For my friends...If you don't already know; I would like to introduce you to Terence McKennas, Alien Dream Time.
“History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable chaostrophy approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, internal surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination - exploring creature that we are.”
“And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace because what we need is a new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe and that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego is supressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but that's what holds the community together. And as we break out of the silly myths of science, and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body, IN THE BODY, there are Niagras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life. I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature.”
“What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get them on the run you have the dominators sweating folks, because that means you’re getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind, and the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. It’s an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet. And without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set, and that's the idea; figuring out how to reset the compass of the self through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, INTELLIGENCE. This is what we have to have to make the forward escape into
hyperspace.”
Monday, June 29, 2009
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Monkey Mayhem and speculations based on quantum psychology…..
We as a species evolved in Africa around 150,000 years ago. The written history of humans is about 6,000 years old. ‘The tool wielding monkeys’ (as Terrence McKenna describes our species) with their technology had gone out of control. We began to mass produce, dig metals out from the earth, and drill for oil and mow down the forest. We pollute the land its rivers and seas, spew toxins into the environment and fight imperialistic wars for control of resources. With our ability for architecture, computers, nuclear and rocket sciences we think gained dominance over other species, inherited the earth and its resources. We call it civilization.
The life that we experience on earth is based on DNA. Approximately 3.9 billion years ago the earth’s surface cooled sufficiently for the first traces of life, and thus DNA, appeared.DNA contains information in its double helix, a one dimensional form that provides the information for a three dimensional form. DNA is the master of transformation that in 4 billion years had multiplied itself into an incalculable amount of species. The DNA molecule, with bases A, G, C, T (adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine) is incapable of building itself on its own, it does so with the help of proteins. In all living species, proteins are made up of exactly 20 amino acids. The information in DNA ends up sequencing the amino acids to make proteins which make up cells that eventually make up an organism. DNA and it duplication mechanism are the same for all living creatures and bears a striking resemblance to human coding systems or language. The only thing that changes from one species to another is the order of the letters. Francis Crick the Nobel Prize winning co-discoverer of DNA writes “It is quite remarkable that such a mechanism exist at all and even more remarkable that every living cell, whether animal, plant, or microbial, contains a version of it.”
The genetic information inside the cell that propagates evolution is never a result of random accidents, or as Darwin suggests that information came from natural selection rather by an intelligent design. If we go by Darwin’s Natural selection (use it or lose it theory); he suggests that organism’s loose memory of genetic information as they evolved into a different species. The theory of Natural selection would reduce the amount of genetic information that is carefully stored in each strand of DNA. It is DNA that determines the nature of the physical being and contains inherited memory of all generations. DNA doesn’t dump information, but merely transforms these instructions into various organisms at an appropriate time by turning on and of various combinations of amino acids based on an intelligent design. To transmit information, the genetic code uses elements (A, G, C and T) that are meaningless individually, but form units of significance when combined, in the same way letters make up words. The genetic code contains 64 three letter words’ all of which have meaning, including two punctuation marks.
Scientist have only recently started to appreciate the wonders of the nanotechnology that exist within a cell which is essentially like a ‘nano’ factory operating by its own instructions. What baffles scientist, is the so called portions of ‘Junk DNA’ information within the chromosome that has no apparent function at this time. ‘Junk DNA’ might actually provide a reservoir of sequences from which potentially advantageous new genes can emerge. In this way, it may be an important genetic basis for evolution. This ‘extra’ information is as if it was put there in place for future transformations, guided by a super intelligent being of some sort. (Call it God? Well certainly not the almighty and insecure kind from church but rather a one of love with a highly developed intelligence and technology). Francis Crick had suggested this force behind DNA is as an alien intelligence (tough I don’t think he even meant the kind with the large heads, beady eyes, and beak like mouths). The technology of DNA certainly appears alien… so highly sophisticated that it is incomprehensible to us.
While many civilizations like those of Egypt, Greece and Rome rose and fell, nature had been around for 550 million years, when DNA based life exploded into a grand variety of multicellular species, algae, and more complex plants and animals, living not only in water but on land and air. As J. Madeleine Nash writes in her review of recent research in paleontology: “Until 600 million years ago, there were no organisms more complex than bacteria, multicelled alge and single celled plankton… Then, 543 million years ago, in the early Cambrian, within a span of no more than 10 million years, creatures with teeth and tentacles and claws and jaws materialize with a suddenness of apparitions. In a burst of creativity like nothing before or since, nature appears to have sketched out the blueprints for virtually the whole animal kingdom…”
The Biosphere is one large organism, and nature is this marvelous engine of procreation and creativity that is constantly changing giving us the various plants, animals, trees, water bodies etc. The earth sustains us as it does with other life forms. The fact is that we are made up of DNA and like everything else in nature. We are just souls meshed in the fabric of nature and are here for a joy ride, to feel, to think and to create. We are not separate from nature, we are nature. To think that we are separate from nature and that we dominate all other life forms is a thinking disorder. Somewhere along the way we got domesticated and lost our connection with nature. Nature was converted to a resource by us, unlike some older cultures that revered nature and were in harmony with her. They were fully aware of the fact that if they harmed nature some grievous harm would come to them in return. This accounts for our present state of affairs.
I am not suggesting that we dump everything and run off into the woods. Our technology like the art we create is only an expression of our times. We as humans progressed through many ages: “The Stone Age lasted many 1000 years, the Bronze Age a few thousand, the Industrial age took three hundred years at which time Fossil fuels made its appearance on the planet with the use of charcoal in steam engines since 1800’s and the nineteenth century, the Chemical age or plastic began a little more than a century ago, the information age 30 years ago, and Biotechnology in the last decade. The Nanotechnology age that could last all of eight minutes….” (Daniel Pinchbeck author of ‘2012: The return of Quetzalcoatl’).
What we are following now is a culture based on consumerism and greed. Market place thinking propagated by the main stream media and advertising that prevents us detaching from our current trends of science and technology and economics. Our political and corporate leaders continue to ignore the signs of change. Economists do not include what nature does for us for e.g. pollinating all of the flowering plants; an act that can be performed only by bees and the wind; or take carbon dioxide out of the air, something only trees can do.
Yes, we did create enormous amounts of waste with technology and its poisonous by-products, with our manufacturing process have added to global warming with high carbon emissions. Wars constantly threaten to obliterate us with the use of weapons of mass destruction. All of these are projections of our current psyche. Our current technology expresses not only our consciousness but also our unconsciousness. “Look at the devilish engines of destruction!” wrote Jung. “They are invented by completely innocuous gentlemen, reasonable and respectable citizens who are everything we could wish. And when the whole thing blows up, and an indescribable hell of destruction is let loose, nobody seems to be responsible. It simply happens, and yet it is all manmade.” The Jungian perspective on Apocalypse considers it a psychic event now taking place within the collective and individual psyche.
The inevitable destruction of the planet of course… is myth; the Earth will rejuvenate. We humans are a species capable of communicating and thinking. We have the ability to change things. Nature did not get us to this point to destroy us; we are her (nature’s) prized children. We are capable of creating art and music, architecture and technology that no other species can. A view of separateness from nature and from each other is the most destructive view in the world. We have to tune in to nature to receive further instructions for our future as a species. This will of course require us to have a collective change in our consciousness to fulfill our destiny. A highly intelligent transformation of our species cannot be attained on an individual basis or in groups of people. A quantum change for everyone, a change based on love and respect for everyone and everything.
It is possible to collectively beat corporate greed and the economic systems currently in use, dump our dependence on fossil fuel and reduce consumerism and supermarket life styles. Real estate need not be a commodity anymore and ‘brand’ names a thing of the past. We need to have sustainable designs and technology that work in conjunction with nature not against it. The noted Physicist Amit Goswami in ‘The self aware universe’ writes. “I had been vainly seeking a description of consciousness within science: instead, what I and others have to look for is a description of science within consciousness.” he realized “we must develop a science compatible within our consciousness, our primary experience.”
Our faith can move mountains…Being brought up in a Roman Catholic family; two stories I can relate to...
Mark 11:23-24 Jesus declares "For verily I say unto you, That whosoever
shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the
sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things
which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.
Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray,
believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them."
The whole of Einstien’s life work was to show that what we perceive as hard matter is mostly empty space with a pattern of energy running through it. This includes ourselves. Nobel Prize winner, Neils Bohr in his interpretation of Quantum physics suggests that when we look at these patterns of energy at smaller and smaller levels, startling results can be seen. Experiments have revealed that when you break up small aspects of this energy into elementary particles, and try to observe how they operate, the act of observation itself alters the results. It is as if these elementary particles are influenced by what the experimenter/observer expects. According to the Princeton physicist John Archibald Wheeler, in the universe postulated by quantum mechanics, there can be no such thing as observer:”Participant’ is the new concept given by Quantum mechanics. The quantum world seems to disregard the rules of classical physics as probability waves (*Quantum mechanics ascribes a special significance to the wave packet: it is interpreted to be a "probability wave" describing the probability that a particle or particles in a particular state will be measured to have a given position and momentum.) spread through space, photon and electron “wave packets” are found at more than one place the same time, only manifesting when the observation is made. The particles would appear to the participant/experimenter in places they couldn’t possibly go, given the laws of the universe as we know them: two places at the same moment, forward or backward in time and other possibilities. Physicists are also confronted with the “quantum jumps’: electrons vanishing from one point and appearing at another, without passing through the space in between.
In other words, the basic stuff of the universe, at its very core, is pure energy that is malleable to human intention and expectation. Christ and Bohr are both suggesting a possibility of creating a very Utopian future just by wishing and dreaming for it to happen.
Remember the story of Christ walking on the water in the stormy sea: He asks St Peter to step out of the boat and join him. Peter walks a few steps towards Christ and his faith falters, he plunges into the sea below him. Peter (the experimenter or participant in this case) had ceased to have focus/faith or have an ‘expectation’ that he could walk on water. Christ on the other hand was a master of mind over matter.
The physicist Dr. Amit Goswami proposes in his 1993 book ‘The self aware universe: How consciousness creates the material world’ that the paradoxes of quantum mechanics – nonlocality, action at a distance, quantum uncertainty etc can be resolved through the hypothesis that consciousness, not matter, is the fundamental reality of the universe and that there is no dualistic split between mind and matter, subject and object. It is the activity of consciousness in determining the “quantum collapse” of a wave form into a particle that brings the world into being. Our minds have the ability to create a universe according to our wishes.
The time is now folks especially for the Shamans, artist, writers, thinkers, poets, scientist, amongst you. We have to dream for a better scenario for our species and the monkeys must move higher and forward, that is our destiny.
Alex A.A.Fernandes.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Support the indigenous people of Peru in your thoughts at least in their fight against large greedy multinationals. The Amazon is the lungs of the earth.A view of separateness from nature and from each other, is the most destructive view in the world.
The life that we experience on earth is based on DNA. Approximately 3.9 billion years ago the earth’s surface cooled sufficiently for the first traces of life, and thus DNA, appeared.DNA contains information in its double helix, a one dimensional form that provides the information for a three dimensional form. DNA is the master of transformation that in 4 billion years had multiplied itself into an incalculable amount of species. The DNA molecule, with bases A, G, C, T (adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine) is incapable of building itself on its own, it does so with the help of proteins. In all living species, proteins are made up of exactly 20 amino acids. The information in DNA ends up sequencing the amino acids to make proteins which make up cells that eventually make up an organism. DNA and it duplication mechanism are the same for all living creatures and bears a striking resemblance to human coding systems or language. The only thing that changes from one species to another is the order of the letters. Francis Crick the Nobel Prize winning co-discoverer of DNA writes “It is quite remarkable that such a mechanism exist at all and even more remarkable that every living cell, whether animal, plant, or microbial, contains a version of it.”
The genetic information inside the cell that propagates evolution is never a result of random accidents, or as Darwin suggests that information came from natural selection rather by an intelligent design. If we go by Darwin’s Natural selection (use it or lose it theory); he suggests that organism’s loose memory of genetic information as they evolved into a different species. The theory of Natural selection would reduce the amount of genetic information that is carefully stored in each strand of DNA. It is DNA that determines the nature of the physical being and contains inherited memory of all generations. DNA doesn’t dump information, but merely transforms these instructions into various organisms at an appropriate time by turning on and of various combinations of amino acids based on an intelligent design. To transmit information, the genetic code uses elements (A, G, C and T) that are meaningless individually, but form units of significance when combined, in the same way letters make up words. The genetic code contains 64 three letter words’ all of which have meaning, including two punctuation marks.
Scientist have only recently started to appreciate the wonders of the nanotechnology that exist within a cell which is essentially like a ‘nano’ factory operating by its own instructions. What baffles scientist, is the so called portions of ‘Junk DNA’ information within the chromosome that has no apparent function at this time. ‘Junk DNA’ might actually provide a reservoir of sequences from which potentially advantageous new genes can emerge. In this way, it may be an important genetic basis for evolution. This ‘extra’ information is as if it was put there in place for future transformations, guided by a super intelligent being of some sort. (Call it God? Well certainly not the almighty and insecure kind from church but rather a one of love with a highly developed intelligence and technology). Francis Crick had suggested this force behind DNA is as an alien intelligence (tough I don’t think he even meant the kind with the large heads, beady eyes, and beak like mouths). The technology of DNA certainly appears alien… so highly sophisticated that it is incomprehensible to us.
While many civilizations like those of Egypt, Greece and Rome rose and fell, nature had been around for 550 million years, when DNA based life exploded into a grand variety of multicellular species, algae, and more complex plants and animals, living not only in water but on land and air. As J. Madeleine Nash writes in her review of recent research in paleontology: “Until 600 million years ago, there were no organisms more complex than bacteria, multicelled alge and single celled plankton… Then, 543 million years ago, in the early Cambrian, within a span of no more than 10 million years, creatures with teeth and tentacles and claws and jaws materialize with a suddenness of apparitions. In a burst of creativity like nothing before or since, nature appears to have sketched out the blueprints for virtually the whole animal kingdom…”
The Biosphere is one large organism, and nature is this marvelous engine of procreation and creativity that is constantly changing giving us the various plants, animals, trees, water bodies etc. The earth sustains us as it does with other life forms. The fact is that we are made up of DNA and like everything else in nature. We are just souls meshed in the fabric of nature and are here for a joy ride, to feel, to think and to create. We are not separate from nature, we are nature. To think that we are separate from nature and that we dominate all other life forms is a thinking disorder. Somewhere along the way we got domesticated and lost our connection with nature. Nature was converted to a resource by us, unlike some older cultures that revered nature and were in harmony with her. They were fully aware of the fact that if they harmed nature some grievous harm would come to them in return. This accounts for our present state of affairs.
I am not suggesting that we dump everything and run off into the woods. Our technology like the art we create is only an expression of our times. We as humans progressed through many ages: “The Stone Age lasted many 1000 years, the Bronze Age a few thousand, the Industrial age took three hundred years at which time Fossil fuels made its appearance on the planet with the use of charcoal in steam engines since 1800’s and the nineteenth century, the Chemical age or plastic began a little more than a century ago, the information age 30 years ago, and Biotechnology in the last decade. The Nanotechnology age that could last all of eight minutes….” (Daniel Pinchbeck author of ‘2012: The return of Quetzalcoatl’).
What we are following now is a culture based on consumerism and greed. Market place thinking propagated by the main stream media and advertising that prevents us detaching from our current trends of science and technology and economics. Our political and corporate leaders continue to ignore the signs of change. Economists do not include what nature does for us for e.g. pollinating all of the flowering plants; an act that can be performed only by bees and the wind; or take carbon dioxide out of the air, something only trees can do.
Yes, we did create enormous amounts of waste with technology and its poisonous by-products, with our manufacturing process have added to global warming with high carbon emissions. Wars constantly threaten to obliterate us with the use of weapons of mass destruction. All of these are projections of our current psyche. Our current technology expresses not only our consciousness but also our unconsciousness. “Look at the devilish engines of destruction!” wrote Jung. “They are invented by completely innocuous gentlemen, reasonable and respectable citizens who are everything we could wish. And when the whole thing blows up, and an indescribable hell of destruction is let loose, nobody seems to be responsible. It simply happens, and yet it is all manmade.” The Jungian perspective on Apocalypse considers it a psychic event now taking place within the collective and individual psyche.
The inevitable destruction of the planet of course… is myth; the Earth will rejuvenate. We humans are a species capable of communicating and thinking. We have the ability to change things. Nature did not get us to this point to destroy us; we are her (nature’s) prized children. We are capable of creating art and music, architecture and technology that no other species can. A view of separateness from nature and from each other is the most destructive view in the world. We have to tune in to nature to receive further instructions for our future as a species. This will of course require us to have a collective change in our consciousness to fulfill our destiny. A highly intelligent transformation of our species cannot be attained on an individual basis or in groups of people. A quantum change for everyone, a change based on love and respect for everyone and everything.
It is possible to collectively beat corporate greed and the economic systems currently in use, dump our dependence on fossil fuel and reduce consumerism and supermarket life styles. Real estate need not be a commodity anymore and ‘brand’ names a thing of the past. We need to have sustainable designs and technology that work in conjunction with nature not against it. The noted Physicist Amit Goswami in ‘The self aware universe’ writes. “I had been vainly seeking a description of consciousness within science: instead, what I and others have to look for is a description of science within consciousness.” he realized “we must develop a science compatible within our consciousness, our primary experience.”
Our faith can move mountains…Being brought up in a Roman Catholic family; two stories I can relate to...
Mark 11:23-24 Jesus declares "For verily I say unto you, That whosoever
shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the
sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things
which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.
Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray,
believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them."
The whole of Einstien’s life work was to show that what we perceive as hard matter is mostly empty space with a pattern of energy running through it. This includes ourselves. Nobel Prize winner, Neils Bohr in his interpretation of Quantum physics suggests that when we look at these patterns of energy at smaller and smaller levels, startling results can be seen. Experiments have revealed that when you break up small aspects of this energy into elementary particles, and try to observe how they operate, the act of observation itself alters the results. It is as if these elementary particles are influenced by what the experimenter/observer expects. According to the Princeton physicist John Archibald Wheeler, in the universe postulated by quantum mechanics, there can be no such thing as observer:”Participant’ is the new concept given by Quantum mechanics. The quantum world seems to disregard the rules of classical physics as probability waves (*Quantum mechanics ascribes a special significance to the wave packet: it is interpreted to be a "probability wave" describing the probability that a particle or particles in a particular state will be measured to have a given position and momentum.) spread through space, photon and electron “wave packets” are found at more than one place the same time, only manifesting when the observation is made. The particles would appear to the participant/experimenter in places they couldn’t possibly go, given the laws of the universe as we know them: two places at the same moment, forward or backward in time and other possibilities. Physicists are also confronted with the “quantum jumps’: electrons vanishing from one point and appearing at another, without passing through the space in between.
In other words, the basic stuff of the universe, at its very core, is pure energy that is malleable to human intention and expectation. Christ and Bohr are both suggesting a possibility of creating a very Utopian future just by wishing and dreaming for it to happen.
Remember the story of Christ walking on the water in the stormy sea: He asks St Peter to step out of the boat and join him. Peter walks a few steps towards Christ and his faith falters, he plunges into the sea below him. Peter (the experimenter or participant in this case) had ceased to have focus/faith or have an ‘expectation’ that he could walk on water. Christ on the other hand was a master of mind over matter.
The physicist Dr. Amit Goswami proposes in his 1993 book ‘The self aware universe: How consciousness creates the material world’ that the paradoxes of quantum mechanics – nonlocality, action at a distance, quantum uncertainty etc can be resolved through the hypothesis that consciousness, not matter, is the fundamental reality of the universe and that there is no dualistic split between mind and matter, subject and object. It is the activity of consciousness in determining the “quantum collapse” of a wave form into a particle that brings the world into being. Our minds have the ability to create a universe according to our wishes.
The time is now folks especially for the Shamans, artist, writers, thinkers, poets, scientist, amongst you. We have to dream for a better scenario for our species and the monkeys must move higher and forward, that is our destiny.
Alex A.A.Fernandes.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Support the indigenous people of Peru in your thoughts at least in their fight against large greedy multinationals. The Amazon is the lungs of the earth.A view of separateness from nature and from each other, is the most destructive view in the world.
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