The Egg, by Andy Weir

You were on your way home when you died.

It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.

And that’s when you met me.

“What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?”

“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words.

“There was a… a truck and it was skidding…”

“Yup,” I said.

“I… I died?”

“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said.

You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” You asked. “Is this the afterlife?”

“More or less,” I said.

“Are you god?” You asked.

“Yup,” I replied. “I’m God.”

“My kids… my wife,” you said.

“What about them?”

“Will they be all right?”

“That’s what I like to see,” I said. “You just died and your main concern is for your family. That’s good stuff right there.”

You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn’t look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher than the almighty.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn’t have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.”

“Oh,” you said. “So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?”

“Neither,” I said. “You’ll be reincarnated.”

“Ah,” you said. “So the Hindus were right,”

“All religions are right in their own way,” I said. “Walk with me.”

You followed along as we strode through the void. “Where are we going?”

“Nowhere in particular,” I said. “It’s just nice to walk while we talk.”

“So what’s the point, then?” You asked. “When I get reborn, I’ll just be a blank slate, right? A baby. So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won’t matter.”

“Not so!” I said. “You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don’t remember them right now.”

I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. “Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had.

“You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.”

“How many times have I been reincarnated, then?”

“Oh lots. Lots and lots. An in to lots of different lives.” I said. “This time around, you’ll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD.”

“Wait, what?” You stammered. “You’re sending me back in time?”

“Well, I guess technically. Time, as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from.”

“Where you come from?” You said.

“Oh sure,” I explained “I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you’ll want to know what it’s like there, but honestly you wouldn’t understand.”

“Oh,” you said, a little let down. “But wait. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point.”

“Sure. Happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan you don’t even know it’s happening.”

“So what’s the point of it all?”

“Seriously?” I asked. “Seriously? You’re asking me for the meaning of life? Isn’t that a little stereotypical?”

“Well it’s a reasonable question,” you persisted.

I looked you in the eye. “The meaning of life, the reason I made this whole universe, is for you to mature.”

“You mean mankind? You want us to mature?”

“No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect.”

“Just me? What about everyone else?”

“There is no one else,” I said. “In this universe, there’s just you and me.”

You stared blankly at me. “But all the people on earth…”

“All you. Different incarnations of you.”

“Wait. I’m everyone!?”

“Now you’re getting it,” I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back.

“I’m every human being who ever lived?”

“Or who will ever live, yes.”

“I’m Abraham Lincoln?”

“And you’re John Wilkes Booth, too,” I added.

“I’m Hitler?” You said, appalled.

“And you’re the millions he killed.”

“I’m Jesus?”

“And you’re everyone who followed him.”

You fell silent.

“Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.”

You thought for a long time.

“Why?” You asked me. “Why do all this?”

“Because someday, you will become like me. Because that’s what you are. You’re one of my kind. You’re my child.”

“Whoa,” you said, incredulous. “You mean I’m a god?”

“No. Not yet. You’re a fetus. You’re still growing. Once you’ve lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born.”

“So the whole universe,” you said, “it’s just…”

“An egg.” I answered. “Now it’s time for you to move on to your next life.”

And I sent you on your way.

Katt Williams - Haters

And now some motivational inspiration for today!

"Live your motherfucking life. You gotta get your motherfucking hustle. Understand ****** is gonna hate you regardless, get that out of your head that fantasy world where ****** ain't hating on you. You gotta to be grateful, you need haters, wtf is you complaining about, wtf do you think a hater's job is?! If you got 14 hating on you, you need to figure out how the fuck to get to 16 before the summer get here! If you got nobody to hate on, feel free to hate on me, say my hair ain't luxurious when you know it is bitch!"

You cannot understand a man's actions unless you understand his beliefs

"If I try to explain, you must get your mind out of the arena of ordinary politics. When I say Hitler does have a Master, that doesn't mean he is a front man in the pedestrian political sense." The novelist paused. "How can I present the picture so you will understand it? You are not German... How can you understand a people of whom it has been said, truthfully, that they have one foot in their own land and one foot in Thule? Have you even heard of Thule? That's the German name for the fabulous kingdom the Greeks called Atlantis. Whether this kingdom ever existed is immaterial; the belief in it has existed since the dawn of history and beliefs motivate actions. In fact, you cannot understand a man's actions unless you understand his beliefs."

The Illuminatus! Trilogy is a series of three novels written by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

Fractal Painting Thingy

It's like a fractal... painting... video... thingy... man... with some Floyd. Lyrics again related to last few posts. Funny how that happens ;).

Breathe, breathe in the air
Don't be afraid to care
Leave, but don't leave me
Look around
Choose your own ground

Long you live and high you fly
And smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry
And all you touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be

Run, rabbit run
Dig that hole, forget the sun
And when at last the work is done
Don't sit down
It's time to dig another one

For long you live and high you fly
But only if you ride the tide
And balanced on the biggest wave
You race towards an early grave

Tips and tricks for physical experience

Related to the last Terence Mckenna post I found this an interesting read: Tips and tricks for physical experience

Attachment to "past" is part of the linear illusion. There are infinite pasts. What we remember as past -- we can use it, change it, or let it go.

"The future" is actually an infinite number of futures. "It" is not determined by the past, only by what we conjure, summon and create for ourselves in the now. We have an empty slate, and all possibilities we can imagine are available to us.

The present is not a result of the past, either. Everything we experience in the present moment is telling us about who we are, right now. now. now. now. Physical reality is a mirror.

The drama and trauma of the old paradigm is worn out. We've experienced all of that over and over again. We're creating a new world now, and so many of the old rules don't apply because we're realizing we are so much more than we thought we were. We can simply let go of old ideas that no longer serve us. Now is the time.

Read it all here

"We are in fact hyperdimentional objects of some sort which cast a shadow into matter."

“We are not primarily biology with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are in fact hyperdimentional objects of some sort which cast a shadow into matter. And the shadow in matter is the body.”

This quote quadruples in awesomeness if you can hear how Terence pronounces "body" ;p. Another fantastic McKenna talk at the Psychedelic Salon: Podcast 267 – “Exploring the Abyss”:

Thanks Relaxed Focus

Illuminatus! Excerpt: Hagbard Celine acts as lawyer for the Native Americans VS the US government

Federal Court for the 17th District of New York State. Plaintiffs: John Feather, Samuel Arrows, et al. Defendants: Bureau of Indian Affairs, Department of the Interior, and President of the United States. For plaintiffs: Hagbard Celine. For the defendants: George Kharis, John Alucard, Thomas Moriarity, James Moran. Presiding: Justice Quasimodo Immhotep.

MR. FEATHER (concluding): And it will be because men do not speak words but speak shit!

MR. KHARIS: Your honor, I move that the last speech be stricken from the record as irrelevant and immaterial. We are dealing here with a practical question, the need of the people of New York for this dam, and Mr. Feather's superstitions are totally beside the point.

MR. CELINE: Your honor, the people of New York have survived a long time without a dam in that particular place. They can survive longer without it. Can anything survive, anything worth having, if our words become, as Mr. Feather says, excrement? Can anything we can reasonably call American Justice survive, if the words of our first President, if the sacred honor of George Washington is destroyed, if his promise that the Mohawk could keep these lands "as long as the mountain stands and the grass is green," if all that becomes nothing but excrement?

MR. KHARIS: Counsel is not arguing. Counsel is making speeches.

MR. CELINE: I am speaking from the heart. Are you— or are you speaking excrement that you are ordered to speak by your superiors?

MR. ALUCARD: More speeches.

MR. CELINE: More excrement.

JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Control yourself, Mr. Celine.

MR. CELINE: I am controlling myself. Otherwise, I would speak as frankly as
my client and say that most of the speeches here are plain old shit. Why do I say "excrement" at all, if it isn't, tike you people, to disguise a little what we are all doing? It's shit. Plain shit.

JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Mr. Celine, you are coming very close to contempt of court. I warn you.

MR. CELINE: Your honor, we speak the tongue of Shakespeare, of Milton, of Melville. Must we go on murdering it? Must we tear it away from its last umbilical connection with reality? What is going on in this room, actually? Defendants, the U.S. government and its agents, want to steal some land from my clients. How long do we have to argue that they have no justice, no right, no honor, in their cause? Why can't we say highway robbery is highway robbery, instead of calling it eminent domain? Why can't we say shit is shit, instead of calling it excrement? Why do we never use language to convey meaning? Why must we always use it conceal meaning? Why do we never speak from the heart? Why do we always speak words programmed into us, like robots?

JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Mr. Celine, I warn you again.

MR. FEATHER: And I warn you. The world will die. The stars will go out. If men and women cannot trust the words spoken, the earth will crack, like a rotten pumpkin.

MR. KHARIS: I call for a recess. Plaintiff and their counsel are both in no emotional state to continue at this time.

MR. CELINE: You even have guns. You have men with guns and clubs, who are called marshals, and they will beat me if I don't shut up. How do you differ from any other gang of bandits, then, except in using language that conceals what you are doing? The only difference is that the bandits are more honest. That's the only difference. The only difference.

JUSTICE IMMHOTEP : Mr. Marshal, restrain the counsel.

MR. CELINE: You're stealing what isn't yours. Why can't you talk turkey for just one moment? Why—

JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Just hold him, Marshal. Don't use unnecessary force. Mr. Celine, I am tempted to forgive you, considering that you are obviously much involved with your clients, emotionally. However, such mercy on my part would encourage other lawyers to believe they could follow your example. I have no choice. I find you guilty of contempt of court. Sentencing will take place when court reconvenes after a fifteen-minute recess. You may speak at that time, but only on any mitigating grounds that should lighten the degree of your sentence. I will not hear the United States government called bandits again. That is all.

MR. CELINE: You steal land, and you will not hear yourselves called bandits. You order men with guns and clubs to hold us down, and you will not hear yourselves called thugs. You don't act from the heart; where the hell do you act from? What in God's name does motivate you?

JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Restrain him, Marshal.

MR. CELINE: (Indistinguishable.)

JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Fifteen-minute recess.

BAILIFF: All rise.

Memes

Some internet randomness from MCS

Guess what

Marina and the Diamonds - I am not a Robot

Marina has a synaesthetic condition that involves seeing musical notes and days of the week in different colours. *Jealous*. The Diamonds refers to the fans, not her band.

Standing Army

"The unit of Empire in the classic European empires was the colony, the unit for the American empire is not the colony, it's the military base." Chalmers Johnson



There are over 700 American bases scattered across the globe in over 100 countries. There are 0 foreign bases in the USA. Obama's Defense Budget of 680 billion dollars is 30 billion more than Bush's last of 650.

"Bases are the Empire." Noam Chomsky



"Perpetual war for perpetual peace has been the American dream." Gore Vidal

Game of Thrones

"Honor!? You think it's honor that's keeping the peace? It's fear!"

If you don't know what to watch (download), I highly recommend Game of Thrones from HBO. It's based on the novels A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin which is one the famous epic fantasy series out there. Stellar acting and plotlines, off to a great start. I'm especially enjoying Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister, in fact, all the actors do an amazing job.
Considering the unintentionally funny Camelot (skinhead Merlin anyone? surferboy brat-overnight Arthur anyone? :p) - which stunningly is about a thousand times worse than the British Merlin series, it's welcome evidence that some tv makers still give a damn about what they show.

Storyline

Seven noble families fight for control of the mythical land of Westeros. Political and sexual intrigue abound. The primary families are the Stark, Lannister, and Baratheon families. Robert Baratheon, King of Westeros, asks his old friend Eddard Stark to serve as his chief advisor. Eddard, suspecting that his predecessor had been murdered, accepts so that he can investigate further. The Queen's family, the Lannisters, may be hatching a plot to take control. Across the sea, the last surviving members of the previously deposed ruling family, the Targaryens, are also plotting a return to power. The conflict between these families and others, including the Greyjoys, the Tullys, the Arryns, and the Tyrells, leads to war. Meanwhile, in the north, an ancient evil awakens. Amidst war and the political confusion, a brotherhood of misfits, The Night's Watch, is all that stands between the realms of men and the horrors beyond.

Ziggy Marley - Rainbow In The Sky

Don't be blind!

more Herman Hesse Quotes

"I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?"

"You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them!"

"For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity."

"You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live." (Steppenwolf)

"I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am responsible for what I do with the life I’ve got."

"Your soul is the whole world." (Siddhartha)

"Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try again and again to console my heart and pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell"

"How foolish it is to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence."

"It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard."

"Sentimentality is a basking in feelings that in reality you don't take seriously enough to make the slightest sacrifice to or ever translate into action."

"This day will never come again and anyone who fails to eat and drink and taste and smell it will never have it offered to him again in all eternity. The sun will never shine as it does today...But you must play your part and sing a song, one of your best."

"An enlightened man had but one duty - to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led." (Demian)

Herman Hesse

Herman Hesse Quotes

"If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us."

"Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours."

"If I know what love is, it is because of you."

"Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish."

"To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do. "

"Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure."

"You must find your dream...but no dream lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular dream."

"We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being."

"I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me."

"I live in my dreams. Other people live in dreams too . . . just not their own."

"What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find." (Siddhartha)

"Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness."

"Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it. "

"Happiness is a how, not a what. A talent, not an object."

Herman Hesse, I highly recommend Steppenwolf and Siddhartha, I should really finish the Glass Bead Game one day.

Frequency!

Due to moving, working and being ridiculously busy the next 2 weeks there will be a bit fewer posts but don't worry things will pick up again after that. I'll keep posting some brainfood when I can, linking to other blogs and some random stuff (btw does anybody know what Steve Willner and Jake Kotze are up to lately?) and if you have something interesting you want to share and help me out finding stuff to post in these hectic weeks send it to dedroidify at hotmail dot com, thanks a lot!

Dark Night of the Soul

I've had the poison leak into my skin and it corroded my heart away

NLP: The Meta Model

The Meta Model is a pragmatic communications model used to specify information in a speaker's language. It is often contrasted with the intentionally ambiguous Milton Erickson inspired-Milton model. The meta model was originally presented in The Structure of Magic I: A Book About Language and Therapy in 1975 by Richard Bandler and linguist John Grinder, the co-founders of neuro-linguistic programming

It is used for gaining specificity, gathering info, assisting people in enrichening their reality maps, and it's the structure of nitpicking! It cuts through the bullshit, and is particularly helpful in therapy, discussions, arguments and seeing through salesmen, politicians, media BS and attempts for manipulation in general.

1) Mindread
You don't like me - how do you know I don't like you?

2) Lost performative
It's bad to be inconsistent - who says, how do you know?
it's a good thing to - according to whom?

3) Cause & effect
You make me sad - how does what i'm doing specifically cause you to choose to feel sad?
he makes me angry - how does what he's doing make you choose to feel angry?

4) Complex Equivalent
challenge it, how does one thing mean the other, give a counter example

she doesn't like me, she's always yelling at me - how does she yelling at you mean that she doesn't like you? Have you ever yelled at someone you liked?
Have you ever not yelled at someone and hated somebody?

You have no respect for my time cause you're late - how does being late have anything to do with respect, have you ever been late and respected somebody, have you ever been on time and disrespected somebody?

5) Presuppositions
If he knew how much I suffered he wouldn't do that - how do you choose to suffer, how do you know he doesn't know, how do you know he wouldn't do that if he knew?

6) Universal Quantifier
generalizations which are mostly untrue

She never listens to me - never? once? (exaggerate) What would happen if she did?
Nobody likes me - nobody? not one person?

7) Mobile operator of Necessity
I have to take care, I should go to school

What would happen if you didn't? - Expands their model of the world

8) Model operator of Possibility
Can, can't will, won't, may, may not, possible, impossible

I can't tell him the truth - what would happen if you did? What prevents you?

9) Nominalisation
Take the noun and turn it into to a verb

There's no communication here - who's not communicating what to whom? How would you like to communicate?
My relationship is terrible - what's terrible about the way you're relating?

10) Unspecified verb
He rejected me - retrieve the missing info - how/who specifically?

11) Simple Deletion
I'm uncomfortable - about who or what are you uncomfortable?
He never listens to me - who/never?

12) Lack of Referential Index
They don't listen to me - who specifically doesn't

13) Comparative Deletion
better, best, good, worst, more, less, most, least
She's a better person - better than whom, she's the best, compared to who
Your offer is expensive - expensive compared to what

14) Pacing current experience
if they try to link a yes-set, break it into chunks

15) Double Bind
If given two or three choices, create your own

Would you like me to stop by on monday or tuesday - wednesday :)

16) Conversational Postulate
answer instead of acting

Can you close the door - yes I can, would you like me to?

17) Extended quote
the other day I met... who said - what does one thing have to do with the other?

NLP: The Milton Model

The Milton Model is a model for indirect interpersonal communications inspired by psychiatrist and pioneer of medical hypnosis, Milton H. Erickson. The model was created by linguist John Grinder and Richard Bandler, the co-founders of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP).

It is described by the authors as the reverse set of the meta model. Whereas the meta model sought to specify distortion, deletions and generalization in a speaker's language, the Milton model intentionally utilizes those patterns.

It is general, ambiguous and metaphoric. The Milton model and meta model of NLP were the first two models of NLP. Bandler and Grinder met with Erickson on a regular basis, and modeled his approach and his work over many months.

The Milton Model lists the key parts of speech and key patterns that are useful in directing another person's line of thinking by being "artfully vague", and in principle the model states that larger chunks (more general use of language) can lead to more rapport, while smaller chunks, (more specific language) is more limiting and has a greater chance of excluding concepts from a person's experience.

The patterns of the Milton Model can be used to

• pace another person's reality to gain rapport.
• access unconscious resources of another person to gather information or to lead them into an altered state.
• distract the conscious mind.

You will find politicians and the media using these speech patterns a lot.
Unfortunately the names for the speech patterns are a bit overly complicated and silly, therefor I wouldn't advise you to try and learn them by their names, but just be aware of the patterns and perhaps try using them when it seems appropriate. These are taken from the wiki article and a Chris Howard training program.

1) Mindread
Claiming to know thoughts and feelings

I know that you're wondering
I think you would agree

2) Lost Performative
Valued Judgements with performer left out, not saying who says it

It's a good thing to wonder...

3) Cause and effect
If... then

As you go deeper into trance you feel more relaxed

4) Complex Equivalent

The fact that you're sitting there means that you can go into trance

5) Presupposition
Assumption

You are learning many things.
Before you go into trance, I'd like you to sit comfortably in that chair as we talk about your outcomes for today.
When you go into trance, you may discover many resources that you did not realize you had yet.

6) Universal Quantifier
Generalization using all, all the things, every, any, everyone,...

You can always improve your language skills with every conversation you have.

7) Model operator of Possibility

You can learn, one can learn, want to.

8) Model operator of Necessity

Have to, must to, need to,...

9) Nominalisation
Using nouns, process words, that are frozen in time, nouns that are no objects

Relationship, love,...

10) Specified verb
Unlinked verb
And you can, can you not?

causes you to wonder what the verb relates to

11) Tag Question
Question added after a statement to ease resistance:

and you can understand that, right?
you're coming, aren't you?
do listen, will you?
let's have a beer, shall we?
you're developing a deep state of relaxation, aren't you?

12) Lack of referential Index
Phrase that dosn't pick out a specific portion of the listeners experience

one can you know

13) Comparative deletion
comparison is made but not specified as to who or what it was made

more or less the right thing to do (compared to what?)
better to do it that way, would it be best if i come around 2 o'clock

14) Pacing current experience
verifiable experience described in undeniable way
yes-set

you're listening to the sound of my voice, and you're going through these audio series

internally they are going yes, you can include something plausible and because they're on a yes-track they accept the plausible statement

15) Double bind
statement that gives the illusion of choice

Would you prefer finishing this portion of the audio series now or later?
Would you like me to stop by on monday or tuesday?

Triple binds are less obvious

16) Conversational postulate (Indirect Suggestion)
Normally a yes/no response - causes person to take action

Can you close the door?
Can you just take a moment to take a deep breath and relax?

17) Extended quote
delivering message in form of a quote but inducing trance, displaces resistance

the other day I met... who said: 'you can understand this information easily

18) Embedding Questions & Commands
Rather than directly asking: "What are you thinking about?", one might state:
"I'm curious to know what you are thinking.", or
"I'm just wondering what you are thinking."

An embedded command is typically distinguished or marked out using a subtle shift in voice tonality or non-verbal cue.

You may begin to feel a sense of comfort, as you begin to develop these skills in your daily life.

19) Negative Command
Don't think of an elephant - what just happened, you probably thought of an elephant.

Don't go into a deep state of relaxation just yet, just sit down on that chair and get comfortable first.

20) Ambiguity
Homophones:
you're = your
merry = marry = mary

Oronyms:
ice cream = i scream
depend = deep end
the sky = this guy
delight = the light

21) Metaphors in general

Hmm

Obi-Wan Kenobi Is Dead, Vader Says

This story from the Galactic Empire Times

Obi-Wan Kenobi, the mastermind of some of the most devastating attacks on the Galactic Empire and the most hunted man in the galaxy, was killed in a firefight with Imperial forces near Alderaan, Darth Vader announced on Sunday.

In a late-night appearance in the East Room of the Imperial Palace, Lord Vader declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that agents of the Imperial Army and stormtroopers of the 501st Legion had finally cornered Kenobi, one of the leaders of the Jedi rebellion, who had eluded the Empire for nearly two decades. Imperial officials said Kenobi resisted and was cut down by Lord Vader's own lightsaber. He was later dumped out of an airlock.

...

“No Stormtroopers were seriously harmed,” Lord Vader said. “They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, I defeated my former master and took custody of his body.” Jedi tradition requires burial within 24 hours, but by doing it in deep space, Imperial authorities presumably were trying to avoid creating a shrine for his followers.

Lord Vader has denied requests to present photographs of the body, describing them as "too gruesome" for the general public.

Read the full story at the Galactic Empire Times

Well a berry very heavy eh heavy do it burtation tonight

(the title is a quote from 1.06)

from Through the Looking Glass

"High profile U.S. television personality Judge Judy is the fourth broadcaster in the past four months to exhibit uncontrollable loss of normal vocalization on-air, to what amounts to speaking in tongues..."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1372538/Are-government-microwave-mind-control-tests-causing-TV-presenters-brains-melt-down.html

weiuuuuuurd

Michael Persinger - No More Secrets

"Just suppose you could know what others are thinking: No more secrets." Color me underwhelmed though.

Here's another lecture by Michael Persinger Psychotropic drugs and the nature of reality.

Westside

added: George W. Bush's third term continues apace

Bradley Manning being mistreated, says Hillary Clinton spokesman. PJ Crowley says Pentagon is being 'ridiculous and stupid' by subjecting WikiLeaks suspect to punitive conditions in jail - and got fired for it.

Thanks Relaxed Focus

Anarchism playlist

Anarchism playlist featuring Alan Watts, RAW, Terence Mckenna, Emma Goldman, etc.

Oh! The Places You’ll Go! by Dr. Seuss

Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You’re off to Great Places!
You’re off and away!

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

You’ll look up and down streets. Look’em over with care. About some you will say, “I don’t choose to go there.” With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet, you’re too smart to go down a not-so-good street.

And you may not find any you’ll want to go down. In that case, of course, you’ll head straight out of town. It’s opener there in the wide open air.

Out there things can happen and frequently do to people as brainy and footsy as you.

And when things start to happen, don’t worry. Don’t stew. Just go right along. You’ll start happening too.

Oh! The Places You’ll Go!

You’ll be on your way up!
You’ll be seeing great sights!
You’ll join the high fliers who soar to high heights.

You won’t lag behind, because you’ll have the speed. You’ll pass the whole gang and you’ll soon take the lead. Wherever you fly, you’ll be best of the best. Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.

Except when you don’t.
Because, sometimes, you won’t.

I’m sorry to say so but, sadly, it’s true that Bang-ups and Hang-ups can happen to you.

You can get all hung up in a prickle-ly perch. And your gang will fly on. You’ll be left in a Lurch.

You’ll come down from the Lurch with an unpleasant bump. And the chances are, then, that you’ll be in a Slump.

And when you’re in a Slump, you’re not in for much fun. Un-slumping yourself is not easily done.

You will come to a place where the streets are not marked. Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked. A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin! Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in? How much can you lose? How much can you win?

And if you go in, should you turn left or right…or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite? Or go around back and sneak in from behind? Simple it’s not, I’m afraid you will find, for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.

You can get so confused that you’ll start in to race down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space, headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.

The Waiting Place…for people just waiting.

Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No or waiting for their hair to grow. Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for wind to fly a kite or waiting around for Friday night or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil, or a Better Break or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants or a wig with curls, or Another Chance. Everyone is just waiting.

No! That’s not for you!
Somehow you’ll escape all that waiting and staying. You’ll find the bright places where Boom Bands are playing. With banner flip-flapping, once more you’ll ride high! Ready for anything under the sky. Ready because you’re that kind of a guy!

Oh, the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done! There are points to be scored. There are games to be won. And the magical things you can do with that ball will make you the winning-est winner of all. Fame! You’ll be famous as famous can be, with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.

Except when they don’t. Because, sometimes, they won’t.

I’m afraid that some times you’ll play lonely games too. Games you can’t win ‘cause you’ll play against you.

All Alone!
Whether you like it or not, Alone will be something you’ll be quite a lot.

And when you’re alone, there’s a very good chance you’ll meet things that scare you right out of your pants. There are some, down the road between hither and yon, that can scare you so much you won’t want to go on.

But on you will go though the weather be foul. On you will go though your enemies prowl. On you will go though the Hakken-Kraks howl. Onward up many a frightening creek, though your arms may get sore and your sneakers may leak. On and on you will hike. And I know you’ll hike far and face up to your problems whatever they are.

You’ll get mixed up, of course, as you already know. You’ll get mixed up with many strange birds as you go. So be sure when you step. Step with care and great tact and remember that Life’s a Great Balancing Act. Just never forget to be dexterous and deft. And never mix up your right foot with your left.

And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and ¾ percent guaranteed.)

Kid, you’ll move mountains!
So…be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray or Mordecai Ale Van Allen O’Shea, you’re off to Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting.
So…get on your way!

Nas - What Goes Around

I just had an epiphany

lol

Sublime with Rome

Omg omg omg omg omg I can see Sublime live in my lifetime! Rome Ramirez must be living the dream, and doing so helping me to realize one of my own, I have a new mission in life, it's seeing Sublime live now it's possible woohoo!

Enter The Void DMT Sequence

Sex, drugs and the NDE: there's nothing sappy and sentimental about this afterlife rendering. In Gaspar Noé's provocative Enter the Void, small-time drug dealer Oscar is shot by police inducing an 'astral journey' around psychedelic Tokyo. Taking inspiration from mushroom trips, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Raymond Moody's NDE bestseller Life After Life, Noé hits the viewer with sensory overload in order to portray the altered states of consciousness that Oscar encounters (including a 6 minute DMT trip) during the movie.

A boring if beautiful DMT trip it seems, just some visuals, bah :p

161 minutes, *wonders if I'll reach the end of that*

The Lovely Bones

Ok so Peter Jackson directs an awesome looking movie with mindblowing visuals from the afterlife and I don't know about it for two years? HOW!?!

The Alchemist, Maktub

Maktub. (it was written.)

The Alchemist is an allegorical novel by Paulo Coelho first published in 1988. It has been hailed as a modern classic. The Alchemist was originally written in Portuguese and has since been translated into 67 languages, winning the Guinness World Record for most translated book by a living author. It has sold more than 65 million copies in more than 150 countries, becoming one of the best-selling books in history.

The Alchemist details the journey of an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago. Santiago, believing a recurring dream to be prophetic, decides to travel to the pyramids of Egypt to find treasure. The Alchemist details the journey of an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago. Santiago, believing a recurring dream to be prophetic, decides to travel to the pyramids of Egypt to find treasure. He then tells a lone gypsy about this treasure. As he leaves, the gypsy mentions one thing: If he does find the treasure, she wants 1/10 of it. On the way, he encounters love, danger, opportunity, disaster and learns a lot about himself and the ways of the world. One of the significant characters that he meets is an old king named Melchizedek who tells him about discovering his personal legend: what he always wanted to accomplish in his life. And that "When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it." This is the core philosophy and motto of the book.

Paulo Coelho is a strong advocate of spreading his books through peer-to-peer file sharing networks. He put his own books on file-sharing networks like BitTorrent, and noted that The Alchemist received a boost in sales due to this. He stated that "I do think that when a reader has the possibility to read some chapters, he or she can always decide to buy the book later." Currently, chapters from The Alchemist can be found on Google Books and Coelho's agency Sant Jordi Associados. Entire copies of his books, including translations, can also be found on Pirate Coelho, a blog off Coelho's main blog. The audiobook is awesomely read by Jeremy Irons.

Lifted - Lighthouse Family

Jimmie's Chicken Shack - Pure

Live version embedded, album version here

if I saw myself today
with a different set of eyes
if I sold myself to you
would it be wise

when you've paved out all the lies
finalize the words that you say

like I'm not breathing... whole
if I'm falling... in

I'm just stumbling through my life... by myself

and I sometimes realize
that we have nothing left to save
still I've never felt this high
and though fortune lights your way
it will never be pure

promises, promises, promises
you and your promises

all I ever really need is you
all I ever really needed was pure in you
in you I'm pure

Why not join the NSA

Fibonacci Sequence

music by Radiohead

U.G. Krishnamurti

Here is an interesting exercise if you got some time, read this (long) article on Reality Sandwich about U.G. Krishnamurti, though you might wanna skim over the less interesting parts to get it over with, read it attentively.

Then, go to YouTube and view some videos featuring the man, the older he is, the better.

Notice anything? Highlight the next white text when you're done:

LOL, got enlightenment?
The first two post labels should explain it all to you if you're confused.

Rebelution - Courage to Grow

Frequency 23 - Reprogram the Robots

23 (full PDF here)
Dictated by Robert Anton Wilson
Transcribed by Howard W. Campbell III

"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

What change would you most like to see manifest Itself in the world around you? Frequency 23 is an experiment in alternative thinking and networking.

What you do with this is up to you.

A meme is a piece of information that reproduces itself, using a human vessel as a communicator-device. The study of memetics is the study of language as intelligent reproduction.

A meme-bearer is someone who acts as a catalyst for certain changes in human thought and behavior. A meme-bearer acts, consciously or unconsciously, as a carrier for any given meme, and works to contaminate the rest of the world at large with these memes, to alter consciousness. Meme-bearers are Change Agents.

“Language is a reality virus.” -William S. Burroughs

It is therefore possible to engineer a massive shift in consciousness through understanding the concept of memetics.

The internet is rife with memes, some beneficial and others detrimental to those who wish to encourage critical thinking and human intelligence increase. A controlled study in internet memetics could be conducted through creating a series of viral rumors, chain-mails, personal bulletins, falsified documents, or otherwise fictional scenarios and studying the ways in which these ideas reproduce themselves.

For this reason, an Agent is prohibited from believing what he or she reads.

Frequency 23 aims to cultivate conscious, witting meme-bearers to act as Change Agents for a higher frequency of awareness. This can be achieved through open dialogues with others, writing and blogging, culture jamming, media projects of all sorts, real-time reality fabrication encounters and group mindfucks, or by merely changing the ways in which you view and interact with the world, and being aware at all times of the ways in which your words and actions shape the world in which we live.

Frequency 23 is a non-profit, creative collective that aims to foster individual growth and the dissemination of paradigm shattering, consciousness altering ideas and actions. It does this through a collective pooling of media, resources, and external networking geared towards intelligence intensification. It operates under the basic assumption that every legitimate revolution is in fact a revolution in consciousness, and perhaps more importantly, the assumption that enlightenment can be contagious.

Frequency 23 is an open-source reality project. A Frequency 23 Agent should understand that reality itself is malleable, and that our interactions with others and the world around us shapes and defines the nature of consensual reality...

Read more here, if you are an artist this is a recommended book too, if you can handle reading the word 'spirits' a million times...

Illustration:


Fitch: You think this jury cares anything about negligent distribution? Product liability? Most of them can't even say the words, let alone understand the meaning. You think your average juror is King Solomon? No! He's a roofer with a mortgage. He wants to go home and sit in his Barcalounger and let the cable TV wash over him. And this man doesn't give a single, solitary droplet of shit about truth, justice or your American way.
Wendell: They're people, Fitch...
Fitch: My point exactly!

Runaway Jury
(This bit seems to me to be more the work of H.C. than RAW)

The movie directed by Gary Fleder, is an inquiry into practical magick. Grisham is fascinated by magicians. He is Narcissistic that way. The first evidence of this is depicted when Gene Hackman is being driven by a cabbie who tells Gene he pegged him for a first time visitor to New Orleans. Gene Hackman plays a profiler working as a jury consultant. We are introduced to his skill-set by the cabbie’s prodding of being able to “peg” somebody.

Profiler—One who grasps how a person’s values create their behavior, affecting their environment, simultaneously as their environment shapes their subtle values. Profilers are only profilers when they become predictive.

Gary Fleder depicts Gene’s perspective as he focuses on a cross hanging from the rearview mirror, then at a picture of an elderly woman, and finally at a parking stub for a memorial hospital. Gene asks, “How’s your mother?… She feeling better?” The cabbie asks how Gene knew about his mother. Gene continues with his cold reading by saying that this cabbie had considered putting his mother in a home but that it didn’t feel like the Christian thing to do and continues by recommending that cabbie “reconsider the home, because: better to have an unhappy mother than an unfriendly wife.”
I transcribed that accurately. How often does natural dialogue use a colon? Kudos to the screenwriters, Koppelman & Levien. But I digress. In the next seen (scene) we see the nebbish actor dude nobody remembers his name (Jeremy Piven) and does movies with John Cusak and Nicholas Cage, with Dustin Hoffman. Anyway, as Hoffman and Nebbish interact, we realize that these men are also magicians. Hoffman is feigning ignorance about Nebbish dude, or as we say colloquially, he is keeping his cards close to his chest. Or, is it vest? I don’t know how that expression goes exactly.
I’m getting ahead of myself if you haven’t seen this movie. But, of course you have seen this movie. You’re a profiler—if not trained or studied, at least by nature. You see. You see things most people don’t see. You run scenarios in your head, revisiting how you might have better handled a scenario. Extraordinarily biting comments come out of your mouth when your filtering system is too stressed. This movie pits people like you against one another. This movie doesn’t have a love triangle, it has a triangulation of manipulation, filled with overt intentions and clandestine tactics. This is competition at its best. Fuck football and auto racing, this is three-dimensional chess played with live bullets and for high stakes.
A fundamental skill of the intentional magician is profiling. If you intend to persuade somebody, and you don’t want to resort to brute force or threats thereof, an understanding of your target is the keyhole to subtle persuasion. Mindhunt articulates the craft of inductive insights. Similarly, Zero Effect summarizes the procedure; the art of research is to see through the facts to underlying passions. Most people are as they present themselves.
A primary skill of a profiler, a magician, is to be able to identify when a person is lying; this is the skill to ascertain when things are not as they seem, when shenanigans are running amuck. Mike Caro, Body Language of Poker author, says that the first step in interpreting tells is to confidently ascertain when somebody is lying or not. Gene Hackman demonstrates this skill when he says to bounce a prospective juror who reveals himself to be an anti-gun advocate, trying to lie his way onto the jury. Following this scene, we learn that John Cusak is a player of poker without cards because we learn that he has previously presented a false front. Non-poker players think that the only time you lie in poker is when you bluff.
Excellent poker players will sometimes muck premium hands if they know they are beat, and pretend they had rags to conceal their prowess in profiling. A poker player must concern himself with his table image. Many a well-quaffed dresser is as blind as a bat. Most “good dressers” are bound by societal standards inwardly projecting the meanings they ascribe to their surface symbols. Generally, magicians can dress well, but even if they can’t, they understand how their presentation may frame the perception of those who view them. David Mamet once wrote in Men’s Health that there are four levels of poker, you start by learning what you should do in a given situation. Next, you learn what other people are representing by interpreting the language of betting. Then, you learn to interpret how others see you.
Finally, you learn to manipulate how others see you, to improve the likelihood of your effect. Our tell that Cusak is playing poker is when we learn that he was performing in an earlier scene when he pretended not to know his now obvious girlfriend. For the slow learners, Fleder has Cusak say, “Everybody has a button. We just got to find out where and push.” Now, we know he not only hopes to persuade this jury, but that he has a clue as to how he might accomplish this. You see, Benjamin Garth is a profiler. The work Benjamin does in advertising is the same technology FBI profilers and jury consultants use. If you think jury consultants are merely hired to find sympathetic jurors, your naïveté is painful to me. They are hired to be the account planners of their side’s case. They don’t make the speeches, just as an account planner doesn’t make the ads, but jury consultants and account planners write the brief that say what should be communicate and in what tone to deliver the message. Jury consultants are like political consultants, their primary job is to frame the debate.
Most bats, blind civilians, can’t even pronounce the key words in important political issues, let alone truly know what they mean. Somebody has to explain this to the masses. The masses then go and talk amongst themselves. If you frame the debate correctly, they’ll reach the conclusion of your intent. In Runaway Jury, the jury represents the masses. The courtroom is the media, the mechanism through which the meme wranglers disseminate their framings. This is theatre. The judge is the FCC. The battle is to be the stage manager. Since the masses are blind to subtleties, the primary weapon of the mass meme wranglers is stigma. If you can generate evil, people will avoid association (or anything negative, see "Birther", "Conspiracy Nut"). The primary story of Runaway Jury is over when Cusak asks, “Who’s with Frank?” But, continuing to mirror life, Fleder ends the movie showing the media covering the trial blindly omitting the real players in the drama. Within good stories, the real players play poker.

Wendell: You know what, Fitch? You're gonna lose.
Fitch: I doubt it.
Wendell: Well, maybe not this case, maybe not the next, but someday, you know, someday. I've seen it before with guys like you. You wanna know why?
Fitch: Why?
Wendell: Because you cannot carry that much contempt without it becoming malignant, until you're gonna be all alone in a room full of shadows, and all you're gonna have is the memories of all those people's lives you have destroyed.
Fitch: That's a good story, Wendell. But it's just further proof of why you can't beat me. Because you may be right... but the thing of it is, I don't give a shit. What's more... I never have. (laughs) That suit...

TLDR:
People are basically unthinking Robots
Robots can easily be (re-)Programmed
Government, Media & Companies do it 24/7
You can do it too.
What are you gonna do?

The office of tribal Liar.

His name was Amschat B'hal Zoon. He lived on the raft with his three wives and three children. He was a Liar.
What always annoyed the enemies of the Zoon tribe was not simply their honesty, which was infuriatingly absolute, but their total directness of approach. The Zoons had never heard about a euphemism, and wouldn't understand what to do with it if they had one, except that they would certainly have called it "a nice way of saying something nasty".
Their rigid adherence to the truth was apparently not enjoined on them by a god, as is usually the case, but appeared to have a genetic base. The average Zoon could no more tell a lie than breathe underwater and, in fact, the very concept was enough to upset them considerably; telling a Lie meant no less than totally altering the universe.
This was something of a drawback to a trading race and so, over the millennia, the elders of the Zoon studied this strange power that everyone else had in such abundance and decided that they should possess it too.
Young men who showed faint signs of having such a talent were encouraged, on special ceremonial occasions, to bend the Truth ever further on a competitive basis. The first recorded Zoon proto-lie was: "Actually my grandfather is quite tall," but eventually they got the hang of it and the office of tribal Liar was instituted.
It must be understood that while the majority of Zoon cannot lie they have great respect for any Zoon who can say that the world is other than it is, and the Liar holds a position of considerable eminence. He represents his tribe in all his dealings with the outside world, their Liars.
Other races get very annoyed about all this. They feel that the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable titles, like "diplomat" or "public relations officer". They feel they are poking fun at the whole thing.

From Terry Pratchett's Equal Rites

Faith No More - Cuckoo for Caca

Are you Cuckoo for Caca?



commit it, leave it, get away
we always drop our good side!

Being good gets you stuff
Being stuff gets you good
Good stuff gets you being
and wheeling and dealing and squealing
Shit lives forever!

Philip Zimbardo - Secret Powers of Time (RSA animate)

Nas & Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley - Patience

Sabali, Sabali, Sabali, yonkontê
Sabali, Sabali, Sabali, kiye
Ni kêra môgô
Sabali, Sabali, Sabali, yonkontê
Sabali, Sabali, Sabali, kagni
Ni kêra môgô

Some of the smartest dummies
Can't read the language of Egyptian mummies
An' a fly go a moon
And can't find food for the starving tummies
Pay no mind to the youths
Cause it's not like the future depends on it
But save the animals in the zoo
Cause the chimpanzee dem a make big money
This is how the media pillages
On the TV the picture is
Savages in villages
And the scientist still can't explain the pyramids, huh
Evangelists making a living on the videos of ribs of the little kids
Stereotyping the image of the images
And this is what the image is
You buy a khaki pants
And all of a sudden you say a Indiana Jones
An' a thief out gold and thief out the scrolls and even the buried bones
Some of the worst paparazzis I've ever seen and I ever known
Put the worst on display so the world can see
And that's all they will ever show
So the ones in the west
Will never move east
And feel like they could be at home
Dem get tricked by the beast
But a where dem ago flee when the monster is fully grown?
Solomonic linage whe dem still can't defeat and them coulda never clone
My spiritual DNA that print in my soul and I will forever own, Lord

Sabali, Sabali, Sabali, yonkontê
Sabali, Sabali, Sabali, kiye
Ni kêra môgô
Sabali, Sabali, Sabali, yonkontê
Sabali, Sabali, Sabali, kagni
Ni kêra môgô

Huh, we born not knowing, are we born knowing all?
We growing wiser, are we just growing tall?
Can you read thoughts? can you read palms?
Huh, can you predict the future? can you see storms, coming?
The Earth was flat if you went too far you would fall off
Now the Earth is round if the shape change again everybody woulda start laugh
The average man can't prove of most of the things that he chooses to speak of
And still won't research and find out the root of the truth that you seek of
Scholars teach in Universities and claim that they're smart and cunning
Tell them find a cure when we sneeze and that's when their nose start running
And the rich get stitched up, when we get cut
Man a heal dem broken bones in the bush with the wed mud
Can you read signs? can you read stars?
Can you make peace? can you fight war?
Can you milk cows, even though you drive cars? huh
Can you survive, against all odds, now?

Sabali, Sabali, Sabali, yonkontê
Sabali, Sabali, Sabali, kiye
Ni kêra môgô
Sabali, Sabali, Sabali, yonkontê
Sabali, Sabali, Sabali, kagni
Ni kêra môgô

Who wrote the Bible? Who wrote the Qur'an?
And was it a lightning storm
That gave birth to the Earth
And then dinosaurs were born? damn
Who made up words? who made up numbers?
And what kind of spell is mankind under?
Everything on the planet we preserve and can it
Microwave it and try it
No matter what we'll survive it
What's hu? what's man? what's human?
Anything along the land we consuming
Eatin', deletin', ruin
Trying to get paper, what
Gotta have land, gotta have acres
So I can sit back like Jack Nicholson
Watch niggas play the game like the lakers
In a world full of 52 fakers
Gypsies, seances, mystical prayers
You superstitious? throw salt over your shoulders
Make a wish for the day cuz
Like somebody got a doll of me
Stickin' needles in my arteries
But I can't feel it
Sometimes it's like 'pardon me, but I got a real big spirit'
I'm fearless.... I'm fearless
Don't you try and grab hold of my soul
It's like a military soldier since seven years old
I held real dead bodies in my arms
Felt their body turn cold, oh
Why we born in the first place
If this is how we gotta go? Damn.

God Complex - Alan Watts

8 Circuits of Consciousness - Leary & RAW

Thanks to Relaxed Focus for this great post and linking an excerpt of Neuropolitique by Timothy Leary and an article by RAW, I'll post the latter here too.

I, Robot
by Robert Anton Wilson
(Originally published in the July 3, 1977 issue of New Libertarian Weekly, p.4)

Fairness? Decency? How can you expect fairness or decency on a planet of sleeping people? --- Gurdjieff, 1918

Last year in Oui magazine, Dr. Timothy Leary and I published an article ghoulishly titled, "Brainwashing: How to Fold, Spindle, and Mutilate the Human Mind." I would like to summarize our basic points here, preparatory to a more general discussion of neurological relativism.
Human beings, Leary and I propose, are basically giant robots created by DNA to make more DNA. (So are all the other mutli-cellular organisms on this backward planet.)

Of course, there is nothing new about the robot theory of biology. The Sufis and yogis knew about it centuries before Pavlov, or even before Mark Twain wrote his stunningly prescient essay "Man, A Machine." Nonetheless, it is so patently offensive to human narcissism that almost everybody recoils from it "as the devil would from holy water."

(Incidentally, you can get a quick estimate of a person's intelligence by asking them how much of themselves is robotic. Those who say "not at all" or "less than 50%" are hopeless imbeciles, always. The few who say "about 99%" are worth talking to; they are quite intelligent. Dr. Leary, who is the freest human being I have ever known, estimates that he is 99.9999% robot.)

The circuitry of the human robot, like that of other primates, is wired to take imprints at crucial moments of what ethologists call "imprint vulnerability." These occur on a pre-programmed schedule; the bio-suvival imprint is taken as soon as the mother's breast is offered; the territorial imprint as soon as the infant is able to walk about, yell and generally meddle in family politics; the laryngeal imprint as soon as the DNA-RNA signals trigger the talking stage; the sexual imprint at the first orgasm or mating experience, etc.

For literary convenience, we can think of the bio-survival imprint as Will and personify it as Scotty, brooding over the life-support and weapons technology. The territorial or emotional imprint, then, is Ego, or Dr. McCoy, the mammalian moralist. The laryngeal (symbolic) imprint is Mind, or Mr. Spock, the linear computer. And the sexual imprint is Adult Personality, or Captain Kirk, the father-protector.

Each of these imprints exists in the nervous system as a separate circuit or network. Any one of them can be kinky or odd, since the biocomputer imprints literally anything at the moments of imprint vulnerability.

A kinky bio-survival imprint may take such forms as anxiety, phobias or outright autism. A weird territorial-emotional imprint can be overly submissive, in which case the subject suffers, or overy dominant, in which case those unfortunate enough to associate with the subject do the suffering. A bizarre symbolic is, at this stage of evolution, the norm: almost every society educates the young for stupidity, dogmatism, intolerance and inability to learn anything new. As for the sexual imprints: everybody can see how compulsive abd weird everybody else's sexual imprint is; but alas, few can see that about themselves.

Brainwashing consists of creating artificial imprint vulnerability. You can do this either with drugs, or with prolonged isolation ("sensory deprivation"), or with terror (new imprints are always taken at the point of near-death, which is what most shamanic initiations rely on), or with a combination of drugs, isolation and terror.

The priests, pedagogues and shamans of all tribes and nations know enough, on the empirical level, about imprint vulnerability. All the crucial transition stages of life are surrounded by ritual, repetition and redundance - and frequenty with terror and isolation, and sometimes (in many societies) with drugs - to ensure that the local belief systems ans "morals" are heavily imprinted.

In short, the process of acculturalization is itself a brainwashing process.

Thus, the Samoan lives inside an imprinted Samoan reality; the German inside a German reality; an American inside an American reality. That's why a crowd of Americans are immediately recognizable in a street full of Turks or Hindus or even in a street of Englishmen or Irish. The naive chauvinism of the traveler who says "all foreigners are crazy" is actually quite valid; indeed, foreigners are crazy; the chauvinist merely lacks the insight to realize that his imprint group is crazy, too.

(As mentioned in previous columns, there are four other imprints, intended for future evolution off this planet and therefore only appearing rarely thus far in our history. These are the neurosomatic imprint, which we call Hedonic Engineering or the art of staying high; the neuroelectric imprint, or Magick; the neurogenetic imprint or DNA-conciousness; and the metaphysiological imprint, or "cosmic consiousness.")

Leary's idea of Intelligence-squared thus does not mean merely an increase in linear I.Q. on the third circuit. (Super-Spockism.) It means learning how to "brainwash" yourself; that is, to selectively tune, focus and serially reimprint all 8 circuits, beginning with as many of them as you can handle. (It is unwise, for instance, to attempt any 6th circuit psionic operations until great skill has been attained in self-metaprogramming the bio-survival, emotional, mental, sexual and Hedonic circuits.)

The plain fact is that most bio-survival anxieties are phobic and irrational, most emotional games silly and infantile (they are imprinted in infancy, after all), most mental sets rigid and nearly blind, most sex-roles as robotic as the mating dance of the penguin. At the same time, the ultimate sophistication is to avoid laying your own bio-survival needs, emotional cons, belief systems and sex games on others, which elementary courtesy is really what libertarianism is all about.

Unfortunately, libertarianism as a third-circuit idea (laryngeal signal) has no more effect in this backward planet than any other third-circuit reality-map. The other circuits continue their robotic trips, anchored in the neurochemistry of the imprinting process. Intelligence-squared, or self-metaprogramming, allows libertarianism to become more than an idea. This is what the Neurological Revolution means; this is what the Great Work of the alchemists aimed for. When the robot awakens and becomes a self-programmer, it can easily have all the goals promised by the alchemists: The Stone of the Wise, the Medicine of Metals, True Wiseom and perfect Happiness. All of those traditional terms are metaphors for the awakening of Intelligence-squared.

Usually, people are libertarians or fascists or snake-worshippers or Republicans or nudists or whatever, because of conditioned networks that fit smoothly into their imprints. People achieve Intelligence-squared, and become effective libertarians, only if they work for it.

Terence Mckenna: DMT trip in dreams and the future

"...I mean that's language, and it's magic, and we have a fascination then, we also paint, then we sculpt, then we write, then we create electronic databases, then film, television, clearly what we want to do is we want to communicate visually, and these things are saying: "there's a way to do it, do it," and I don't understand do we all have to be loaded on DMT all the time? Can you learn to do this? The gentleman who asked about dreams, here's a piece of information that is critical in this jiggsaw puzzle:

If you have smoked DMT at any time in the past, it is possible to have a dream, in which people are running around and you're checked into the Mars hotel and the luggage is lost and this and that, and in the middle of all that someone drags out a little glass pipe and hands it to you, and it will happen, it will happen in the dream.

Not a memory, not a simulacrum, it will really happen. Well, to me that's an amazing piece of data, because what it's saying is you can do it on the natch (without use of drugs). You may have to be dead asleep but still, on the natch this can be done. And the lucid dreamers, the bio-feedback people, the people who claim these wonderful things that you can do with sleep and dream and programming, I challenge them, teach people to have DMT dreams in their sleep, and then let's figure out how to drag that puppy out into the light. So we can do it at will, on the natch.

I think and there's scientific evidence to support this, remember I said DMT is in the human brain. Well it concentrates in the human cerebro spinal fluid on a 24 hour cycle and it reaches its peak of concentration between 3 and 4 am in most people, that's when the deep REM sleep is happening, when you give somebody DMT, they lay back, they close their eyes and the way you the guide, the sitter, I don't like the word guide, you the sitter, the way you can tell that they're getting off is their eyes dart wildly behind their closed eyelids, it means they're in REM, they're in REM sleep, they've been immediately shoved into deep dreaming.

So I believe that what DMT is doing in normal human metabolism is it mediates the descent, the spiral descent into dream and that every single night we are reuinted with the boundriless oceanic mystery of being that we are so frantic about in waking life and so distant from. And that if we could in fact just engineer a drug that would allow us to remain fully conscious as we drift deeper into dream we would need no other drug or substance, that that's where we want to go, and I think that's where history is headed.

What the archaic revival is about is a revivification of the aboriginal dreamtime, we are going to live in the imagination, we are preparing to decamp from 3-dimensional space, I mean yes the earth is the cradle of the human race, but you don't stay in the cradle forever you know. And it's something like going into dream, it's something like taking the hypertechnical virtual reality internet head of the snake, and inserting the shamanic late-paleolithic ecstatic orgiastic tail of the snake, and then you have the oroboric completion. Then you have the quintessence and the work is complete and history ends and we live then in the light of the stone made manifest."

from Terence McKenna - Rap Dancing into the 3rd millenium

Alan Watts: Leaves Are Not Green

Ken Wilber - Lucid Dreams and Causal Body

Link to Dedroidify Page on Integral Theory

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward

Geez I found this hard to watch, so preachy...

Robert Anton Wilson on Anarchism

Contractual, not obligatory.

Terence Mckenna - The World is Code

"The universe is a puzzle, life is a problem to be solved, it's a conundrum, it's not what it appears to be. There are doors, there are locks and keys, there are levels, and if you get it right, somehow it will give way to something extremely unexpected."

"If you thought much about telepathy you might have naively assumed that telepathy is you hearing me think, that isn't what it is, telepathy is you seeing what I mean. And it's not something which happens dramatically, it is a function of eloquence."

"If the world is code, then it can be hacked. It permits magick because it says, behind the laws of physics, is a deeper level and if you can reach that deeper level, you can make changes there."

Robert Anton Wilson: On Philosophy and Normality

The normal is that which none of us quite are.



"PSYCON, that's the committee for surrealist investigation of claims of the 'normal'."

A 10.000 Dollar reward to anybody who can produce an average human being or a normal day!

Namkhai Norbu - Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light (teaser)

Dreams have also inspired important scientific advances. Perhaps the most celebrated of these is the discovery of the molecular structure of benzene by Kekule. His account: "My mind was elsewhere... I turned the chair to the fireplace, and fell half asleep. Again the atoms gamboled in front of my eyes. Smaller groups this time kept mostly in the background. My mind’s eye, trained by repeated visions of the same sort, now distinguished larger formations of various shapes. Long chains... everything in movement, twisting and turning like snakes. And look what was that? One snake grabbed its own tail, and mockingly the shape whirled before my eyes. I awoke as if struck by lightning; this time again I spent the rest of the night working out its consequences."

The Russian chemist Mendelev discovered the periodic table method of classifying elements according to atomic weight while dreaming. Elias Howe completed his invention of the sewing machine while dreaming. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity came to him partly in a dream.

Other dream-inspired creations include literary masterpieces such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, Voltaire’s Candide, “The Raven” by Poe and Ulysses by James Joyce. Robert Louis Stevenson was able to formulate stories while dreaming, which he later wrote down and published. Even some popular music compositions by Billy Joel and Paul McCartney have come in dreams.

Such unusual dreams notwithstanding, our society as a whole has lost touch with the art of dreaming. Recently, however, a widespread interest in the creative power of dreams has surfaced, emerging from several divergent disciplines, including science, western depth psychology, the increasing awareness of native cultures, and religion.

from the preface by Michael Katz

'Namkhai Norbu - Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light' is a 65 page book edited and introduced by Michael Katz.

Some golden quotes from Terence Mckenna

So you know what we have to do is stop looking for leadership from the top, because the least among us make their way into those positions of power, I mean you can see that now, those guys are not fit to throw guts down to a bear, any of them.
So what we have to do is knock off this fantasy of being citizens inside a democratic state, I mean, what we are, are the propagandized masses inside a fascist dictatorship, and what people have to do is begin to form affinity groups, get their own ship together, get their own goals defined, and then move out into it and do it, it's not gonna come from the policy council of the republic or democratic party, that's just silly to think that.


The mushroom said to me once, it said: "If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan. Because there are only planners and plannees. So what do you wanna do?"


I once said to the mushroom, why me? Why are you telling me all this stuff? And it without hesitation, it said: because you don't believe anything, you don't believe anything." Belief makes it impossible to believe the opposite proposition, and that means you just truncated your freedom. No matter how noble the belief you have taken on. You have just rejected and limited your ability to believe other things.

My favorite story in the gospels, and this shows you how ... I am, my favorite story in the gospels, is the story of the apostel Thomas. Because you will recall that after the crucifixion - this is a good place to end, this is an alchemical story - after the crucifixion Christ appeared to the apostels in the upper room in Jerusalem, 40 days after, and Thomas was not there. I don't know where he was, somewhere, they sent him out for sandwiches or something. Anyway he came back, and they said "the master was with us" and he said "come oooon you guys," he said, "you been smoking too much red lab we brought in 3 weeks ago," and they said "no no the master was with us," and he said, "unless I put my hand into the wound, I will not believe it."
So then time passed, and then Christ came again to the apostels, and Thomas was among them on this second get go, and Christ walked in and kicked off his overshoes and looked around the room, and he said "Thomas, come forward, put your hand into the wound," which he did, which he did.
Now, people have different interpretations of this story, my interpretation of it ... is that alone among all human beings, in all of human history, only one person was ever so priviliged as to be allowed to touch the resurrected body, it was Thomas the Doubter, who was allowed to touch the resurrection body because he didn't believe, and so if you want to touch the resurrection body, be very careful with where you commit your belief, keep your eyes open, stay smart, take it easy...

Taken from Hermeticism and Alchemy
(highly recommended talk, even if it's about everything and not just the title)