12/05/2015
Giordano Bruno Books at Google Books.
Giordano Bruno: Philosopher Heretic
Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science: Broken Lives and Organizational Power
Essays on Giordano Bruno
Orson Welles, Volume 3: One-Man Band’ by Simon Callow
‘Orson Welles, Volume 3: One-Man Band’, by Simon Callow
Review by Christopher Silvester
One-Man Band shares its title with that of an unfinished Welles documentary film, a series of comic segments about life in Britain filmed between 1968 and 1971, and aptly evokes his career-long battle for freedom from studio control. This battle brought chaos, but a chaos that for his biographer “was often invigorating, life-affirming, liberating — even necessary”. Welles is best understood, Callow argues, not as a frustrated director who worked in that role far too infrequently but as a Romantic artist, “a force of nature, ablaze with energy”, unceasingly experimental, “always trying to storm the citadel of creativity” http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ee00d138-990e-11e5-9228-87e603d47bdc.html
12/04/2015
Marshall McLuhan Speaks Special Collection: Television News Is a New Mythic Form
Concept: Television news is a new mythic formWATCH THE VIDEO HERE.
[Wolfe]I think a hundred years from now historians, that’s assuming that the Chinese will have any interest our character or history, won’t look at the 1960s in the case of, say, the United States as the era of the war in Vietnam, of the moon shot or anything of that sort. I think it will be looked at in terms of what you refer to as the ground has changed, the way people have changed the their ways of living.
[McLuhan]We used to concentrate on figures and now the ground itself has become figure. The area of attention has shifted from the older characters to the ground. Now that includes audience. The audience has now become actor. Don’t you think this is a tendency as a result of developments in our time?
[Wolfe]Well, certainly Woodstock was a perfect example of it. Woodstock is probably the great, typical event of our times because …
[McLuhan]Instant city.
[Wolfe]It was set up. From the very beginning there was going to be a movie made of Woodstock. As it started out every one of us were paying our eighteen dollars for the weekend. Gradually, so many people came, they just abandoned that and let them all come in. But actually they should have paid them all eighteen dollars asthey came in because they became the show.
[McLuhan]Consider in that regard what we call coverage. Coverage now is no longer just on a single individual but on a whole complex action. In turn, don’t you think that in both Vietnam and in the North of Ireland that the audience wants to get into the action, that the coverage encourages the audience to get into the action? I have been told by reporters from the North of Ireland that when the news is not on, and the cameras are ready to go, the public is all out in the streets ready to go into action as soon as the cameras are.
[Wolfe]Yes, that’s marvelous.
[McLuhan]They all retire inside to watch the news, and then come outside to participate in covering the news and in acting it out themselves. Now I think the difference between hired actors and the public itself is tending to merge. This kind of unexpected flip happened in the Eichmann trial. The coverage pushes up the figure dramatically into heroic dimensions but at the same time involves the audience so completely in the process of his action that it begins to feel far more guilty than he did. He appears merely as a person carrying out orders - the orders of the community. He was a welladjusted, nice guy who was doing what had to be done, according to the audience command, the audience being so involved in this process that it now begins to feel like a villain. Therefore, they want to cut that show right out of their lives.
[Wolfe]Do you think this explains the really strange fascination that Arthur Bremer had with Sirhan Sirhan? Bremer obviously looked at Sirhan as some kind of heroic figure. He wasn’t this poor, helpless, useless human being who had done this desperate thing, certainly not in Arthur Bremer’s eyes.
[McLuhan]No, and again, he had made the news. Sirhan had made the news. Now this you can take in every sense of the word as having gotten into the news, having been created into a vast figure by the news. “Making the news” is a very strange phrase, but the media themselves can now create events that are so much bigger than people, so much bigger than the audience, that it really is a new mythic form.
[Wolfe]I would really like to run down a checklist of all the predictions you made six years ago that people thought were absolutely crazy that have come true.
[McLuhan]I’ve always been very careful never to predict anything that had not already happened. The future is not what it used to be.
http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/interview/1970-television-news-is-a-new-mythic-form/
EZRA POUND’S ANTI-DEBUSSY OPERA TO RECEIVE UK PREMIERE
EZRA POUND’S ANTI-DEBUSSY OPERA TO RECEIVE UK PREMIERE
November 28, 2015 by Norman Lebrecht.
Le Testament had its first complete premiere on BBC radio in 1933, Antheil converting the “two tins and washboard” into a small orchestra. Not that Pound was enthusiastic about the results: “The god damn bastard who sang Villon has no savagery whatsoever. Vegetarian.”
The music for Testament is gruff, untutored and wild, and all the more compelling for it. The ferocious aria of the ancient prostitute Heaulmiere, her lips withered, breasts shrivelled, hits you right between the eyes. Pound called it the “fireworks” of the piece. It wasn’t to be his only operatic attempt. He began two other operas, Cavalcanti and Collis o Heliconii. They were never completed.
http://slippedisc.com/2015/11/ezra-pounds-anti-debussy-opera-to-receive-uk-premiere/
Cathay: Ezra Pound's re-imagination of Chinese Poetry by Kerry Brown
Cathay: Ezra Pound's re-imagination of Chinese Poetry
This slim volume, born from an accidental discovery, set the tone for modern translations of Chinese poetry into English
By Kerry Brown
This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the first publication of Ezra Pound's slender volume of oriental poems, Cathay. While the collection does not have the fame of his epic lifelong work, Cantos, it ranks highly among modern fusion poetry that blends in two different literary traditions.
Pound never claimed to be fluent in Chinese, writes Ira Nadel in his introduction, although in the last decades of his life he did study Confucius's Analects with a dictionary by his side. He used Chinese characters in his work, but Pound's view from early on was that Chinese ideograms or characters, and the culture they represented, had primarily an aesthetic appeal.
The translations, which he based his own works on, came from the work of Ernest Fenollosa, an early Orientalist who mostly used Japanese renditions of classical Chinese works. Cathay is, therefore, a double mediation—a work based on another body of work which itself was derivative — rather than directly linked to the source material.
Pound was criticized for this remoteness once Cathay was published. But in the intervening hundred years, the consensus remains that he did manage to capture something of the spirit and deeper meaning of the Chinese texts.
Pound made a major contribution to the modern western concept of "the Orient", a place of otherness, with a different tempo and emotional register to European or American cultures. He described the dominant feelings of being lost and the sense of solitude within his imagined Orient. "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter" is the most celebrated of this genre, with its tale of "two small people, without dislike or suspicion" who marry at 14, get separated at 16, with the wife waiting for her husband to one day return.
Exile and absence marks many of the other poems, reinforcing this sense that Chinese poetry is about delicate understatement and restraint, expressed through metaphors concerning the landscape, vegetation, or water.
Pound's imagination and work dealt with a larger "orient" rather than a specific place called China. The ways in which he treated this idea of what is oriental typifies other writers or thinkers from Europe or North America, whose cultures are distinct from that in Japan, China, or across East Asia.
Pound makes certain assumptions. In the Cantos, he described the whole dynastic history of China. Historians would now despair at his idea of such neat divisions between order and chaos. But when we remember that he is writing not so much about what China or the Orient as an actual place might be, but how western imagination configured it and responded to ideas about it this question of how accurate Pound's translations are becomes unimportant. What makes his poetry important not only in and for itself, but because its role in this history of western conceptualization of the Orient, and of China.
The book is also a reminder that Pound was a skilled lyricist. His later political adventures, which almost led to a conviction for treason during World War II for producing propaganda for the Fascist government of Italy, have tended to overshadow awareness of his immense technical skills. The Cathay poems show the intensity, the concreteness and the music that Pound at his best was able to create. Cathay contains hybrid material—most of it related to Fenollosa's renditions of Japanese-Chinese texts, but he also put in his celebrated translation from the Old English, The Seafarer. There is nothing discordant about this. In fact, it stimulates thoughts on how similar the worlds from these two eras—ancient imperial China and the dark ages of Europe—might be. Both describe loss, vulnerabilities, and the creation of beliefs.
Pound is perhaps one of the very few creative figures that succeeded in bridging two very different cultural worlds. Cathay stands as a testament to that.http://english.caixin.com/2015-11-28/100879225.html
Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King's College, London. His latest book China's CEO: Xi Jinping will be out in April, 2016Reprinted with permission from The Asian Review of Books
11/16/2015
(Robert Anton Wilson’s introduction to: Undoing Yourself With Energized Meditation and Other Devices by Christopher S. Hyatt, Ph.D.)
(Robert Anton Wilson’s introduction to: Undoing Yourself With Energized Meditation and Other Devices by Christopher S. Hyatt, Ph.D.)
The one sure way to make yourself unpopular in the United States these days is to mention the fact that Christianity and Democracy have been among the worst disasters to ever befall the human race. Nonetheless, as all students of history know, Christianity has been the bloodiest and most destructive religion in the long career of fanaticism on this planet; although Liberals and Rationalists keep reminding us of that tragic record of the Religion of Love, few of them have cared to observe or remember the data on warfare collected by Harvard sociologist, Prof. Pitrim Sorokin. In Social and Cultural Dynamics, and other works, Sorokin documents beyond all doubt that democratic nations have been involved in more imperialistic wars, and have fought them with greater ferocity, than any other kinds of governments, from the dawn of civilization to the present. Oriental despotisms, absolute monarchies, even modern fascist and communist nations have all had heinous records of tyranny and general human oppression, but collectively they have been much less aggressive and war-like than the democracies, from ancient Athens to modern America.
The blood-thirsty nature of Christianity and Democracy — which is obvious, psychologically, if one listens even for a few minutes to a typical speech by Rev. Jerry Falwell or his good friend Ronald Reagan — is, of course, based on arrogance, megalomania and a deeprooted sense of total moral superiority to all non-Christian and non-Democratic peoples. But beyond that, the violent nature of Christian/Democratic countries is rooted in the singular delusion shared by both the Religion of Love and the Politics of Liberty. This delusion is the belief that human beings are born with some sort of metaphysical “free will” which makes them unique in the animal kingdom and only slightly less exalted than the gods themselves.
The “free will” fantasy is not a minor error, like thinking it is Tuesday when actually it is Wednesday. It is not even to be compared to a major intellectual blunder of the ordinary sort, like Marx’s notion that once a totalitarian “worker’s state” was created, it would then quickly and magically “wither away.” It is even more nefarious and pernicious than the medieval lunacy that imagined witches everywhere and burned over 10,000,000 women at the stake on the basis of hysteria, superstition and the kind of hearsay and rumor that no modern court would permit to be entered as evidence. The “free will” delusion is much more serious than any of that. It is the kind of radical 180-degree reversal of reality that, once it enters a person’s mind, guarantees that they will be incapable of understanding anything happening around them; they might as well be deaf, dumb, blind and wearing signs warning the world, “ULTIMATE DESTINATION: THE MADHOUSE.”
I do not speak flippantly, nor do I mean to be understood as writing satire or polemic. The facts of modern biology and psychology have demonstrated clearly and conclusively that 99 percent of the human race is in a robotic or zombi-like state 99.99999 percent of the time. This does not refer to “other people.” It refers to YOU AND ME. As the Firesign Theatre used to say, We’re all Bozos on this bus. The best that can be said of any of us, usually, is that we have occasional moments of lucidity, but that can be said of any schizophrenic patient.
EAST, WEST AND THE MIDDLE
In the Orient, which has its own idiocies and superstitions, there has always been a singular sanity about the “free will” myth: virtually without exception, all the great Oriental philosophers have recognized that donkeys, grass-hoppers, dolphins, toads, hummingbirds, dogs, chickens, tigers, sharks, gophers, spiders, chimpanzees, cobras, cows, lice, squid, deer, and humans are equally important, equally unimportant, equally empty, equally expressive of the “World Soul” or “Life Force.” Buddhism, Vedanta and Taoism also recognize that each of these clever animals just mentioned, including the humans, have about equally as much “free will” as flowers, shrubs, rocks and viruses, and that the human delusion of being separate from and superior to the rest of the natural order is a kind of narcissistic self-hypnosis. Awakening from that egotistic trance is the major goal of every Oriental system of psychology.
Opposing this Oriental recognition of, and submission to, the order of things as they are, and yet opposing also the Christian and Democratic delusions of “free will” and “individual responsibility,” there is the hidden tradition of Sufism in Islam and Hermeticism in Europe. This “occult” teaching recognizes that, although domesticated primates (humans) are born as mechanical as the wild primates (such as chimpanzees), there are techniques by which we can become less mechanical and approximate in daily and yearly increments toward freedom and responsibility.
These “spiritual” (neurological) techniques of Un-doing and rerobotizing oneself are, of course, of no interest in the Orient, where it is accepted that we are born robots and will die robots; and they are of even less interest in the Christian-Democratic cultures which assume that we are already free and responsible and do not have to work and work HARD to achieve even a small beginning of nonmechanical consciousness and non-robotic behavior.
The Orient forgives easily, because it does not expect robots to do anything else but what was programmed into them by the accidents of heredity and environment. The Christian and Democratic nations are so bloody-minded because they can forgive nothing, blaming every man and woman for whatever imprinted or conditioned behavior is locally Taboo. (This is why Nietzsche called Christianity “the Religion of Revenge” and Joyce described the Christian God as a Hanging Judge.) The Sufic and Hermetic traditions are almost Oriental in forgiving robots for being robots, but are far from sentimental about it. As one Sufi poet said:
The fool neither forgives nor forgets;
The half-enlightened forgive and forget;
The Sufi forgives but does not forget.
That is, Sufism and other Hermetic traditions recognize that robots will behave like robots, and does not “blame” them, but it also does not forget, for a moment or even a nanosecond, that we are living in a robotic world — “an armed madhouse” in the metaphor of poet Allen Ginsberg. Those of this tradition know that when a man spouts Christian and Democratic verbalisms that does not mean he will act with brotherly love at all, at all; he will go on acting like a badly-wired robot in most cases.
Sufism is only the largest of several Near Eastern and European “mystic” movements which recognize the robotry of ordinary humanity but, unlike the Orient, attempt to Un-do and de-robotize those who have a dawning apprehension of their mechanical state and sincerely want to become less mechanical, as far as that is possible. I am not writing a recruiting manual for Sufism (which is doing quite well without my advertisements): I am merely using the Sufi school as one example of the tradition to which this marvelous book, UNDOING YOURSELF, belongs.
Most readers, if they have encountered such ideas at all, probably identify them with Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, two of the most talented expositors of a school of neo-Sufism which they peddled under the brand name of “Esoteric Christianity.” The present book also owes a great deal to Aleister Crowley, who belonged to this tradition but sold his own brand of it under the label of Gnostic Magick. There is also a strong influence here of the bio-psychology of Wilhelm Reich; but all this tracing of “sources” is ultimately trivial. The importance of Christopher Hyatt’s work is what you can get out of it and that depends entirely on what you put into it.
IT WORKS, IF YOU WORK
In my travels, I often encounter people who somehow have gotten the wild idea that I am the Head of the Illuminati (actually, I am at most a toe-nail) and who want me to explain the Secrets of High Magick to them. (Although it is hard to restrain my sense of humor at such times, I usually resist the temptation to tell them they can achieve Total Illumination by singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” in pig Latin while standing on their heads.) The questions I am asked most often, by those who can ask something more specific than “What is The Secret?” are almost always about Crowley’s doctrine of the True Will. People tell me, most earnestly, that they have read ten or twenty or more of Crowley’s books, and have read them many times, and still do not understand what “True Will” means.
As Gurdjieff would say, “What does this question signify? It signifies that these people are walking in their sleep and only dreaming they are awake. That is what this question signifies.”
There is only one possible reason why people can read Crowley at length and not understand what True Will means. That reason seems incredible at first sight, but it is the only reason that can explain this astounding scotoma. The reason many readers of Crowley do not understand True Will is that these earnest students have never performed any of the exercizes that Crowley provides for those who sincerely want to de-robotize themselves and experience what is meant by True Will.
Shortly after my manual of de-mechanization exercizes, Prometheus Rising, was published, I was at a Cosmic Con with, among others, E.J. Gold of the Fake Sufi School. He told me that nobody would do any of the exercizes in my book, but I would still get lots of letters from people saying the book had “liberated” them. Since I sometimes think Sufis and even Fake Sufis are perhaps overly skeptical about humanity in its present evolutionary stage, I have made a point of asking people, when they praise that book in my presence, how many of the exercizes they’ve done.
Most people look faintly abashed and admit they have only done a “few” of the exercizes (which probably means they haven’t done any). However, some people claim to have done all or most of the exercizes, and these people generally look so delighted about the matter that I tend to believe them. I therefore conclude that the Sufi and Gurdjieff traditions are wrong in saying that 999 out of 1000 will never work on the techniques of liberation. Actually, it appears to be only around 987 out of 1000 who prefer to talk about the work rather than doing it. At least 13 out of every 1000 will actually do the exercizes.
I have decided that one of the reasons that most readers of selfliberation books never even make the effort to liberate themselves is that reading the books is actually a kind of superstitious “magick ritual,” which they think will have an effect with no other effort on their parts. The same sort of superstition leads others to think that peeking at the answers in the back of the book of logical puzzles is as beneficial as solving the puzzles for themselves; and there is even a text out now with the answers to Zen koans, as if the answers, and not the process of arriving at them, were the meaning of Zen.
Aside from such “symbolic magick” (as distinguished from real magick ritual, which is a type of Brain Change experiment), the main reason people prefer to read neurological exercizes rather than doing the exercizes is the dread and sheer horror which the word “work” invokes in most people. Some great teachers, especially Gurdjieff and Crowley, have literally frightened away thousands of would-be students by insisting on the necessity of HARD WORK (as I also frightened a lot of readers by using those words several times in this essay.)
Of course, there is a quite legitimate reason why the word “work” has such horrible conditioned associations for most people in the modern world. That reason is that most “work” in this age is stupid, monotonous, brain-rotting, irritating, usually pointless and basically consists of the agonizing process of being slowly bored to death over a period of about 40 to 45 years of drudgery; Marx was quite right in calling it “wage slavery.” Most people know this, but are afraid to admit it, because to dislike “work” is regarded as a symptom of Communism or some other dreadful mental illness.
I recently heard a politician admit on BBC that the reason English workers are so notoriously “lazy” is that their jobs are so unspeakably sub-human and dull. “If I had to do that kind of work, I would call in sick as often as possible and goof off at every chance,” he said flatly. Alas, I had tuned in late and never did catch this chap’s name, which is a terrible misfortune for me, since I suspect he is the only Honest Politician in the world.
It is this universal but repressed hatred of “work” that causes almost everybody to despise and persecute the unemployed. Almost everybody envies the folks of the dole (on Welfare, as you say in The States) because almost everybody secretly wishes they could escape their own jobs and live without working.
It has taken me decades to understand this, because I am part of that very fortunate minority who work at jobs we actually enjoy. (It is hard to make me stop working, as my wife will assure you.) The minority who actually loves its work seems to be made up chiefly of the writers, dancers, actors and other artists, most scientists above the technician-troll level, computer freaks, and the righteous dopedealers of California. Everybody else wishes they had the courage to go on the dole, but is ashamed of the stigma attached to being a non-worker, and resolves the tension by being as nasty as possible to the unemployed on every possible occasion.
HEY! CATCH THIS! A SECRET OF
THE ILLUMINATI REVEALED!
THE ILLUMINATI REVEALED!
Here I want to let you in on a real Secret of the Illuminati, one that has never been published before.
The so-called “work” involved in Brain Change is not like ordinary “work” at all. It is more like the creative ecstasy of the artist and scientist, once you really get involved in doing it. Most people
are afraid of it only because they think “work” must be a curse and can’t imagine that “work” can be fun.
are afraid of it only because they think “work” must be a curse and can’t imagine that “work” can be fun.
So it is best not to think of Energized Meditation as “work” at all, at least as you have experienced “work” in most of the world today. It might be better and more accurate to consider the EM exercizes as “play” than as “work.” Of course, play has its own rigours, and you do have to put energy into it to become a winner rather than a perpetual loser, but it is still entirely unlike the wage slavery that most people call “work.” In fact, to be blunt about it, it is more like sex-play than any other kind of play because it definitely unleashes energies that have erotic as well as therapeutic side-effects. You are a dunce if you avoid it just because you think anything that needs effort must be “work” in the sense that people in factories and offices are suffering from the curse of “work” in our society.
Think of it more in terms of your favorite sport or recreation—fishing or bird-watching or softball or whatever you do with passion and just for the excitement of it. If that kind of thing should not be called “play,” then I do not know what “play” means.
So when I wrote “Hard Work,” I was just trying to jar you into actually paying attention for once. I really should have said, for accuracy, Hard Play.
The second part of this Secret of the Illuminati is what I have called elsewhere Wilson’s 23rd Law. (Wilson’s First Law, of course, is “Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclopedia.” Wilson’s Second Law is the Snafu Principle described in ILLUMINATUS: “Communication is only possible between equals.” All of Wilson’s Laws will be published when the world is ready for the staggering revelations contained therein.)
Wilson’s 23rd Law is:
Do it every day
This is the most profound of all the Secrets of the Illuminati and I have often been warned that Terrible Consequences will ensue if I reveal it prematurely, but—what the hell, these are parlous times, friend, and this primitive planet needs all the Light that can be unleashed on its dark, superstitious mind. Let me repeat, since I am sure you didn’t get it the first time:
Do it every day!
Have you ever wondered why Einstein became such a great physicist? It was because he loved the equations and concepts of mathematical physics so much that he “worked” on them—or played and tinkered with them—every day. That’s why Otto von Klemper became such a great conductor: he loved Beethoven and Mozart and that crowd so much that he practised his music every day. It’s why Babe Ruth became such a great ball-player: he loved the game so
deeply that he was playing or rehearsing every day.
deeply that he was playing or rehearsing every day.
This rule also explains, incidentally, how people destroy themselves.
Do you want to become a suicide (it’s the fashionable thing in some circles, after all)? Practise being depressed, worried and resentful every day, and don’t let anybody distract you with Energized Meditation or any other mind-change system. Do you want to land in jail on an assault and battery charge? Practise getting damned bloody angry every day. If you want to become paranoid, look carefully every day for evidence of treachery and duplicity around
you. If your ambition is to die young, do the depression-worryresentment system every day but center in especially on visualizing and worrying about every imaginable illness that might possibly
inflict itself upon you.
you. If your ambition is to die young, do the depression-worryresentment system every day but center in especially on visualizing and worrying about every imaginable illness that might possibly
inflict itself upon you.
(On the other hand, if you want to live as long as George Burns, “work hard” every day at being as cheerful and optimistic as he is.)
Almost anything is possible if you
DO IT EVERY DAY
Of course, this rule does not guarantee 100 percent results. Playing Chopin on the piano every day for 4 or 5 decades does not mean you will become as good as Van Cliburn; it merely means that you eventually will be a better piano player than anybody in your home state. Worrying every day does not absolutely guarantee a clinical depression or an early death, but after only a few years it does ensure you will be one of the three or four most miserable people in your neighborhood. Writing a sonnet every day for twenty years may not necessarily make you Shakespeare or Mrs. Browning, but it will make you the best poet for an area of about forty to fifty miles, probably. Doing Energized Meditation or similar exercizes does not mean you will be a Perfectly Enlightened Being or a Guru in a few years, just that you will be a great deal happier and a hell of a lot more perceptive, creative and “intuitive” than most people you’ll meet in an average city.
There is a story that Bobbie Fisher, the chess champion, was once in a room with other chess masters when the conversation turned to the latest nuclear accident and the effects of the resultant fall-out. Fisher listened impatiently for a few minutes and then exclaimed irritably, “What the hell does that have to do with chess?” While I am not urging that you imitate that degree of monomania or obsession, there is a significant lesson in this tale. The reason Fisher became a champion is that he cared so much about chess that he did not even have to nag himself or remind himself to do it every bloody day.
WARNING!
THREATS TO THE PRIMATE EGO
ARE COMING!
ARE COMING!
Unfortunately—while the Energized Meditation system is fun, and erotic, and makes you “smarter” (in the sense of more aware of detail and complexity), and even jolts you out of total mammalian reflex behavior into something approximating in slow but definite increments toward that mystic “free will” Christians claim you were given at birth, and I recommend it heartily—I must admit that there are pages coming up shortly in this book that will probably make you extremely uncomfortable.
Dr. Hyatt is a rude, insulting and deliberately annoying writer. He does not soothe or pacify the reader with the Christian and Democratic mythology of our society by pretending that we are all
free and rational people here. He insists on reminding us, every few pages, in the most blunt language possible, that most of us most of the time are conditioned chimpanzees in a cage.
free and rational people here. He insists on reminding us, every few pages, in the most blunt language possible, that most of us most of the time are conditioned chimpanzees in a cage.
Don’t let it worry you too much.
The situation is this: there are mechanical systems operating throughout the domesticated primate (human) organism, each on different levels. For instance, as Bucky Fuller liked to say, you never sit down and ask how many hairs you should sprout on your head and body in the next week: that is one of the thousands of biological programs that operate entirely on mechanical circuitry. Except in various systems of yoga, you do not have much control over your breathing, either: that is also an auto-pilot. The digestive-excretive circuits also operate with a minimum of conscious attention or strategy, except when you need to find a public toilet and the bars are all closed. (Make a list of ten more programs that keep you alive and functioning, over which you have never had any conscious control. Be one of the 13 readers out of a thousand who actually do it before reading on.)
The reason that mystics and certain other psychologists are always “attacking” the ego is that the ego is the one mechanical circuit that suffers chronically from the illusion that it is non-mechanical and “free.”
The ego and its delusions must be undermined—either attacked openly and bluntly, as in the Gurdjieff system and this book, or subverted more subtly and slowly, as in certain other systems—before any real progress can be made toward “liberation,” “enlightenment,” “finding IT,” discovering the “True Will” in Crowley’s sense, or whatever is your favorite term for becoming less robotic and more aware—less the computer and more the programmer of the computer—less the conditioned rat in the Behaviorist’s maze and more the Beyond-Human that the Sufic-Hermetic traditions and Neitzsche have predicted.
The main reason you shouldn’t be afraid of this attack on your precious little ego is that the ego is infinitely resourceful and finds ways to sneak back into its habitual mechanical trance no matter how many times you think you have Awakened once and for all. This is another Secret of the Illuminati and explains the great humility and the keen sense of humor of all the genuine Mages. In other words, if you think it is scary to lose your precious primate ego abruptly and forever, don’t worry about that; it is no more likely than becoming the world’s greatest Rock star tomorrow morning. The only real way to get loose from mechanical ego trips is to learn several ego-transcending games and then for twenty or forty years or longer DO THEM EVERY DAY.
Before you put that much effort and time into it, you need not worry that your wonderful, precious and totally marvelous Ego will go away suddenly, it will merely get transformed a bit,
“enlarged” in perspective and “reduced” in conceit (a little), freed from some of its more idiotic habits, and it will even pretend to go away at times, but it will always come back and usually at the most embarrassing times. It’s easier to assassinate the President of the United States than to kill your own ego.
“enlarged” in perspective and “reduced” in conceit (a little), freed from some of its more idiotic habits, and it will even pretend to go away at times, but it will always come back and usually at the most embarrassing times. It’s easier to assassinate the President of the United States than to kill your own ego.
500 micrograms of pure Sandoz LSD will “destroy” the ego more totally than any of the EM exercizes in this book—atom bomb it out of existence, as it were. The results even in that case, as all old acid-heads will assure you, are, however spectacular, always temporary. As Dr. John Lilly wrote in Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, after a heavy trip on genuine laboratory Acid,
For a time, the self then feels free, cleaned
out. The strength gained can be immense; the
energy freed is double . . . Humor appears in
abundance, good humor… Beauty is enhanced,
the bodily appearance becomes youthful . . .
These positive effects can last as long as two to
four weeks before reassertion of the old programs
takes place.
We are the products of mechanical genetic programs, mechanical imprints and mechanical conditioning, just like the other animals. The progress to post-animal, non-mechanical and trans-ego freedom is often rapidly accelerated for a period, or several periods, of sudden
flash-like Awakenings and post-human perspectives, and I personally suspect that is happening increasingly under the stress of our age of terrorism and accelerated evolutionary change, but the ultimate result of a true transcendence of robot consciousness is approached in slow increments over years and decades. (Total “freedom” from mechanism on all circuits seems impossible to me, in my current level of ignorance. I don’t think the organism would survive if most of it did not remain a smooth-running and unconscious machine.)
flash-like Awakenings and post-human perspectives, and I personally suspect that is happening increasingly under the stress of our age of terrorism and accelerated evolutionary change, but the ultimate result of a true transcendence of robot consciousness is approached in slow increments over years and decades. (Total “freedom” from mechanism on all circuits seems impossible to me, in my current level of ignorance. I don’t think the organism would survive if most of it did not remain a smooth-running and unconscious machine.)
E.J. Gold of the Fake Sufi School, mentioned earlier, has a saying to the effect that the attempt to achieve total Transcendence of mechanical ego programs is as absurd as “sticking toothpicks between your eyelids to be sure you never go to sleep for a moment.”
There seem to be genuine biological reasons why we need to spend about one third of our lives asleep and a large part of the other two-thirds half-entranced by mechanical conditioned processes. The purpose of all schools of liberation is to wake up fully often enough to have some perspective outside the sleeping and conditioned ego states.
WHAT “IS” ALL THIS?
The great Dublin scientist and philosopher, de Selby, once took an empty jam jar and filled it with all the small cruddy items he could find around the house. The fuzz that accumulates on carpets, the dust on book shelves, bent paperclips, broken staples, the grunge from bathtub rings, grotty kitchen encrustations, nameless shards of forgotten plaster statues long broken, archaeological excavations from the cellar, miscellaneous delvings in the rubbish bin, torn covers of match books scrawled with inscrutable phone numbers, even belly-button lint, all went in. This was a labour of some weeks, and when it was finished even de Selby himself could not remember or classify the total contents of the jar. He then selected a statistical universe of 123 Dubliners and 246 visitors form England or the Continent just off the Dun Laoghaire ferry and asked each to guess what the jar contained.
77.6 percent of the sample answered at once, “Oh, I know, it is ” and then made some wild guess. (The most common guess, given by 54.3 percent, was that it “was” the stuff mixed into the curry sauce in Pakistani restaurants. Others commonly said it “was” uranium ore, wood cement and tree bark.)
Of the 22.4 percent who did not guess what it “was,” 83.5 percent immediately asked the directions to Clontarf Castle and presumably did not want to guess because they were in hurry to catch the evening Musical show.
De Selby concluded that most Europeans, at this stage of evolution, believe that everything and anything can meaningfully be described in a simple proposition in the form, “This is a thingamajig.”
I believe, on the basis of experience, that similar results would be found in an American sample of the same size. We are still haunted by the ghost of Aristotle, the bloke who first tried to describe and explain the whole universe in permutations of sentences having the form, This is a Y, All Z are Y, Some Y are X, therefore some Z are X.
Most people, and especially most politicians and clergymen, remain firmly convinced that anything and everything can be meaningfully discussed in that Aristotelian manner—or as Ernest Fenollosa once said, Western culture thinks that “A ring-tailed baboon is not a Constitutional Assembly” is one of the two types of meaningful statements (the other being “The U.S. Congress and U.K. Parliament are Constitutional Assemblies.”)
From the point of view of current science, c. 1980-87, there appear to be two things wrong with this Aristotelian mind-set. In the first place, scientific models are not expressed in this metaphor of identity (A is a B) but in the functional language of relationships (When A moves an increment of x in any dimension, B will move an increment of y in some other dimension.) The latter type of functional statement allows for scientific predictions, which can be partially verified or totally refuted by experience and experiment; the former, Aristotelian type of is-ness statement leads only to verbal argument.
The second objection to Aristotelian A is a B statements is that they appear totally contradicted by neurology and experiments with instruments. Neurologically, we never know what A “is,” but what it appears to our senses and brain. The senses pick up some (not all) the signals of the space-time event and the brain edits and orchestrates these signals into some familiar Gestalt. (This seems to be how de Selby’s subjects edited and orchestrated a jar full of junk into Pakistani sauce or uranium ore.) Instrumentally, the same editing goes on. An instrument does not tell us what A “is” but what class of signals from A that particular instrument can measure. A voltmeter tells us nothing about the temperature of A, a thermometer tells us nothing about the height of A, a ruler or scale tells us nothing about the molecular structure of A, etc.—each instrument creates its own gloss or reality-tunnel, just as our inner instruments (brain and perceptors) create a gloss or reality-tunnel. To speak accurately, we should never say “This ‘is’ an A,” but, rather, “This seems to fit the category of A in my system of glossing or in this instrument’s reality-tunnel.”
Does this sound like pedantry or unnecessary hair-splitting? Consider for a moment the human suffering and social catastrophes that have been unleashed in various times and places by such statements as “Miss Jones is a witch,” “Mr. Smith is a homosexual,” “Mr. Goldberg is a Jew,” “This book is heretical,” “This painting or photo is pornography.” If you think about this deeply enough, it might almost appear that the Catholic witch-hunts, most idiotic censorship, Hitler’s annihilation camps and quite a few other historical horrors never would have happened if we had no words for “is” in our languages, or if we remembered that “is” always functions as a metaphor.
Most of the guilt and “chronic low-grade emergency” (as Fritz Perls called it) which keeps you from realizing your full potential can usually be traced to some sentence having the form “I am a B” in which B equals roughly “no-good shit.” That sentence got conditioned into you when you were very young and you may not think it consciously any more, or you may well think it and even say it aloud frequently, but if you feel basically unhappy with your life some such sentence exists somewhere in your brain.
Even is-ness sentences that seem factual contain dangers due to the mechanical-conditioned level of most human consciousness on this planet at this time. “He is a homosexual” may appear a safe remark when heard in a Group Encounter session, or at a San Francisco cocktail party, but in the Bible Belt, “homosexual” contains the conditioned association of “sinner” and particularly nefarious “sinner” at that, and it is not unknown for violence or even murder to result from this is-ness sentence, just as “Jew” seems to be a neutral label for one of three major religions of the West but in Nazi Germany signified somebody subject to arrest, slave labor and eventual execution.
I read recently in a science-fiction fan magazine, “The Irish really are disgusting.” Leaving aside my own mechanical prejudices (as a person of partially Irish genetic structure who lives by preference in Ireland) the most fascinating thing about this is-ness statement seems to me that it occurred in a publication where one would never see such semantically isomorphic statements as “The Jews really are sub-human” or “Women really are inferior to men.”
To quote Mr. G. again, “What does this signify? It signifies that most people are walking in their sleep and dreaming they are awake.” That is, certain historically infamous types of racial or sexual stereotypes have become unfashionable and virtually Taboo in “educated” circles, but the mechanical conditioned reactions underlying such stereotypes still exist, the machine is still asleep, in Gurdjieff’s terms, so people who would not stereotype Jews see nothing inconsistent in stereotyping the Irish or the Poles or some other group. In a mechanical or primitive stage of evolution, this cannot be considered surprising.
What does still surprise me (occasionally) is that people who can see this mechanical level of functioning in others can remain blissfully oblivious of the same mechanisms in themselves.
One way to understand Energized Meditation, and simultaneously grasp the significance of what I have just been saying about Aristotelian habits, is to apply mathematical subscripts to significant nouns in the manner urged by the semanticist, Alfred Korzybski. For instance, the Nazi mentality consists of something like
Jew1= Jew2 = Jew3 = Jew4 etc.
Now this is obviously false to sensory-sensual space-time experience. In sensory-sensual space-time experience—or what we ordinarily call “reality” if we haven’t been ruined by philosophy courses—every Jew we meet is a specific event in the space-time continuum. The first may be a poet, the second an actress, the third a grocer, etc. if we place this group in the gloss of category-by-occupation. Put them in the category of good looks, and the first may seem as handsome as Paul Newman, the second as unhandsome as Edward G. Robinson, the third as cute as Barbra Streisand, etc. Put them in any other grid, and differences still emerge, just as there are no two leaves on an oak tree that are exactly the same in all respects.
Don’t go back to sleep yet; hang in there a moment. We are not preaching a sermon on “tolerance” like a 1950s Hollywood movie. We are just using anti-semitism as an example of a mechanical mental set that illuminates many, many other mechanical mental sets that you are going to have to recognize in yourself if Energized Meditation is to do you any good.
For instance, at the beginning, for the shock effect, I said some critical things about Christianity and Democracy. If you drew the conclusion that I dislike all aspects of Christian and Democratic society, you had a mechanical “is” somewhere in your evaluations. In fact, I would much rather live in Christian Democratic nations, for all their faults, than in any of the Moslem Fundamentalist nations or Buddhist nations, and I would rather be gored by a rhinoceros than try to live in a Marxist nation. As for fascist nations, whether I tried to cope or not, I rather suspect they would shoot me in a few months, if not in the first week.
If the Nazi mentality acts “as if Jew(n) = Jew(k) or any Jew is “the same” as any other Jew, people who seem a lot more sophisticated often act “as if any Rock music = any other Rock music (it “is” all equally wonderful or equally “barbarous”)/ or any science fiction novel = any other science fiction novel (the book critics in Time seem to have that mechanical conditioned reflex), or “all television should be abolished” (there was a book on that subject recently, in which the author seriously seemed to have the Nazi-like hallucination that TV shown = TV showk), or any cop = any other cop, or any fast food place is as “bad” as any other fast food place, etc.
Mechanical reactions are the statistical norm; full conscious attention remains very rare. (That’s why one Zen Master always gave the answer “Attention!” when he was asked what Zen “is.”) We started from that unChristian and unDemocratic premise and we have worked our way back to it by a circuitous route, but now perhaps we can see more clearly what this mechanical A=B hypnosis does to us.
We have been using examples of difference between elements of the “same” group, but no element remains unchanged in time. Consider yourself as an element, X, in the group “humanity.” It should be obvious that
X(1987) is not X(1976)
You have changed quite a bit in the last ten years, have you not? If people weren’t in the habit of calling you by the same name, you might not even “believe” that the You of today “really is” in some sense the You of 1976. In fact, if you can forget your name for a few moments, the entity or more precisely the space-time event called You obviously was changing, sometimes faster and sometimes more slowly all through the decade. If you are more than 20 years old, just think of how absurd it would be to claim that the You of 1986 “really is” the You of 1966 …
Think about this seriously. It would be a damned good idea, right now, to make a list of ten important changes that have occurred in “You” since 1966 and ten changes since 1976. Is it too much trouble to get a paper and pen? Well, at least make a list in your head. Can you even visualize what you looked like and dressed like in 1966? Really think hard about some of the other changes in You over 20 years.
Now, to understand what this book can do for you, try to apply this awareness on a smaller time-scale. Is it possible that You(last week) “really is” in every respect You(this week)? Alas, this may almost seem possible, but it is not strictly true unless you have died and they pickled you in formaldehyde.
Think, really, about the changes in “You” in one week. How many more changes could have occurred in that week, if You did not have the illusion that You are a finished product and not a Work in Progress?
Keep at it. Think seriously about whether it is strictly and totally true that You(yesterday) really is You(today).
When you get to the point of understanding that You(one second ago) is not strictly You(right here and now), then you are ready to begin to understand what Christopher Hyatt is offering you in this book and how you can use it.
11/11/2015
ALL sides defeated. WWI and TTOTT.
The Great War (not so great in my humble opinion) has been an ongoing part of my study into the tale of the tribe, pivoting on the poetry and prose of Ezra Pound and James Joyce, who both lived through WW1, and who both lost friends.
I understand, and respect why we have a period of silence in memory of those fallen, but i fail to understand why so few of the silent care to engage in the search for the main causes of war, or pay much attention to those who are brave enough to go there, into the complexity of the deep politics of war. To exhibit constructive criticism of authority, the industrial political economic war machine, those who make the guns and bombs and bullets, and sell them. And the apathy of the public, the sleeping masses who seem hoodwinked into supporting this monstrous killing machine in the name of patriotism. Or at least, not yet motivated to stand proud and say I AM AGAINST WAR, ALL WAR. And in saying that, imply a favour for life over death, compassion and sympathy, not hate and retribution.
I favour an interconnected global network of co-operative humanity, not annexed and isolated sovereign states fighting over material wealth, atoms, oil and arms. Like weasels fighting in a hole, as Willy Yeats described war.
Maybe...lets remember all our ancestors, ALL of them, and their struggles in a life lived against all the odds to bring us here. Stop the wars for our futures present sake. Stop the arms dealers. Or perhaps sign a petition, or star speaking out against the trident nuclear submarine plans? "Its a pity that ALL nations couldn't be defeated"--Ezra Pound, letter to James Joyce concerning the slaughter of WW1
A memorable line lifted from the Roman poet Horace, and used by the British Poet Winifred Owen: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” sounds to me, today, like the mantra of a maniac suicide bomber. What do you think? "1,2,3,4 what are we fighting for?"--Country Joe. As Ez wrote: the youth of WW1 have died “For an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization, / … / For two gross of broken statues, / For a few thousand battered books.” Peace means peace. Man! Look into the causes of war to oppose escalations of war. And yes, make room to honor the dead, all of them on all sides, love all the people. There is a time for silence and a time to speak. I suspect we could do with some more strong anti-war voices, poets, artists and perhaps a politician or two? with a basis in humanitarian principles, no fear, and a whole lot of luck. Fear leads to hate, as Yoda said. Yes mate. Steve Fly
I understand, and respect why we have a period of silence in memory of those fallen, but i fail to understand why so few of the silent care to engage in the search for the main causes of war, or pay much attention to those who are brave enough to go there, into the complexity of the deep politics of war. To exhibit constructive criticism of authority, the industrial political economic war machine, those who make the guns and bombs and bullets, and sell them. And the apathy of the public, the sleeping masses who seem hoodwinked into supporting this monstrous killing machine in the name of patriotism. Or at least, not yet motivated to stand proud and say I AM AGAINST WAR, ALL WAR. And in saying that, imply a favour for life over death, compassion and sympathy, not hate and retribution.
I favour an interconnected global network of co-operative humanity, not annexed and isolated sovereign states fighting over material wealth, atoms, oil and arms. Like weasels fighting in a hole, as Willy Yeats described war.
Maybe...lets remember all our ancestors, ALL of them, and their struggles in a life lived against all the odds to bring us here. Stop the wars for our futures present sake. Stop the arms dealers. Or perhaps sign a petition, or star speaking out against the trident nuclear submarine plans? "Its a pity that ALL nations couldn't be defeated"--Ezra Pound, letter to James Joyce concerning the slaughter of WW1
A memorable line lifted from the Roman poet Horace, and used by the British Poet Winifred Owen: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” sounds to me, today, like the mantra of a maniac suicide bomber. What do you think? "1,2,3,4 what are we fighting for?"--Country Joe. As Ez wrote: the youth of WW1 have died “For an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization, / … / For two gross of broken statues, / For a few thousand battered books.” Peace means peace. Man! Look into the causes of war to oppose escalations of war. And yes, make room to honor the dead, all of them on all sides, love all the people. There is a time for silence and a time to speak. I suspect we could do with some more strong anti-war voices, poets, artists and perhaps a politician or two? with a basis in humanitarian principles, no fear, and a whole lot of luck. Fear leads to hate, as Yoda said. Yes mate. Steve Fly
9/19/2015
Dragonflies seem stranger than i can imagine.
Reading page 132, of ‘stranger than we can imagine’ by John Higgs, posted to me by Bogus Magus (Toby Philpott), only 10 minutes ago, i had a visitation experience. Probably the closest i have come yet. Let me try to explain.
Page 132, begins with‘...was more than just a story of nuts-and-bolts physical space travel. As the slogan of the 1990s television series ‘The X-Files’ put it, ‘i want to believe. Jung was not interested in the question of whether UFOs were ‘real’ or not. He wanted to know what their sudden appearance said about the late twentieth century…’ and he goes on ‘Whether a witness reported meeting fairies, angels, demons or gods depended on which of those labels their culture found most plausible.’—John Higgs, Pg. 132. Chapter 7: Science Fiction. Stranger Than We Can Imagine. 2015.
While i sit reading these words above, a dragonfly buzzes up real close to my head, darts around my back. Stops, hovers, then lands on me right near the top of my arm. I glance down and to my right, and stare into the incredible, green and cream eyes of this mini-miracle of nature. I begin to feel slightly awkward by the unblinking gaze, i notice tiny muscles in its face, and again the eyes looking, seemingly at my facial features. The dragonfly sits for maybe 90 seconds, as i sneak-a-peek back to the text, and again back at the flying insect.
Perfectly still, all four wings begin shooting a assortment of coloured photons into my head. Sapphire and emerald jewels, there at the lower limits of my visual perception, and like indras-net, each jewel hangs from a beautiful webbed lattice of wing-tensigrity, pretty much beyond all meaningful description.
And when i went back to pick up the text again, after it finally launched itself and spiralled off over the hedge, i thought to myself; umm, perhaps this could be a real visitation experience from a UFO, at least i feel it certainly visited me, and i’ve little knowledge about Dragonflies, and how to distinguish them from say, a horsefly, or maybe it was another species of flying insect?
And so i went on to think that maybe this dragonfly here acts like the perfect symbol for a modern day angel, god, demon, fairy, UFO? in fact, to be honest, to my own mind, it would be all of these things and more due to the context of the book i was reading, coincidently at that very moment.
Now what might have been a not so meaningful first encounter with a dragonfly, up that close, becomes a jump of point, an intersection point where synchronicity, and the real time waking processing of this reader, sitting in a garden near Bristol, England, intertwine, bootstrap and go all...epiphany on me...illuminated detail, pish: just like that. Now, what does the dragonfly symbolise to me, and to culture at large, maybe i should look to Jung first. Makes sense to me.
So...i researched some interesting dragonfly data, and compiled some short quotes that were meaningful to me (below) Two facts jumped out at me, first i used the word ‘darting', and ‘sapphire' to describe the dragonfly, above, and it turns out Japanese poet Basho, and English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, also used those words to describe a dragonfly.
The scientific details about the reproduction, visual cortex, feeding habits and speciation of dragonflies boggles the mind, they do indeed seem very alien and ancient when compared with us, the domesticated primates. Most of this information is rather occult, i know of only one person who studies dragonflies, in the context of photography, and doubt that most of these details concerning my sudden interest in them today, would interest him much.
Yet, on further meditation i recalled my other previous encounters with dragonflies, but not as right up close as todays visit. In Flevo' park, Amsterdam, i saw some dragonflies mating on a fallen tree, from the recent storm there, and managed to take some pictures. About 30 minutes afterwards, beside the Flevo lake, i managed to capture video and pictures of a dragonfly, buzzing us and seemingly patrolling the lakeside. (see media section below)
On another occasion, while swimming in the Flevo lake itself, i got pretty close up with a dragonfly, which, was captured on film too. So coming to think about it, i re-suppose that i have a few documented encounters of the dragonfly kind. But what does this tell us about our culture today? maybe its something to do with the dragonfly having a symbolic link to water, or skimming over it, and that the Native American Hopi Indians perform a Dragonfly song to warn men of danger, which features their word for water: tsee, tsee, tsee? According to information displayed at the website: www.scalar.usc.edu
I found the details of Dragonfly flight, together with the various categories and descriptions fascinating, and probably have a direct bearing on proposed advanced UFO technology, if agility, vision and camouflage are important. So study the dragonfly, the four types of flight, the physical and mathematical forces, counter-forces etc. All humankind might benefit from this, and yet, this miniature miracle could also be used for bad. Misused by defence aerospace companies, drone and missile businesses and more, to deliver death and destruction, or simply just watch and observe the prey, sending all images back to skynet.
Furthermore, i was talking to a friend in the garden about the producer ‘Youth’ 3 mins before the dragonfly landed on me. This has some relation to our story here, as John Higgs, the author of the text that triggered this blog, also wrote and brilliant piece about ‘Youth’, the guy who founded Dragonfly records. Youth also played on, and produced Beatnik Youth, an album together with my bandmate John Sinclair (this author plays drums on three cuts from the album)
In conclusion, or something resembling an answer to my initial question, how would a dragonfly help us make sense of the world today, what can it teach us? well, here goes:
Cherish your waters. Skim across the surface of id, and dive deep down into the larvae of the unconscious. Develop alternative flight paths, of speech, look through the illusion, live life to the fullest. Help save our wetlands. End the use of chemical fertiliser and stop the pollution of natural lakes, marshes, rivers, waterfalls and woodlands. Embrace transformation. Fly.
Check out the new book by John Higgs, and see what kind of visitations you have. let me know if anything comes up. Cheers.
—Steve Fly
Bristol. UK
Quotes from wikipedia:
- They are symbols of courage, strength and happiness in Japan, but seen as sinister in European folklore.
- About 3012 species of dragonfly were known in 2010; these are classified into 348 genera in 11 families.
- An adult dragonfly eye has nearly 24,000 ommatidia.
- Fossils of very large dragonfly ancestors in the Protodonata are found from 325 million years ago
- Defending a breeding territory is fairly common among male dragonflies, especially among species that congregate around ponds in large numbers.
- Most of a dragonfly's life is spent as a nymph, beneath the water's surface. The nymph extends its labium (a toothed mouthpart) to catch animals such as mosquito larvae, tadpoles and small fish.[39] They breathe through gills in their rectum, and can rapidly propel themselves by suddenly expelling water through the anus.
- They have four different styles of flight:[46] A number of flying modes are used that include counter-stroking, with forewings beating 180 degrees out of phase with the hindwings, is used for hovering and slow flight.
- In high-speed territorial battles between male Australian emperors Hemianax papuensis, the fighting dragonflies adjust their flight paths to appear stationary to their rivals, minimizing the chance of being detected as they approach.
- Dragonflies can fly at 100 body-lengths per second, and 3 lengths per second backwards
- They are almost exclusively carnivorous, eating a wide variety of insects ranging from small midges and mosquitoes to butterflies, moths, damselflies and smaller dragonflies.
- With the destruction of rainforest habitats, many of these species are in danger of becoming extinct before they have even been named.
- For some Native American tribes, dragonflies represent swiftness and activity; for the Navajo they symbolize pure water. They are a common motif in Zuni pottery; stylized as a double-barred cross, they appear in Hopi rock art and on Pueblonecklaces.
- Douglas, a British motorcycle manufacturer based in Bristol, named its innovatively designed postwar 350cc flat twin model the Dragonfly.
- As a seasonal symbol in Japan, the dragonfly is associated with autumn.[79] More generally, dragonflies are symbols of courage, strength, and happiness, and they often appear in art and literature, especially haiku. Japanese children catch large dragonflies as a game, using a hair with a small pebble tied to each end, which they throw into the air.
- The poet Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694) wrote haiku such as "Crimson pepper pod / add two pairs of wings, and look / darting dragonfly", relating the autumn season to the dragonfly.[88] Hori Bakusui (1718-1783) similarly wrote "Dyed he is with the / Colour of autumnal days, / O red dragonfly.”
- The poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson described a dragonfly splitting its old skin and emerging shining metallic blue like "sapphire mail" in his 1842 poem "The Two Voices", with the lines "An inner impulse rent the veil / Of his old husk: from head to tail / Came out clear plates of sapphire mail.”
- 'Dragonflies, or damselflies, were connected to Freya the Norse goddess of love, fertility and warfare. Freya was famous for her beauty and her knowledge as a magician. It was she who taught Odin the shamanic practices known as seidr which were still practiced during Christian times. The paired bodies of mating dragonflies form the shape of a heart, perhaps being the source for that modern symbol of love. In ancient lore, the dragonfly represents transformation, adaptation and insight.'--http://www.crystalinks.com/dragonfly.html
9/10/2015
7/10/2015
Robert Anton Wilson & Steven 'fly' Pratt: A Serial Killer In The Whitehouse
A teaser from my full audio interview with Dr Robert Anton Wilson, recorded at his humble home in Capitola/Live Oak/Santa Cruz, California (looking out over the Monterey Bay).
This recording was rediscovered in a jumble-bunch of mini discs--if you can remember that flash-in-the-pan format--only last week. I made my first round of rough chapter edits, and here is part 6 out of 32.
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6/14/2015
BBC Radio 3: The Trial Of Ezra Pound
BBC Radio 3, Sunday, 20 Jul 2008, 21:30.
"To mark 2008's 50th anniversary of his release, historian Sean Street investigates how Ezra Pound, one of the 20th century's most important poets, was accused of treason by the US Government and held for years in a mental hospital after he made a series of anti-American and anti-Semitic broadcasts in Italy.
The programme investigates the significance of the case today, asking whether he committed treason or inconveniently used his right to free speech. With contributions from Pound's daughter Mary de Rachewiltz, his biographer David Moody and the playwright Bernard Kops, who wrote a play about Pound, in order to find out how we should view the complex and controversial poet."
W.B Yeats: Politics, Psychology and Spiritualism
He created a complex system of spirituality, using the image of interlocking gyres (similar to spiral cones) to map out the development and reincarnation of the soul....
...He published his intricate theories of personality and history in A Vision in 1925 (which he substantially revised in 1937), and some of the symbolic patterns (gyres, moon phases) with which he organised these theories provide important background to many of the poems and plays he wrote during the second half of his career.--http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/wb-150/magic-myth-and-secrecy-wb-yeats-and-the-occult-31207213.html
We are entering," he said, "the political era, dominated by considerations of political necessity which belong to your people. That will be bad enough, but there will be worse to come. For after that there will be an age dominated by psychologists, which will be based on the complete understanding by everyone of all his own motives at every stage of his life. After that, there will be the worst age of all: the age of our people, the spiritualists. That will be a time when the separation of the living from the dead, and the dead from the living, will be completely broken down, and the world of the living will be in full communication with that of the dead.
Yeats expressed these ideas in a half-prophetic, half-humorous vein, and I may have distorted them in recording them. But certainly he spoke of the three ages to come, of the political, the psychological, and the spiritual: and he affirmed that the last would be "the worst". It is difficult to understand how to take such a prophecy. What is clear though, is that he saw spiritualism as a revolutionary social force as important in its power to influence the world, as politics, psychology, or science. (World Within World, 180–81)-- http://yeatsvision.blogspot.nl/
Zhanmusi Qiaoyisi BIG in CHINA
By what miracles of linguistic mastery and literary imagination could Chinese characters be made to capture Joyce’s mind-bending manipulations of the alphabet? By what subtleties of cross-cultural understanding could the specificities of Ireland and its mythologies be translated for a Chinese audience? -- http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/13/james-joyce-china-bloomsday-chinese-reputation
...the alphabet vs. the equation....?
5/20/2015
re:publica 2015 - Cory Doctorow: The NSA are not the Stasi: Godwin for mass surveillance
Published on May 7, 2015
Find out more at: http://re-publica.de/session/nsa-are-...
It's tempting to compare NSA mass surveillance to the GDR's notorious Stasi, but the differences are more illuminating than the similarities.
Cory Doctorow
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany
(CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)
It's tempting to compare NSA mass surveillance to the GDR's notorious Stasi, but the differences are more illuminating than the similarities.
Cory Doctorow
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany
(CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)
Giordano Bruno "On Magic" year-1588- read by Joe Kiernan
Published on Aug 25, 2014
This is one of Bruno's great book's on magic, dealing with "bonding in general." Couliano characterizes it as "one of those little-known works whose importance in the history of ideas far outstrips that of more famous ones." It explains how the masses can be manipulated with psychological and magical bonds, and how one can escape these snares.
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