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untasted said: I want you to write about the moon/stars.Though tempting to approach this poetically or scientifically or even astrologically, I think today, I'll run at this from some other angle. Metaphoric maybe? I don't know.
Anyhow, I was just thinking of light from stars which are of course suns that are some insane brazillions of miles away. I was also thinking of how when a fast-moving vehicle passes us, it is but a wonky blur we can't see clearly. However, if you're traveling the same speed as that vehicle it is perfectly clear. Thus, if one were to travel at the speed of light, light would then become clear to us.
Perhaps the world we see, the ephemeral world, is light blurring past us. What then, would the world and even ourselves look like if we could see it clearly for just a moment. As we know from physics and the wonderful Einstein, as we approach the speed of light, time slows and at the speed of light, time would stop. So, if seeing the world clearly coincides with time stopping, time vanishing, wouldn't that then mean that true reality, the universe and ourselves seen clearly, is the universe and ourselves without the effects of time. Time is the world blurring past us.
As Mircea Eliade, Philip K. Dick, and many many mystery schools and initiation traditions tell us, "Time can be overcome." Certain rituals and experiences result in a transcendence of time, showing the initiate their true selves, their selves outside of the constraints of time. Is this consciousness at the speed of light? A human soul moving like a star through space? Indeed, indeed.
"The higher 'soul,' or higher faculty as I would prefer to say, has absolutely no value in itself. Many who have attained it have remained imbeciles or worse; some have 'graduated' to higher imbecility, or fanaticism. The 'vegetative soul,' or oldest part of the brain, merely perceives simple sensations: hot or cold, damp or dry, seemingly safe or seemingly noxious. The 'animal' soul, or middle brain, perceives the body language of similar organisms and can, somewhat, predict their behavior from this. The 'human' soul, or later brain, perceives the structures of a simple, mechanical kind. The 'fourth soul,' or emerging brain, perceives the invisible web of connections between all things; but it is no more infallible than the rest of the brain, or the gut, or the liver, or the gonads. It merely works without effort, unlike the more primitive parts of the brain, which is why meanings seem to flow into us, when this is activated, and we forget that we are still creating the meanings. We imagine we are 'receiving revelations,' and hence we do not take responsibility or exercise any prudence or common sense. This is why there are so many 'holy fools' and so few holy wise men."-Robert Anton Wilson, The Widow's Son: The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, Volume Two
"Either he had seen God too soon or he had seen him too late. In any case, it had done him no good at all in terms of survival. Encountering the living God had not helped to equip him for tasks of ordinary endurance, which ordinary men, not so favored, handle."
A human being is a part of a whole, called by us "universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Everybody has experienced a sense of "losing oneself" in an activity--whether a movie, sport, sex, or meditation. Now, researchers have caught the brain in the act of losing "self" as it shuts down introspection during a demanding sensory task.
The researchers--led by Rafael Malach and Ilan Goldberg of the Weizmann Institute of Science reporting in the April 20, 2006, issue of Neuron--say their findings show that self-related function actually shuts down during such intense sensory tasks. Thus, an "observer" function in the brain does not appear to play an active part of in the production of our vivid sensory experiences. These findings go against common models of sensory experience that assume that there is some kind of "homunculus", or observer function in the brain that "looks at" sensory brain areas. Thus the finding, they said, has significance for understanding the basic nature of consciousness and perception.
My hair is the longest it's been since the winter of 1996. I've been too lazy to get it cut and I'm kinda digging the shag. It matches the beard quite nicely. It almost makes me wish I never got LASIK surgery; I could get cool hipster frames and look like this guy. You know, if the illustration had a beard, and I had an iPod.
I baked my first batch of cookies ever. Technically they were Ethan's cookies, his gift to his mom for Mother's Day. They were Ghirardelli chocolate chip, both semi-sweet and white chips. Some of them were too small and malformed, but the majority were normal-looking and they all tasted excellent nonetheless. Let this be a lesson to you: Don't judge a cookie by it's shape.
I'm starting to get anxious about the housewarming party next week. Many of our attendees are fellow LJers and almost all of them I have not met in person. There have been times in my life where I have been a social butterfly, however, the last few years, I've been much more selective and somehow this has translated into a bit of social anxiety. I'm sure it will be fine and I will be my normal, charming, charismatic self. But in the meantime, I think I'll worry I'm an idiot and have nothing to say and it will be a slow, awkward death.
In other news and other realms entirely, I wrote this as a comment in someone else's journal and liked it enough to replicate it here:
I think that's a common misconception. People, especially Buddhists reference "killing the ego" but the ego is the focus of consciousness, like the lens on a camera, the what the ego focuses on is our reality. Most people's egos are totally and rigidly focused on their selves, the little 'I' if you will. When we perform various consciousness-expanding exercises, be it meditation, psychedelics, ceremonial magick, yoga, tantra, etc... we learn to refocus our ego on larger and larger parts of ourselves. Thus it is not our ego that dies, but it's rigidity and narrow focus, leaving us not fractured or damaged, but fuller, more whole individuals.
So I guess that's about it for tonight. Another week begins soon. Another Monday. Another alarm clock. Morning traffic. Breakfast cereal. Phone calls. Lunch breaks. Evening traffic. Dinner. You know the routine.
Thanks.
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hoodedvoodoo for an hour and a half before his cellphone battery died. It was good to reconnect and share our mutual experiences of high weirdness. Writing, zombies, astrology, fru-fru new agers, orgone accumulators, cults, aliens, existentialism, and our wacky dreams were some of our varied topics."It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth."~John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
BASEL, Switzerland -- When Kevin Herbert has a particularly intractable programming problem, or finds himself pondering a big career decision, he deploys a powerful mind expanding tool -- LSD-25.
"It must be changing something about the internal communication in my brain. Whatever my inner process is that lets me solve problems, it works differently, or maybe different parts of my brain are used, " said Herbert, 42, an early employee of Cisco Systems who says he solved his toughest technical problems while tripping to drum solos by the Grateful Dead -- who were among the many artists inspired by LSD.
"When I'm on LSD and hearing something that's pure rhythm, it takes me to another world and into anther brain state where I've stopped thinking and started knowing," said Herbert who intervened to ban drug testing of technologists at Cisco Systems.
Herbert, who lives in Santa Cruz, California, joined 2,000 researchers, scientists, artists and historians gathered here over the weekend to celebrate the 100th birthday of Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD here in 1938. The centenarian received a congratulatory birthday letter from the Swiss president, roses and a spontaneous kiss from a young woman in the crowd.
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timeasmymeasurekrja
