
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Will Rogers
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Lillian Smith
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J.R.R. Tolkien
"No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place."
Zen Saying
"By your stumbling, the world is perfected."
Sri Aurobindo
"To dream of the person you would like to be is to waste the person you are."
Anonymous
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St. Augustine
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Paul Bowles
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Ashleigh Brilliant
"You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection."
Buddha
"Well being is attained little by little, and is no little thing itself."
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"Something we were withholding made us weak, until we found it was ourselves."
Robert Frost
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Shakti Gawain
"We live counterfeit lives in order to resemble the idea we first had of ourselves."
Andre Gide
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Goethe
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Goethe
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Lao-Tzu
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Dr. Karl Menninger
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Clark Moustakas
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Colin Powell
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Chinese Proverb
"To change and to improve are two different things."
German Proverb
"We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be."
May Sarton
"It is as hard to see one's self as to look backward without turning around."
Henry David Thoreau
"Envy comes from people's ignorance of, or lack of belief in, their own gifts."
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"Nature has made us frivolous to console us for our miseries."
Voltaire
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Alec Waugh
Albert Einstein
"We should take care not to make intellect our god; it has, or course, powerful muscles, but no personality."
"That he is God, that we are also God, and that the only difference between him and ourselves is that he is ever aware of, and lives fully in his truth, where as we are unaware of our truth."
Sai Baba
"Often we find atheism both in individual and society a necessary passage to deeper religious and spiritual truth: One has sometimes to deny God in order to find Him."
Sri Aurobindo
"When the mind creates God's form, then the mind itself becomes that form and God Himself will fill that form with Himself and His Divinity."
Sai Baba
"God gave us memory that we might have roses in December."
James M. Barry
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Paul Bowles
"The divinity itself became his terror; for, obviously, if one is oneself one's god, then God himself, the will of God, the power that would destroy one's egocentric system, becomes a monster."
Joseph Campbell
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Khaled El-Fadl, Professor of Islamic Law
-from "Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero"
"God has entrusted me with myself."
Epictetus
"The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere."
Empedocles
"There is no separation between us and God; we are divine expressions of the creative principle on this level of existence."
Shakti Gawain
"God has no religion."
Gandhi
"And even as each one of you stands alone in God’s knowledge, so must each one of you be alone in his knowledge of God and in his understanding of the earth."
Kahlil Gibran
"If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise."
Goethe
"And to be open to faith takes vulnerability, and some people aren't willing to do that because we've been burned - some literally - by religion."
Reverand Joseph Griesedieck
"There is no room for God in him who is full of himself."
Hasidic Saying
"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man."
Elbert Hubbard
"I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences."
William James
"It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels he is worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him."
Abraham Lincoln
"I have held many things in my hands
and I have lost them all;
but whatever I have placed in God's hands,
that I still possess."
Martin Luther
"We must accept that this creative pulse within us is God's creative pulse itself."
Joseph Chilton Pearce
"The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there."
George Bernard Shaw
"Nirvana is not the blowing out of the candle. It is the extinguishing of the flame because day is come."
Rabindranath Tagore
"Prayer to be fruitful must come from the heart and must be able to touch the heart of God."
Mother Teresa
"I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much."
Mother Teresa
"God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through."
Paul Valery
"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him."
Voltaire
"The real danger is not that machines will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like machines."
Sydney J. Harris
"If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual."
Frank Herbert
"If a man insisted always on being serious, and never allowed himself a bit of fun and relaxation, he would go mad or become unstable without knowing it."
Herodotus
"Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams."
Mary Ellen Kelly
"Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber."
Plato
"Don't follow any advice, no matter how good, until you feel as deeply in your spirit as you think in your mind that the counsel is wise."
David Seabury
"Who knows if to live is to be dead, and to be dead, to live? And we really, it may be said, are dead; in fact I once heard sages say that we are now dead, and the body is our tomb..."
Socrates
"A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it."
Rabindranath Tagore
"Truly great madness can not be achieved without significant intelligence."
Henrik Tikkanen
"The mind has exactly the same power as the hands: not merely to grasp the world, but to change it."
Colin b Wilson
"Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America -- that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement."
Thomas Wolfe
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Phillip K Dick
Steve Mizrach
Erik Davis
and many more
thank you and have a beautiful day-night-luv n lite
if any one sees anything out of place the universe will implode
remember what the doormouse said?
feed your head !
this has been a blu/red pill of a page
PROFILE---RESUME ---FILM FANATIX--- RED PILL--- ZORROS