World Mysteries
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Whenever a feeling of aversion comes into the heart of a good soul,
it's not without significance.
Consider that intuitive wisdom to be a Divine attribute,
not a vain suspicion:
the light of the heart has apprehended
intuitively from the Universal Tablet.
- Rumi








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DISCOVERY
"Help us to find God."
"No one can help you there."
"Why not?"
"For the same reason that no one can help the fish to find the ocean."










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posted by Indigobusiness @ Wednesday, May 31, 2006
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The Purpose Driven Life Takers
This is just plain sick. Many Christian activists complain that the violence contained in these games have a direct impact on American Society. I guess killing people who are for a "separation of Church and state" is fair game. Will these be handed out at the next "Justice Sunday" event?
"Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission - both a religious mission and a military mission -- to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state - especially moderate, mainstream Christians.
Your mission is "to conduct physical and spiritual warfare"; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice. You have never felt so powerful, so driven by a purpose: you are 13 years old. You are playing a real-time strategy video game whose creators are linked to the empire of mega-church pastor Rick Warren, best selling author of The Purpose Driven Life.....read on
posted by Indigobusiness @ Wednesday, May 31, 2006
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So welcome to The Tao of Willie, my little guide to the happiness in your own heart. From the get-go, we need to get one thing straight. If you’re looking for a scholarly work about the ancient Eastern philosophy found in the Tao Te Ching, this may not be what you had in mind.
On the other hand, if you don’t know beans about the ancient Chinese philosophy called the Tao, there’s no reason to fret.
You don’t have to know the Tao for the Tao to know you.
Whatever you think of the Tao, if my thoughts strike that bell of truth in your heart, it will also be ringing in mine.
That’s the way it is between friends.
What Is It?
What is gooder than God?
More evil than the devil?
The rich need it
The poor have it
And if you eat it you will die?
Before I give you the answer to that “gooder than God” riddle, we need to consider one important question: What the *#*@! is a Tao?
I thought you’d never ask.
The Tao—pronounced “tao” or “dao” depending on how hip you want to sound—is a philosophy of life based on a Chinese text called the Tao Te Ching, or “The Way and Its Power.”
The Tao Te Ching is the work of several writers who were inspired by the teachings of a guy named Lao Tzu, who lived about six hundred years before Christ. But the ideas behind the Tao are older still, and were very likely derived from some of man’s oldest teachings.
Like all of life, the Tao is an eternal mystery, and has so much meaning that it may be easier to say what it is not.
The Tao is NOT a religion.
It has no gods, and could be as helpful to a Christian or a Jew as to a druid who worships trees, a narcissist who worships himself, or a record executive who worships money. Truthfully, the record exec is probably the person who most needs the Tao.
Once you know what the Tao is not, then everything else is the Tao.
The Tao is the biggest thing there is.
The Tao connects the personal with the universal. It is the link between you and other people. It is the link between you and the natural world, the link between you and the universe. The Tao is the link between you and yourself.
And that ain’t all. The Tao is a way of life, a science and an art. It is the natural order, and it is a path that leads to peace and freedom. The Tao is the deepest well of the purest water, but you cannot see it or hear it, touch it or taste it. You also cannot use it up.
The general idea is that if you live your life in accordance with your own essential nature, then your life will be empowered by the Tao.
When Shakespeare wrote, “To thine own self be true,” he was dipping into the Tao ... or into some really good snuff.
The opposite of the Tao would be to live your life in defiance of your original nature, in which case your chances of finding tranquility are pretty much shot to shit.
If you live according to the Tao, you live in accordance with the natural world, with other people, and yourself.
If you live in opposition to the Tao, your life will unfold in opposition to the natural world, to other people, and to yourself.
The choice is up to you.
If you read this guide distilled from my view of life, love, and laughter, then find yourself wanting more, you will have missed the essence of the Tao, which relies not in wanting more, but in needing less.
“To know you have enough,” says the Tao, “is to be truly rich.”
Like any good philosophy, the Tao is a search for knowledge.
Where do you get this knowledge? When I was a kid, sometimes a feller would be reluctant to say where he’d gotten something—like, say, a “borrowed” horse—so he’d say he got it “from the getting place.”
But before we get to the getting place, what about my riddle? What is gooder than God and more evil than the devil, that the rich need and the poor have, and if you eat it you will die?
The answer, of course, is “nothing.”
posted by Indigobusiness @ Wednesday, May 31, 2006
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By Dahr Jamail
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday 30 May 2006
The media feeding frenzy around what has been referred to as "Iraq's My Lai" has become frenetic. Focus on US Marines slaughtering at least 20 civilians in Haditha last November is reminiscent of the media spasm around the "scandal" of Abu Ghraib during April and May 2004.
Yet just like Abu Ghraib, while the media spotlight shines squarely on the Haditha massacre, countless atrocities continue daily, conveniently out of the awareness of the general public. Torture did not stop simply because the media finally decided, albeit in horribly belated fashion, to cover the story, and the daily slaughter of Iraqi civilians by US forces and US-backed Iraqi "security" forces has not stopped either.
Earlier this month, I received a news release from Iraq, which read, "On Saturday, May 13th, 2006, at 10:00 p.m., US Forces accompanied by the Iraqi National Guard attacked the houses of Iraqi people in the Al-Latifya district south of Baghdad by an intensive helicopter shelling. This led the families to flee to the Al-Mazar and water canals to protect themselves from the fierce shelling. Then seven helicopters landed to pursue the families who fled … and killed them. The number of victims amounted to more than 25 martyrs. US forces detained another six persons including two women named Israa Ahmed Hasan and Widad Ahmed Hasan, and a child named Huda Hitham Mohammed Hasan, whose father was killed during the shelling."
The report from the Iraqi NGO called The Monitoring Net of Human Rights in Iraq (MHRI) continued, "The forces didn't stop at this limit. They held an attack on May 15th, 2006, supported also by the Iraqi National Guards. They also attacked the families' houses, and arrested a number of them while others fled. US snipers then used the homes to target more Iraqis. The reason for this crime was due to the downing of a helicopter in an area close to where the forces held their attack."
The US military preferred to report the incident as an offensive where they killed 41 "insurgents," a line effectively parroted by much of the media.
posted by Indigobusiness @ Tuesday, May 30, 2006
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The selection of issues that should rank high on the agenda of concern for human welfare and rights is, naturally, a subjective matter. But there are a few choices that seem unavoidable, because they bear so directly on the prospects for decent survival. Among them are at least these three: nuclear war, environmental disaster, and the fact that the government of the world's leading power is acting in ways that increase the likelihood of these catastrophes. It is important to stress the government, because the population, not surprisingly, does not agree.
That brings up a fourth issue that should deeply concern Americans, and the world: the sharp divide between public opinion and public policy, one of the reasons for the fear, which cannot casually be put aside, that, as Gar Alperowitz puts it in America Beyond Capitalism, "the American 'system' as a whole is in real trouble - that it is heading in a direction that spells the end of its historic values [of] equality, liberty, and meaningful democracy".
The "system" is coming to have some of the features of failed states, to adopt a currently fashionable notion that is conventionally applied to states regarded as potential threats to our security (like Iraq) or as needing our intervention to rescue the population from severe internal threats (like Haiti). Though the concept is recognised to be, according to the journal Foreign Affairs, "frustratingly imprecise", some of the primary characteristics of failed states can be identified. One is their inability or unwillingness to protect their citizens from violence and perhaps even destruction. Another is their tendency to regard themselves as beyond the reach of domestic or international law, and hence free to carry out aggression and violence. And if they have democratic forms, they suffer from a serious "democratic deficit" that deprives their formal democratic institutions of real substance.
Among the hardest tasks that anyone can undertake, and one of the most important, is to look honestly in the mirror. If we allow ourselves to do so, we should have little difficulty in finding the characteristics of "failed states" right at home.
posted by Indigobusiness @ Tuesday, May 30, 2006
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posted by Indigobusiness @ Tuesday, May 30, 2006
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Is It Raining Aliens?
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| Courtesy Dr. Godfrey Louis | |
| E.T. Under the Microscope: Scientists have yet to identify the unusual particles [above, magnified 500 times] isolated from India’s mysterious red rainwater. | |
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As bizarre as it may seem, the sample jars brimming with cloudy, reddish rainwater in Godfrey Louis’s laboratory in southern India may hold, well, aliens. In April, Louis, a solid-state physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, published a paper in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science in which he hypothesizes that the samples—water taken from the mysterious blood-colored showers that fell sporadically across Louis’s home state of Kerala in the summer of 2001—contain microbes from outer space.
Specifically, Louis has isolated strange, thick-walled, red-tinted cell-like structures about 10 microns in size. Stranger still, dozens of his experiments suggest that the particles may lack DNA yet still reproduce plentifully, even in water superheated to nearly 600˚F. (The known upper limit for life in water is about 250˚F.) So how to explain them? Louis speculates that the particles could be extraterrestrial bacteria adapted to the harsh conditions of space and that the microbes hitched a ride on a comet or meteorite that later broke apart in the upper atmosphere and mixed with rain clouds above India. If his theory proves correct, the cells would be the first confirmed evidence of alien life and, as such, could yield tantalizing new clues to the origins of life on Earth.
Meanwhile, more down-to-earth theories abound. One Indian government investigation conducted in 2001 lays blame for what some have called the “blood rains” on algae. Other theories have implicated fungal spores, red dust swept up from the Arabian peninsula, even a fine mist of blood cells produced by a meteor striking a high-flying flock of bats.
Louis and his colleagues dismiss all these theories, pointing to the fact that both algae and fungus possess DNA and that blood cells have thin walls and die quickly when exposed to water and air. More important, they argue, blood cells don’t replicate. “We’ve already got some stunning pictures—transmission electron micrographs—of these cells sliced in the middle,” Wickramasinghe says. “We see them budding, with little daughter cells inside the big cells.”
posted by Indigobusiness @ Tuesday, May 30, 2006
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![]() Solar Conveyer |
Art credit: NASA
posted by Indigobusiness @ Tuesday, May 30, 2006
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A Brief History of the Apocalypse The 21st century has begun in earnest! And despite the cries of doomsayers, psychics and prophets, the world has not come to an end! Is the idea that the End is near a recent phenomenon? Far from it. Indeed, Chicken Littles have crying doom since ancient times. The aim of this page is to debunk end-time prophecy by listing hundreds of failed doomsday predictions, allay the fears spread by end-time preachers, and demonstrate that doomcrying is nothing new. I also hope you will derive amusement from some of the more bizarre prophecies. I have strived for accuracy through careful cross-referencing among source materials. I'm constantly adding new information and correcting mistakes, yet there may still be some errors. Please journey with me through the wild, wacky and wonderful world of failed doomsday prophecy! |
Enter |
2800BC - 1700 | 1701-1970 | 1971-1997 | 1998-1999 | 2000-Now | The Future |
| SOON! | Bibliography | Glossary | Links | Updates |
posted by Indigobusiness @ Monday, May 29, 2006
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posted by Indigobusiness @ Sunday, May 28, 2006
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posted by Indigobusiness @ Saturday, May 27, 2006
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| Preparing Iboga rootbark for ritual purposes |
Could the root of an obscure African plant contain the secret to combatting addiction? The search for a substance capable of breaking the chains of chemical dependency - the so-called "magic bullet" - is one of the enduring preoccupations of modern medicine. Most people have concluded that the search is a futile one - that addiction is a disease without cure. Yet a growing alliance of activists claim that conventional wisdom is wrong: there is a substance capable of ending an addicts' craving for a fix - it is called ibogaine, and it is said to possess miraculous powers of healing.
Ibogaine is a naturally occurring alkaloid found in the root of an African plant called tabernathe iboga. In Africa, ibogaine is used in religious ceremonies to induce visions, but in the West, it is being used to treat addictions to heroin, cocaine, alcohol and nicotine. Howard Lotsof, the man who first drew attention to ibogaine's anti-addictive properties, claims that after a single dose of ibogaine most people abstain from using drugs for more than three months. It is an astonishing boast to make on behalf of a drug that is illegal in America, and almost unheard of in Britain. If ibogaine were made widely available, Lotsof believes the effects would be revolutionary: "I think there could easily be a 30 per cent reduction in drug use within three years - for many drugs of abuse, that is."
So far, there is little hard data to assess ibogaine's performance. Despite the reams of testimony posted on the Internet, the drug remains an expensive luxury and is comparatively rare; only about 300 people have been treated with it in the past decade. I decided to find someone who had taken ibogaine and could vouch for it's effects. Chris Sanders, the organiser of the Ibogaine Project in London, did not know of anyone in the UK who had taken the drug; nor did Howard Lotsof. But Karl Naeher, whose "clinic" in northern Italy is the only place in Europe where Ibogaine treatments are currently available, told me he had recently treated an Englishman called Richard.
posted by Indigobusiness @ Saturday, May 27, 2006
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Glowing, silvery blue clouds that have been spreading around the world and brightening mysteriously in recent years will soon be studied in unprecedented detail by a NASA spacecraft.
The Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) mission will be the first satellite dedicated to studying this enigmatic phenomenon. Due to launch in late 2006, it should reveal whether the clouds are caused by global warming, as many scientists believe.
"Noctilucent" clouds, which glow at night, form in the upper atmosphere, at an altitude of about 80 kilometres, and their glow can be seen just after sunset or just before sunrise.
"Even though the Sun's gone down and you're in darkness, the clouds are so high up, the Sun is still illuminating them," explains AIM principal investigator James Russell at Hampton University in Virginia, US. Russell described the mission on Thursday at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Baltimore, Maryland, US.
The clouds were first observed above polar regions in 1885 – suggesting they may have been caused by the eruption of Krakatoa two years before. But they have spread to latitudes as low as 40° in recent years. "They're also getting brighter, and each year there are more of them than in the previous year," Russell told New Scientist.
posted by Indigobusiness @ Friday, May 26, 2006
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Study Finds No Cancer-Marijuana Connection
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 26, 2006; A03
The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer.
The new findings "were against our expectations," said Donald Tashkin of the University of California at Los Angeles, a pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30 years.
"We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use," he said. "What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect."
Federal health and drug enforcement officials have widely used Tashkin's previous work on marijuana to make the case that the drug is dangerous. Tashkin said that while he still believes marijuana is potentially harmful, its cancer-causing effects appear to be of less concern than previously thought.
Earlier work established that marijuana does contain cancer-causing chemicals as potentially harmful as those in tobacco, he said. However, marijuana also contains the chemical THC, which he said may kill aging cells and keep them from becoming cancerous.

AP/CP, Richard Lam
posted by Indigobusiness @ Friday, May 26, 2006
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NEW materials that can change the way light and other forms of radiation bend around an object may provide a way to make objects invisible, researchers said.
Two separate teams of researchers have come up with theories on ways to use experimental "metamaterials" to cloak an object and hide it from visible light, infrared light, microwaves and perhaps even sonar probes.
Their work suggests science-fiction portrayals of invisibility, such as the cloaking devices used to hide space ships in Star Trek, might be truly possible.
Harry Potter's cloak or The Invisible Man of films and fiction might be a bit harder to emulate, however, because the materials must be used in a thick shell.
The concept begins with refraction - a quality of light in which the electromagnetic waves take the quickest, but not necessarily the shortest, route.
This accounts for the illusion that a pencil immersed in a glass of water appears broken, for instance.
"Imagine a situation where a medium guides light around a hole in it," physicist Ulf Leonhardt of Britain's University of St Andrews, wrote in one of the reports, published in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science.
"The light rays end up behind the object as if they had travelled in a straight line.
"Any object placed in the hole would be hidden from sight. The medium would create the ultimate optical illusion: invisibility," Mr Leonhardt wrote.
posted by Indigobusiness @ Friday, May 26, 2006
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![]() ![]() | TITICUT FOLLIES (1967)Director and Producer: Frederick Wiseman DOWNLOAD (.torrent) (Note: You need a BitTorrent Client to download) Runtime: 84 min * The only American film banned from release for reasons other than obscenity or national security. |
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Prisons and mental institutions, where recalcitrant or ill-fitting citizens are put out of sight, are the dirty secrets of civilized society. As they are owned and controlled by precisely those who wish to keep them secret, and are also confined to specific, enclosed spaces, filmmakers are easily kept out. Wiseman's achievement in creating this unique film document is therefore all the more impressive: it is a major work of subversive cinema and a searing indictment -- without editorializing narration -- of the "system". Wiseman (and his extraordinary cameraman-anthropologist John Marshall) officially gained entrance to a state prison hospital for the criminally insane, where the film was shot, and obtained the co-operation of it's psychiatrists, guards, and social workers. Massachusetts, however, subsequently obtained an injunction preventing the film's exhibition, thereby keeping the secret.
This is a gallery of horrors, a reflection of man's infinite capacity to dehumanize his fellow beings. Broken men, retarded, catatonic, schizophrenic, toothless -- many incarcerated for life -- vegetate in empty cells, bare of furniture, utensils, toilets, or beds. They are incontinent, they masturbate, babble, put on a horrifying annual variety show (the "Titicut Follies"), beat against the bars in rage, and scream. They stand on their heads for minutes on end while chanting self-invented hymns, or are force-fed through the nose while a Dr. Strangelove psychiatrist himself (!) pours liquid down the stomach tube. They are taunted or patronized, drink their own dirty bathwater while in the tub (smilingly calling it champagne), and die, ignomiously, their bodies shaved before burial and cotton-wool stuffed into their eyes. The camera flinches from nothing: here it is, it says, and since you are not doing anything about eliminating this, at least have the courage to watch.
Amos Vogel, FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART
posted by Indigobusiness @ Thursday, May 25, 2006
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Grumpy is Good
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At last: a good excuse to be grumpy!
posted by Indigobusiness @ Thursday, May 25, 2006
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Blue Ring Discovered Around Uranus from ScienceDaily
"The outer ring of Saturn is blue and has Enceladus right smack at its brightest spot, and Uranus is strikingly similar, with its blue ring right on top of Mab's orbit," said Imke de Pater, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. "The blue color says that this ring is predominantly submicron-sized material, much smaller than the material in most other rings, which appear red."
The authors of the paper in the April 7 issue of Science are de Pater, Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.; Heidi B. Hammel of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.; and Seran Gibbard of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
The similarity between these outer rings implies a similar explanation for the blue color, according to the authors. Many scientists now ascribe Saturn's blue E ring to the small dust, gas and ice particles spewed into Enceladus' orbit by newly discovered plumes on that moon's surface. However, this is unlikely to be the case with Mab, a small, dead, rocky ball, about 15 miles across - one-twentieth the diameter of Enceladus.
I didn’t even know that Saturn had one...
posted by Indigobusiness @ Wednesday, May 24, 2006
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I thought this short short story by Terry Bisson was fun: They are made out of meat. For those who prefer video to literature, there’s also this seven-minute film adaptation.
Okay. Enough of me flapping my meat at you.
Posted in net.kooks, space | Permalink | No Comments »
posted by Indigobusiness @ Wednesday, May 24, 2006
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~There is no God and we are his prophets.~
-Cormac McCarthy-
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Man is superior to the stars if he lives in the power of superior wisdom. Such a person being the master over heaven and earth by means of his will is a magus and magic is not sorcery but supreme wisdom
-Paracelsus-



Go with God and in Good Health
photo credit: http://www.freeimages.co.uk/
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