God and Purpose

God's Love (Rated X)

The self is an adventitious designation to unify thoughts, and plans of behaviour. It's no more real than Wednesday.

-from the comments

Life and Death

Cow Te Ching

Selected Verses

from

THE COW TE CHING

(The Cow and its Characteristics)

by

The Zen Masters Kevin Solway & David Quinn

Copyright © 1995-2001

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The Cow that can be told is not the eternal Cow.
The Woman that can be named is not the eternal Woman.
Man is the Creator of ten thousand things.
Woman is the beginning of hell on earth.
Ever desireless, one can see the truth.
Ever desiring, there is only appearance.
These two differ in name, and are forever opposed; this appears as darkness.
The gate to all knowledge.

-etc

Expect the Unexpected

Antarctic Sky by Wetjens Dimmlich

Today’s obsession with ‘progress’ – a straight line from one accomplishment to another – blinds us to the lost realities of our past. Our research reveals a legacy closer to the ideas of the ancients. They spoke of the earth’s past as a story filled with shocking turmoil and hard-fought survival.

Rand & Rose Flem-Ath

India’s lost island paradise

Book: When the Sky Fell

American Mean Streak

Mary Dejevsky: A mean streak in the US mainstream

The US tolerates more inequality, deprivation and suffering than is acceptable here

When we Europeans – the British included – contemplate the battles President Obama must fight to reform the US health system, our first response tends to be disbelief. How can it be that so obvious a social good as universal health insurance, so humane a solution to common vulnerability, is not sewn deep into the fabric of the United States? How can one of the biggest, richest and most advanced countries in the world tolerate a situation where, at any one time, one in six of the population has to pay for their treatment item by item, or resort to hospital casualty wards?

The second response, as automatic as the first, is to blame heartless and ignorant Republicans. To Europeans, a universal health system is so basic to a civilised society that only the loony right could possibly oppose it: the people who cling to their guns, picket abortion clinics (when they are not trying to shoot the abortionists) and block funding for birth control in the third world. All right, we are saying to ourselves, there are Americans who think like this, but they are out on an ideological limb.

If only this were true. The reason why Obama is finding health reform such a struggle – even though it was central to his election platform – is not because an extreme wing of the Republican Party, mobilised by media shock-jocks, is foaming at the mouth, or because Republicans have more money than Democrats to buy lobbying and advertising power. Nor is it only because so many influential groups, from insurance companies through doctors, have lucrative interests to defend – although this is a big part of it.

cont. @ The Independent

Militarizing Life Science

Biologists napping while work militarized

Malcolm Dando

Abstract

As researchers discover more agents that alter mental states, the Chemical Weapons Convention needs modification to help ensure that the life sciences are not used for hostile purposes, says Malcolm Dando.

J. Field

In October 2002, Chechen rebel fighters held more than 750 people hostage at a Nord-Ost production in a theatre in Moscow. The siege was broken only after special military forces used what the Russian Health Minister, Yuri Shevchenko, later described as a mixture of substances derived from fentanyl — an opiate developed in the 1950s as an anaesthetic. Widespread relief that many of the hostages were saved was tempered by 124 of them being killed by the gas.

Chemicals with effects like those of fentanyl are often known as 'incapacitating agents'. These substances affect biochemical processes and physiological systems to produce a disabling condition such as unconsciousness, and in higher concentrations can cause death. With effects that last from hours to days, they are distinct from standard riot-control agents such as CS gas, which cause sensory irritation that disappears shortly after termination of exposure.

That Russian special military forces resorted to using fentanyl in Moscow is a possible harbinger of the wider militarization of advances in the biological sciences.

cont.@Nature

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also see: Arms expert warns new mind drugs eyed by military

Awaken

ENTER

KNOW THYSELF

Reliable Information

A Universe of Reliable Information

Published: March 19, 2009, 12:00 am
Revised: August 7, 2009, 11:08 am

Author(s): Digital Universe Foundation

Contents

Ever find yourself...

• wondering whether information that you find on the Internet (and elsewhere) is truly accurate?
• confronted by a piece of information but unable to understand how it fits into the bigger picture?
• confused by endless debates on important issues and
  want to better understand the underlying facts?
• frustrated by the seemingly pointless trivia pervading
  media today and want to explore and be inspired by
  things of greater substance and meaning?

...then you’ve come to the right place: the Digital Universe!

The Digital Universe is a network of subject-specific web sites (called Portals) with reliable information from trusted sources covering a wide range of subjects. The portal network is being built by hundreds of scientists, researchers, scholars and other experts — known as Stewards — from around the world. These Stewards assemble the best and most reliable information available to humans, organizing it for easy access to the general public. In addition to making sometimes arcane information easier to understand, the Digital Universe (with the help of the Digital Universe Navigator) creates links between related information and places this information into the overall context of human knowledge.

Atheism: Out of the Closet

Is atheism the answer?

Freethought Examiner-D.M. Murdock

Richard Dawkins & London Bus Campaign
Photo by Zoe Margolis

There has been a great deal of debate in the media lately concerning the "New Atheism" as led by "atheist gods" such as Richard Dawkins, P.Z. Myers, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. This notoriety has been enhanced by Dawkins & Co.'s infamous "bus ads," as well as the "Imagine No Religion" billboards by the Freedom from Religion Foundation headed by Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor. Then there is the little chat between famous atheists Bill Maher and Brad Pitt that is kicking up controversy, along with a number of other "stars" expressing their unbelief. We also read reports that atheism is on the rise in the United States, reaching percentages never recorded before. Truly, atheism is out of the closet.

Fist of an Angry God

Like the fist of an angry god

Deep in the outer realms of our solar system, well over a billion kilometers away, something bizarre happened at Saturn’s F ring.

I mean, seriously: what the hell happened here?

-Bad Astronomy

The Brutal Truth

The brutal truth
about America’s healthcare

An extraordinary report from Guy Adams in Los Angeles at the music arena that has been turned into a makeshift medical centre

They came in their thousands, queuing through the night to secure one of the coveted wristbands offering entry into a strange parallel universe where medical care is a free and basic right and not an expensive luxury. Some of these Americans had walked miles simply to have their blood pressure checked, some had slept in their cars in the hope of getting an eye-test or a mammogram, others had brought their children for immunisations that could end up saving their life.

In the week that Britain's National Health Service was held aloft by Republicans as an "evil and Orwellian" example of everything that is wrong with free healthcare, these extraordinary scenes in Inglewood, California yesterday provided a sobering reminder of exactly why President Barack Obama is trying to reform the US system.

-cont. @ The Independent

Imaginary Friends

Planet of Lost Children

But between you and me they were really dupes of the Wicked King
Who wanted to rob the children of their dreams - T Bone Burnett

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via Rigorous Intuition

The Last Days of Philip K. Dick

The Last Days of Philip K. Dick

by Ray Nelson When I saw Phil Dick for the last time, he was beside himself with glee, having recently received a fat check from his agent for film options on a long shopping list of novels and short stories, in every case for a figure in excess of what he had gotten for their original publications. In addition, the first in the series of optioned stories, Blade Runner, was nearing completion and Phil had seen the rushes and heartily approved of how it had turned out. I glanced around at the small, dim, shabby apartment he occupied and said "I suppose now you'll move out of here and get yourself a mansion with a swimming pool and hot and cold running starlets". He loomed over me me where I sat on a threadbare sofa, and slowly shook his head. "I have responsibilities," he intoned. "But surely you have some of the money left, enough to at least rent a place more in keeping with your material success". He gazed down at me with cocker spaniel eyes. "No Ray, I also have my priorities... read the rest here

Planet of Weeds

by David Quammen

originally published in Harper's, October 1998

Hope is a duty from which paleontologists are exempt. Their job is to take the long view, the cold and stony view, of triumphs and catastrophes in the history of life. They study teeth, tree trunks, leaves, pollen, and other biological relics, and from it they attempt to discern the lost secrets of time, the big patterns of stasis and change, the trends of innovation and adaptation and refinement and decline that have blown like sea winds among ancient creatures in ancient ecosystems. Although life is their subject, death and burial supply all their data. They're the coroners of biology. This gives to paleontologists a certain distance, a hyperopic perspective beyond the reach of anxiety over outcomes of the struggles they chronicle. If hope is the thing with feathers, as Emily Dickinson said, then it's good to remember that feathers don't generally fossilize well. In lieu of hope and despair, paleontologists have a highly developed sense of cyclicity. That's why I recently went to Chicago, with a handful of urgently grim questions, and called on a paleontologist named David Jablonski. I wanted answers unvarnished with obligatory hope.

Jablonski is a big-pattern man, a macroevolutionist, who works fastidiously from the particular to the very broad. He's an expert on the morphology and distribution of marine bivalves and gastropods -- or clams and snails, as he calls them when speaking casually. He sifts through the record of those mollusk lineages, preserved in rock and later harvested into museum drawers, to extract ideas about the origin of novelty. His attention roams back through 600 million years of time. His special skill involves framing large, resonant questions that can be answered with small, lithified clamshells. For instance: By what combinations of causal factor and sheer chance have the great evolutionary innovations arisen? How quickly have those innovations taken hold? How long have they abided? He's also interested in extinction, the converse of abidance, the yang to evolution's yin. Why do some species survive for a long time, he wonders, whereas others die out much sooner? And why has the rate of extinction -- low throughout most of Earth's history -- spiked upward cataclysmically on just a few occasions? How do those cataclysmic episodes, known in the trade as mass extinctions, differ in kind as well as degree from the gradual process of species extinction during the millions of years between? Can what struck in the past strike again?

The concept of mass extinction implies a biological crisis that spanned large parts of the planet and, in a relatively short time, eradicated a sizable number of species from a variety of groups. There's no absolute threshold of magnitude, and dozens of different episodes in geologic history might qualify, but five big ones stand out: Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, Cretaceous. The Ordovician extinction, 439 million years ago, entailed the disappearance of roughly 85 percent of marine animal species -- and that was before there were any animals on land. The Devonian extinction, 367 million years ago, seems to have been almost as severe. About 245 million years ago came the Permian extinction, the worst ever, claiming 95 percent of all known animal species and therefore almost wiping out the animal kingdom altogether. The Triassic, 208 million years ago, was bad again, though not nearly so bad as the Permian. The most recent was the Cretaceous extinction (sometimes called the K-T event because it defines the boundary between two geologic periods, with K for Cretaceous, never mind why, and T for Tertiary), familiar even to schoolchildren because it ended the age of dinosaurs. Less familiarly, the K-T event also brought extinction of the marine reptiles and the ammonites, as well as major losses of species among fish, mammals, amphibians, sea urchins, and other groups, totaling 76 percent of all species. In between these five episodes occurred some lesser mass extinctions, and throughout the intervening lulls extinction continued, too -- but at a much slower pace, known as the background rate, claiming only about one species in any major group every million years. At the background rate, extinction is infrequent enough to be counterbalanced by the evolution of new species. Each of the five major episodes, in contrast, represents a drastic net loss of species diversity, a deep trough of biological impoverishment from which Earth only slowly recovered. How slowly? How long is the lag between a nadir of impoverishment and a recovery to ecological fullness? That's another of Jablonski's research interests. His rough estimates run to 5 or 10 million years. What drew me to this man's work, and then to his doorstep, were his special competence on mass extinctions and his willingness to discuss the notion that a sixth one is in progress now.

Some people will tell you that we as a species, Homo sapiens, the savvy ape, all 5.9 billion of us in our collective impact, are destroying the world. Me, I won't tell you that, because "the world" is so vague, whereas what we are or aren't destroying is quite specific. Some people will tell you that we are rampaging suicidally toward a degree of global wreckage that will result in our own extinction. I won't tell you that either. Some people say that the environment will be the paramount political and social concern of the twenty-first century, but what they mean by "the environment" is anyone's guess. Polluted air? Polluted water? Acid rain? A frayed skein of ozone over Antarctica? Greenhouse gases emitted by smokestacks and cars? Toxic wastes? None of these concerns is the big one, paleontological in scope, though some are more closely entangled with it than others. If the world's air is clean for humans to breathe but supports no birds or butterflies, if the world's waters are pure for humans to drink but contain no fish or crustaceans or diatoms, have we solved our environmental problems? Well, I suppose so, at least as environmentalism is commonly construed. That clumsy, confused, and presumptuous formulation "the environment" implies viewing air, water, soil, forests, rivers, swamps, deserts, and oceans as merely a milieu within which something important is set: human life, human history. But what's at issue in fact is not an environment; it's a living world.

-read the rest here

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Thanks to Jersey Cynic for the tip

Making Love to Nature

The Vegetable Whisperer

Carmel Wroth -backyardmedia.org

Originally published in Brink Magazine, 2008-2009

Bob Cannard coaxes perfection out of his farm by allowing a little bad behavior

The day I visited Bob Cannard’s farm in the Sonoma Valley, I nearly drove right by. The road had climbed steadily up from the cul-de-sacs, the wineries and the golf course of Glen Ellen, toward the blue-green ridge of the Sonoma foothills. I had passed the neighbor’s neatly trimmed vineyards and entered a domain of green meadows blooming with wildflowers and lush forests of redwood, bay, oak and madrone. One field, scattered with olive trees and tall patches of oats and rose clover, might have been part of a farm, or might have been a long-abandoned orchard. I wasn’t quite sure. I finally realized I’d arrived at a working farm when I passed a rickety barn stacked with shovels, rakes and hoes, and stopped in front of a little blue and white farm house.

I got out and took a deep breath of sweet air. This was it, the Shangri-la of locavores, the farm that started it all. Every week, vans from Chez Panisse come up this drive to pick up the food Cannard grows on these 30 unkempt acres. Since 1984, when Alice Waters’ father discovered Bob Cannard, the famous Berkeley restaurant has relied on him to provide the freshest produce for its famously local and seasonal bill of fare. He supplies about half their fruits and vegetables, and is one of a handful of farmers billed on the menu. More than just a celebrity restaurateur, Waters has become an apostle for local, sustainable agriculture. And Waters isn’t alone. Nationwide, eating locally has taken off as the latest cause of the environmentally minded, with writers like Barbara Kingsolver and Michael Pollan making the case for growing your own food or supporting local farmers. Through it all, as the favorite of gourmet chefs, Cannard’s farm has remained the gold standard of just how delicious local, sustainable food can be.

Cannard on his farm.

Ma'at

Ma'at, Goddess of Truth, Balance, Order...

Ma'at, unlike Hathor and Nephthys, seemed to be more of a concept than an actual goddess. Her name, literally, meant 'truth' in Egyptian. She was truth, order, balance and justice personified. She was harmony, she was what was right, she was what things should be. It was thought that if Ma'at didn't exist, the universe would become chaos, once again!

Ma'at was reality, the solid grounding of reality that made the Sun rise, the stars shine, the river flood and mankind think. The universe itself, all the world around them, was sacred in the ancient view.

"Ethics" is an issue of human will and human permission. It is a function of the human world of duality. What is "ethical" for one group is sin for another. But Ma'at, the reality that made all groups what they are is transcendent of ethics, just as a rock or a flower is amoral, a-ethical, without "truth or falsehood." How can a flower be "false" or "ethical." It just is. How can the universe be "ethical or moral, right or wrong"? It simply is. That is Ma'at.

-- Walk Like An Egyptian: A Modern Guide To The Religion and Philosophy Of Ancient Egypt, Ramona Louise Wheeler

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excerpted from TheKeep

Choose Your Apocalypse

How Is America Going To End?

Slate's "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" lets you map out the death of the United States.

By Josh Levin -Slate

Update, Aug. 7: The results of "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" are in. Check out the most popular scenarios, results by age, gender, and political affiliation, and the end-of-America social network.

For the last week, I've considered many possible scenarios for America's downfall: the rise of a climate strongman, the emergence of a transnational class of superhumans, secession by the country's leading maple syrup producer, and others. At the same time, the Slate hive mind has been cranking away, analyzing the likelihood of various end-of-America scenarios with our "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" interactive feature.

Black Elk

Black Elk, A Visionary?

When reading this bear in mind that it was written for a modern college course in history. It was necessary to take a politically correct position in the paper, but at the same time I managed to bring a few pertinent facts to light in respect to the reality of 19th Century European-American/American-Indian relations and how that relationship tends to be viewed today in the context of political correctness. What I mean by this is that Black Elk's visions were interpreted by a white American and then bent or spun into a series of allegedly profound and symbolic messages meant to bolster the derived concept of the "noble savage." To make a long story short, much ado has been made over the last 140 years seeking to explain the victimization of the Native American at the hands of Whites in such a way as to suggest that somehow the two cultures could have coexisted alongside one another peacefully. This is just pure fantasy. Sure, it sounds nice, but the fact of the matter is that the two cultures WERE diametrically opposed to one another in just about every possible way - this isn't something the modern American likes to think about, but nonetheless it's true...

continued @ Curt Maynard's New West blog

The Cleaver

Quetzalcoatl And The Galactic Jellyfish

At 9:45pm on Wednesday (03-Jun-2009), I was pondering the manifestation of crop circles and how their remarkable glyphs might occur in other mediums/substances apart from cereal crop. I recalled there have been formations in snow, ice and water. I thought about sand. Earth. Like the Nazca lines. What about the sky? Air? As if to seek further inspiration, I looked up into the sky...

A massive serpent hung in the air above me, composed of a stunning twist of deep orange vapor. It remained motionless as I watched it, until the sun finally set over the horizon and nothing more could be seen. One word echoed through my mind: Quetzalcoatl.

read the rest @ The Cleaver

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** Get your copy here **

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"Buy this disc or I'll shoot this blog. "

-Indigus

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Secret Teachings

The following article, which appeared in the May-June 2006 issue of New Dawn magazine(www.newdawnmagazine.com), is adapted from the author’s book in
progress on the history of the American occult.

The 'Secret Teachings' Reborn

The Mysterious Life and
Mission of Manly P. Hall

By Mitch Horowitz

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an explosion of spiritual teachers and impresarios dealing in “secret wisdom.” Their ranks included hacks and frauds — as well as more than a few genuine scholars of esoteric traditions. Most have vanished from memory, their writings a historical footnote.

There exists one distinct figure, though, whose movement and teachings not only survived his passing but are even experiencing a revival in our day. His name is Manly P. Hall. While few academicians will ever know of him, Hall was among the twentieth century’s – and perhaps any century’s – most commanding and unusual scholars of esoteric and mythological lore. Yet the source of his knowledge and the extent of his virtuosity can justly be called a mystery.

While working as a clerk at a Wall Street banking firm – the “outstanding event” of which involved “witnessing a man depressed over investment losses take his life” – the 27-year-old Hall self-published one of the most complex and thoroughgoing works ever to catalogue the esoteric wisdom of antiquity, The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Hall’s Secret Teachings is almost impossible to classify. Written and compiled on an Alexandrian scale, its hundreds of entries shine a rare light on some of the most fascinating and little-understood aspects of myth, religion, and philosophy.

-cont.

Mystery

MYSTERY
-- something not understood or beyond understanding -- whatever resists or defies explanation -- profound, inexplicable, or secretive quality
-- a religious truth that one can know only by revelation and cannot fully understand

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In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth
the humble reasoning of a single individual. I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

-Galileo Galilei

Textbooks present science as a noble search for truth, in which progress depends on questioning established ideas. But for many scientists know from bitter experience that disagreeing with the dominant view is dangerous - especially when that view is backed by powerful interest groups.

The trouble with the world is
that the stupid are cocksure
and the intelligent are full
of doubt.

-- Bertrand Russell

Kundalini Tales

KUNDALINI TALES

An interview with Richard SAUDER

Some Mind Control victims –from Kathleen Sullivan to Cathy O’Brien- and less known victims all agreed to says that they have been guided to underground military bases, sometimes very weird. Is it plausible or was is a deliberate set up, a show to intimidate them?

Richard Sauder: There certainly have been many people who have reported being abducted, in some cases seemingly by American military units or intelligence operatives, and taken to mysterious underground facilities or bases where they have witnessed and experienced highly unusual events and procedures, in some cases even involving entities that appear non-human, or perhaps extraterrestrial. As the numbers of such reports grow over the years, I am inclined to believe that at least some of these reports must be credible, and maybe a great many of them. There is frequently also an element of mind control involved in these stories. In my research, I have personally communicated with a number of people who have reported being taken to strange underground facilities. I can mention the ones I have spoken with who have already gone public with their stories. Christa Tilton, who is perhaps best known for coming forth with her story about being taken to what she called the Dulce base back in the 1980s, where she saw very strange technological apparatuses and creatures, and had many bizarre experiences; Melinda Leslie, who is very actively involved in researching and speaking about this very theme as a result of her own abductions and experiences; Larry Warren, the UFO investigator and co-author with Peter Robbins of the book, Left at East Gate, who was taken to a secret, deep underground base beneath the American military base at Bentwaters in southern England; and the mind control researcher and activist, Carol Rutz, author of the book, A Nation Betrayed, who has also written and spoken on these topics as a consequence of her own horrific experiences as a child and young woman.

In this regard, I might also mention the writings and research of the late Karla Turner, whose work also touched on this question, in part, and with whom I had some very brief contact before her death.

Of course these experiences and abductions to underground bases are staged! In the sense that they are not normal, everyday events, it is only logical to say that they are staged. The question is: why, and by whom, are they staged? The more I work with these sorts of questions and stories the more I am forced to question the nature of reality itself. It may be the case that virtually everything that happens on this planet is “staged” or in some sense programmed by the directors of the theatrical production called “Life on Earth” that we are all starring in. Maybe the directors mostly remain just out of sight in the wings, or underground. Though there is definitely a mind control theme that reoccurs in many of these stories, there is also a genetic theme that keeps popping up too.

Perhaps what you are getting at in your question is whether all human beings, all “apparent” human beings, are really human, or terrestrial humans, at any rate. Perhaps others have so seamlessly woven themselves into our race and our reality that they can stage operations where they move humans back and forth between our reality and theirs, using the American military, and subterranean military installations, as one cover for their machinations. Of course this raises the question as to how much of what we see and recognize as “terrestrial human” reality really is “terrestrial human” reality! The short answer for me is: who knows? I have arrived at the point where it is clear to me that we are postively awash in a sea of misinformation, disinformation, lies, propaganda, deceit and cover-ups of every conceivable and inconceivable variety. Who in their right mind believes anymore that they can read the daily newspaper or watch the television news broadcasts and find out what “really” is happening on planet Earth? Probably like most people reading this interview I went away to school and learned from my teachers the “facts” of and about life, the world, history, society, the universe, and so forth ad nauseam. Now I am questioning almost everything!

continued @ Karmapolis

Copywrong

Law to allow searching of PC's, Laptops, and media devices