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This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they’re explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago.
The dates beside a word indicate the earliest year for which there is a surviving written record of that word (in English, unless otherwise indicated). This should be taken as approximate, especially before about 1700, since a word may have been used in conversation for hundreds of years before it turns up in a manuscript that has had the good fortune to survive the centuries.
The basic sources of this work are Weekley’s “An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English,” Klein’s “A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language,” “Oxford English Dictionary” (second edition), “Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology,” Holthauzen’s “Etymologisches Wörterbuch der Englischen Sprache,” Ayto’s “20th Century Words,” and Chapman’s “Dictionary of American Slang.” A full list of sources used in this compilation can be found here.
Since this dictionary went up, it has benefited from the suggestions of dozens of people I have never met, from around the world. Tremendous thanks and appreciation to all of you.
Based on Karen Armstrong’s book, this film examines the concept of God in the three major monotheistic religions from the days of Abraham to modern times. Through analysis of historic and holy texts and incorporation of ancient art and artifacts, the program explores the deity written about in the Bible and the Quran. The evolution and intertwining of various Christian, Jewish and Islamic interpretations of God are also addressed.
my son wanted to be a super hero this year for halloween
but wanted to make up his own “guy”
he decided he would be “moth man”
moths being “drawn to light” and all
he has a thing for puns
he selected the death’s head hawk moth to be modeled after
his super power was a “cosmic photon laser” that would shoot form his eyes at super villains and “bad guys in general”
this laser would blind them in a darkness to everything but the truth
placing them in a state of reckoning and understanding
he would have no need to fight them
and no need to “call the cops” since the villains would “right themselves”
moth man is also a freestyle rapper…
which you would really just have to hear
quotes above are his words
all his ideas
i just did the work to manifest as best i could
this is a 10 min music mix he and worked on together that basically serve as theme song and fight scene score
he picked out the songs and i mixed them http://www.mediafire.com/?yjmyd2gjn3z
Disc 1 – Trance Speech and Direct Voice, Precognition
Disc 2 – Xenoglossy, Glossolalia
Disc 3 – Paranormal Music, Raps and Haunting Phenomena, Electric Voice Phenomena
3 disc box set of paranormal phenomena including “trance speech, direct voices, clairvoyance, xenoglossy, glossolalia including ethnological material, paranormal music, ‘rappings’ and other poltergeist manifestations as well as so-called ‘Electronic voice phenomena’” dating from 1905-2007
nice
i mean NICE doc on “this subject”
angles
ideas
perspectives
vid will mostlikely not play here
but will open to the tudou page proper
http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/W6Rjkr3Olvk
Interest in the Mayan Long Count Calendar and 2012 end-of-the-world prophecies is increasing rapidly with about four years left to the target date of December 21, 2012 (or thereabouts).
A significant number of new books, as well as reprints of older ones, on the topic of 2012 are being published, some becoming legitimate bestsellers, including: Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization’s End by Lawrence E. Joseph; Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 by John Major Jenkins; and 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck.
On the fiction front, Whitley Strieber’s latest novel, 2012: The War for Souls, is slated to be a Michael Bay-produced (and possibly directed) film at Warner Bros. Pictures.
An increasing number of mainstream publications are writing about 2012. The New York Times Magazine ran a feature on the topic, focusing on John Major Jenkins, in its July 1, 2007 edition; USA Today published an article entitled “Does Maya calendar predict 2012 apocalypse?” on March 28, 2007; and Publishers Weekly ran a story about the large number of new books on the topic on March 26, 2007. A second PW story ran in the September 3, 2007 edition with a quote from a well-known editor saying that 2012 “has practically become its own category” of books; and proving that the trend is only strengthening, a year later the September 22, 2008 issue of PW in its cover story stated “publishers agree that New Age readers can’t get enough prophetic 2012 literature,” and “sales on this topic have been through the roof.”
Perhaps most significantly from a mainstream awareness perspective, Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, Day After Tomorrow, 10,000 BC) is directing a new tent-pole film for Sony Pictures entitled 2012. It is set for wide theatrical release in July, 2009.
The Disinformation Company specializes in publishing articles on topics surfacing in the culture on its popular website at www.disinfo.com and publishes books by authors writing in this and related fields. (For instance, Disinformation author Graham Hancock’s bestselling book Fingerprints of the Gods was one of the first to focus on the Mayan calendar and its end date in 2012, and will be one of the bases for the Roland Emmerich movie.) Of course, in addition to its publishing division, The Disinformation Company also produces and distributes documentary films.
Producer Gary Baddeley recognized that interest in 2012 was on a fast track into the zeitgeist in 2007 and initiated the process of planning and producing 2012: Science Or Superstition with director Nimrod Erez. The Disinformation team, including co-producer Ralph Bernardo, contacted and arranged interviews with multiple experts, often obtaining speedy access due to more than ten years of working with them or colleagues in their fields.
Interviews were conducted in New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Palenque and also shot on location in Mexico and Egypt. Co-producer Bernardo worked with NASA to obtain illuminating footage of our solar system and galaxy and was able to locate leading astronomy professor Anthony Aveni, a cornerstone of the film’s balanced approach. Director Nimrod Erez worked closely with animators to illustrate the sometimes complicated concepts discussed in the film, allowing the viewer to see visually, the hard to grasp phenomenon of precession.
In accord with the Disinformation style of documentary filmmaking and publishing, the producers attempted to highlight multiple views of the subject matter and to interview experts who address the issues from varying and sometimes conflicting perspectives. The goal was to present the viewer with a balanced look at the 2012 phenomenon, allowing him or her to form an independent opinion on the debate about what the December 21, 2012 date means to all of us.
im looking for differnt versions of this story
translations
etc.
just wonderd if readers knew of any
A hunter goes into the bush. He finds an old human skull.
The hunter says: “What brought you here?”
The skull answers: “Talking brought me here.”
The hunter runs off. He runs to the king.
He tells the king: “I found a dry human skull in the bush. It asks you how its father and mother are.”
The king says: “Never since my mother bore me have I heard that a dead skull can speak.”
The king summons the Alkali, the Saba, and the Degi and asks them if they have ever heard the like. None of the wise men has heard the like, and they decide to send guards out with the hunter into the bush to find out if his story is true and, if so, to learn the reason for it. The guards accompany the hunter into the bush with the order to kill him on the spot should he have lied.
The guards and the hunter come to the skull.
The hunter addresses the skull: “Skull, speak.”
The skull is silent.
The hunter asks as before: “What brought you here?”
The skull does not answer.
The whole day long the hunter begs the skull to speak, but it does not answer. In the evening the guards tell the hunter to make the skull speak, and when he cannot, the guards kill the hunter in accordance with the king’s command.
When the guards are gone, the skull opens its jaws and asks the dead hunter’s head: “What brought you here?” The dead hunter’s head replies: “Talking brought me here!”
i’ve gotten 3 messages and mails about this today
Story behind this clip:
This clip was recorded about ten years ago from a real program on a italian local television.
Through a myspage page (http://www.myspace.com/annamariagalanti ) and some extensive research we managed to get in touch both with Fausto and Anna Maria Galanti. The former is still in good health, and mostly ALIVE. The latter was immediatly fired after this transmission and found herself without a job or a home. In addition, she’s currently fighting with a impostor giving herselfout to be the ‘real’ Countess Anna Maria Galanti. If you understand italian, you can hear Anna Maria yell about the impostor here:
http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=rPEMvi-…
Finally, thanks a lot to Funda and Jordan for giving me a hand with the translation.-Statues03
September 29th, 2009 by paulbradshaw
http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009/09/29/the-end-of-objectivity-web-2-0-version
This week a new nail was driven into the coffin of the notion of journalistic objectivity. The culprit? The Washington Post’s leaked social media policy.
The policy is aimed at preserving the appearance of objectivity rather than its actual existence. It focuses on what journalists are perceived to be, rather than what they actually do.
And in doing so, it hits upon the very reason why their attempt is doomed from the start:
“Our online data trails reflect on our professional reputations and those of The Washington Post. Be sure that your pattern of use does not suggest, for example, that you are interested only in people with one particular view of a topic or issue.”
Our behaviour as journalists is now measurable. And measurability gives the lie to the pretence that journalists behave like scientists, impartially observing the petri dish of society.
That pretence has been crumbling for years. In 1976 the Glasgow Media Group’s Bad News study demonstrated how TV news favoured powerful groups by measuring a number of factors in news coverage. Dozens of other studies have followed a similar vein, using the measurability of journalistic output as their barometer. Meanwhile, depending where you sit politically, you’ll find a right-wing or left-wing media conspiracy to believe in.
Objectivity was always a phantom conjured by publishers to appeal to maximum audiences and advertisers [see comments fleshing out objectivity as method vs style]. Regulators then helped by requiring objectivity to broadcast in a limited bandwidth spectrum. The first nail in its coffin came with the end of those limits. As Dan Gillmor explained in The End of Objectivity:
“Objectivity is a construct of recent times. One reason for its rise in the journalism sphere has been the consolidation of newspapers and television into monopolies and oligopolies in the past half-century. If one voice overwhelms all the others, there is a public interest in playing stories as straight as possible — not favoring one side over the other (or others, to be more precise, as there are rarely just two sides to any issue).
“There were good business reasons to be “objective,” too, not least that a newspaper didn’t want to make large parts of its community angry. And, no doubt, libel law has played a role, too. If a publication could say it “got both sides,” perhaps a libel plaintiff would have more trouble winning.”
It was also born from 19th century beliefs in the scientific method and the search for abstract ‘truth’. But society is not a petri dish; and journalists are no scientists: their methodologies are flawed by the need for narrative and the rhythm of the deadline. And most don’t understand scientific methods at all.
So when you can not only measure the lack of balance in journalistic output, but also the lack of balance in journalists’ behaviour and relationships online, the game is well and truly up.
Imagine you’re a trainee journalist who has grown up in a Web 2.0 world: a member of countless Facebook groups; signatory to a dozen online petitions; tagged in Flickr galleries of protests and rallies. Oh, and your profile tells us not only your gender, but your ethnicity, religion, relationship status and sexuality. Will an offer of a job on the Washington Post now come with the request that you cut all ties to your previous life and wipe all records of your former existence as you join the monastic seclusion of Journalistic Objectivity?
Yes, journalists have opinions. And friends. And they rely on easily accessible sources.
Well, hold the front page.
So there lies the problem - but also the solution. Transparency is hastening the demise of the already crumbling notion of journalistic objectivity; but it also represents the best hope for journalistic integrity – and ultimately, for many journalists that was what the pursuit of objectivity was about.
As David Weinberger argues:
“Transparency subsumes objectivity. Anyone who claims objectivity should be willing to back that assertion up by letting us look at sources, disagreements, and the personal assumptions and values supposedly bracketed out of the report.
“Objectivity without transparency increasingly will look like arrogance. And then foolishness. Why should we trust what one person — with the best of intentions — insists is true when we instead could have a web of evidence, ideas, and argument?”
So keep your social media profiles, and make yourself available to a thousand potential sources rather than relying on the dozen in your contacts book. Link to your raw material and let people comment on the holes in your narrative. Engage with online communities if you expect them to engage with you.And stop thinking about the PR of how you look and focus on the journalism of what you do.
Written by Paul Bradshaw – Visit Website
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_librarian_blog
Since 1982, the ALA has sponsored this event to remind us not to take our intellectual freedom for granted.
ALA reports that there were 581 challenges to books in schools and libraries in 2008; however,the Banned Books Week web sight informs us that the official ALA figures do not include ALL the challenges. Seventy to eighty percent of challenges are not reported to the ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom (though they do not provide supporting documentation for that figure, other resources indicate this data is supported by surveys undertaken by a variety of advocacy groups.) Banned Books does offer a nice mashup that maps the challenges.
At the ALA web site, you can review the differences between a challenge and an actual banning of books. They also provide information about the types of challenges and bans that take place in schools and libraries throughout the country.
On the web site, there is little information about the procedures ALA follows in response to these challenges or activities, or exactly how many are successful or unsuccessful. You can learn a little more about the challenges in this report by Roger Doyle at http://www.ila.org/pdf/2008banned.pdf.
A further exploration of the ALA web site reveals the Office of Lawyers for Libraries which holds regional advocacy institutes for lawyers retained to represent libraries on legal issues. In February they will be holding an Advocacy Institute in Los Angeles. You can also take advantage of a number of self help tools posted on the ALA Advocacy University web site.
Most of the resources focus on how to advocate for your library in terms of lobbying. There is only one paper based resource that focuses on lobbying for the library workers. There are no resources to help advocate for job security or academic freedom for individual librarians who are on the front lines battling censorship everyday. Oh wait, that was yesterday’s post.
In any case, Resource Shelf is doing a marvelous job keeping track of banned book resources to consult. This is a very important issue that I hope will all support.(VS)
i’d skip the first 30 secs of unreadable scroll
this vid is sort of a statement/response rebuttal of the kirk cameron video i posted on hijackin the origin of species
this video expresses similar ideas and perspectives as my rant
but has some nice scriptures and some serious illumination on how kirk is mixing words and definitions to work an audience that is ignorant in the ideas
and literally shows kirk lying to support his position
weird
not only fables and fairy tales
but lies
jeez
how do they not get what seeds they are planting and what fruit will be harvested
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&ref=magazine
This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.
And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.
Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.
Of those who did see it, at least one person, an educated Englishwoman who was allowed to read some of the book in the 1920s, thought it held infinite wisdom — “There are people in my country who would read it from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely,” she wrote — while another, a well-known literary type who glimpsed it shortly after, deemed it both fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was the work of a psychotic.
So for the better part of the past century, despite the fact that it is thought to be the pivotal work of one of the era’s great thinkers, the book has existed mostly just as a rumor, cosseted behind the skeins of its own legend — revered and puzzled over only from a great distance.
Which is why one rainy November night in 2007, I boarded a flight in Boston and rode the clouds until I woke up in Zurich, pulling up to the airport gate at about the same hour that the main branch of the United Bank of Switzerland, located on the city’s swanky Bahnhofstrasse, across from Tommy Hilfiger and close to Cartier, was opening its doors for the day. A change was under way: the book, which had spent the past 23 years locked inside a safe deposit box in one of the bank’s underground vaults, was just then being wrapped in black cloth and loaded into a discreet-looking padded suitcase on wheels. It was then rolled past the guards, out into the sunlight and clear, cold air, where it was loaded into a waiting car and whisked away.
THIS COULD SOUND, I realize, like the start of a spy novel or a Hollywood bank caper, but it is rather a story about genius and madness, as well as possession and obsession, with one object — this old, unusual book — skating among those things. Also, there are a lot of Jungians involved, a species of thinkers who subscribe to the theories of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and author of the big red leather book. And Jungians, almost by definition, tend to get enthused anytime something previously hidden reveals itself, when whatever’s been underground finally makes it to the surface.
Carl Jung founded the field of analytical psychology and, along with Sigmund Freud, was responsible for popularizing the idea that a person’s interior life merited not just attention but dedicated exploration — a notion that has since propelled tens of millions of people into psychotherapy. Freud, who started as Jung’s mentor and later became his rival, generally viewed the unconscious mind as a warehouse for repressed desires, which could then be codified and pathologized and treated. Jung, over time, came to see the psyche as an inherently more spiritual and fluid place, an ocean that could be fished for enlightenment and healing.
Whether or not he would have wanted it this way, Jung — who regarded himself as a scientist — is today remembered more as a countercultural icon, a proponent of spirituality outside religion and the ultimate champion of dreamers and seekers everywhere, which has earned him both posthumous respect and posthumous ridicule. Jung’s ideas laid the foundation for the widely used Myers-Briggs personality test and influenced the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous. His central tenets — the existence of a collective unconscious and the power of archetypes — have seeped into the larger domain of New Age thinking while remaining more at the fringes of mainstream psychology.
A big man with wire-rimmed glasses, a booming laugh and a penchant for the experimental, Jung was interested in the psychological aspects of séances, of astrology, of witchcraft. He could be jocular and also impatient. He was a dynamic speaker, an empathic listener. He had a famously magnetic appeal with women. Working at Zurich’s Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, Jung listened intently to the ravings of schizophrenics, believing they held clues to both personal and universal truths. At home, in his spare time, he pored over Dante, Goethe, Swedenborg and Nietzsche. He began to study mythology and world cultures, applying what he learned to the live feed from the unconscious — claiming that dreams offered a rich and symbolic narrative coming from the depths of the psyche. Somewhere along the way, he started to view the human soul — not just the mind and the body — as requiring specific care and development, an idea that pushed him into a province long occupied by poets and priests but not so much by medical doctors and empirical scientists.
Jung soon found himself in opposition not just to Freud but also to most of his field, the psychiatrists who constituted the dominant culture at the time, speaking the clinical language of symptom and diagnosis behind the deadbolts of asylum wards. Separation was not easy. As his convictions began to crystallize, Jung, who was at that point an outwardly successful and ambitious man with a young family, a thriving private practice and a big, elegant house on the shores of Lake Zurich, felt his own psyche starting to teeter and slide, until finally he was dumped into what would become a life-altering crisis.
What happened next to Carl Jung has become, among Jungians and other scholars, the topic of enduring legend and controversy. It has been characterized variously as a creative illness, a descent into the underworld, a bout with insanity, a narcissistic self-deification, a transcendence, a midlife breakdown and an inner disturbance mirroring the upheaval of World War I. Whatever the case, in 1913, Jung, who was then 38, got lost in the soup of his own psyche. He was haunted by troubling visions and heard inner voices. Grappling with the horror of some of what he saw, he worried in moments that he was, in his own words, “menaced by a psychosis” or “doing a schizophrenia.”
He later would compare this period of his life — this “confrontation with the unconscious,” as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He described his visions as coming in an “incessant stream.” He likened them to rocks falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava. “I often had to cling to the table,” he recalled, “so as not to fall apart.”
Had he been a psychiatric patient, Jung might well have been told he had a nervous disorder and encouraged to ignore the circus going on in his head. But as a psychiatrist, and one with a decidedly maverick streak, he tried instead to tear down the wall between his rational self and his psyche. For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations — what he called “active imaginations.” “In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ ” Jung wrote later in his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” “I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.” He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists.
Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.
What he wrote did not belong to his previous canon of dispassionate, academic essays on psychiatry. Nor was it a straightforward diary. It did not mention his wife, or his children, or his colleagues, nor for that matter did it use any psychiatric language at all. Instead, the book was a kind of phantasmagoric morality play, driven by Jung’s own wish not just to chart a course out of the mangrove swamp of his inner world but also to take some of its riches with him. It was this last part — the idea that a person might move beneficially between the poles of the rational and irrational, the light and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious — that provided the germ for his later work and for what analytical psychology would become.
The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.
He worked on his red book — and he called it just that, the Red Book — on and off for about 16 years, long after his personal crisis had passed, but he never managed to finish it. He actively fretted over it, wondering whether to have it published and face ridicule from his scientifically oriented peers or to put it in a drawer and forget it. Regarding the significance of what the book contained, however, Jung was unequivocal. “All my works, all my creative activity,” he would recall later, “has come from those initial fantasies and dreams.”
Jung evidently kept the Red Book locked in a cupboard in his house in the Zurich suburb of Küsnacht. When he died in 1961, he left no specific instructions about what to do with it. His son, Franz, an architect and the third of Jung’s five children, took over running the house and chose to leave the book, with its strange musings and elaborate paintings, where it was. Later, in 1984, the family transferred it to the bank, where since then it has fulminated as both an asset and a liability.
Anytime someone did ask to see the Red Book, family members said, without hesitation and sometimes without decorum, no. The book was private, they asserted, an intensely personal work. In 1989, an American analyst named Stephen Martin, who was then the editor of a Jungian journal and now directs a Jungian nonprofit foundation, visited Jung’s son (his other four children were daughters) and inquired about the Red Book. The question was met with a vehemence that surprised him. “Franz Jung, an otherwise genial and gracious man, reacted sharply, nearly with anger,” Martin later wrote in his foundation’s newsletter, saying “in no uncertain terms” that Martin could not “see the Red Book, nor could he ever imagine that it would be published.”
And yet, Carl Jung’s secret Red Book — scanned, translated and footnoted — will be in stores early next month, published by W. W. Norton and billed as the “most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology.” Surely it is a victory for someone, but it is too early yet to say for whom.
STEPHEN MARTIN IS a compact, bearded man of 57. He has a buoyant, irreverent wit and what feels like a fully intact sense of wonder. If you happen to have a conversation with him anytime before, say, 10 a.m., he will ask his first question — “How did you sleep?” — and likely follow it with a second one — “Did you dream?” Because for Martin, as it is for all Jungian analysts, dreaming offers a barometric reading of the psyche. At his house in a leafy suburb of Philadelphia, Martin keeps five thick books filled with notations on and interpretations of all the dreams he had while studying to be an analyst 30 years ago in Zurich, under the tutelage of a Swiss analyst then in her 70s named Liliane Frey-Rohn. These days, Martin stores his dreams on his computer, but his dream life is — as he says everybody’s dream life should be — as involving as ever.
Even as some of his peers in the Jungian world are cautious about regarding Carl Jung as a sage — a history of anti-Semitic remarks and his sometimes patriarchal views of women have caused some to distance themselves — Martin is unapologetically reverential. He keeps Jung’s 20 volumes of collected works on a shelf at home. He rereads “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” at least twice a year. Many years ago, when one of his daughters interviewed him as part of a school project and asked what his religion was, Martin, a nonobservant Jew, answered, “Oh, honey, I’m a Jungian.”
The first time I met him, at the train station in Ardmore, Pa., Martin shook my hand and thoughtfully took my suitcase. “Come,” he said. “I’ll take you to see the holy hankie.” We then walked several blocks to the office where Martin sees clients. The room was cozy and cavelike, with a thick rug and walls painted a deep, handsome shade of blue. There was a Mission-style sofa and two upholstered chairs and an espresso machine in one corner.
Several mounted vintage posters of Zurich hung on the walls, along with framed photographs of Carl Jung, looking wise and white-haired, and Liliane Frey-Rohn, a round-faced woman smiling maternally from behind a pair of severe glasses.
Martin tenderly lifted several first-edition books by Jung from a shelf, opening them so I could see how they had been inscribed to Frey-Rohn, who later bequeathed them to Martin. Finally, we found ourselves standing in front of a square frame hung on the room’s far wall, another gift from his former analyst and the centerpiece of Martin’s Jung arcana. Inside the frame was a delicate linen square, its crispness worn away by age — a folded handkerchief with the letters “CGJ” embroidered neatly in one corner in gray. Martin pointed. “There you have it,” he said with exaggerated pomp, “the holy hankie, the sacred nasal shroud of C. G. Jung.”
In addition to practicing as an analyst, Martin is the director of the Philemon Foundation, which focuses on preparing the unpublished works of Carl Jung for publication, with the Red Book as its central project. He has spent the last several years aggressively, sometimes evangelistically, raising money in the Jungian community to support his foundation. The foundation, in turn, helped pay for the translating of the book and the addition of a scholarly apparatus — a lengthy introduction and vast network of footnotes — written by a London-based historian named Sonu Shamdasani, who serves as the foundation’s general editor and who spent about three years persuading the family to endorse the publication of the book and to allow him access to it.
Given the Philemon Foundation’s aim to excavate and make public C. G. Jung’s old papers — lectures he delivered at Zurich’s Psychological Club or unpublished letters, for example — both Martin and Shamdasani, who started the foundation in 2003, have worked to develop a relationship with the Jung family, the owners and notoriously protective gatekeepers of Jung’s works. Martin echoed what nearly everybody I met subsequently would tell me about working with Jung’s descendants. “It’s sometimes delicate,” he said, adding by way of explanation, “They are very Swiss.”
What he likely meant by this was that the members of the Jung family who work most actively on maintaining Jung’s estate tend to do things carefully and with an emphasis on privacy and decorum and are on occasion taken aback by the relatively brazen and totally informal way that American Jungians — who it is safe to say are the most ardent of all Jungians — inject themselves into the family’s business. There are Americans knocking unannounced on the door of the family home in Küsnacht; Americans scaling the fence at Bollingen, the stone tower Jung built as a summer residence farther south on the shore of Lake Zurich. Americans pepper Ulrich Hoerni, one of Jung’s grandsons who manages Jung’s editorial and archival matters through a family foundation, almost weekly with requests for various permissions. The relationship between the Jungs and the people who are inspired by Jung is, almost by necessity, a complex symbiosis. The Red Book — which on one hand described Jung’s self-analysis and became the genesis for the Jungian method and on the other was just strange enough to possibly embarrass the family — held a certain electrical charge. Martin recognized the descendants’ quandary. “They own it, but they haven’t lived it,” he said, describing Jung’s legacy. “It’s very consternating for them because we all feel like we own it.” Even the old psychiatrist himself seemed to recognize the tension. “Thank God I am Jung,” he is rumored once to have said, “and not a Jungian.”
“This guy, he was a bodhisattva,” Martin said to me that day. “This is the greatest psychic explorer of the 20th century, and this book tells the story of his inner life.” He added, “It gives me goose bumps just thinking about it.” He had at that point yet to lay eyes on the book, but for him that made it all the more tantalizing. His hope was that the Red Book would “reinvigorate” Jungian psychology, or at the very least bring himself personally closer to Jung. “Will I understand it?” he said. “Probably not. Will it disappoint? Probably. Will it inspire? How could it not?” He paused a moment, seeming to think it through. “I want to be transformed by it,” he said finally. “That’s all there is.”
IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND and decode the Red Book — a process he says required more than five years of concentrated work — Sonu Shamdasani took long, rambling walks on London’s Hampstead Heath. He would translate the book in the morning, then walk miles in the park in the afternoon, his mind trying to follow the rabbit’s path Jung had forged through his own mind.
Shamdasani is 46. He has thick black hair, a punctilious eye for detail and an understated, even somnolent, way of speaking. He is friendly but not particularly given to small talk. If Stephen Martin is — in Jungian terms — a “feeling type,” then Shamdasani, who teaches at the University College London’s Wellcome Trust Center for the History of Medicine and keeps a book by the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus by his sofa for light reading, is a “thinking type.” He has studied Jungian psychology for more than 15 years and is particularly drawn to the breadth of Jung’s psychology and his knowledge of Eastern thought, as well as the historical richness of his era, a period when visionary writing was more common, when science and art were more entwined and when Europe was slipping into the psychic upheaval of war. He tends to be suspicious of interpretive thinking that’s not anchored by hard fact — and has, in fact, made a habit of attacking anybody he deems guilty of sloppy scholarship — and also maintains a generally unsentimental attitude toward Jung. Both of these qualities make him, at times, awkward company among both Jungians and Jungs.
The relationship between historians and the families of history’s luminaries is, almost by nature, one of mutual disenchantment. One side works to extract; the other to protect. One pushes; one pulls. Stephen Joyce, James Joyce’s literary executor and last living heir, has compared scholars and biographers to “rats and lice.” Vladimir Nabokov’s son Dmitri recently told an interviewer that he considered destroying his father’s last known novel in order to rescue it from the “monstrous nincompoops” who had already picked over his father’s life and works. T. S. Eliot’s widow, Valerie Fletcher, has actively kept his papers out of the hands of biographers, and Anna Freud was, during her lifetime, notoriously selective about who was allowed to read and quote from her father’s archives.
Even against this backdrop, the Jungs, led by Ulrich Hoerni, the chief literary administrator, have distinguished themselves with their custodial vigor. Over the years, they have tried to interfere with the publication of books perceived to be negative or inaccurate (including one by the award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair), engaged in legal standoffs with Jungians and other academics over rights to Jung’s work and maintained a state of high agitation concerning the way C. G. Jung is portrayed. Shamdasani was initially cautious with Jung’s heirs. “They had a retinue of people coming to them and asking to see the crown jewels,” he told me in London this summer. “And the standard reply was, ‘Get lost.’ ”
Shamdasani first approached the family with a proposal to edit and eventually publish the Red Book in 1997, which turned out to be an opportune moment. Franz Jung, a vehement opponent of exposing Jung’s private side, had recently died, and the family was reeling from the publication of two controversial and widely discussed books by an American psychologist named Richard Noll, who proposed that Jung was a philandering, self-appointed prophet of a sun-worshiping Aryan cult and that several of his central ideas were either plagiarized or based upon falsified research.
While the attacks by Noll might have normally propelled the family to more vociferously guard the Red Book, Shamdasani showed up with the right bargaining chips — two partial typed draft manuscripts (without illustrations) of the Red Book he had dug up elsewhere. One was sitting on a bookshelf in a house in southern Switzerland, at the home of the elderly daughter of a woman who once worked as a transcriptionist and translator for Jung. The second he found at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, in an uncataloged box of papers belonging to a well-known German publisher. The fact that there were partial copies of the Red Book signified two things — one, that Jung had distributed it to at least a few friends, presumably soliciting feedback for publication; and two, that the book, so long considered private and inaccessible, was in fact findable. The specter of Richard Noll and anybody else who, they feared, might want to taint Jung by quoting selectively from the book loomed large. With or without the family’s blessing, the Red Book — or at least parts of it — would likely become public at some point soon, “probably,” Shamdasani wrote ominously in a report to the family, “in sensationalistic form.”
For about two years, Shamdasani flew back and forth to Zurich, making his case to Jung’s heirs. He had lunches and coffees and delivered a lecture. Finally, after what were by all accounts tense deliberations inside the family, Shamdasani was given a small salary and a color copy of the original book and was granted permission to proceed in preparing it for publication, though he was bound by a strict confidentiality agreement. When money ran short in 2003, the Philemon Foundation was created to finance Shamdasani’s research.
Having lived more or less alone with the book for almost a decade, Shamdasani — who is a lover of fine wine and the intricacies of jazz — these days has the slightly stunned aspect of someone who has only very recently found his way out of an enormous maze. When I visited him this summer in the book-stuffed duplex overlooking the heath, he was just adding his 1,051st footnote to the Red Book.
The footnotes map both Shamdasani’s journey and Jung’s. They include references to Faust, Keats, Ovid, the Norse gods Odin and Thor, the Egyptian deities Isis and Osiris, the Greek goddess Hecate, ancient Gnostic texts, Greek Hyperboreans, King Herod, the Old Testament, the New Testament, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, astrology, the artist Giacometti and the alchemical formulation of gold. And that’s just naming a few. The central premise of the book, Shamdasani told me, was that Jung had become disillusioned with scientific rationalism — what he called “the spirit of the times” — and over the course of many quixotic encounters with his own soul and with other inner figures, he comes to know and appreciate “the spirit of the depths,” a field that makes room for magic, coincidence and the mythological metaphors delivered by dreams.
“It is the nuclear reactor for all his works,” Shamdasani said, noting that Jung’s more well-known concepts — including his belief that humanity shares a pool of ancient wisdom that he called the collective unconscious and the thought that personalities have both male and female components (animus and anima) — have their roots in the Red Book. Creating the book also led Jung to reformulate how he worked with clients, as evidenced by an entry Shamdasani found in a self-published book written by a former client, in which she recalls Jung’s advice for processing what went on in the deeper and sometimes frightening parts of her mind.
“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.”
ZURICH IS, IF NOTHING ELSE, one of Europe’s more purposeful cities. Its church bells clang precisely; its trains glide in and out on a flawless schedule. There are crowded fondue restaurants and chocolatiers and rosy-cheeked natives breezily pedaling their bicycles over the stone bridges that span the Limmat River. In summer, white-sailed yachts puff around Lake Zurich; in winter, the Alps glitter on the horizon. And during the lunch hour year-round, squads of young bankers stride the Bahnhofstrasse in their power suits and high-end watches, appearing eternally mindful of the fact that beneath everyone’s feet lie labyrinthine vaults stuffed with a dazzling and disproportionate amount of the world’s wealth.
But there, too, ventilating the city’s material splendor with their devotion to dreams, are the Jungians. Some 100 Jungian analysts practice in and around Zurich, examining their clients’ dreams in sessions held in small offices tucked inside buildings around the city. Another few hundred analysts in training can be found studying at one of the two Jungian institutes in the area. More than once, I have been told that, in addition to being a fantastic tourist destination and a good place to hide money, Zurich is an excellent city for dreaming.
Jungians are accustomed to being in the minority pretty much everywhere they go, but here, inside a city of 370,000, they have found a certain quiet purchase. Zurich, for Jungians, is spiritually loaded. It’s a kind of Jerusalem, the place where C. G. Jung began his career, held seminars, cultivated an inner circle of disciples, developed his theories of the psyche and eventually grew old. Many of the people who enroll in the institutes are Swiss, American, British or German, but some are from places like Japan and South Africa and Brazil. Though there are other Jungian institutes in other cities around the world offering diploma programs, learning the techniques of dream analysis in Zurich is a little bit like learning to hit a baseball in Yankee Stadium. For a believer, the place alone conveys a talismanic grace.
Just as I had, Stephen Martin flew to Zurich the week the Red Book was taken from its bank-vault home and moved to a small photo studio near the opera house to be scanned, page by page, for publication. (A separate English translation along with Shamdasani’s introduction and footnotes will be included at the back of the book.) Martin already made a habit of visiting Zurich a few times a year for “bratwurst and renewal” and to attend to Philemon Foundation business. My first morning there, we walked around the older parts of Zurich, before going to see the book. Zurich made Martin nostalgic. It was here that he met his wife, Charlotte, and here that he developed the almost equally important relationship with his analyst, Frey-Rohn, carrying himself and his dreams to her office two or three times weekly for several years.
Undergoing analysis is a central, learn-by-doing part of Jungian training, which usually takes about five years and also involves taking courses in folklore, mythology, comparative religion and psychopathology, among others. It is, Martin says, very much a “mentor-based discipline.” He is fond of pointing out his own conferred pedigree, because Frey-Rohn was herself analyzed by C. G. Jung. Most analysts seem to know their bloodlines. That morning, Martin and I were passing a cafe when he spotted another American analyst, someone he knew in school and who has since settled in Switzerland. “Oh, there’s Bob,” Martin said merrily, making his way toward the man. “Bob trained with Liliane,” he explained to me, “and that makes us kind of like brothers.”
Jungian analysis revolves largely around writing down your dreams (or drawing them) and bringing them to the analyst — someone who is patently good with both symbols and people — to be scoured for personal and archetypal meaning. Borrowing from Jung’s own experiences, analysts often encourage clients to experiment on their own with active imagination, to summon a waking dreamscape and to interact with whatever, or whoever, surfaces there. Analysis is considered to be a form of psychotherapy, and many analysts are in fact trained also as psychotherapists, but in its purist form, a Jungian analyst eschews clinical talk of diagnoses and recovery in favor of broader (and some might say fuzzier) goals of self-discovery and wholeness — a maturation process Jung himself referred to as “individuation.” Perhaps as a result, Jungian analysis has a distinct appeal to people in midlife. “The purpose of analysis is not treatment,” Martin explained to me. “That’s the purpose of psychotherapy. The purpose of analysis,” he added, a touch grandly, “is to give life back to someone who’s lost it.”
Later that day, we went to the photo studio where the work on the book was already under way. The room was a charmless space with concrete floors and black walls. Its hushed atmosphere and glaring lights added a slightly surgical aspect. There was the editor from Norton in a tweedy sport coat. There was an art director hired by Norton and two technicians from a company called DigitalFusion, who had flown to Zurich from Southern California with what looked to be a half-ton of computer and camera equipment.
Shamdasani arrived ahead of us. And so did Ulrich Hoerni, who, along with his cousin Peter Jung, had become a cautious supporter of Shamdasani, working to build consensus inside the family to allow the book out into the world. Hoerni was the one to fetch the book from the bank and was now standing by, his brow furrowed, appearing somewhat tortured. To talk to Jung’s heirs is to understand that nearly four decades after his death, they continue to reel inside the psychic tornado Jung created during his lifetime, caught between the opposing forces of his admirers and critics and between their own filial loyalties and history’s pressing tendency to judge and rejudge its own playmakers. Hoerni would later tell me that Shamdasani’s discovery of the stray copies of the Red Book surprised him, that even today he’s not entirely clear about whether Carl Jung ever intended for the Red Book to be published. “He left it an open question,” he said. “One might think he would have taken some of his children aside and said, ‘This is what it is and what I want done with it,’ but he didn’t.” It was a burden Hoerni seemed to wear heavily. He had shown up at the photo studio not just with the Red Book in its special padded suitcase but also with a bedroll and a toothbrush, since after the day’s work was wrapped, he would be spending the night curled up near the book — “a necessary insurance measure,” he would explain.
And finally, there sunbathing under the lights, sat Carl Jung’s Red Book, splayed open to Page 37. One side of the open page showed an intricate mosaic painting of a giant holding an ax, surrounded by winged serpents and crocodiles. The other side was filled with a cramped German calligraphy that seemed at once controlled and also, just given the number of words on the page, created the impression of something written feverishly, cathartically. Above the book a 10,200-pixel scanner suspended on a dolly clicked and whirred, capturing the book one-tenth of a millimeter at a time and uploading the images into a computer.
The Red Book had an undeniable beauty. Its colors seemed almost to pulse, its writing almost to crawl. Shamdasani’s relief was palpable, as was Hoerni’s anxiety. Everyone in the room seemed frozen in a kind of awe, especially Stephen Martin, who stood about eight feet away from the book but then finally, after a few minutes, began to inch closer to it. When the art director called for a break, Martin leaned in, tilting his head to read some of the German on the page. Whether he understood it or not, he didn’t say. He only looked up and smiled.
ONE AFTERNOON I took a break from the scanning and visited Andreas Jung, who lives with his wife, Vreni, in C. G. Jung’s old house at 228 Seestrasse in the town of Küsnacht. The house — a 5,000-square-foot, 1908 baroque-style home, designed by the psychiatrist and financed largely with his wife, Emma’s, inheritance — sits on an expanse between the road and the lake. Two rows of trimmed, towering topiary trees create a narrow passage to the entrance. The house faces the white-capped lake, a set of manicured gardens and, in one corner, an anomalous, unruly patch of bamboo.
Andreas is a tall man with a quiet demeanor and a gentlemanly way of dressing. At 64, he resembles a thinner, milder version of his famous grandfather, whom he refers to as “C. G.” Among Jung’s five children (all but one are dead) and 19 grandchildren (all but five are still living), he is one of the youngest and also known as the most accommodating to curious outsiders. It is an uneasy kind of celebrity. He and Vreni make tea and politely serve cookies and dispense little anecdotes about Jung to those courteous enough to make an advance appointment. “People want to talk to me and sometimes even touch me,” Andreas told me, seeming both amused and a little sheepish. “But it is not at all because of me, of course. It is because of my grandfather.” He mentioned that the gardeners who trim the trees are often perplexed when they encounter strangers — usually foreigners — snapping pictures of the house. “In Switzerland, C. G. Jung is not thought to be so important,” he said. “They don’t see the point of it.”
Jung, who was born in the mountain village of Kesswil, was a lifelong outsider in Zurich, even as in his adult years he seeded the city with his followers and became — along with Paul Klee and Karl Barth — one of the best-known Swissmen of his era. Perhaps his marginalization stemmed in part from the offbeat nature of his ideas. (He was mocked, for example, for publishing a book in the late 1950s that examined the psychological phenomenon of flying saucers.) Maybe it was his well-documented abrasiveness toward people he found uninteresting. Or maybe it was connected to the fact that he broke with the established ranks of his profession. (During the troubled period when he began writing the Red Book, Jung resigned from his position at Burghölzli, never to return.) Most likely, too, it had something to do with the unconventional, unhidden, 40-something-year affair he conducted with a shy but intellectually forbidding woman named Toni Wolff, one of Jung’s former analysands who went on to become an analyst as well as Jung’s close professional collaborator and a frequent, if not fully welcome, fixture at the Jung family dinner table.
“The life of C. G. Jung was not easy,” Andreas said. “For the family, it was not easy at all.” As a young man, Andreas had sometimes gone and found his grandfather’s Red Book in the cupboard and paged through it, just for fun. Knowing its author personally, he said, “It was not strange to me at all.”
For the family, C. G. Jung became more of a puzzle after his death, having left behind a large amount of unpublished work and an audience eager to get its hands on it. “There were big fights,” Andreas told me when I visited him again this summer. Andreas, who was 19 when his grandfather died, recalled family debates over whether or not to allow some of Jung’s private letters to be published. When the extended family gathered for the annual Christmas party in Küsnacht, Jung’s children would disappear into a room and have heated discussions about what to do with what he had left behind while his grandchildren played in another room. “My cousins and brothers and I, we thought they were silly to argue over these things,” Andreas said, with a light laugh. “But later when our parents died, we found ourselves having those same arguments.”
Even Jung’s great-grandchildren felt his presence. “He was omnipresent,” Daniel Baumann, whose grandmother was Jung’s daughter Gret, would tell me when I met him later. He described his own childhood with a mix of bitterness and sympathy directed at the older generations. “It was, ‘Jung said this,’ and ‘Jung did that,’ and ‘Jung thought that.’ When you did something, he was always present somehow. He just continued to live on. He was with us. He is still with us,” Baumann said. Baumann is an architect and also the president of the board of the C. G. Jung Institute in Küsnacht. He deals with Jungians all the time, and for them, he said, it was the same. Jung was both there and not there. “It’s sort of like a hologram,” he said. “Everyone projects something in the space, and Jung begins to be a real person again.”
ONE NIGHT DURING the week of the scanning in Zurich, I had a big dream. A big dream, the Jungians tell me, is a departure from all your regular dreams, which in my case meant this dream was not about falling off a cliff or missing an exam. This dream was about an elephant — a dead elephant with its head cut off. The head was on a grill at a suburban-style barbecue, and I was holding the spatula. Everybody milled around with cocktails; the head sizzled over the flames. I was angry at my daughter’s kindergarten teacher because she was supposed to be grilling the elephant head at the barbecue, but she hadn’t bothered to show up. And so the job fell to me. Then I woke up.
At the hotel breakfast buffet, I bumped into Stephen Martin and a Californian analyst named Nancy Furlotti, who is the vice president on the board of the Philemon Foundation and was at that moment having tea and muesli.
“How are you?” Martin said.
“Did you dream?” Furlotti asked
“What do elephants mean to you?” Martin asked after I relayed my dream.
“I like elephants,” I said. “I admire elephants.”
“There’s Ganesha,” Furlotti said, more to Martin than to me. “Ganesha is an Indian god of wisdom.”
“Elephants are maternal,” Martin offered, “very caring.”
They spent a few minutes puzzling over the archetypal role of the kindergarten teacher. “How do you feel about her?” “Would you say she is more like a mother figure or more like a witch?”
Giving a dream to a Jungian analyst is a little bit like feeding a complex quadratic equation to someone who really enjoys math. It takes time. The process itself is to be savored. The solution is not always immediately evident. In the following months, I told my dream to several more analysts, and each one circled around similar symbolic concepts about femininity and wisdom. One day I was in the office of Murray Stein, an American analyst who lives in Switzerland and serves as the president of the International School of Analytical Psychology, talking about the Red Book. Stein was telling me about how some Jungian analysts he knew were worried about the publication — worried specifically that it was a private document and would be apprehended as the work of a crazy person, which then reminded me of my crazy dream. I related it to him, saying that the very thought of eating an elephant’s head struck me as grotesque and embarrassing and possibly a sign there was something deeply wrong with my psyche. Stein assured me that eating is a symbol for integration. “Don’t worry,” he said soothingly. “It’s horrifying on a naturalistic level, but symbolically it is good.”
It turned out that nearly everybody around the Red Book was dreaming that week. Nancy Furlotti dreamed that we were all sitting at a table drinking amber liquid from glass globes and talking about death. (Was the scanning of the book a death? Wasn’t death followed by rebirth?) Sonu Shamdasani dreamed that he came upon Hoerni sleeping in the garden of a museum. Stephen Martin was sure that he had felt some invisible hand patting him on the back while he slept. And Hugh Milstein, one of the digital techs scanning the book, passed a tormented night watching a ghostly, white-faced child flash on a computer screen. (Furlotti and Martin debated: could that be Mercurius? The god of travelers at a crossroads?)
Early one morning we were standing around the photo studio discussing our various dreams when Ulrich Hoerni trudged through the door, having deputized his nephew Felix to spend the previous night next to the Red Book. Felix had done his job; the Red Book lay sleeping with its cover closed on the table. But Hoerni, appearing weary, seemed to be taking an extra hard look at the book. The Jungians greeted him. “How are you? Did you dream last night?”
“Yes,” Hoerni said quietly, not moving his gaze from the table. “I dreamed the book was on fire.”
ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH the Red Book — after he has traversed a desert, scrambled up mountains, carried God on his back, committed murder, visited hell; and after he has had long and inconclusive talks with his guru, Philemon, a man with bullhorns and a long beard who flaps around on kingfisher wings — Jung is feeling understandably tired and insane. This is when his soul, a female figure who surfaces periodically throughout the book, shows up again. She tells him not to fear madness but to accept it, even to tap into it as a source of creativity. “If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature.”
The Red Book is not an easy journey — it wasn’t for Jung, it wasn’t for his family, nor for Shamdasani, and neither will it be for readers. The book is bombastic, baroque and like so much else about Carl Jung, a willful oddity, synched with an antediluvian and mystical reality. The text is dense, often poetic, always strange. The art is arresting and also strange. Even today, its publication feels risky, like an exposure. But then again, it is possible Jung intended it as such. In 1959, after having left the book more or less untouched for 30 or so years, he penned a brief epilogue, acknowledging the central dilemma in considering the book’s fate. “To the superficial observer,” he wrote, “it will appear like madness.” Yet the very fact he wrote an epilogue seems to indicate that he trusted his words would someday find the right audience.
Shamdasani figures that the Red Book’s contents will ignite both Jung’s fans and his critics. Already there are Jungians planning conferences and lectures devoted to the Red Book, something that Shamdasani finds amusing. Recalling that it took him years to feel as if he understood anything about the book, he’s curious to know what people will be saying about it just months after it is published. As far as he is concerned, once the book sees daylight, it will become a major and unignorable piece of Jung’s history, the gateway into Carl Jung’s most inner of inner experiences. “Once it’s published, there will be a ‘before’ and ‘after’ in Jungian scholarship,” he told me, adding, “it will wipe out all the biographies, just for starters.” What about the rest of us, the people who aren’t Jungians, I wondered. Was there something in the Red Book for us? “Absolutely, there is a human story here,” Shamdasani said. “The basic message he’s sending is ‘Value your inner life.’ ”
After it was scanned, the book went back to its bank-vault home, but it will move again — this time to New York, accompanied by a number of Jung’s descendents. For the next few months it will be on display at the Rubin Museum of Art. Ulrich Hoerni told me this summer that he assumed the book would generate “criticism and gossip,” but by bringing it out they were potentially rescuing future generations of Jungs from some of the struggles of the past. If another generation inherited the Red Book, he said, “the question would again have to be asked, ‘What do we do with it?’ ”
Stephen Martin too will be on hand for the book’s arrival in New York. He is already sensing that it will shed positive light on Jung — this thanks to a dream he had recently about an “inexpressively sublime” dawn breaking over the Swiss Alps — even as others are not so certain.
In the Red Book, after Jung’s soul urges him to embrace the madness, Jung is still doubtful. Then suddenly, as happens in dreams, his soul turns into “a fat, little professor,” who expresses a kind of paternal concern for Jung.
Jung says: “I too believe that I’ve completely lost myself. Am I really crazy? It’s all terribly confusing.”
The professor responds: “Have patience, everything will work out. Anyway, sleep well.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 20, 2009
An article on Page 34 this weekend about Carl Jung and a book he wrote about struggling with his own demons misspells the name of a street in Zurich where, before it was published, the book was held for years in a bank safe-deposit box, and a correction in this space on Saturday also misspelled the name. It is Bahnhofstrasse, not Banhofstrasse or Banhoffstrasse. The article also misstates the location of Bollingen, the town where Jung built a stone tower as a summer residence. While it is on the north shore of Lake Zurich, it is south of the Jung family home in Küsnacht.
the first vid in a 17 part series made by AronRa
check out his youtube page for the series and more of his work
http://www.youtube.com/AronRa
http://darwinwasright.homestead.com/1stFFoC.html
The U.S. population seems pretty evenly divided over whether the human species is biologically related to other animals or whether we were “specially-created” as part of a flurry of miracles. Even our collective politicians -seemingly all of them- are wrapped up in this controversy. Yet its hard to find even one of them who knows what its about. Why is it that there is such concern in so many grade schools (K thru 12) about teaching evolution, yet there is still a complete consensus among scientists all over America and the rest of the world -that evolution is the backbone of modern biology, and a demonstrable reality historically as well?
Most people really don’t understand science; what it is, how it works, what hypotheses and theories are, or even the purpose behind it. Sadly even those on your school faculty or state Board of Education often need an education themselves before they can be trusted to govern how or what our kids will be taught, and that’s why I thought I should speak up and do what I can to help.
To adequately understand evolution, you not only have to understand how to be scientific, (which is the real trick for most people) but you also have to know something about cellular biology, genetics, and anatomy, geology, particularly paleontology, as well as environmental systems, tectonics, atomic chemistry, and especially taxonomy, which most people don’t know squat about at all. Most people who accept evolution also tend to know a whole lot about cosmology, geography, history, sociology, politics, and of course, religion.
But to believe in creationism, you don’t have to know anything about anything, and its better if you don’t! Because creationism relies on ignorance. It is not honest research! It is a scam, a con job exploiting the common folk, and preying on their deepest beliefs and fears. Creationist apologetics depends on misrepresented data and misquoted authorities, out-of-date and out-of-context, and uses distorted definitions if it uses definitions at all.
There are basically two types of creationists; the professional or political creationists; these are the activists who lead the movement and who will regularly deliberately lie to promote their propaganda; and the second type which are the innocently-deceived followers commonly known as “sheep”. I know lots of intellectual Christians, but I can’t get any of them to actually watch the tele-evangelists, because they either already know how phony they are, or they don’t want to find out. But that only allows a radical fringe to claim support from they masses they now also claim to represent. So there’s nothing to stop them. Professional creationists are making money hand over fist with faith-healing scams or bilking little old ladies out of prayer donations, or selling books and videos at their circus-like seminars where they have undeserved respect as powerful leaders. All of them feign knowledge they can’t really possess, and some of them claim degrees they’ve never actually earned.
“You are a scientist, correct?”
“That’s right; I have a PhD in truthology from Christian Tech.”
Were it not for this con, they’d have to go back to selling used cars, wonder drugs, and multi-level marketing schemes. They will never change their minds no matter what it costs anyone else. So it is obviously the “sheep” whom I’m attempting to reach with this speech –so that they might not be sheep anymore, and will stop feeding fuel into that manipulative movement. Because its one thing to believe in something that might be true (like God in general or Christianity specifically) even though neither can be substantiated or tested in any objective way. But it is a whole other matter to willfully deceive others into believing things which are definitely not true -like creationism, especially when we can also prove that those doing this know their assorted arguments are bogus, and know they’re lying to our children, and that they hope to continue doing so under the guise of “education”.
Creationism extorts support through peer-pressure, prejudice, and paranoid propaganda, and sells itself with short, simplistic slogans which appeal to those who don’t want to think too much, or are afraid to question their own beliefs. Worst of all, it actually forbids critical inquiry, and promotes anti-intellectualism, and it is based on at least a dozen foundational falsehoods. First and foremost among them is the idea that accepting evolution requires the rejection of theism, if not all other religious or spiritual beliefs as well.
For decades those behind the creationism movement have tried very hard to portray the illusion that one cannot accept evolution and still believe in God. They know better, but they still want you to believe that evolution is atheist, and that it is either evolution without God, or God creating without evolution. That’s been their central claim since the creationism movement began. But this supposed controversy never was about whether or not there is a god. Most people believe there is a god, and they believe he is in control of all the seemingly-random events of our lives. This is true of most of the people who accept evolution also. Most of them believe in God as well, and they believe that God is in control of evolution; that evolution, like every other system in nature, is part of God’s design.
Of the couple hundred different, and often violently-conflicting denominations of Christianity, the largest of them by far is Catholicism followed by Orthodoxy. Both of these have stated support of evolution and denounced creationism. Pope Benedict recently described evolution as an “enriching reality” and described creationist contests against it as “absurd”. Both of the popes before him advised Christians ‘round the world to consider evolution to be “more than an hypothesis” and not to fear acceptance of that as being any challenge to their faith in Christ.
The early pioneers of evolutionary science were all initially Christian, (including Darwin) and many leading proponents of modern evolutionary science are still Christian today. For example, microbiologist Dr. Ken Miller, (who testified against intelligent design creationism in Kitzmiller v. Dover) -is a Catholic. Another outspoken proponent of evolution, Dr. Robert T. Bakker, (who has PhDs from both Harvard and Yale) is not only one of the leading, and most recognizable paleontologists in the world today, but he also happens to be a Bible-believing Pentecostal preacher; though he interprets Genesis differently than literalists would. In his book, Bones, Bibles and Creation, he says that to treat the Bible as though it were common history is to degrade its eternal meaning. One of the earliest geneticists, Theodosius Dobzhansky was an Orthodox Christian who many times professed his belief that life was created by God, but that nothing in biology made sense except in light of evolution. All these men agree that even if there really is a god, and even if that god is the Christian god, and even if that god created the universe and everything in it, =which they all believe- evolution would still be at least mostly true, and creationism would still be completely wrong.
Of all the developed nations throughout Christendom, only the United States has a significant number of creationists, and they’re the minority even here! Every other predominantly-Christian country tends to regard creationism as an incredulous, (if not insane) radical fringe movement which is an almost exclusively American phenomenon, and not taken seriously anywhere else. Poll after poll continues to reveal that, around the world, most “evolutionists” are Christian, and most Christians are evolutionists. So evolution is not synonymous with atheism, and creationism isn’t synonymous with Christianity either. Most creationists aren’t even Christians! There are millions more Muslim and Hindu creationists than Christian ones.
Regardless which religion they claim, creationism can be collectively defined as the fraction of religious believers who reject science, not just the conclusions of science, but its methods as well, and I mean all of them, from uniformitarianism and methodological naturalism to the peer review process and requirement that all positive claims be based on testable evidence. These people rely instead on blind faith in the assumed authority of their favored fables. In all cases, creationism is an obstinate and dogmatic superstitious belief which holds that members of most seemingly-related taxonomic groups did not evolve naturally, but were created magically, -that plants and animals were literally poofed out of nothing fully-formed, in their current state, unrelated to anything else –despite all indications to the contrary.
Creationists may side with western Abrahamic religions, (being the Judeo-Christian/Islamic mythos) in which there are conflicting versions of the same tales. Or creationists may belong to one of many eastern religions where the sacred stories of creation are much older, completely different, and dedicated to other gods and pantheons. But in every case, the proposed “creator” is supernatural, meaning that it is not a part of perceptible reality. Therefore it is undetectable by any testable means, and can only be assumed to exist for subjective emotional reasons, or as a result of cultural indoctrination, rather than because of any measurable evidence or logical rationale. In other words, there’s no way to say if its really there. Worst of all, there’s also no way to distinguish anyone’s gods or ghosts from the imaginary beings some primitive folks just made up either. This doesn’t mean no god exists. But it does mean that science can’t say anything about them. Because even if gods are real, they still don’t appear to be, and apparently don’t want to –since all the holy books demand they be believed on faith alone. As there is nothing anyone can verify and thus actually know to be correct about gods, then science is unable to make any comment about them at all. Because science can only ever investigate things with demonstrable evidence can be tested or measured.
From the creationist’s perspective, the method or mechanism of creation which these mystical beings use is nothing more than a golem spell where clay statues are animated with an enchantment. Or its an incantation in which complex modern plants and animals are “spoken” into being. That’s right, magic words which cause fully-developed adult animals to be conjured out of thin air. Or a god simply wishes them to exist; so they do. That’s it! There really is nothing more to it than that; pure freakin’ magic –by definition. Remember that the next time you hear anything from a creation “scientist”.
So for those who believe in God, the question really is how God created, and whether it was by one of many inextricably integrated natural systems he seemingly designed, or whether he simply blinked, wiggled his nose, wished upon a star and said “abra-cadabera”.
The 1st Falsehood of creationism:
“evolution = atheism”
so i thought i would type along while watchin this vid
as i tend to do in a stream of consciousness tag along style
i seriously got a lil scared about 2mins in and decided to leave it alone
but here’s the vid and my type along
edit: and here is the intro he speaks of
http://c0122981.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/090917BananaManIntro.pdf
so he start’s off with the vague, open and loaded question
“are you concerned about what’s happening to our country?”
divisive but loaded to where pretty much anyone would say yes based upon their own ideals and paradigms
but as soon as you internally answer “yes”
he goes off to tag his issues and grievances like we held the same when the question was asked
“god-given liberties”
how does repressed responsibility projected as a space daddy give you liberties
liberty is the right and power to express oneself in a manner of one’s choosing
it is to be free of restriction or control
isn’t that what the religions of abraham do
don’t they have like 10 set-in-stone restrictions
and are you not allowed to choose and control yourself
but must be modeled after a misunderstood and misused palestinian shaman
don’t they have that “sin” shit
and the whole eden guilt trip
tha fuck is mike seaver talkin bout!
and i’m pretty sure kids can pray in public fella
they do it all the time
i think what folk don’t like is when you try to proselytize us in public
yes
they can freely open a bible in school
they can open any book of religion and fantasy they wish
so long as its appropriate and non interfering with school work
which is what you are there to do
don’t you go to school on the weekends for the bible?
in some public places the ten commandments are not wished for or wanted displayed by the public
they are tribal commandments from 15 centuries ago!
they are societal law and civil codes for a specific population
why would the public want such displayed?
to what ends?
what about every other tribe, group, cult, club, justice league or cabal
are we to be privy and reminded of their rules and regulations?
do you think so kirk?
and yeah
the gideons
nor any other religious sub sect are allowed to proselytize at schools
im down for lettin the gideons as long as e let the hare krishnas, pastafarians and ubermensch do the same
you with me there kirk?
yes kirk
most of the enlightened or educated folk in the country do not believe in space daddies or flying monkeys
that would tend to make quite a bit of sense ya
since they have the investigative and educated experience
and kirk
atheism has doubled because paradigms like yours and people like you are the alternative!
it’s really that simple
really
not due to proselytizing professors
um
see
what you’re doing there is projection
you are assuming others do what you do
i would surely say 61% of the students at such a high level of education as you speak of are already atheistic or agnostic
again it comes with being able to think your own thoughts or process information at such a high standard
the brainwashing thing is projection too man
dont worry its very normal and nobody really gets it yet
but like you said
the %’s are rising
so that should soon change
thank god the culture is changing!
are you at all familiar with american history
seriously man
thankfully we are evolving
and everyone is pretty much aware of your “alternative”
or the logic you present as the alternative
it’s not like the evil agnostic uni profs are the only voice in the wilderness
you yourself are already overexposed and hold the unique ability to outshine and actually help keep folk agnostic more than anyone who tries to parody you
you’re better than hal lindsey(p.b.u.h.)
im completely lost on that heart changing shit with the gospel
logic?
see…
in your world
folk thinking for themselves is sin
and
you imagine that is a good thing?
ah i think we’re past 61% now
ok
so now you feel threatened by some fellas theory of evolution
and have decided to hijack his work and add false propaganda
please tell me you get the irony of including hitler into that
right
c’mon now
right
wow
think of the intro we could write for the bible!
everyone who accepts and attends the origin theory over the creation theory has already heard all that about darwin
what with the upper education n all
hitler was also a christian there kirk
i’ll let you think your own thought on that for…
well
however long
as i’m only 2 mins in to this so far…
uh-oh
wait
oh your god!
you did not just use science to discredit your “opposition”
did you really just do that?
!wow!
yep
im out!
smile, dance and think about thought
-j
seriously
i mean
seriously
LOGIC!
anyways
yeah
reminds me of third grade
didn’t have as many laughs then though
ha
although the delivery is simple and loaded
i found the ideas and avenues fun and curious
The Pharmacratic Inquisition DVD – Official Online Edition
1:51:19
How deep does the rabbit hole go? Gnostic Media is proud to present the official online edition of The Pharmacratic Inquisition 2007. If you enjoyed “Zeitgeist – The Movie”, you will love this video; the creators of this video are listed as one of the sources for the Zeitgeist Movie. The Pharmacratic Inquisition 2007 is a video version of the book, “Astrotheology & Shamanism” by Jan Irvin & Andrew Rutajit. The painstakingly detailed and heavily footnoted research in the book comes to life in this video and is now available to you for FREE! For further research of the claims made in this video, please read AstroTheology & Shamanism – this book is available to order as a combo with the DVD. Thousands of years ago, in the pre monarchic era, sacred plants and other entheogenic substances where politically correct and highly respected for their ability to bring forth the divine, Yahweh, God, The Great Spirit, etc., by the many cultures who used them. Often the entire tribe or community would partake in the entheogenic rites and rituals. These rites were often used in initiation into adulthood, for healing, to help guide the community in the decision process, and to bring the direct religious experience to anyone seeking it. In the pre literate world, the knowledge of psychedelic sacraments, as well as fertility rites and astronomical knowledge surrounding the sun, stars, and zodiac, known as astrotheology, were anthropomorphized into a character or a deity; consequently, their stories and practices could easily be passed down for generations. Weather changes over millenniums caused environmental changes that altered the available foods and plant sacraments available in the local vicinity. If a tribe lost its shamanic El-der (El – God), all of the tribe’s knowledge of their plant sacraments as well as astronomical knowledge would be lost. The Church’s inquisitions extracted this sacred knowledge from the local Shamans who were then exterminated…It is time to recognize the fact that this Pharmacratic Inquisition is still intact and destroy it.
“Persistence Hunt” of a Male Kudu, by tribesman of the San on the Kalahari Desert of Africa.
i normally dont care for his logic play
and find it loaded and slippery at times
i did find this perspective very curious and foreign
i love logic
all logic
and i love logic play
this ol boy is good stuff
i’m not too familiar with him
i’ve seen a blurbs here and there
and i get he displays passion and a specific perspective
i really love his angles and ideas
(i assume here that most of you get that i dont believe in them or any ones)
but really appreciate the duality in logic play
idk
i heard advertisers are boycottin his show
i hope he stays on somehow
somewhere
Joe Rogan and Randall Carlson chat about catastrophe, ancient civilizations, consciousness, DMT, and our future as a species…
by DowneastDem
Tue Jun 30, 2009 at 02:41:39 PM PDT
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/6/30/748515/-Scientists-Visit-the-Creation-Museum
The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky opened in 2007 to present an account of the origins of the universe, life and mankind according to a literal interpretation of the Bible. The museum is used by many evangelical Christians as a backdrop to attack the moral relativism that they believe is ruining America. Visitors to the museum learn that the universe was created 6000 years ago (in six days) and dinosaurs and humans cohabited the earth.
Yesterday a group of scientists visited the Creation Museum.
- DowneastDem’s diary :: ::
The University of Cincinnati was hosting a conference for paleontologists from all over the world. During a break in the activities, a group of 70 scientists made the short trip to the Creation Museum. While the Americans are accustomed to the general hostility to science among many of their fellow citizens, many of the foreign scientists were shocked at what they found.
Tamaki Sato was confused by the dinosaur exhibit. The placards described the various dinosaurs as originating from different geological periods — the stegosaurus from the Upper Jurassic, the heterodontosaurus from the Lower Jurassic, the velociraptor from the Upper Cretaceous — yet in each case, the date of demise was the same: around 2348 B.C.
“I was just curious why,” said Dr. Sato, a professor of geology from Tokyo Gakugei University in Japan.
Poor Dr. Sato. Has he never read the Bible? Doesn’t he know that 2348 BC was the year of the Great Flood?
Of course, the godless Europeans were also taken aback by the exhibits:
“I’m very curious and fascinated,” Stefan Bengtson, a professor of paleozoology at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, said before the visit, “because we have little of that kind of thing in Sweden.”
It’s fun to laugh at the museum and the people that actually believe in the junk science presented there. But not all the scientists were amused:
“It’s sort of a monument to scientific illiteracy, isn’t it?” said Jerry Lipps, professor of geology, paleontology and evolution at University of California, Berkeley.
Lisa Park of the University of Akron cried at one point as she walked a hallway full of flashing images of war, famine and natural disasters which the museum blames on belief in evolution.
“I think it’s very bad science and even worse theology — and the theology is far more offensive to me,” said Park, a professor of paleontology who is an elder in the Presbyterian Church.
“I think there’s a lot of focus on fear, and I don’t think that’s a very Christian message… I find it a malicious manipulation of the public.”
More than 750,000 people have visited the museum since it opened. Each day, busloads of children from Christian schools throughout America arrive at the Creation Museum for special guided tours.
Rec list? There is a God!
eh
fanmade teaser trailer
http://marketsaw.blogspot.com/2009/03/major-avatar-set-piece-details-see.html
http://www.firstshowing.net/2008/10/29/jon-favreau-calls-james-camerons-avatar-the-future
Jon Favreau Calls James Cameron’s Avatar ‘The Future’
October 29, 2008
Source: Ain’t It Cool News
by Alex Billington
Jon Favreau is another filmmaker who has really solidified his place in the cinematic world in directing Iron Man earlier this year. He’s returning for Iron Man 2, which is a relief, but looking towards the future, the door is open for so much more. Instead of dwelling on Iron Man 2, though, Quint from Ain’t It Cool News talked with Favreau in a recent interview about nearly everything else besides the sequel. And one area I was particularly interested in was his thoughts on James Cameron’s Avatar, since he’s one of the lucky few who has seen a few finished scenes from the film. “He’s trying to present this format in a way where it is a game-changer and in seeing it I think it’s the future,” Favreau explains.
We’ve been covering Avatar very closely for the last year, publishing nearly every last interview that Cameron has done. However, we still haven’t seen a single photo or anything from the film yet, but Favreau has. “I really liked the bits that I saw and I saw all the various stages of finished [footage], but he’s a purist in the way he approaches things, and he’s very meticulous.” Favreau jumps into explaining how Cameron “likes to put on a big show” and strive for cinematic revolution. “He’s really pushing the boundaries on motion capture, he’s integrating live action with motion capture and CGI. It takes a painstaking technical approach to that. And he really wants to make it a very visceral, emotional experience.”
“He’s sort of tireless in how much he invests into it as far as his time and effort. You know, he doesn’t make a lot of movies, so a lot of thought and effort goes into each one. And I think that he’s trying to present this format in a way where it is a game-changer and in seeing it I think it’s the future. I don’t think it’s a flash in the pan. I think it’s going to open up a whole new door and I think more so than the glasses it becomes about how many screens could actually present it in its pristine form.”
“The amount of screens is just growing at a very, very fast rate in the States and I think in Europe as well and I think Avatar is going to be the kind of movie that’s an event that you have to go see and you want to see again just to understand what you’re looking at. And then you still have his very effective storytelling. He really creates an adventure and draws you into it in the hero’s journey sense of storytelling, the Joseph Campbell sense of storytelling.”
Favreau adds that he has learned a great deal from Cameron in regards to motion capture and CGI and will be using similar techniques in Iron Man 2 because the way he made Avatar is such a technical revolution. “It is a game-changer from a production standpoint certainly in the way he’s using motion capture and operating a camera within a volume… the line between animation and live action is blurring in many ways.” He adds that even the typical process of filmmaking is changing due to Avatar. “The way that Jim’s doing it, it’s a much more organic process where post-production, production, and pre-production all sort of roll into one another and you’re moving back and forth between those media.”
I’ve been saying Avatar will be the next big cinematic revolution for years now, just because I believe James Cameron has achieved something truly spectacular. I don’t think any of us can really grasp what it will be like at this very moment. We’ll need to see it to believe it, because we can’t even comprehend what it’s all about until we get our first glimpse, which is why we haven’t seen any photos yet. Hearing Favreau say these kind of things only further solidifies my hope that it will be the next revolution. I just get excited thinking about how amazing Avatar could be and how big of a leap forward it will be for cinema.
Quint’s fantastic interview with Favreau also touches briefly on IMAX and why Favreau doesn’t think it’ll really work for Iron Man 2. He primarily believes that CGI at such a high resolution isn’t entirely believable yet and it’s a pain to lug around enormous cameras on set. I’m not entirely sure I can take his side, only because The Dark Knight looked so amazing, but it sounds like Iron Man 2 probably won’t have any scenes shot in IMAX. Either way, I’m very excited to see Favreau take on Iron Man 2 because it seems like he’s really going to push his own filmmaking boundaries even further than the first one. As for Avatar, I know I’m anxiously awaiting our first glimpse at the beautiful world the Cameron has created.
-
Major “Avatar” Set Piece Details – See Through the Eyes of an Alien!
Thursday, March 05, 2009
**UPDATE: March 7 - Jim here, got a MASSIVE update to Michael’s story from a MarketSaw reader by the name of Cremany from Germany. He is claiming to have seen a 3 minute clip sequence of Na’vi running through Pandora! He also says there are 2 more clips involved – check out his quotes from the comments section of this post:
ok… i asked a friend who was at CeBit with me and he saw the whole sequence of avatar (3 minutes)! It was 100% avatar, but it wasn’t a promotion for the movie, it was a promotion for a company which works on the photorealistic enviroment in the movie. The company uses 3 clips from avatar to present the technology.
the clip is in a first-person viewpoint and shows a person running on a a root very fast, suddenly the root ends and the person jumps to another root and start running again. you can see big trees in the size of a skyscraper, it is a very dusty and dark.
a friend told me the second clip shows a convoy drivinig through a canyon and suddenly a few big rocks roll into the canyon and the third clip looks like the inside of a huge mushroom with a crystal in the middle.
the clips are really photorealistic but you can see it’s computer animated… impressiv but not mind-melting. it’s very hard for me to explain because i didn’t give the clip a lot of attention…i didn’t realize that this was from avatar.
it was only first-person, but in the second clip my friend saw a few na’vis.but when i saw the clip i didn’t know it could be avatar before i read the topic here on this site. i wasn’t sure, so i ask my friend and he knew more aboud it and he saw all 3 clips, too. he has also a few connections to the event-management, they confirmed the avatar clips as promotion for a company which works together with panasonic.
This could be the clip we have been waiting for guys! I know there were clips shown in Nuremberg, Germany at the Toy Fair so this makes a lot of sense. CeBit is in Hannover. Keep it here for more updates!
Hi everyone, Michael here. A few months ago, G@BRIEL GR@Y dropped into a discussion here on MarketSaw, where he described what he considered to be the standout visual effects set piece of Avatar: a 12 minute sequence seen through the eyes of Jake in Avatar form as, among other things, he runs through the Pandoran jungle. Now, I have heard from a completely different source, who I can confirm as legit, that there is indeed a first person set piece in the film.
First, here is what G@BRIEL GR@Y had to say a few months ago:
There is a twelve min segment entirely in the first person viewpoint. this as im sure you all could understand is a tricky thing, you`ve seen examples in doom. which look cool….but never felt real. for instance blinking blurring of vision. photoreal is now easy. animateing it to define real is very hard. this most definatly is the money shot of the biggest movie ever conceived.
G@BRIEL GR@Y also posted the following on ComingSoon.net (as reported by MarketSaw reader Darkoo):
I was told about a 12 min segment of avatar where its in the first person viewpoint.and they were having probs making the scene feel real because people blink and have blurred vision. and from what im told they have found a very interesting compromise.
Here is what my source, who spoke to someone who had seen parts of the sequence, had to say to me a couple days ago:
1) He said that ‘when you are running through the jungle of Pandora and their tails are moving in front of your face, your brain will melt.’
2) I asked whether it a return to Tech-Noir form from JC and he said ‘its like Aliens, but from the POV of the Aliens’ :)
3) Big Rock Candy Mountain is supposed to be ‘amazing.’
4) Slightly off topic, the BAA preprod at Lightstorm was ‘very much in line with Kishiro’s artwork.’ Imagine that in 3D? /brain melts
So G@BRIEL GR@Y’s report is almost certainly legit, which is very exciting. The concept of Avatar is very much about letting go of the confines of your body, and experiencing the world through a different set of eyes. I think this sequence will be an incredible way of driving this point home. And, yes, it will certainly be brain-meltingly cool. It will be fascinating to watch Battle Angel continue to develop, too. Mark Goerner’s interview shed some fascinating light on the huge amount of work that has gone into that project so far. I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.
-
http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/news/james-cameron-not-messing-around-with-his-avatar-trailer.php
James Cameron Not Messing Around With His ‘Avatar’ Trailer
Posted by Neil Miller (neil@filmschoolrejects.com) on March 10, 2009
James Cameron takes his craft very seriously. And rightfully so, as Cameron’s upcoming film Avatar has built up some impressive buzz and even mightier expectations. Fans expect that the man who pioneered cool CGI effects with Terminator 2 and took scale to the umpteenth level with Titanic
will deliver something truly remarkable with his next film, said to be another potentially mind-boggling sensory experience. And to live up to such lofty expectations, one must choose carefully when cutting together a trailer — as it can severely modify the expectations, hopes and dreams of his faithful fans.
This is why we are now seeing a report from Market Saw that is claiming that eight trailers have failed to meet Cameron’s standards of excellence. There have been strong rumors from various sources saying that a trailer will play for press and industry folks at ShoWest in Las Vegas at the end of this month, but nothing has been confirmed. There has been some footage shown at various toy conferences in Europe, including a three minute clip of Na’vi running through Pandora that was shown at CeBit in Hannover, Germany. You can read a much more in-depth report about that footage here.
Also notable in the Market Saw report is some new information about how grounded the film will be in real science. For those not familiar, the film follows the story of a Marine (Sam Worthington) who is brought to the distant planet of Pandora, inhabited by a humanoid race known as the Na’vi. As he attempts to settle the planet as an alternative home for humanity, he gets in too deep with the Na’vi and ultimately crosses over to lead the indigenous race in a battle for survival. And as the report explains, the film will have a lot of hard-science based elements as Cameron and team build up this richly bio-diverse planet. “What Weta and Cameron have done is create a complete alien ecosystem grounded in hard science,” Explains Market Saw
’s source. “If Pandora were real, it would look and feel like what will be represented on screen.”
If true, this “eight trailers denied” rumor gives weight to the immense expectations that James Cameron has for this film, which would be his first directorial work since he made the highest grossing film of all-time, Titanic, in 1997. Also, I am digging the “real science” element of Pandora’s ecosystem. If anything, Cameron’s film will be a very cool experience.
Are you excited about Avatar?
-
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/movies/25avatar.html
Fan Fever Is Rising for Debut of ‘Avatar’
LOS ANGELES — In an old airplane hangar near the beach here, James Cameron has been working feverishly to complete a movie that may:
(a) Change filmmaking forever
(b) Alter your brain
(c) Cure cancer
For certain expectant movie fans, the answer might as well be all of the above.
Eight months before its scheduled release on Dec. 18, Mr. Cameron’s “Avatar,” a science-fiction thriller filmed with his own specially devised 3-D technology, is stirring up a kind of anticipation that until now had been reserved for, say, the Rapture.
That might foretell a hit on the order of Mr. Cameron’s “Titanic,” with $1.8 billion in worldwide ticket sales.
Or it might just be a giant headache for 20th Century Fox, which is backing “Avatar” and will have to spend much of the year managing expectations for a film whose technological wizardry is presumed by more than a few to promise an experiential leap for audiences comparable to that of “The Jazz Singer,” the arrival of Technicolor or an Obama campaign rally.
To date, neither a trailer nor even a still photo from the film, which tells the story of a disabled soldier who uses technology to inhabit an alien body on a distant planet, has been made public by Mr. Cameron or Fox.
But a number of enthusiasts who have been swapping notes on the message boards at IMDB.com claim to have already seen the movie — in their dreams. “The special effects were mostly drawings and cartoons, but they looked 3-D still,” wrote one “planetshane,” whose particular dream involved a pirated copy of an early version.
“It was the best movie I had ever seen,” the post continued.
Only a few weeks ago, Joshua Quittner, a technology writer for Time magazine, fed the frenzy when he reported feeling a strange yearning to return to the movie’s mythical planet, Pandora, the morning after he was shown just 15 minutes of the film. Mr. Cameron, Mr. Quittner wrote, theorized that the movie’s 3-D action had set off actual “memory creation.”
Questioned by telephone recently at his home in Mill Valley, Calif., Mr. Quittner said he was still reeling from the experience.
“It was like doing some kind of drug,” he said, describing a scene in which the movie’s hero, played by Sam Worthington, ran around “with this kind of hot alien chick,” was attacked by jaguarlike creatures and was sprinkled with sprites that floated down, like snowflakes.
“You feel like the little feathery things are landing on your arm,” said Mr. Quittner, who remained eager for another dose.
Executives and producers of the film declined to be interviewed for this article. In a statement Fox said: “Jim Cameron is breaking new ground with this film. Like all movie fans, the studio is excited by the prospect of such an original piece of entertainment.”
In a brief interview reported by The Associated Press in December, Mr. Cameron said he was worried that “Avatar” could not live up to the expectations that were building around it. “Whatever they think it’s going to be, it’s probably not,” he said at the time about those who were speculating about the movie on the Internet and elsewhere.
Yet Mr. Cameron has done his share to feed the hype with his repeated assurances that a coming wave of 3-D cinema (yes, it still requires glasses) would have the power to penetrate the brain in a way that movies never have.
Some fans believe that Mr. Cameron and his colleagues have finally crossed the “uncanny valley.” That is a supposed point at which a viewer’s responsiveness to a simulated human takes a sudden drop into revulsion as the image comes close to reality but strikes the watcher as being zombielike, or not quite right.
Dr. Mario Mendez, a behavioral neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine, said it is entirely possible that Mr. Cameron’s work could tap brain systems that are undisturbed by conventional 2-D movies. One, he said, is a kind of inner global-positioning system that orients a person to the surrounding world.
“Three-D demonstrably creates a space that triggers this GPS; it’s really very stimulating,” Dr. Mendez said. He added that he had used virtual-reality therapy in working with soldiers at the Veterans Administration hospital in Los Angeles — and found himself jarred by his experience with a “virtual Iraq” simulation.
“It was with me for days and days,” Dr. Mendez said.
At ShoWest, a convention of movie exhibitors, a few weeks ago, Mr. Cameron in a short promotional video compared watching “Avatar” to “dreaming with your eyes wide open.” (It was a neat complement to those who have been viewing the movie in their sleep.)
But, sooner rather than later, an increasingly restless group of the fans would like to sample the real thing. And that presents a conundrum for Fox, which will be hard pressed to release a conventional, 2-D trailer online — one of the most powerful ways to promote a movie these days — without undercutting the promise of a transcendental 3-D experience.
“I can’t believe they would spend 12 years developing the technology and telling us in words how great this is, then show us in 2-D,” said T. F. Powell, who runs AvatarMovieZone.com, an unofficial fan site devoted to the film. Mr. Powell recently spoke by telephone from Kansas.
Some fans are already teasing their peers about expecting too much.
“You would think this movie cures cancer,” taunted a skeptical Danny Danger in his “movie preview extravaganza” on a MySpace blog in January.
Typically, studios have given a peek at some of their biggest science-fiction and fantasy movies during the giant Comic-Con convention, an annual summer gathering of the fans in San Diego. But that also poses problems for “Avatar,” in that Comic-Con’s convention hall setting has not been equipped to showcase films in 3-D.
“I can’t imagine we will not have something, but nothing has been confirmed,” said David Glanzer, the convention’s director of marketing and public relations, speaking of the prospects for an “Avatar” moment at Comic-Con.
As for the movie’s release in December, Mr. Glanzer said, “Maybe they should have nurses in the lobby.”
It was a joking reference to a ploy once used by the producer William Castle. He posted fake nurses in the lobby of theaters that showed his own neuron-challenging horror film “Macabre,” while insuring every member of the audience for $1,000 against “death by fright.”
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http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/04/29/steven-soderbergh-praises-james-camerons-avatar
Steven Soderbergh Praises James Cameron’s Avatar
Posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 by Peter Sciretta
It seems like every other week now a new filmmaker or studio executive makes a comment about how James Cameron’s Avatar is going to revolutionize cinema. Jon Favreau
has called Avatar “a game-changer” and having seen some footage, he thinks “it’s the future.” Recently Sony head Amy Pascal told Forbes that she thinks Avatar is “going to change the way you consume entertainment. I don’t know that it will ever be the way you see dramas, but I can’t say anymore that it won’t be.” And Steven Spielberg has even predicted that Avatar will be the biggest 3-D live-action film ever.
Academy Award winning director Steven Soderbergh is the latest filmmaker to praise Cameron’s upcoming sci-fi epic: “I’ve seen some stuff and holy sh*t,” Soderbergh told ComingSoon . “It’s the craziest sh*t ever. That could negate everything I just said.”
Cameron’s new film is being treated like the second coming. I’m not sure how the film could possibly live up to all the ginormously hype. But just like all of you, I’m riding on the high buzz and hoping it will be great.
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Cameron’s Avatar a 3D drug trip?
By John Howell 30 April 2009
http://sffmedia.com/films/science-fiction-films/352-camerons-avatar-a-3d-drug-trip.html
They have yet to release a trailer or even a publicity photo from actual footage, but James Cameron and his team have managed to generate some impressive hype for his upcoming 3D science fiction epic, Avatar. His first movie since Titanic has a budget pushing US $200 million and enough hype to power a mission to Mars. Now it appears the 3D technology he created to turn his vision into a reality, the key to the movie’s success or failure, may be habit forming. A technology writer for Time Magazine, after being shown 15 minutes of the movie, posited the movie’s 3D action had set off actual “memory creation.”
“I couldn’t tell what was real and what was animated–even knowing that the 9-ft.-tall blue, dappled dude couldn’t possibly be real. The scenes were so startling and absorbing that the following morning, I had the peculiar sensation of wanting to return there, as if Pandora were real,” he said.
The New York Times interviewed him later.
“It was like doing some kind of drug,” he said, describing a scene showing Sam Worthington running around “with this kind of hot alien chick,” and being attacked by jaguarlike creatures. He was sprinkled with sprites that floated down, like snowflakes. “You feel like the little feathery things are landing on your arm”.
In the same New York Times article, Dr. Mario Mendez, a behavioural neurologist at the University of California, said it is entirely possible Cameron’s 3D technology could tap brain systems that are undisturbed by conventional 2D movies. An inner global-positioning system that orients a person to the surrounding world, was one example he gave.
“Three-D demonstrably creates a space that triggers this GPS; it’s really very stimulating”.
He went on to say that he had used virtual-reality therapy in working with soldiers at the Veterans Administration hospital in Los Angeles, finding himself jarred by his experience with a “virtual Iraq” simulation.
Cameron himself told Time Magazine that 3D viewing “is so close to a real experience that it actually triggers memory creation in a way that 2D viewing doesn’t.” Cameron also believes that stereoscopic (3D) viewing uses more neurons, which would further heighten the impact of 3D.
So will we all become addicted to 3D films? I’m not sure reality will ever match the hype, but I’m certainly keen to see how close it comes. The last 3D movie I saw, Robert Zemeckis’s excellent animated feature Beowulf, certainly captured my imagination. I remember certain scenes with an unusual clarity (and not just those involving Angelina Jolie).
The only reason I haven’t watched more 3D movies since is that apart from animated cartoons, like Monsters VS Aliens, big screen productions with serious actors and scripts seem hard to find. Perhaps now that Hollywood appears to have caught the 3D bug on a massive scale, with Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson willing converts, we’ll be flooded by addictive 3D productions that will transform our viewing experience forever. Or maybe Avatar will come and go and the 3D hype with it? I hope for the former but expect the latter. Only time will tell.
James Cameron’s Avatar was supposed to be released in May, but the international released date has been pushed back until 19 December.
Welcome to Global One TV, an online social network broadcasting Spiritual Television 24 Hours a Day awakening the Divinity within.
(we are having some trouble getting this to load w/o auto-playing, hopefully it won’t auto-play and all you need to do is click on the video box and perhaps the “on-air: box to activate it, let us know how it’s working for you)
At any moment your heart could stop beating and it could all be over. The brain-body organism that thinks it is you would cease to exist.
If you can truly be with this thought for a moment, the body will produce sensations of fear that the intellect will have a hard time trying to combat. And this is how religion is born.
The era that has spanned for thousands of years – one that is rooted in fear, causes division, promotes superstition – that era is ending now. This is the dawning of a new age.
We no longer need to invent imaginary friends or a jealous father who lives in the sky. We can know who we are without all of this.
In order to be moral, we don’t need a list of 10 things or the threat of burning in a pit of fire for all eternity.
In order to be good, we don’t need the promise of eternal paradise dangled in front of us.
We, as a race of intelligent beings are in a stage of maturity. We no longer require the parental supervision of Popes, Rabbis and Mullahs.
We are free to seek the Divinity within.
We are free to seek the Divinity in all things.
The spiritual realm is no longer a place that is roped off, only to be visited by special people with special powers. It is everywhere, at all times in all places and yet it transcends place and time – just as we transcend place and time.
You are not your story.
You are not only the brain-body organism which you currently inhabit. You are so much less and so much more.
We as a society can now take off the training wheels of organized religion and awaken to “religiousness”.
Let us give up our jihads, our crusades and take a quantum leap in our consciousness toward radical spiritual evolution. Using the power of Collective Intention we can make this possible and it begins right now.
Peace,
The Bible tells us that God created Adam and Eve just a few thousand years ago, by some fundamentalist interpretations. Science informs us that this is mere fiction and that man is a few million years old, and that civilization just tens of thousands of years old. Could it be, however, that conventional science is just as mistaken as the Bible stories? There is a great deal of archeological evidence that the history of life on earth might be far different than what current geological and anthropological texts tell us. Consider these astonishing finds:
The Grooved Spheres
Over the last few decades, miners in South Africa have been digging up mysterious metal spheres. Origin unknown, these spheres measure approximately an inch or so in diameter, and some are etched with three parallel grooves running around the equator. Two types of spheres have been found: one is composed of a solid bluish metal with flecks of white; the other is hollowed out and filled with a spongy white substance. The kicker is that the rock in which they where found is Precambrian – and dated to 2.8 billion years old! Who made them and for what purpose is unknown.
The Dropa Stones
In 1938, an archeological expedition led by Dr. Chi Pu Tei into the Baian-Kara-Ula mountains of China made an astonishing discovery in some caves that had apparently been occupied by some ancient culture. Buried in the dust of ages on the cave floor were hundreds of stone disks. Measuring about nine inches in diameter, each had a circle cut into the center and was etched with a spiral groove, making it look for all the world like some ancient phonograph record some 10,000 to 12,000 years old. The spiral groove, it turns out, is actually composed of tiny hieroglyphics that tell the incredible story of spaceships from some distant world that crash-landed in the mountains. The ships were piloted by people who called themselves the Dropa, and the remains of whose descendents, possibly, were found in the cave.
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The Ica Stones
Beginning in the 1930s, the father of Dr. Javier Cabrera, Cultural Anthropologist for Ica, Peru, discovered many hundreds of ceremonial burial stones in the tombs of the ancient Incas. Dr. Cabrera, carrying on his father’s work, has collected more than 1,100 of these andesite stones, which are estimated to be between 500 and 1,500 years old and have become known collectively as the Ica Stones. The stones bear etchings, many of which are sexually graphic (which was common to the culture), some picture idols and others depict such practices as open-heart surgery and brain transplants. The most astonishing etchings, however, clearly represent dinosaurs – brontosaurs, triceratops (see photo), stegosaurus and pterosaurs. While skeptics consider the Ica Stones a hoax, their authenticity has neither been proved or disproved.
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The Antikythera Mechanism
A perplexing artifact was recovered by sponge-divers from a shipwreck in 1900 off the coast of Antikythera, a small island that lies northwest of Crete. The divers brought up from the wreck a great many marble and and bronze statues that had apparently been the ship’s cargo. Among the findings was a hunk of corroded bronze that contained some kind of mechanism composed of many gears and wheels. Writing on the case indicated that it was made in 80 B.C., and many experts at first thought it was an astrolabe, an astronomer’s tool. An x-ray of the mechanism, however, revealed it to be far more complex, containing a sophisticated system of differential gears. Gearing of this complexity was not known to exist until 1575! It is still unknown who constructed this amazing instrument 2,000 years ago or how the technology was lost.
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The Baghdad Battery
Today batteries can be found in any grocery, drug, convenience and department store you come across. Well, here’s a battery that’s 2,000 years old! Known as the Baghdad Battery, this curiosity was found in the ruins of a Parthian village believed to date back to between 248 B.C. and 226 A.D. The device consists of a 5-1/2-inch high clay vessel inside of which was a copper cylinder held in place by asphalt, and inside of that was an oxidized iron rod. Experts who examined it concluded that the device needed only to be filled with an acid or alkaline liquid to produce an electric charge. It is believed that this ancient battery might have been used for electroplating objects with gold. If so, how was this technology lost… and the battery not rediscovered for another 1,800 years?
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The Coso Artifact
While mineral hunting in the mountains of California near Olancha during the winter of 1961, Wallace Lane, Virginia Maxey and Mike Mikesell found a rock, among many others, that they thought was a geode – a good addition for their gem shop. Upon cutting it open, however, Mikesell found an object inside that seemed to be made of white porcelain. In the center was a shaft of shiny metal. Experts estimated that it should have taken about 500,000 years for this fossil-encrusted nodule to form, yet the object inside was obviously of sophisticated human manufacture. Further investigation revealed that the porcelain was surround by a hexagonal casing, and an x-ray revealed a tiny spring at one end. Some who have examined the evidence say it looks very much like a modern-day spark plug. How did it get inside a 500,000-year-old rock?
Ancient Model Aircraft
There are artifacts belonging to ancient Egyptian and Central American cultures that look amazingly like modern-day aircraft. The Egyptian artifact, found in a tomb at Saqquara, Egypt in 1898, is a six-inch wooden object that strongly resembles a model airplane, with fuselage, wings and tail. Experts believe the object is so aerodynamic that it is actually able to glide. The small object discovered in Central America (shown at right), and estimated to be 1,000 years old, is made of gold and could easily be mistaken for a model of a delta-wing aircraft – or even the Space Shuttle. It even features what looks like a pilot’s seat.
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Giant Stone Balls of Costa Rica
Workmen hacking and burning their way through the dense jungle of Costa Rica to clear an area for banana plantations in the 1930s stumbled upon some incredible objects: dozens of stone balls, many of which were perfectly spherical. They varied in size from as small as a tennis ball to an astonishing 8 feet in diameter and weighing 16 tons! Although the great stone balls are clearly man-made, it is unknown who made them, for what purpose and, most puzzling, how they achieved such spherical precision.
Impossible Fossils
Fossils, as we learned in grade school, appear in rocks that were formed many thousands of years ago. Yet there are a number of fossils that just don’t make geological or historical sense. A fossil of a human handprint, for example, was found in limestone estimated to be 110 million years old. What appears to be a fossilized human finger found in the Canadian Arctic also dates back 100 to 110 million years ago. And what appears to be the fossil of a human footprint, possibly wearing a sandal, was found near Delta, Utah in a shale deposit estimated to be 300 million to 600 million years old.
Out-of-Place Metal Objects
Humans were not even around 65 million years ago, never mind people who could work metal. So then how does science explain semi-ovoid metallic tubes dug out of 65-million-year-old Cretaceous chalk in France? In 1885, a block of coal was broken open to find a metal cube obviously worked by intelligent hands. In 1912, employees at an electric plant broke apart a large chunk of coal out of which fell an iron pot! A nail was found embedded in a sandstone block from the Mesozoic Era. And there are many, many more such anomalies.
What are we to make of these finds? There are several possibilities:
- Intelligent humans date back much, much further than we realize.
- Other intelligent beings and civilizations existed on earth far beyond our recorded history.
- Our dating methods are completely inaccurate, and that stone, coal and fossils form much more rapidly than we now estimate.
In any case, these examples – and there are many more – should prompt any curious and open-minded scientist to reexamine and rethink the true history of life on earth.
