This is a No-FAQ Zone, still heavily under construction.
This is a No-FAQ Zone, still heavily under construction.
--Mark Pesce, Hyperreal
"My favorite tarot card, The Fool - known by some as Il Pesce - is most often pictured as a carefree lad stepping out into a chasm that can only be forded in an act of faith. It is in this thrust toward the unknown that I most often find myself, arms outstretched, to find myself dangerously balanced atop nothing at all.
"And yet, in moments like these, I discover my capacity for flight. Gravity - or at least, gravitas - bounds the body in space, but it fails to ground the spirit in its flight toward some higher truth. If we avoid becoming overly Gnostic about its significance, the Fool represents the body which, in its innocence, does not know it is condemned to fall to the ground. This prelapsarian soul, who has not tasted the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, apprehends the whole universe directly, yet makes no assumptions about its nature.
"We should be so lucky. But, because we are not, we live entirely constrained by our doubts, which bring us down on our respective crowns, irreversibly broken, thermodynamically transformed into something less than whole, despite a reconstruction from countless pieces. What is missing - inevitably - is the Telos, the flicker of destiny that speaks not to how (the consuming passion of the rational mind), but to why. ...
"...At the center of this labyrinth, at the heart of the religious belief which could perhaps be called Eschatism, lies the ever approaching terminal date. Even if it is allowed that this event has some exterior reality, that time can end, even that the time of that ending can be known, it still seems unreasonably close at hand. The Eschaton of the Maya and McKenna lies just over 5200 days in the future. ... Seeing the approaching End of Everything as a digital hourglass will most certainly cast a new light on everything. ..." --Mark Pesce<; Hyperreal; read more on cite
"The theory of Intelligent design (ID) claims that life and living things show signs of having been designed by an intelligent agent. Proponents of this claim are openly defying the materialistic views loosely called "Darwinism" and are in effect offering life's complexity as an argument for the existence of God. Opponents ridicule this claim as knowingly deceptive and having no standing as a scientific "hypothesis". The debate over this issue has been long, vociferous and fascinating..." --Wikipedia; read more on cite
--Gerry Zeitlin; Open SETI
"...In recent years, the unoccupied intellectual middle ground between evolutionary science and creationism has begun to fill from both directions. Evolutionists have spawned astrobiology and varieties of panspermia, in which organic compounds (mainstream version) or even whole cells (modern or "strong" panspermia per Hoyle and Wickramasinghe) fall to Earth after riding on cosmic detritus. Creationists have found greater academic acceptance by dropping all reference to the "creator" but retaining the function of Intelligent Design. And new theories of evolution are ready to embrace teleological mechanisms embedded in the DNA molecule.
Something had to be done. ..." --Gerry Zeitlin; Open SETI; read more on cite
--Dirk Dunbar
"Any attempt to authenticate Jesus’ teachings and historicity is destined to be a matter of personal perspective. Ancient or contemporary, fundamental or liberal, mystical or scientific, emotional or “factual,” every depiction of Jesus reveals convictions of some kind—including mine. I realize that the notion of a global, cosmic, and universal Christ—to which I subscribe—is a modern and contemporary invention. I am equally convinced that the traditional orthodox Christ (who is by no means homogenous) is based on an ancient invention. While the contemporary Jesus of so-called radical theologians speaks to trans-cultural concerns such as gender and international relations and the environmental crisis, the orthodox view of Jesus speaks through legends and myths that have been historicized and teachings of eternal judgment and prophecies such as the Second Coming that have been institutionalized. Despite my obvious prejudices, neither view is complete or “true.”
"So what can be said of Jesus? How are his words and actions to be regarded if nothing is certain? I do not claim to have an answer, but—despite being aware of The Jesus Seminar’s edict: “Beware of finding a Jesus entirely congenial to you” (Funk, 1993, 5)—I will attempt to offer an overview of and support for the quest to universalize Christ. My attempt will take shape through five snapshots of Jesus—one that questions orthodoxy’s mythologized version, a reconstructed Gnostic one, a modern scholarly one that demythologizes Jesus, one that remythologizes him, and one based on the findings of The Jesus Seminar. My goal is not to convert the reader to a particular view (mine is admittedly incomplete), but to consider past, current, and potential future issues in the dialogue regarding an evolving Jesus. ..." --Dirk Dunbar, Quodlibet Journal; read more on cite
--Claudia Probst & Michael Shpaizman, Digital Mutations
"...It is a collection of simulated relatives, which has been growing continually since 1996. A series of images, represented by real individuals from the past, are transferred and transformed throughout time and analysed by human faculty and machine capability.
Artificial models of personality are leading a never-ending battle between Feelings and Technology, Beauty and Ugliness. This can be read as a metaphor, or as a fact. ..." --Claudia Probst & Michael Shpaizman, Digital Mutations read more on cite
--Henry Swift, Online Bulletin of Science Within Consciousness
"...The word Consciousness in the previous section has the same fundamental description as those esoteric versions given for the Christian Godhead, the Jewish Yahweh, the Muslim Allah, and the Hindu Brahmin. Accordingly, the reader is free to use whichever word he/she prefers in this modern Creation Story.
In the above description, a living, aware being was essential for creation to happen. This gives man an essential functioning role in the workings of the universe. It contrasts with the prior despiriting scientific-view from Isaac Newton wherein all was predictable in the world, and neither man or God had a role to play. So science agrees with the mystics that God created the world —-but not in six days and not in the past. Instead, creation happens every moment of our waking lives, and we are essential in the process!
Consider this, however. Humans may not be the only beings that manifest reality by their observations. Animals, insects, bacteria, and plants all distinguish between themselves and the environment, and they demonstrate their awareness through their responsiveness to that environment. So they must all be both conscious and aware, though of course to quite widely varying degrees. Apparently they share in creating the world with you, even though the world they observe may be quite different from yours. ..." --Henry Swift, Online Bulletin of Science Within Consciousness; read more on cite
--Michael C. Kearl, "Social Rhythms, Cycles, and Clocks
"Although the concept of a group often brings to mind spatial connotations, such as the different neighborhoods of a city or the "turfs" of street gangs, groups can also be understood as temporal systems. Members of work groups, for instance, cross the temporal boundary between family and work when they "punch in" at the company time clock. They are reminded of the pressures of group existence through such exhortations as "don't waste time" and "time is money." Mothers attempting to get all family members to the dinner table for a shared meal are attempting to reaffirm family solidarity through establishing the centrality of family time boundaries. It is the group that creates "time to get serious," "born-again experiences," the pressures of deadlines, and the daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal flows of activities. As Emile Durkheim observed in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, it "is the rhythm of social life which is at the basis of the category of time." ..." --Michael C. Kearl, "Social Rhythms, Cycles, and Clocks"; read more on cite
--Barbara Marx Hubbard; evolve
"We live in an unprecedented time in the evolutionary history on planet Earth. The human species has gained powers great enough to destroy our world, or to co-create a vastly better future for all Earth life. Through science and technology, we are probing into the invisible processes of creation—the atom, the gene, the brain. We are learning to place human intent into matter. We are participating in the evolution of evolution from unconscious to conscious choice, from natural selection to selection according to human purpose.
Those of us alive today are the first generation born with the choice of learning conscious, ethical evolution, or suffering devolution and the destruction of our life-support systems with unimaginably more tragedy than the world has yet experienced.
We do not have much time. Within the next 30 to 50 years, we must change our fundamental behavior to be more in alignment with our natural systems and our visions of a positive future. Never before has the human species had to change this quickly in order to survive. .." --Barbara Marx Hubbard; evolve; read more on cite
--Beatriz Gato-Rivera, "Brane Worlds, the Subanthropic Principle and the Undectability Conjecture
"...In this note we discuss the intriging possiblity whether we could be in fact immersed in a large civilization without being aware of it. Our conclusion is that this possibility cannot be ruled out provided two conditions are met, that we call the Subanthropic Principle and the Undetectability Conjecture. The Subanthropic Principle states that we are not typical among the intelligent observers from the Universe. Typical civilizations of typical galaxies would be hundreds of thousands, or millions, of years more evolved than ours and, consequently, typical intelligent observers would be orders of magnitude more intelligent than us. The Undetectability Conjecture states that, generically, all advanced civilizations camouflage their planets for security reasons, so that no signal of civilization can be detected by external observers, who would only obtain distorted data for disuasion purposes..." --Beatriz Gato-Rivera, "Brane Worlds, the Subanthropic Principle and the Undectability Conjecture"; read more on cite
"Experiences We Study", Division of Personality Studies; University of Virginia;
"...We are particularly interested in studying NDEs that may bear on the question of whether the mind can function outside the physical body, and on whether we may survive bodily death. One such type of experience is the so-called veridical NDE, in which experiencers acquire verifiable information that they could not have obtained by any normal means. For example, some experiencers report seeing events going on at some distant location, such as another room of the hospital; or an experiencer might meet a deceased loved one who then communicates verifiable information the experiencer had not known. Other kinds of NDEs that may bear on the mind/body question include those in which mental functioning seems to be enhanced despite physiological evidence that the brain is impaired...." --"Experiences We Study", Division of Personality Studies; University of Virginia; read more on cite
--SmartMeme Strategy and Training Project
"...Our planet is headed into an accelerating crisis. Ecologically speaking it is a meltdown defined by the sixth mass extinction, the destruction of the planet's last wilderness areas and the forced assimilation of the planet's few remaining earth centered cultures. Corporate capitalism's inherent drive towards global domination has literally pushed the life support systems of the planet to the point of collapse.
So let's begin our analysis by asking ourselves an often unanswered question. Why has the radical ecology movement failed to capture the imagination of the American public for more than the proverbial 15 minutes? Why in America - the engine of consumption which drives the system of global destruction - isn't there more visible resistance to the suicidal direction of the corporatized consumer society?
One easy culprit is the environmental movements failure to weave our range of issues into a holistic analysis (story) about the type of cultural transformation needed to address the ecological crisis ..." --SmartMeme Strategy and Training Project; read more on cite
--Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow; The Great Story
"THE GREAT STORY, also known as the Universe Story or Epic of Evolution, is humanity's common creation story. It is the 14 billion year scientific epic of cosmic genesis, from the formation of the galaxies and the origin of Earth life to the emergence of self-reflective consciousness and compassion and the development of human technology...
"THE GREAT STORY is the story that honors and embraces all other stories. It is the sacred epic of an evolving Universe of emergent complexity and breathtaking creativity, a story that offers each of us the opportunity to find meaning and purpose in our lives and our time in history. ..." --Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow; The Great Story; read more on cite
<...In every human society, the largest of all contexts is the story of how everything began, how things came to be as they are, and where everything is going. This story, a people's cosmology, as the "big picture," gives meaning to our existence in every area of life. It helps us understand the mysteries of life and death. It is the soil out of which all of our beliefs, customs, behavior, traditions and institutions grow. A people's cosmology crystallizes into a set of unquestioned assumptions and beliefs about life in that culture. Like sunglasses with colored lenses, our cosmology colors everything we see. It determines the way we perceive things, what we perceive, what we can and can't see as possible, and what we can't see at all. Its rules and boundaries are generally transparent. It is our reality.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead remarked that every culture she ever encountered had an account of how things came to be in the beginning. Every human society developed a story or set of stories that revealed "the truth," as revealed by observation and intuition, of the origin and nature of the world, why things are as they are, and our role in the destiny of things. Such an account helped people in each culture decide what was good and bad, what was to be avoided, and what was to be pursued. Written down, it often became scripture. A people's cosmology is their Sacred Story. ..." --Michael Dowd, "Cosmology, the Largest Context"; read more on cite
Earth Had a Challenging Childhood
Earth Had a Challenging Childhood;
a Great Story Performance Parable
"...Earth had a challenging childhood. Through its first several hundred million birthdays, the only birthday present Earth could expect to receive was another big asteroid impact. Boom! Torched again!
You see, the solar system was a messy place some four billion years ago. There were little space rocks, big asteroids, and icy comets everywhere. Until the planets fully used their gravitational attractions to pull in and sweep up the debris cluttering their orbits, it was just one darn asteroid impact after another.
But was it really a bad day for Planet Earth whenever an asteroid collided? Was it really a bad day when an uninvited visitor from space set off another humungous earthquake that shook the planet like jelly, setting off scores of volcanic eruptions that drowned the surface in fresh lava?
Consider: These very same asteroids were what helped Earth acquire its great mass. From the very beginning Earth was built from scratch from colliding asteroids. There was no Earth, no Mars, no Venus, until asteroids started coming together. But come together they did. Earth grew bigger and bigger and bigger as the asteroids crashed in from all directions. Boom! Boom! Boom! ..." --Connie Barlow, "The Great Story"; read more on cite
--Michael Dowd
# 1. MAJOR CHALLENGES Effects of Global Warming: rising sea level; intensity/frequency of hurricanes, tornados, droughts, flooding; plants and animals needing human-assisted translocation
# Continuing loss of biodiversity due to human causes
# Impact of growing human population on food, energy, pollution, habitats
# Gap between the rich and poor, haves/have nots
# Bio-computers becoming more intelligent that human beings
# Any one or a combination of wild cards
2. WILD CARDS
# Supervolcano eruption (e.g., Yellowstone) or methane burp
# Asteroid impact or extreme solar activity
# Pole Shift or Gulf Stream shutting down
# Geopolitical conflicts
# NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) error or terror
# GNR (Genetic, Nanotechnology, Robotic) error or terror
# Epidemic(s) of flu, smallpox, drug resistant TB, etc.
# The Singurarity (Kurzweil) and its effects
3. LONG-TERM AND SHORT-TERM TRENDS CONTINUING
# Bad news, chaos, breakdowns catalyze creativity and transformation
# Organic/Nested Creativity paradigm replaces Mechanistic paradigm
# Technology further enables/empowers human connectedness
# People/organizations share information and experience more often, more widely, and more deeply
# Circles of care, compassion, concern, and commitment continue to widen
# Cooperation (interdependence/nonzero: win-win, lose-lose) expands at multiple levels
# Feedback (inner and outer) is increasing accurate and helpful
# World's religions integrate/celebrate evolution and ecology
4. LIKELY GOOD NEWS (NEXT 250 YEARS)
# Human population stabilizes and then declines
# Clean, renewable energy sources replace toxic, nonrenewable energy sources
# "Sixth Great Mass Extinction" is ended
# Biomimicry design revolution: law, medicine, politics, economics, education...
# Global democratic/biocratic revolution / World-wide religious revival
# All significant pollution problems solved
# Global self-interest, personal self-interest, and corporate self-interest aligned
# Birth of "Cybiont" (de Rosnay): humanity, technology, and nature as one organism..." --Michael Dowd, "The Great Story"; visit cite
--Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
"We must know the present need of human society. And what is that need? Human society is no longer bounded by geographical limits to particular countries or communities. Human society is broader than in the Middle Ages, and the world tendency is toward one state or one human society. The ideals of spiritual communism, according to Srimad-Bhagavatam, are based more or less on the oneness of the entire human society, nay, of the entire energy of living beings. The need is felt by great thinkers to make this a successful ideology. Srimad-Bhagavatam will fill this need in human society. It begins, therefore, with the aphorism of Vedanta philosophy janmady asya yatah to establish the ideal of a common cause.
"Human society, at the present moment, is not in the darkness of oblivion. It has made rapid progress in the field of material comforts, education and economic development throughout the entire world. But there is a pinprick somewhere in the social body at large, and therefore there are large-scale quarrels, even over less important issues. There is need of a clue as to how humanity can become one in peace, friendship and prosperity with a common cause. Srimad-Bhagavatam will fill this need, for it is a cultural presentation for the respiritualization of the entire human society. ..." --Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada; dharmakshetra; read more on cite
--Ceisiwr Serith
"Many scholars have shed much ink trying to decide what the meaning of sacrifice is. Their efforts were doomed from the start. They were trying to find the one thing that lay behind all sacrifices. There simply isn't one. Sacrifice can have different meanings in different cultures, and even more than one in the same culture. I will concentrate on sacrifice in the shared Indo-European culture.
"I see three meanings in Indo-European sacrifice: the shared meal, the ghosti-relationship, and the relationship with Chaos. Let's look at each of them in turn.
"The shared meal is the simplest and most obvious of the three. The average person, thinking of sacrifice, thinks of the great holocausts of ancient Israel, where entire animals were destroyed by fire. This kind of sacrifice does exist in Indo-European religion (the Druidic human sacrifices come to mind), but they were exceptional and I will not try to deal with them here. The usual sacrifice is quite different. Rather than destroying the entire animal, certain parts (usually inedible) are given to the gods through the fire, but the bulk of it is cooked and eaten by the human participants. The sacrifice is thus a shared meal -- the gods eat their part and we eat ours, gathered together at the same table. It is a party to which we invite the gods, a sacred barbecue. It is communion in its most literal sense.
"This leads us to the next meaning -- the ghosti-relationship. ..." --Ceisiwr Serith, ADF Neo-Pagan Druidism; read more on cite
The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Explore & Learn
"This Web feature is designed to complement "Art of the First Cities," on view at the Metropolitan Museum through August 17, 2003. The landmark exhibition surveys the flourishing of the world’s earliest civilizations in Mesopotamia and surrounding regions—stretching from the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean across Iran and Central Asia to the Indus Valley—during one of the most seminal and creative periods in history.
"Select a theme below to explore a selection of rare and outstanding works of art that illuminate the thousand years in which the world's earliest cities were transformed into the world's first states and empires. ..." The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Explore & Learn: Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus; read more on cite
The Jigsaw Puzzle Lost Continent
--Graham Hancock
"In Underworld the simple new idea on which the whole investigation is founded arises from facts of geology that have been well-known for decades. At the end of the Ice Age, over a 10,000 year period between 17,000 and 7000 years ago -- just before the supposed beginnings of civilization -- 25 million square kilometers of what were then the most habitable lands on earth were flooded by rising sea levels as the ice caps melted. That's a landmass roughly equivalent in size to the whole of South America (17 million sq kms) and the United States (9.6 million sq kms) added together. Its an area almost three times as large as Canada and much larger than China and Europe combined. And it's also an area on which hardly any archaeology has ever been done. How can we be sure, therefore, that archaeology has got the story of the origins of civilization right when so many of the places where our ancestors lived shortly before what we think of as the start of civilization have never been studied by archaeologists at all? ..." --Graham Hancock; read more on cite
Unlocking the Locked-In Legacies
by Neil Freer
"While the evolutionists and the creationists have been battling it out through dramatic episodes of the Scopes soaps, another explanatory paradigm has been developing exponentially which subsumes, corrects, and makes obsolete, specifically relative to the human species, both of those rather primitive paradigms.
While the scientific imperialists and the religious dogmatists have thought that they owned the discussion by proprietarily boxing the argument and defining the binary options, the Sumerian scholar, Zecharia Sitchin, has advanced a robust and coherent paradigm of our genesis and unique history that, if true, ----- and I am convinced that it is after working critically with it for 28 years ----- is profound, comprehensive, and fundamental enough to enable us to rewrite the entire history of our beginnings and the planet astronomically, evolutionarily, paleontologically, archaeologically and, literally, redefine ourselves as humans. ..." --Neil Freer, "Sapiens Rising"; read more on cite
Knowledge of the future:
"Knowledge of the future is only a flowery trapping of Tao.
It is the beginning of folly.
Therefore the truly great man dwells on what is real and not what is on the surface,
On the fruit and not the flower."
The invention of writing:At the Egyptian city of Naucratis,
there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth ; the bird which is called
the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as
arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice,
but his great discovery was ..." -- androidsinlove.blogspot.com; read more on cite
Link: Shamanic Journeys Articles on Sacred Travel, Spiritual Experience and Metaphysical Thought..
Giraffe is a gentle creature who sees life from a unique perspective. The tallest of the animals, she is afforded a view from an exceptional height, while her broad stance maintains her strong connection to the earth. Giraffe has a huge heart, and with all her being, she perceives heart’s dimension, seeing and feeling the heart connections between herself and the entire web of life. In leading you on this journey, she gives you an opportunity to ask for...--Nicki Scully, Shamanic Journeys; read more on cite
Continue reading "Nicki Scully: Giraffe - Seeing From the Heart" »
The very early Earth was a red-hot ball of molten slag, shot through with veins of complex chemistry, churning violently. It fell together out of a rich stew of gases and dust, while the sun was still new...
Link: read more on cite.
Link: The Crosshouse of Miringa Te Kakara1.
THE CROSSHOUSE AT MIRINGA TE KAKARA…AN ANCIENT NEW ZEALAND TEMPLE.
'In the course of normal science, it may happen that anomalies begin to accumulate. Some of these may be set aside for future research. Some may be dismissed as irrelevant. But if a sufficient number of anomalies accumulate, anomalies, which resist solution by the paradigm or incorporation into it, a crisis develops. As the crisis intensifies, scientists begin to offer and promote new paradigms capable of accommodating the anomalies. If one of these paradigms attracts the attention of a sufficient number of members of the research community, a scientific revolution takes place. The research community learns to see things in a different way. It develops a new set of methods and concerns. Kuhn points out that unless there is a recognizable crisis, provoked by an accumulation of crucial anomalies, there will be no movement to a new paradigm. The first step toward movement to a new paradigm is thus recognition of anomalies, of counterinstances to the current paradigm' (Michael Cremo).
