Phil Jackson: The "Zen Master"

Phil Jackson is the current head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers. His reputation was established as head coach of the Chicago Bulls from 1989 through 1998; during his tenure, Chicago won six NBA titles. His next team, the Los Angeles Lakers, won three consecutive NBA titles from 2000-2002, and another in 2009, giving him 10 NBA titles as a coach, surpassing the record 9 he previously shared with Red Auerbach.

Jackson is known for his use of Tex Winter's triangle offense as well as a holistic approach to coaching that is influenced by Eastern philosophy, earning him the nickname "Zen Master". (Jackson cites Robert Pirsig's book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as one of the major guiding forces in his life.) He also applies Native American spiritual practices as documented in his book "Sacred Hoops."

Motivational Techniques

One of Jackson's many accomplishments is that he succeeds like no other in keeping the ego's of superstars - like Michael Jordan, Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant - in check. He uses an array of motivational techniques for that. With the Chicago Bulls, Jackson sometimes replaced the training by a meditation session. Still he gives players specially chosen books for them to read during the long travels in the NBA.

The famous 'triangle offense', Jackson's offensive system, leaves the players a lot of freedom. The triangle doesn't require players to run into tight, studied patterns, but is a game of nuance, where attackers continuously react to the positions of their defenders and the movements of their teammates. It's a system that requires a lot of maturity from the executioners, for if a superstar - read: Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant - goes it alone too much, the triangle blocks.

Along with being called the "Zen Master," Jackson is known as the master of mind games. In the Laker film room before the 2000 playoffs, Jackson displayed images of Edward Norton's character from the movie American History X, who has a bald head and a tattoo of a swastika, alternating with photos with Sacramento's white, shaved-headed and tattooed point guard, Jason Williams. Jackson then displayed pictures of Adolf Hitler alternately appearing with Sacramento coach Rick Adelman. When Rick Adelman learned of this, he openly questioned Jackson's motivational techniques saying Jackson had "crossed the line." Nevertheless, the Lakers went on to win the series and the championship.

In addition, in the 2001 NBA Finals against the Philadelphia 76ers, Jackson had Tyronn Lue, a player on the Lakers team who was comparable in size and height to Sixers star Allen Iverson, wear a sock on his arm during Lakers practice to simulate Iverson's use of a compression arm sleeve as part of his regular gametime attire. Philadelphia media considered this to be a mind game tactic of Jackson's, but the main idea was to simulate what a game against Iverson is like, right down to the tattoos and cornrows (which Lue also had).

Kozmikon: Bill banning forced identity-chip implants clears House

Check this at Kozmikon:

HARRISBURG - Invasion of privacy is an issue that really gets under State Rep. Babette Josephs' skin.

That's why the Philadelphia Democrat introduced a bill, passed unanimously last week by the House, that would ban the forced implantation of computer chips in humans.

Conjuring Orwellian images, Josephs worries the identification devices - the size of a grain of rice - could lead to a real-life Big Brother nightmare.

"I'm doing, I think, what the legislature does too little of," she said. "This is a problem on the horizon, and I want to address it before it becomes a societal disgrace."

...
Moul amended Josephs' bill to allow chips to be implanted by court order. The bill also would allow the chips to be implanted in Guantanamo Bay detainees who end up in Pennsylvania.

"Terrorists could take that ankle bracelet off with a saw and strap it to a dog and let them run around," Moul said. "We need to know if these people are returning to the war to fight against America."

"The only terrorists I know of are the people trying to get humans implanted with microchips..." Tommy

Konkrete Junkyard: They Don't

Following this, check this at Konkrete Junkyard.




2pac - They Don't Give A Fuck About Us

The Eye of DS9

Botox Parties, Michael Jackson, and the Disillusioned Transhumanist

with Christopher Dewdney, culture theorist and author of Last Flesh: Life in the Transhuman Era via Renegade Futurist

DEWDNEY: For me, Michael Jackson represents a sort of pioneer of self-transformation. Aside from whatever questionable personal motives are impelling him, he is using cosmetic surgery to achieve a look that is definitely transhuman. He has taken us by proxy to the frontier of what is currently possible with cosmetic surgery and he has even escaped the constraints of race by lightening his skin color. This last aspect is perhaps the most controversial and disconcerting, but the freedom to choose all your “inherited” features, both familial and racial, will probably become an intrinsic part of the transhuman era.
...
Yet when I asked a lot of “average” people — people who weren’t part of my circle — what they would do with the kind of self-transformative power that may perhaps be ours to wield, I was increasingly appalled. The jocks I talked to wanted to be bigger and stronger so they could beat the shit out of everybody else; the women wanted to morph into their ideal role models. I began to realize that what most people wanted was conformity; their “ideals” would turn us into a world of underachieving Nicole Kidmans and eight-foot Brad Pitts, identical cut-outs with no individualism.

My previous rather naive notion that biotechnology would free us from the tyranny of “normalcy,” that we could become anything we wanted, morph ourselves into elongated, blue-skinned, orange-haired, sixteen-fingered geniuses or perhaps flying ribbons of sensual bliss that performed acrobatic choreographies above the sunset, was a very utopian and, as it turns out, unpopular dream. Individuality or creative improvisation is the last thing most people want. So Botox is really a dreadful symptom of a new, radical mundanity enabled by biotechnology. And that’s disillusioning.

Read it all

Fuck someone uglier than you - Doug Stanhope

Fuck someone uglier than you - Doug Stanhope

Let's make the world a better place.

Antero Alli: The Eight-Circuit Brain (Excerpt from new book)

Reality Sandwich is featuring an excerpt from Antero Alli's new book The Eight-Circuit Brain: Navigational Strategies for the Energetic Body, forthcoming from Vertical Pool Publishing.

The Four Survival Circuits: Their Fixations and Anchors

Each of the first four "survival circuits" are driven by variations on the primary will to survive. Fixations refer to any concentration and investment of consciousness in specific events and experiences that activate a given circuit. Fixation also demonstrates how consciousness can become fixed, or "stuck," in one circuit over another by overemphasis. Anchors refer to how we know a circuit has been earned and integrated and is ready to serve as a stabilizing influence, or anchor, for absorbing and integrating the shock from its higher overtone function (1 & 5, 2 & 6, 3 & 7, 4 & 8; more on this later).

C-1 Physio-Biological Intelligence; the will to survive fixations: food, shelter, self-preservation, material goods, safety and security.

Anchor: degree of confidence earned and maintained to assure physical survival.

C-2 Emotional-Territorial Intelligence; the will to power fixations: self-defense, territoriality, status, ego-strength, emotional honesty.

Anchor: degree of emotional confidence earned and maintained to assure personal worth.

C-3 Symbolic-Conceptual Intelligence; the will to sanity fixations: thinking, problem solving, analysis, semantics, system theories.

Anchor: degree of mental confidence earned and maintained to assure peace of mind.

C-4 Social-Moral Intelligence; the will to socialize fixations: friendship, domestication, sexual rites and tribal identity, ethical codes, religions.

Anchor: degree of social confidence earned and maintained to assure sense of belonging.

The Four Post-Survival Circuits: Their Catalysts and Shocks

Catalysts refer to whatever triggers and stimulates the specific energy, or current, innate to a given circuit. Shocks refer to the specific impact these currents and energies have to stimulate growth and evolution in their corresponding survival circuits, i.e., 5 & 1, 6 & 2, 7 & 3, and 8 & 4.

C-5 Somatic Intelligence of Body Wisdom and Five Senses

Catalysts: whatever triggers the experience of rapture, communion with nature, tantra (yoga, meditation, ritual), charisma, second wind, falling in love (endorphins) and the expanding presence of being here now.

The Shocks of Ecstasy and Bliss (absence of suffering).

C-6 Intuitive-Psychic Intelligence of the Brain, Spine, & CNS.

Catalysts: whatever triggers the experience of the energetic body or aura, the second attention, intuition, clairvoyance and other psychic abilities, ritual magick, reality selection, direct perception of a relative nature of reality.

The Shocks of Uncertainty and Freedom (absence of falsely assumed certitudes and dogmas).

C-7 Mytho-Poetic Genetic Intelligence of DNA and the Planetary Entity.

Catalysts: whatever triggers the experience of ancestral and past life memories, autonomous archetypes, synchronicity, planetary (Gaia) mind, cosmic consciousness.

The Shocks of Indivisibility and Cosmic Unity (absence of dualistic consciousness).

C-8 Quantum-Nonlocal Intelligence of Subatomic interactions.

Catalysts: whatever triggers near death experience, out of body experiences, the dreambody/dreamtime continuum, communion with Void and the mysterious singularity at the heart of subatomic activity.

The Shocks of Death and Impermanence (absence of ego-identification and release from physical body).

Read more at Reality Sandwich. Hat tip to Posthuman Blues.

Remote Viewing via Lucid Dreaming or Astral Projection

NeuroSoup: Remote Viewing via Lucid Dreaming or Astral Projection

Robert Anton Wilson: Neurosemantic Grids (Circuit 3)

Robert Anton Wilson: Neurosemantic Grids (Circuit 3)

"Reality is the temporary resultant of continuous struggles between rival gangs of programmers. Those who control signals control humanity."
RAW - Prometheus Rising

Terence McKenna - Turbo-Charged Buddhism

Terence McKenna - Turbo-Charged Buddhism

"Take the Diamond Sutra for a spin."
Terence McKenna