Slisesix

The New Oz...

The New Ozymandias

by occams hatchet (via MyLeftWing)

Ozymandias

- by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land

-cont. here

Rumi on the claim "I am God"

People imagine that it is a presumptive claim, whereas it is really a presumptive claim to say "I am the slave of God"; and "I am God" is an expression of great humility. The man who says "I am the slave of God" affirms two existences, his own and God's, but he that says "I am God" has made himself non-existent and has given himself up and says "I am God", that is, "I am naught, He is all; there is no being but God's." This is the extreme of humility and self-abasement.

- Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'

~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Mystery Train

The King and I

Suzanne Scott on Mystery Train

Empty streets littered with broken-down pick-up trucks, vacant lots clogged with overgrown weeds, interiors notable only for their peeling wallpaper and dingy textiles, landmarks that hardly appear to be worth marking to the naked eye—this is Jim Jarmusch’s Memphis, a ghost town where the residence of its most notable ghost, the gloriously gaudy Graceland, always looms offscreen, unreachable by the lowdown inhabitants of Mystery Train. Elvis Aaron Presley permeates each filmic short story in Jarmusch’s overlapping triad, sometimes directly, other times indirectly, but his presence is far more than simple connective tissue. In a film that ruminates on the status of the Other in American society (whether they be Japanese tourists, an Italian stranded for a lone night, or a British immigrant dissatisfied with the American dream), Elvis is the ultimate accepted Other, concurrently revered for his difference and claimed as our own. As Elvis is framed as an idol, a specter and a doppelganger in turn, his rule over the Memphis outside of Graceland’s gates (and America at large) is examined in subtle and often bittersweet detail by Jarmusch until at last the myth is secondary to our interaction with that myth and how those interactions form our identity.

Just as Graceland stands as a solitary diamond in the surrounding urban rough, Jarmusch punctuates dingy landscapes and low-class signifiers with dazzling flashes of red—a suitcase, a smear of lipstick, a pimp-worthy three-piece suit, and so on—giving the impression of a failed attempt to grab a bit of Elvis’s glamour and try it on for size, only to inevitably discover that it looks cartoonish out of context. Elvis’s very aesthetic—the greaser pompadour, the Southern drawl—peppers Jarmusch’s otherwise sparse frames, painting and pictures often hanging as defacto crucifixes on the walls, looking down on the film’s characters with doleful, doting eyes. Even staring up from a scrapbook of American iconography cobbled together by a Japanese tourist, juxtaposed side by side with the likes of Madonna and the Statue of Liberty, Elvis remains a phenomenon rather than a person.

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Seeking Ultimate Reality

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Seeking The Ultimate Nature of Reality

by Norman Livergood

This essay involves an investigation into the ultimate nature of reality. For many modern people, such an idea appears ridiculous, since the ultimate nature of reality is thought by them to be unknowable. Mary Atwood alluded to this in her work on Hermeticism.

"We are well aware that this kind of philosophy is obsolete; that the capacity of man is considered unequal to the discovery of essential Causes; and that all pretensions to interior illumination have appeared fanciful, and are lightly esteemed in the comparison with modern experimental sciences. It may be a question however whether they, who have determined thus, were competent judges; whether they have at all entered upon the ground of the ancient doctrine to prove it, or studied so far as even to surmise the Method by which the ancients were assisted to propound the mystery of the Causal Principle in life." M. A. Atwood, Hermetic Philosophy and Alchemy, 1850

True philosophers--a rare species in the modern world--quest for the universal substrate of life, the essence which subsists in all that gains existence through this elemental constituent. This underlying element is sometimes referred to as force, light, substance, entity, or higher consciousness.

"The force referred to, and with which the Hermetist sought to become identified," Mary Atwood indicates, "is that of the Light which in the philosophical prologue to the fourth Gospel is called 'the life of men' and 'without which is nothing which has been made,' however unconscious of its latent presence its creatures may be--for it 'dwelleth in darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not.' It is the Light that, anteriorly to that of the solar and stellar bodies and all other derivatives from it, originated at the primal Fiat Lux [let there be light]. . ."

Hermeticists referred to this essence as Materia Prima, the "First Matter," una sola Res: "the One Thing," the basal substrate underlying all terrestrial phenomena. Some seers believed this elemental essence to be incapable of being externalized, and therefore cognized only introspectively, while others held that it is capable of sensory appearance.

The authentic philosopher distinguishes between the two aspects of knowledge:

The appearance of reality as presented to our five senses and our naive judgment The nature of reality as it is in its basic essence

For most people, faith in ordinary perception is total; they believe that they see, hear, taste, smell, and touch a "real" world "out there" with unquestionable verity. They assume that reality is as they experience it. The ordinary world-view is not only acceptable but preferable to any other they might consider. Certainly, for the ordinary events of life their perception is accurate enough to allow them to avoid running into tall buildings and anticipating that the sun will "rise" ¹ in the morning without fail.

Because of our modern assumption that ordinary perception puts us in touch with reality, it's difficult to understand what philosophers have meant by searching for the ultimate nature of reality. For most people, it doesn't make sense to search for something you already have; if you already know reality through ordinary perception, why would you search for it?

We must somehow develop the realization of the delusory nature of sense experience and comprehend that reality is something which is largely unknown and deeply mysterious. The difficulty is that our ordinary "description" of the world works and appears to provide us with the ultimate grasp of reality.

In this essay, we'll be engaging in exercises which provide a definite experience of the unreliability of our sense perceptions, so we can begin to comprehend that reality is something unknown and mysterious. The exercises can feel like nonsense to those who are incapable of suspending their total belief in their ordinary perceptions. Persons of this kind dismiss metaphysical exercises with glib statements such as: "Of course this is a seeming perceptual illusion, but it is caused by . . ." Such people like to feel they "save" their "interpretation" of reality with such magical phrases as "visual illusion." Even after experiencing an instance where their senses reveal two different "realities," their ordinary sense of knowing reality unquestionably remains.

The fact that our senses are unreliable (produce experience of two different "realities") indicates that what we are perceiving has a different nature than our ordinary sense experience reveals. We must learn from such experiences that reality is largely unknown and deeply mysterious. The exercises in this essay help us learn to create a new interpretation of reality and to comprehend that reality is mysterious and concealed, so we stop assuming that reality is completely known, that no mystery attaches to it.

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"How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?"

E. M. Forester

-excerpt
read the rest @ hermes press

Mind Sculpting

The Mind Can Change the Brain

From Lucid Nutrition:

The Quest For Happiness

Martin E. P. Seligman, author of the book, Authentic Happiness, has said that we all have a "set point" for happiness, just as we do for weight. He felt that although people can improve or hinder their well-being, they aren't likely to take long leaps in either direction from their set points.

On the contrary, scientists who continue to probe the limits of neuroplasticity, are finding that mind sculpting can occur even without input from the outside world. The brain can change as a result of the thoughts we think!

It was a fairly modest experiment, as these things go, with volunteers trooping into the lab at Harvard Medical School to learn and practice a little five-finger piano exercise. Neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone instructed the members of one group to play as fluidly as they could, trying to keep to the metronome's 60 beats per minute. Every day for five days, the volunteers practiced for two hours. Then they took a test.

At the end of each day's practice session, they sat beneath a coil of wire that sent a brief magnetic pulse into the motor cortex of their brain, located in a strip running from the crown of the head toward each ear. The so-called transcranial- magnetic-stimulation (TMS) test allows scientists to infer the function of neurons just beneath the coil. In the piano players, the TMS mapped how much of the motor cortex controlled the finger movements needed for the piano exercise. What the scientists found was that after a week of practice, the stretch of motor cortex devoted to these finger movements took over surrounding areas like dandelions on a suburban lawn. The finding was in line with a growing number of discoveries at the time showing that greater use of a particular muscle causes the brain to devote more cortical real estate to it.

But Pascual-Leone did not stop there.

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The Code

Rewriting the Reality Code

The Quantum Power of Living From The Answer

© Gregg Braden

“What strange beings we are!”
noted the 13th Century mystic Rumi,
“That sitting in Hell at the bottom of the dark, we are afraid of our own immortality!”

Perhaps it is actually the power to choose our immortality, as well as everything from our personal healing to the peace of our world, that truly frightens us!

___________

A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that it is us —our consciousness— that holds the key to life and even reality itself! In 1967 the pioneering physicist Konrad Zuse married the ideas of consciousness with modern technology and proposed that our universe works like a massive consciousness computer. And just as every computer translates “Input-commands” into “Output-results,” our cosmic consciousness computer appears to do precisely the same thing! When we translate our deepest beliefs into the reality of our world, we are literally re-writing the code that makes the universe appear as it does.

Living In A Participatory Universe

A series of breathtaking discoveries has given us a powerful new way to think of our role in the universe. Rather than the conventional view that suggests we are passive observers, living a brief moment of time in a creation that already exists, the discoveries suggest that it is actually consciousness itself that is responsible for the existence of the universe! Perhaps the most revolutionary discovery supporting this idea, is the scientific fact that when we look at the stuff our world is made of — tiny quantum particles such as an electron, for example — the very act of us watching that electron changes the way it behaves in our presence. What’s more, the longer we look, the more it changes! In 1998, scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science documented this phenomenon showing that “the greater the amount of ‘watching,’ the greater the observer’s influence on what actually takes place.” (Nature, Feb. 26, 1998) Citing such experiments, Princeton University physicist John Wheeler suggests that we not only play a role in the creation of our everyday world, but we play the prime role in what he calls a “participatory universe.” Wheeler states that we can no longer think of ourselves merely as onlookers who have no effect on the world around us, because it is impossible to simply watch. If we are alive and conscious, then we are affecting our world. “The old word ‘observer,’” he says, “simply has to be crossed off the books…and we must put in the new word ‘participator!” The key to Wheeler’s proposition is the word “participatory.” In a participatory universe, you and I are part of the equation. We are both creating the events of our lives, as well as the experiencers of what we create. Both are happening at the same time! In other words, we are like artists expressing our deepest passions, fears, dreams, and desires through the living essence of a mysterious quantum canvas. The difference between us and conventional artists, however, is that we are the canvas, as well as the images upon the canvas. We are the tools as well as the artists using the tools. And just as artists refine an image until it is just right in their minds, we may think of ourselves as perpetual artists, building a creation that is ever changing and never ending. Through our artist’s palette of beliefs, judgments, emotions, and prayers, we find ourselves in relationships, jobs, and situations of support and betrayal that play out with different people in different places. What a beautiful, bizarre, and powerful concept.

Living from the Answer

From the perspective of us participating in an ever-changing universe, the solution to any condition is a change in attitude and belief. And this is the great secret of propelling our heart’s desires from the possibility of imagination, to the reality of our everyday lives. The key is our ability to feel as if our dreams have already come to life, our prayers already answered, and live from that feeling. There is a subtle, and yet powerful difference between working toward a result, and feeling from that result. When we work toward something, we embark upon an open-ended and never-ending journey. While we may identify milestones, and set goals to get us closer to our accomplishment, in our mind we are always “on our way” to the goal, rather than in the experience of accomplishing our goal. This is precisely why Neville’s invitation to “enter the image” of our heart’s desire and “think from it” is so powerful in our lives. In the ancient studies of martial arts, we see a beautiful metaphor in the physical world for precisely the way this principle works in consciousness. When martial artists choose to break a concrete block as a demonstration of focus, for example, the very last thing in their minds is the place where their hand will touch that block. The key is to place our focus upon the completed act: the healing already accomplished, or the brick already broken. As a student of the martial arts, I was taught to do this by focusing on a point in space that is beyond the bottom of the block. The only way that my hand could be at that point was if it had already passed through the brick. In this way, I was thinking from the completion, rather than how hard it would be to get to the completion. I was feeling the joy of what it feels like to accomplish the act, rather than all of the things that must happen before I could be successful. This simple example offers a powerful analogy for precisely the way that consciousness seems to work. And this is the great secret that has been protected and preserved for us in wisdom of our past. From the monasteries of Egypt and Tibet to the forgotten texts of our most cherished traditions we are reminded that we are part of, rather than separate from, the world around us. As part of everything we see, we have the power to participate — not control or manipulate — but to consciously chart the course of our lives and our world. Please don’t be deceived by the simplicity of contemporary philosopher Goddard Neville’s words when he suggests that all we need to do is to “assume the feeling of our wish fulfilled.” In a participatory universe of our own making, why would we expect that peace, healing, and a long and healthy life should be any more difficult?

***

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Charlie don't surf

Memorable Quotes from
Apocalypse Now

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[while flying in a helicopter with Air Cavalry soldiers]
Chef: Why do all you guys sit on your helmets?
Soldier: So we don't get our balls blown off.

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[first lines]
Willard: [voiceover] Saigon... shit; I'm still only in Saigon... Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in the jungle. When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. I'd wake up and there'd be nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife, until I said "yes" to a divorce. When I was here, I wanted to be there; when I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle. I'm here a week now... waiting for a mission... getting softer; every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger. Each time I looked around, the walls moved in a little tighter.

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Kilgore: You either surf or you fight.

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Willard: Are you crazy God damnit? Don't you think its a little risky for some R&R?

Kilgore: If I say its safe to surf this beach Captain, then its safe to surf this beach. I mean I'm not afraid to surf this place, I'll surf this whole fucking place!

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Kilgore: Charlie don't surf!

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Kurtz: I've seen horrors... horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that... but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God... the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men... trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us.

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[last lines]
Kurtz: [voiceover] The horror... the horror...

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Evolver

...Evolver

It’s no longer about knowing what’s wrong. It’s about becoming what’s right. It’s about integrating logic and heart, vision and will. It’s about making life juicier by making good ideas real. A new world is springing up around us – of visionary politics and liberating hackers, earthly communities and galactic highs. Evolver magazine & media and the EVO membership are portals into this world.

Evolver media will spread the “new news” of what’s possible, focusing on active solutions, helpful products, new social movements, and do-it-yourself designs. At once open-source group-mind and creative meta-media, the Evolver Project is designed to creatively and quickly respond to our rapidly changing times. Through our partnerships, cultural mixology, and creatively engaged membership, the Evolver Project will also serve as a model for a passionate planetary culture: one jacked up on collaboration, connection, and exuberant renewal.

The Evolver Project is seeking contributions from artists, writers, filmmakers, photographers, visionaries, and dreamers of all kinds who are interested in giving form and expression to the emerging paradigm of planetary culture!

To submit art or short films, between 1 and 8 minutes: art@evolverproject.com To submit writing: submissions@evolverproject.com