Inside The Octopus Mind
Who can think? Who can feel? Via Orion, the revelation that octopi — boneless creatures with brains the size of a walnut — seem to have immense intelligence, feelings, and personalities is challenging our understanding of what consciousness means and where it comes from:
I have always loved octopuses. No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange. Here is someone who, even if she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long, could still squeeze her body through an opening the size of an orange; an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink. But most intriguing of all, recent research indicates that octopuses are remarkably intelligent.
Many times I have stood…
Address To The Industrial Nation
YOU will be pleased to know … actually … let’s start at the beginning. All systems are a product of their histories. Events over time shape the state of OS and application software both for good and bad; while users make forward progress on productive work, bugs and malicious software may destabilize and corrupt their efforts. External events to a historical version of a virtual monitor ma-chine. Replay is intentionally non-deterministic, and may be parametrized as to modify the stream of events that are delivered. In the second, analysis stage, the engine pro-state as mutable through time has been the subject of many tools to assist with semantic comparisons between the resulting alternate states.
Now, a lot of people like to talk about “industrial musicK” like they know what they’re talking about. They only talk of machine drums, sequencers set on 16th-note patterns, barre cords, tedious vocal distortion and sound bites sampled…
The First Large Global Conflict Where People Are Aligned by Consciousness and Not Nation State or Religion
Naomi Wolf. Photo: David Shankbone (CC)
Interesting take on Occupy by Naomi Wolf, at Alternet:
America’s politicians, it seems, have had their fill of democracy. Across the country, police, acting under orders from local officials, are breaking up protest encampments set up by supporters of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement – sometimes with shocking and utterly gratuitous violence.
In the worst incident so far, hundreds of police, dressed in riot gear, surrounded Occupy Oakland’s encampment and fired rubber bullets (which can be fatal), flash grenades and tear-gas canisters – with some officers taking aim directly at demonstrators. The Occupy Oakland Twitter feed read like a report from Cairo’s Tahrir Square: “they are surrounding us”; “hundreds and hundreds of police”; “there are armoured vehicles and Hummers”. There were 170 arrests.
My own recent arrest, while obeying the terms of a permit and standing peacefully on a street in lower Manhattan, brought the reality of…
How To Start A Dance Kult
Let’s start with what God is: the Father, Son & Holy Spirit.
The confusion about the nature of God starts with the idea God is separate from Existence. Also, there seems to be a tendency to treat the Father as God itself and the Son & Holy Spirit as a part of, but not equal to the Father. From these simple misunderstandings comes the logical paradoxes we’re all familiar with.
So here’s where we begin to clear things up. God is the single thing, but there are three aspects that make up the totality of God. Here’s the analogy: we take a piece of cheese. The cheese is one thing; however, there are aspects to the cheese that make up the whole thing: we have the shape, color & taste of the cheese. So where does the cheese end and its aspects begin? Well obviously that’s an impossible question.
So now the issue…
Scientists Find Evidence That Hypnotic Trances Are Real
Many people are skeptical of hypnosis, believing it to be a pseudoscientific practice based on some combination of relaxation/image visualization/the power of suggestion, et cetera.
However, a group of Scandinavian scientists say they have evidence that hypnotic trances are a real and unique state of consciousness, which cannot be imitated or faked by the non-hypnotized, and which (at least some) hypnotists can activate and deactivate at will using a one-word cue. So be careful out there. Nano Patents and Innovations writes:
A multidisciplinary group of researchers from Finland and Sweden has found that strange stare may be a key that can eventually lead to a solution to this long debate about the existence of a hypnotic state.
One of the most widely known features of a hypnotized person in the popular culture is a glazed, wide-open look in the eyes. Paradoxically, this sign has not been considered to have any major importance among researchers…
Christ as Consciousness
Before a person receives Consciousness they’re just another animal — albeit a sophisticated one. We tacitly assume everyone has Consciousness because people can walk upright, carry on in conversation and generally act civil. However, some people are merely domesticated primates — they only have a highly developed brain supplemented by a complex language system. But you can teach a chimp one of our languages; doesn’t mean they have Consciousness.
This new paradigm, this new consensus that Christ is our personal Consciousness — is key to lifting the veil of ignorance that has kept us in fear of each other. Incidentally, Apocalypse literally means, ‘lifting the veil.‘ This revelation of God within us will unite us on higher mental levels causing, by reflex action, peace on earth.
The original purpose of government and religion was to create in a world where they were no longer needed. They taught us the proper ways to act…
Steve Jobs Said LSD ‘Was One Of The Most Important Things In His Life’
Most of the obituaries for Steve Jobs touched upon his creativity, vision, and “think different” thought process at the helm of Apple. Strange then to omit that fact that Jobs used LSD and proclaimed dropping acid to be “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.” (This is also the reason iPods come in so many colors.) Via the Fix:
But equally suggestive, is a quote from Steve Jobs to New York Times reporter John Markoff. Speaking about psychedelics, Jobs said, “Doing LSD was one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.” He was hardly alone among computer scientists in his appreciation of hallucinogenics and their capacity to liberate human thought from the prison of the mind. Jobs even let drop that Microsoft’s Bill Gates would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once.” Apple’s…
1950s Housewife Tries LSD
A “stable, well-balanced” housewife describes her experience after receiving a 100 gama dose of LSD-25 as part of government research — she served as a voluntary participant in clinical trials of the drug. She tries to express what she sees but unfortunately “can’t talk in technicolor.” She sums the journey up with, “I’ve never seen such infinite beauty…this is reality.” Luckily, people who attempt such encounters now are jailed.
Graham Hancock On The Joe Rogan Experience
Renaissance man Joe Rogan spends some serious time with Graham Hancock. Dig in for a two hour mind dump from the author of amazing books like Supernatural and The Master Game.
Elves of the Apocalypse: “Machine Elves” and the Self-Sabotage of Psychedelic Research
Beware the “clockwork [sic] elves” who control the global elite promising them “eternal life, total power, total control, everything you could ever want, just kill everyone [...] friendly little guys…” Via Modern Mythology:
Right. Most if not all mythologies include creatures resembling elves. Therefore the archetypal image must be based upon encounters with the Machine … Er … Clockwork Elves. As with all paranoid logic, this argument is easily felled by Occam’s Razor, which advocates that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity,” in short, that the “simplest answer is most likely the correct one.” It is much more plausible to propose that the entities encountered during the DMT-experience could very well bear some measure of resemblance to elves (elongated and angular shapes are common); that one comes to think “if they look like elves, they are elves” at least makes sense!
THERE ARE NO FUCKING MACHINE ELVES!
To be fair, Alex didn’t make…
Drugs And The Meaning Of Life
Does the altering of consciousness, through means chemical or otherwise, lie at the very heart of existence? Author and neuroscientist Sam Harris, usually known for ripping religion to shreds, delves into the meaning and value of drugs in an essay via SamHarris.org:
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts. Every waking moment — and even in our dreams — we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition toward states of consciousness that we value.
Drugs are another means toward this end. Some are illegal; some are stigmatized; some are dangerous — though, perversely, these sets only partially intersect. There are drugs of extraordinary power and utility, like…
Sex On The Brain: Orgasms Unlock Altered Consciousness
Kayt Sukel writes in New Scientist:
With a click and a whirr, I am pulled into the scanner. My head is strapped down and I have been draped with a blanket so that I may touch my nether regions — my clitoris in particular — with a certain degree of modesty. I am here neither for a medical procedure nor an adult movie. Rather, I am about to stimulate myself to orgasm while an fMRI scanner tracks the blood flow in my brain.
My actions are helping Barry Komisaruk at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, and colleagues to tease apart the mechanisms underlying sexual arousal. In doing so, not only have they discovered that there is more than one route to orgasm, but they may also have revealed a novel type of consciousness — an understanding of which could lead to new treatments for pain.
Graham Hancock On Sovereignty Over Consciousness
Graham Hancock, author of Entangled: The Eater of Souls and Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, speaks out on the subject of sovereignty over consciousness and the drug war:
Interview with ‘Selections From the Dream Manual’ Artist Michael Skrtic
Via Technoccult:
Klint Finley: What possessed you to undertake this process of creating a collage painting for every line of Bill’s original Dream Manual?
Michael Skrtic: The Dream Manual appeared first in 1984 or 1985 in a magazine called The Negentropy Express, which was an APA (an amateur press association) by the Society for Creative Thought. I was one of the founding members of the Society for Creative Thought and I was immediately taken with Bill’s original text and the original short little collage things that he did to accompany the text. It sort of followed me around since then. In the early 90s, I had just moved to Stockholm and I was looking for a project. I thought, ah, I know what I’ll do, I’ll colorize Bill’s original collages, so I blew them up and I colorized a couple of pages, and then I got involved with something else. Fast forward to 2003.…
Graham Hancock: The War on Your Consciousness
Mandelbrot Islands of Consciousness. Image: David R. Ingham (CC)
Site editor’s note: This article was originally published as part of the Russ Kick-edited Disinformation anthology, You Are STILL Being Lied To. Hancock’s latest book is a novel dealing with some of the issues presented below titled ENTANGLED: The Eater of Souls.
We are told that the “War on Drugs” is being waged, on our behalf, by our governments and their armed bureaucracies and police forces, to save us from ourselves. “Potential for abuse and harm” are supposed to be the criteria by which the use of drugs is suppressed—the greater a drug’s potential for abuse and harm, the greater and more vigorous the degree of suppression, and the more draconian the penalties applied against its users.
In line with this scheme drugs are typically ranked into a hierarchy: Schedules I, II, and III in the US, Classes A, B, and C in the UK,…
Graham Hancock on Conscious Media Network (Video)
On his recent North American tour, Entangled author Graham Hancock took some time out for an interview with Conscious Media Network’s Regina Meredith. A sample is shown below. You can watch the full interview at Conscious Media Network, which requires a subscription but offers a free 5-day pass. Great stuff!
Graham Hancock Presents: Elves, Aliens, Angels & Ayahuasca (Video)
Graham Hancock’s first stop on his 2010 North American book tour (for his novel Entangled) was Dragon*Con in Atlanta, Georgia. On opening night he presented his lecture “Elves, Aliens, Angels and Ayahuasca” at Eyedrum. The Disinformation Company videotaped the lecture and is pleased to present it in full for those of Graham’s readers not close to tour stops or who were otherwise unable to attend. Make no mistake, the live lectures with Question and Answer sessions are the real deal, but we hope you’ll enjoy this video nonetheless (please excuse the low lighting). For more information about his ideas and the book visit Entangledthebook.com.
EsoZone Portland 2010 Starts This Weekend
EsoZone Portland is back for another year! Once it again, the event is an unconference — an event in which the schedule is set by the participants on the fly at the event. Anything can happen, but some of the possible subjects include:
Outsider Art • Discordia • SubGenius
The Occult • Satanism • Conspiracy Analysis
Life Extension • Intelligence Enhancement
Space Migration • Psychedelic Futurism
Consciousness Expansion • R/evolutionary Living
Renegade Metaphysics • Radical Psychotherapy
Aliens • Neo-Shamanism • Temporary Autonomous Zones
Body Modification • Alternative Sexuality • Fringe Culture
Human-Dolphin Communication • DIY Media
Cybernetics and Systems Theory • Pranks
Atheism • Zen • Martial Arts • Recession Hacking
There will also be performances by artists such as Cult of Zir and Ogo Eion and Psychetect in the evenings.
Daniel Pinchbeck Returns with ‘Notes from the Edge Times’
I am delighted to announce the upcoming publication of Notes from the Edge Times. My new book collects essays written in the three-and-a-half years since the release of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, my last work. The book covers a wide range of subjects, some of them familiar to readers of my earlier works, and some of them ventures into strange new territories. In essence, however seemingly diverse, all of the chapters revolve around a single subject: How do we confront the current mega-crises of species extinction, global financial collapse, and resource depletion and initiate a new planetary culture that integrates the physical and psychic aspects of our being, while meshing harmonically with our planet’s fragile ecology?
If you enjoyed my other work, I hope you will take the plunge and pre-order this new book before its official release on October 14. Apparently, in today’s anxious publishing climate, pre-orders from Amazon and other sites determine how much attention the publisher’s sales and marketing departments…
