Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within is a feature length documentary which invites the viewer to rediscover an enchanted cosmos in the modern world by awakening to the divine within. The film examines the re-emergence of archaic techniques of ecstasy in the modern world by weaving a synthesis of ecological and evolutionary awareness, electronic dance culture, and the current pharmacological re-evaluation of entheogenic compounds.
Within a narrative framework that imagines consciousness itself to be evolving, Entheogen documents the emergence of techno-shamanism in the post-modern world that frames the following questions: How can a renewal of ancient initiatory rites of passage alleviate our ecological crisis? What do trance dancing and festivals celebrating unbridled artistic expression speak to in our collective psyche? How do we re-invent ourselves in a disenchanted world from which God has long ago withdrawn? Entheogen invites the viewer to consider that the answers to these questions lie within the consciousness of each and every human being, and are accessible if only we give ourselves permission to awaken to the divine within. ... more »
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Friday, December 28
'Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within', a new feature length documentary
by
Ron
on December 28, 2007 10:41PM (PST)
Thursday, December 27
'The Holographic Universe', by Michael Talbot
by
Ron
on December 27, 2007 12:29PM (PST)
As part of my preparation for an intensive training I'm starting in January on the Big Island of Hawaii with the innovative physicist Nassim Haramein, I'm now reading the book The Holographic Universe, by Michael Talbot. I recommend this book.
...The idea that consciousness and life (and indeed all things) are ensembles enfolded throughout the universe has an equally dazzling flip side. Just as every portion of a hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole. This means that if we knew how to access it we could find the Andromeda galaxy in the thumbnail of our left Hand. we could also find Cleopatra meeting Caesar for the first time, for in principle the whole past and implications for the whole future are also enfolded in each small region of space and time. ... more » Tuesday, December 25
"Al-Kemi: A Memoir"
by
Kim
on December 25, 2007 08:59PM (PST)
Al-Kemi recounts the story of the eighteen months that Andrew VandenBroeck, a painter and writer, spent in daily contact with the remarkable French philosopher, hermetist, and Egyptologist, R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz (1887-1961). Structured like a mystery, and distilled in the crucible of memory for fifteen years, Al-Kemi provides a passionately felt, personal, and dramatic introduction to the startling world of this contemporary alchemist (from back cover).
... Before reaching these particulars, it must be known that de Lubicz held the traditional conception of an esoteric science and its transmission: true knowledge is inaccessible to the rational mind. This epistemological tenet caused his writings to be spiked with metaphor, innuendo, and at times, obscurity. He mistrusted the written word, disliked writing because truth was inevitably degraded when committed to paper through a profane language. This attitude most clearly ordinates the lineage along which he inscribes himself by his premises and his results. His low regard for “demotic” writing as a means of truth-communication made personal contact with him invaluable, for he had no such reservations concerning the spoken word, the word of gesture. Thus he actively believed in oral transmission of a kind of knowledge best called “gnosis,” [3] and in private, I always found him accessible to leisurely conversation on the most exalted topics. As our relationship soon proved more than casual, his information became increasingly direct, in contrast to his written expression which often presents problems of meaning and referent. more »
To such an epistemology, personal contact is the kingpin of communication, and I found out later to what extent his frame of reference was tailored to his correspondent. ... Tuesday, December 18
"Code Name God" – Science Could Support Spiritual Beliefs
by
Ron
on December 18, 2007 04:33PM (PST)
Dr. Mani Bhaumik is the co-inventor of the laser technology that made Lasik eye surgery possible. His contributions to science merited the rare dual election as a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, while his successes won him a spot on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Eventually he discovered that :happiness is an inside job," and immersed himself in study of the hidden relationship between science and spirituality and the integration of mind and matter. He has published over fifty papers in professional journals and maintains a lively correspondence with other physicists around the world. His alma mater, Indian Institute of Technology, bestowed him with an honorary D.Sc. degree for lifetime academic achievements. Dr. Bhaumik is the founder of the Mani Bhaumik Educational Foundation, which currently provides full scholarships to sixty seven extremely bright but underprivileged Indian young men and women to enable them to earn a university degree in science, engineering or medicine. His US Foundation, Cosmogenics, is set up to foster research in consciousness and healing as well as mind/body integration. ... more »
Thursday, December 13
The Spiritual Tradition at the Roots of Western Civilization
by
Ron
on December 13, 2007 12:02PM (PST)
Here's another remarkable article from Vol 1, No 2 (2007) of SCIY Editor Ulrich J. Mohroff's superb new journal: Anti-Matters. I'll soon post another article from a different source to conclude this series re the roots of western civilization. (Hint: the original meaning of the word "philosophy" was "love of Sophia," the Goddess of Wisdom.) ~ ronjon
So many of us today are concerned about the extinction of all the species that the western world is wiping out. But there's hardly anyone who notices the most extraordinary threat of all: the extinction of our knowledge of what we are. Perhaps the simplest way of describing the situation would be to say that, two and a half thousand years ago in the West, we were given a gift and in our childishness we threw away the instructions for how to use it. We felt we knew what we were playing with. And, as a result, western civilization may soon be nothing but an experiment that failed. Even in these modern times, what half-heartedly is described as mystical perception is always pushed to the periphery. When it's not denied it's held at arm's length out there at the margins of society. But what we haven't been told is that a spiritual tradition lies at the very roots of western civilization. ... more »
Introducing SCIY Editor Ulrich J. Mohroff's superb new journal: "Anti-Matters"
by
Ron
on December 13, 2007 03:00AM (PST)
I'm introducing here SCIY Editor Ulrich J. Mohroff's superb new journal: Anti-Matters, which I highly recommend reading. I'm taking the liberty of reproducing below the Table of Contents of Vol 1, No 2 (2007). ~ ronjon
The following is from Ulrich J. Mohrhoff's "Preface to the Second Issue": The release date of the last yearly issue of AntiMatters — the second issue in the case of this first volume — is November 24th. On this day in 1926, Sri Aurobindo arrived at a turning point in his yoga. According to Sri Aurobindo, there is a highest mental plane, to which he gave the name “overmind.” The Isha Upanishad refers to it as a “brilliant golden lid” obstructing the passage from mind to supermind. For years Sri Aurobindo had striven to negotiate this passage. Success came on that day in 1926, when the light and power of the overmind descended into his physical being. Subsequently Sri Aurobindo withdrew from outer contacts to concentrate on the more difficult task of enabling the supermind to descend, take possession of his body, and for the first time act on matter directly, rather than through mental intermediaries. Here is part of a conversation of the Mother with Satprem (Mother’s Agenda, August 2, 1961): ... more »
Buried in the Sands of Time: The Gospel according to Thomas
by
Ron
on December 13, 2007 02:00AM (PST)
The following article is from Vol 1, No 2 (2007) of SCIY Editor Ulrich J. Mohroff's superb new journal: Anti-Matters, which I'll introduce in the next SCIY article. ~ ronjon
The question we have to consider in this essay is whether Jesus, regarded as the founder of the Christian religion, actually believed in the God of the Jews or in any God in Heaven and thus divided reality into two worlds. The writers of the four gospels seem to think he did, and the churches both Catholic and Protestant, deriving their doctrines largely from these gospels, follow this view. The gospel writers were naturally influenced by the popular Jewish religious sentiment of the time as well as by prevalent pagan Greek and Egyptian eschatological beliefs. Their writings reflect the feelings and mirror the beliefs of the ordinary man the soldier, merchant, artisan, slave living in a world of differentiation, division, hostility and discord. To the simple man whose mental capacities denied him a wider, more penetrating vision, this division was the reality, the truth. Did Jesus also subscribe to this idea of the world, or is there proof to the contrary? Was he a dualist, a believer in two realities and two worlds: this one here, and another above or was he a monist, a man to whom reality was one unitary, organic whole? ...Most Christians are acquainted with those sayings in John's gospel which explain reality from a monistic point of view, such as the famous John 17:22: "And the glory (of oneness) which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, as we are one." But in addition to these famous words there is a whole collection of monistic sayings of Jesus which the church literally dropped under the table. What kind of work is this Gospel according to Thomas, which is officially regarded as "apocryphal," unauthentic, not admitted to the New Testament canon? ... more » Monday, December 3
Blue Brain Project Moves Onto Whole Brain, Really?
by
Ron
on December 3, 2007 02:40PM (PST)
"An ambitious project to create an accurate computer model of the brain has reached an impressive milestone," writes today's Technology Review. "Scientists in Switzerland working with IBM researchers have shown that their computer simulation of the neocortical column, arguably the most complex part of a mammal's brain, appears (emphasis added) to behave like its biological counterpart. By demonstrating that their simulation is realistic, the researchers say, these results suggest that an entire mammal brain could be completely modeled within three years, and a human brain within the next decade..."
The article goes onto to share the response of Christof Koch from Caltech who calls the 10 year target of modeling the human brain "ridiculous." Despite the fantastic progress to date I agree with Christof on this. ... more »
Taking Science on Faith, by Paul Davies (NYT)
by
Ron
on December 3, 2007 12:14PM (PST)
Thanks to RY Deshpande for referring this article.
SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term "doubting Thomas" well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue. The problem with this neat separation into "non-overlapping magisteria," as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn't be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified. The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental rules on which nature runs. The laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, the laws that regulate the world within the atom, the laws of motion — all are expressed as tidy mathematical relationships. But where do these laws come from? And why do they have the form that they do? ... more » Monday, November 19
What I'm optimistic about (and not), by Ray Kurzweil
by
Ron
on November 19, 2007 07:34PM (PST)
Optimism exists on a continuum in between confidence and hope. Let me take these in order.
I am confident that the acceleration and expanding purview of information technology will solve within twenty years the problems that now preoccupy us. -- Consider energy. We are awash in energy (10,000 times more than required to meet all our needs falls on Earth) but we are not very good at capturing it. That will change with the full nanotechnology-based assembly of macro objects at the nano scale, controlled by massively parallel information processes, which will be feasible within twenty years. Even though our energy needs are projected to triple within that time, we'll capture that .0003 of the sunlight needed to meet our energy needs with no use of fossil fuels, using extremely inexpensive, highly efficient, lightweight, nano-engineered solar panels, and we'll store the energy in highly distributed (and therefore safe) nanotechnology-based fuel cells. Solar power is now providing 1 part in 1,000 of our needs, but that percentage is doubling every two years, which means multiplying by 1,000 in twenty years. Almost all the discussions I've seen about energy and its consequences (such as global warming) fail to consider the ability of future nanotechnology-based solutions to solve this problem. This development will be motivated not just by concern for the environment but also by the $2 trillion we spend annually on energy. This is already a major area of venture funding. Consider health. As of just recently, we have the tools to reprogram biology. This is also at an early stage but is progressing through the same exponential growth of information technology, which we see in every aspect of biological progress. The amount of genetic data we have sequenced has doubled every year, and the price per base pair has come down commensurately. The first genome cost a billion dollars. The National Institutes of Health is now starting a project to collect a million genomes at $1,000 apiece. We can turn genes off with RNA interference, add new genes (to adults) with new reliable forms of gene therapy, and turn on and off proteins and enzymes at critical stages of disease progression. We are gaining the means to model, simulate, and reprogram disease and aging processes as information processes. In ten years, these technologies will be 1,000 times more powerful than they are today, and it will be a very different world, in terms of our ability to turn off disease and aging. ... more » Wednesday, November 7
Beyond the Central Dogma of Physics, by SCIY Editor Ulrich Mohrhoff
by
Ron
on November 7, 2007 03:28PM (PST)
...In physics, too, there is a Central Dogma, which I have dubbed ‘the evolutionary paradigm’. It is the notion that physics can be neatly divided into a kinematical part, which concerns the description of a physical system at an instant of time, and a dynamical part, which concerns the evolution of a physical system from earlier to later times.
The laws of physics are correlation laws. In classical physics, states are correlated deterministically, so earlier states can be used to predict later states (and later states can be used to retrodict earlier states). Quantum physics correlates measurement outcomes statistically, so earlier measurement outcomes can be used to predict the probabilities of the possible outcomes of later measurements (and later measurement outcomes can be used to retrodict the probabilities of the possible outcomes of earlier measurements). Because the quantum-mechanical correlation laws are genuinely probabilistic, they may not conform to the evolutionary paradigm. And they don’t. For one thing, the time-symmetry of the laws of physics is at odds with the unidirectionality of the evolutionary paradigm, which has its roots in a physically unwarranted projection into the world of the way we perceive the world. (This casts doubt on the appropriateness of the evolutionary paradigm even for classical physics.) For another thing, the interpretation of a quantum state as an evolving physical state (rather than as a mere computational device) gives rise to no end of pseudo-questions (and gratuitous answers), such as the notorious questions of where and when and how (and with respect to which basis) the wave function collapses ... more » Sunday, November 4
Philosophy and religion, between exchange and tension: by Mohammed Arkoun
by
Ron
on November 4, 2007 05:46PM (PST)
“Islamizing” modernity instead of modernizing Islam – preposterous! worries Professor Mohammed Arkoun. A refuge in poor countries, a rejection of “tele-techno-scientific reasoning” in rich countries, religiosity is spreading in the world at the expense of humanist values and philosophical thinking. ... more »
Wednesday, October 31
The Universe in a Single Atom, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama
by
Ron
on October 31, 2007 11:56PM (PDT)
I'm reading this book now and am quite impressed by it. Highly recommended!
~ ronjon  I have often wondered about the interface of key Buddhist concepts and major scientific ideas. This book is the result of that long period of thinking and of the intellectual journey of a Buddhist monk from Tibet into the world of bubble chambers, particle accelerators, and fMRI. ... more » Monday, October 29
Which Came First: The Chicken or the Big Bang?
by
Ron
on October 29, 2007 11:16PM (PDT)
"...some of the currently fashionable theories... are those involving multiple universes or multiple dimensions. ... Exceedingly popular among quantum physicists and string theorists, these "multiverse" ideas attempt to account for our universe's life-friendliness by proposing that it just happens to be one of billions of other universes that didn't turn out so well. After all, in a "multiversal" ocean of zillions of infinitely varied soap bubbles, they reason, there would have to be at least one with the precise qualities necessary to give rise to living beings like ourselves, and of course, that's the one we're in.
Still other scientists, arguing on behalf of what's known as the anthropic principle—the general idea that our universe's life-friendliness is not a random accident—find this kind of speculation absurd. "To be blunt, in my view, it's just giving up," cosmologist James N. Gardner, author of "Biocosm," told WIE. "It represents a failure to recognize that just as the appearance of a seemingly well-tuned natural world constituted a vital set of clues for Darwin to follow, so, too, does the appearance of a seemingly well-tuned cosmos constitute a vital set of clues that should be pursued." Arizona State University physicist Paul Davis agrees. In his latest book, "Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life," he argues that most theories about a multiverse simply represent a failure of the imagination. He much prefers two alternatives: 1) the idea that there is some kind of implicit life force or evolutionary impulse guiding the emergence of life and consciousness in our universe, or 2) what's been described as Davies' "self-creating universe in a teleological backward causation" theory. He proposes that the natural laws forged so precisely fourteen billion years ago in the big bang happened to favor the eventual emergence of life because our existence as living beings, here and now, actually fine-tuned them to be that way—retroactively. "Crazy though the idea may seem at first," Davies explains, "there is in fact no fundamental impediment to a mechanism that allows later events to influence earlier events." Invoking arcane mysteries of quantum physics such as entanglement, nonlocality, and the idea that conscious observation plays an essential role in "collapsing" quantum potentials into concrete reality, Davies contends that the presence of conscious observers today is no accident. Our existence, he says, is due to the ability of conscious observations to ripple forward and backward in time, influencing even the quantum fluctuations that took place in the initial nanoseconds of the big bang itself—a time when the laws of physics were still susceptible to subtle tweaking. "If the conditions necessary for life are somehow written into the universe at the big bang," Davies told "New Scientist" last fall, "there must be some sort of two-way link." In other words, the universe may be continually pulling itself up by its own bootstraps—from the future to the past—as a self-correcting, self-contained, and very living system. ... more » Monday, October 22
God pent in the mire and Technocapitalism
by
Ron
on October 22, 2007 04:26PM (PDT)
I'm reposting here an important comment that was originally posted by RY Deshpande on Tue 18 Sep 2007. Comments are invited.
Can technocapitalism be an opportunity for shaping the future of mankind in any decisive way? Ronjon’s query (12 January 2007) to this effect follows from Sri Aurobindo’s letter about his poem The Life Heavens: God is pent in the mire, but that very fact imposes a necessity to break through that prison to a consciousness rising to the heights. This raises the question whether the rise of technocapiltalism could be interpreted as a disguised opportunity that "imposes a necessity to break through that prison..."? This effectively amounts to asking the question if by the means and methods of technocapitalism, consciousness could rise to the heights. ... more »
The Human Cycle, by Sri Aurobindo
by
Ron
on October 22, 2007 03:59PM (PDT)
This is the first of a series of selections from Sri Aurobindo's book: The Human Cycle. Comments are invited.
Modern Science, obsessed with the greatness of its physical discoveries and the idea of the sole existence of Matter, has long attempted to base upon physical data even its study of Soul and Mind and of those workings of Nature in man and animal in which a knowledge of psychology is as important as any of the physical sciences. Its very psychology founded itself upon physiology and the scrutiny of the brain and nervous system. It is not surprising therefore that in history and sociology attention should have been concentrated on the external data, laws, institutions, rites, customs, economic factors and developments, while the deeper psychological elements so important in the activities of a mental, emotional, ideative being like man have been very much neglected. This kind of science would explain history and social development as much as possible by economic necessity or motive,—by economy understood in its widest sense. ... more » Friday, October 19
Monks and Scientists to Conduct Research on Mind-Body Links
by
Ron
on October 19, 2007 11:11AM (PDT)
The Dalai Lama has always taught enlightenment — but what few people know is he says that path includes lessons in modern science. -- And Emory [University, USA] will now assist Tibetans to realize His Holiness’s vision.
“It has been His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s lifelong vision to find a way to converge spirituality and science,” said Geshe Lobsan Tenzin Negi, chair of the Emory-Tibet partnership. Next summer, faculty including religion professor John Dunne and biology professor Alexander Escobar will journey to the Tibetan exile community in Dharamsala, India, to educate Buddhist monks and nuns about modern science. ... more » Tuesday, October 16
The Global Consciousness Project (EGG)
by
Ron
on October 16, 2007 01:35PM (PDT)
The Global Consciousness Project, also called the EGG Project, is an international, multidisciplinary collaboration of scientists, engineers, artists and others. This website introduces methods, technology, and empirical results under the "Scientific Work" menu below, and gives background, interpretations, and implications under "Aesthetic View".
We have been collecting data from a global network of random event generators since August, 1998. The network has grown to about 65 host sites around the world running random colors per egg per sec custom software that reads the output of physical random number generators and records a 200-bit trial sum once every second, continuously over months and years. The data are transmitted over the internet to a server in Princeton, NJ, USA, where they are archived for later analysis. Individual data create a random tapestry of color. The dot below indicates their global coherence. Our purpose is to examine subtle correlations that reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world. We have learned that when millions of us share intentions and emotions the GCP/EGG network shows correlations. We can interpret this as evidence for participation in a growing global consciousness. It suggests we have the capability and responsibility for conscious evolution. ... more » Monday, October 8
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