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“For centuries, man has used organized religion to control the hearts and minds (not to mention the pocketbooks) of the ignorant masses. Well, Sir Richard Bishop has decided he would like a piece of the action.
This film is a diabolical experiment in hypnotic mind control — a phantasmagorical presentation of demonic and divine imagery, meticulously assembled and designed to put the viewer into an altered state of darkened awareness. Includes original music from Elektronika Demonika, as well as unreleased material.
If you ever wanted to go to hell and back, this film will get you halfway there. Some viewers may find the imagery used in this film to be disturbing, but that’s the idea. Contains some strong sexual content (as all true religion should). Not for the weak-minded, faint of heart, or those suffering from occasional seizures.” (Locust Music)
check 8:15 for the Whitney music box
Jim discusses screensavers, information theory, and (with crowd participation) the Whitney music box, which sets an algorithm to music. Blending visual, musical, technical, mathematical, and intentionally useless elements, Jim gives a notable Gel talk.
A few months later, Jim posted a recap of his Gel experience.
John Whitney’s demo reel of work created with his analog computer/film camera magic machine he built from a WWII anti-aircraft gun sight. Also Whitney and the techniques he developed with this machine were what inspired Douglas Trumbull (special fx wizard) to use the slit scan technique on 2001: A Space Odyssey
Anita the duck buys a psychic device at a novelty store in an alternate universe and creates mayhem at a crazy party. By Sally Cruikshank, with music by Robt. Armstrong and Allan Dodge
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
“We Are All Connected” was made from sampling The History Channel’s Universe series, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, Richard Feynman’s 1983 interviews, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s cosmic sermon, and Bill Nye’s Eyes of Nye Series, plus added visuals from The Elegant Universe (NOVA), Stephen Hawking’s Universe, Cosmos and more.
[deGrasse Tyson]
We are all connected;
To each other, biologically
To the earth, chemically
To the rest of the universe atomically
[Feynman]
I think nature’s imagination
Is so much greater than man’s
She’s never going to let us relax
[Sagan]
We live in an in-between universe
Where things change all right
But according to patterns, rules,
Or as we call them, laws of nature
[Nye]
I’m this guy standing on a planet
Really I’m just a speck
Compared with a star, the planet is just another speck
To think about all of this
To think about the vast emptiness of space
There’s billions and billions of stars
Billions and billions of specks
[Sagan]
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it
But the way those atoms are put together
The cosmos is also within us
We’re made of star stuff
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself
Across the sea of space
The stars are other suns
We have traveled this way before
And there is much to be learned
I find it elevating and exhilarating
To discover that we live in a universe
Which permits the evolution of molecular machines
As intricate and subtle as we
[deGrasse Tyson]
I know that the molecules in my body are traceable
To phenomena in the cosmos
That makes me want to grab people in the street
And say, have you heard this??
(Richard Feynman on hand drums and chanting)
[Feynman]
There’s this tremendous mess
Of waves all over in space
Which is the light bouncing around the room
And going from one thing to the other
And it’s all really there
But you gotta stop and think about it
About the complexity to really get the pleasure
And it’s all really there
The inconceivable nature of nature
-
and of course
another excuse to post this
“A Glorious Dawn” is crafted from sampling Carl Sagan’s 1980 PBS Documentary Cosmos and Stephen Hawking’s 1997 PBS cosmology documentary series Stephen Hawking’s Universe. Cosmos is available to watch for free on Hulu, and many parts of Stephen Hawking’s Universe can be found on Youtube and various other video sites online.
[Sagan]
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch
You must first invent the universe
Space is filled with a network of wormholes
You might emerge somewhere else in space
Some when-else in time
The sky calls to us
If we do not destroy ourselves
We will one day venture to the stars
A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the milky way
The Cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths
Of exquisite interrelationships
Of the awesome machinery of nature
I believe our future depends powerfully
On how well we understand this cosmos
In which we float like a mote of dust
In the morning sky
But the brain does much more than just recollect
It inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes
it generates abstractions
The simplest thought like the concept of the number one
Has an elaborate logical underpinning
The brain has it’s own language
For testing the structure and consistency of the world
[Hawking]
For thousands of years
People have wondered about the universe
Did it stretch out forever
Or was there a limit
From the big bang to black holes
From dark matter to a possible big crunch
Our image of the universe today
Is full of strange sounding ideas
[Sagan]
How lucky we are to live in this time
The first moment in human history
When we are in fact visiting other worlds
The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean
Recently we’ve waded a little way out
And the water seems inviting
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.
http://www.jamescohan.com/artists/fred-tomaselli
Fred Tomaselli on WNYC’s Soundcheck with John Schaefer
DOWNLOAD MP3 (6.1 MB)
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
from: aurorainthedesert
Hehehehe Jesus wants to ravish you with His Love! I am not ON ecstasy I’m experiencing ecstasy (or rapturous delight as the dictionary describes it) not a drug induced ecstasy but a God induced one!
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.
ol boy has a helmet that can…
yeah
just watch
the helmet is in the intro to the lecture itself
i like to listen to this guy speak
his voice
his logic
searchin out more of his work now
kinda curious as to why im ignorant of him given the work n all
“christians” or christ likin folk should pay attention to the 36:45 min mark up until 39:00
and the info presented on rauvolfia
then his remarks on synergism
this is one h.a.i.r.y. fella
47:45 is another buena vista!
seriously
i mean
seriously
LOGIC!
anyways
yeah
reminds me of third grade
didn’t have as many laughs then though
crackers
negros
and sundry ochre shaded folk
and you know!!!
Weeding out marijuana: Researchers close in on engineering recognizable, drug-free Cannabis plant
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-09/uom-wom091509.php
U of Minnesota researchers identify genes producing THC
In a first step toward engineering a drug-free Cannabis plant for hemp fiber and oil, University of Minnesota researchers have identified genes producing tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive substance in marijuana. Studying the genes could also lead to new and better drugs for pain, nausea and other conditions.
The finding is published in the September issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany. Lead author is David Marks, a professor of plant biology in the College of Biological Sciences.
The study revealed that the genes are active in tiny hairs covering the flowers of Cannabis plants. In marijuana, the hairs accumulate high amounts of THC, whereas in hemp the hairs have little. Hemp and marijuana are difficult to distinguish apart from differences in THC.
With the genes identified, finding a way to silence them—and thus produce a drug-free plant — comes a step closer to reality. Another desirable step is to make drug-free plants visually recognizable. Since the hairs can be seen with a magnifying glass, this could be accomplished by engineering a hairless Cannabis plant.
The researchers are currently using the methods of the latest study to identify genes that lead to hair growth in hopes of silencing them.
“We are beginning to understand which genes control hair growth in other plants, and the resources created in our study will allow us to look for similar genes in Cannabis sativa,” said Marks.
“Cannabis genetics can contribute to better agriculture, medicine, and drug enforcement,” said George Weiblen, an associate professor of plant biology and a co-author of the study.
As with Dobermans and Dachshunds, marijuana and hemp are different breeds of the same species (Cannabis sativa), but marijuana contains much more THC than hemp, which is a source of industrial fiber and nutritious oil.
Hemp was raised for its fiber — which is similar to cotton but more durable — in the United States until legislation outlawed all Cannabis plants because they contain THC. Today, marijuana contains as much as 25 percent THC, whereas hemp plants contain less than 0.3 percent.
Hemp was once a popular crop in the upper Midwest because it tolerates a cool climate and marginal soils that won’t support other crops but, after drug legislation, hemp fiber was replaced by plastic and other alternatives. Recent popular demand for hemp products has led some states to consider the economic and environmental benefits of hemp. North Dakota legislation aims to reintroduce it as a crop, and Minnesota is considering similar legislation. At the same time, California and other states permit the medicinal use of marijuana.
“I can’t think of a plant so regarded as a menace by some and a miracle by others,” says Weiblen, who is one of the few researchers in the United States permitted to study Cannabis genetics. In 2006, Weiblen and colleagues developed a DNA “fingerprinting” technique capable of distinguishing among Cannabis plants in criminal investigations.
“Why Are We Here?”
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“Are We Real?”
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“Are We Alone?”
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A snake with a single clawed foot has been discovered in China, according to reports.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/6187320/Snake-with-foot-found-in-China.html
Dean Qiongxiu, 66, said she discovered the reptile clinging to the wall of her bedroom with its talons in the middle of the night.
“I woke up and heard a strange scratching sound. I turned on the light and saw this monster working its way along the wall using his claw,” said Mrs Duan of Suining, southwest China.
Mrs Duan said she was so scared she grabbed a shoe and beat the snake to death before preserving its body in a bottle of alcohol.
The snake – 16 inches long and the thickness of a little finger – is now being studied at the Life Sciences Department at China’s West Normal University in Nanchang.
Snake expert Long Shuai said: “It is truly shocking but we won’t know the cause until we’ve conducted an autopsy.”
A more common mutation among snakes is the growth of a second head, which occurs in a similar way to the formation of Siamese twins in humans.
Such animals are often caught and preserved as lucky tokens but have very little chance of surviving in the wild anyway, especially as the heads have a tendency to attack each other.
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.
In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians – Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing – whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.
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
Jnana Yoga By Sri Swami Sivananda
Introduction
Brahman and Maya
Sadhana Chatushtaya
The Seven Stages of Jnana
Practical Hints
Jnana is knowledge. To know Brahman as one’s own Self is Jnana. To say, “I am Brahman, the pure, all-pervading Consciousness, the non-enjoyer, non-doer and silent witness,” is Jnana. To behold the one Self everywhere is Jnana.
Ajnana is ignorance. To identify oneself with the illusory vehicles of body, mind, Prana and the senses is Ajnana. To say, ” I am the doer, the enjoyer, I am a Brahmin, a Brahmachari, this is mine, he is my son,” is Ajnana. Jnana alone can destroy Ajnana, even as light alone can remove darkness.
Brahman, the Supreme Self, is neither the doer of actions nor the enjoyer of the fruits of actions. The creation, preservation and destruction of the world are not due to Him. They are due to the action of Maya, the Lord’s energy manifesting itself as the world-process.
Just as space appears to be of three kinds – absolute space, space limited by a jar, and space reflected in the water of a jar, – so also there are three kinds of intelligence. They are absolute intelligence, intelligence reflected in Maya, and intelligence reflected in the Jiva (the individual soul). The notion of the doer is the function of intelligence as reflected in the intellect. This, together with the notion of Jiva, is superimposed by the ignorant on the pure and limitless Brahman, the silent witness.
The illustration of space absolute, space limited by a jar and space reflected in water of a jar, is given to convey the idea that in reality Brahman alone is. Because of Maya, however, It appears as three.
The notion that the reflection of intelligence is real, is erroneous, and is due to ignorance. Brahman is without limitation; limitation is a superimposition on Brahman.
The identity of the Supreme Self and the Jiva or reflected self is established through the statement of the Upanishad ‘Tat Tvam Asi’ – ‘That Thou Art’. When the knowledge of the identity of the two arises, then world problems and ignorance, with all their offshoots, are destroyed and all doubts disappear.
Self-realization or direct intuitive perception of the Supreme Self is necessary for attaining freedom and perfection. This Jnana Yoga or the path of Wisdom is, however, not meant for the masses whose hearts are not pure enough and whose intellects are not sharp enough to understand and practice this razor-edge path. Hence, Karma Yoga and Upasana (Bhakti) are to be practiced first, which will render the heart pure and make it fit for the reception of Knowledge.
Brahman is Sat, the Absolute, Reality. That which exists in the past, present and future; which has no beginning, middle and end; which is unchanging and not conditioned by time, space and causation; which exists during the waking, dream and deep sleep states; which is of the nature of one homogeneous essence, is Sat. This is found in Brahman, the Absolute. The scriptures emphatically declare: “Only Sat was prior to the evolution of this universe.”
This phenomenal universe is unreal. Isvara created this universe out of His own body (Maya), just as a spider creates a web from its own saliva. It is merely an appearance, like a snake in a rope or like silver in mother-of-pearl. It has no independent existence.
It is difficult to conceive how the Infinite comes out of Itself and becomes the finite. The magician can bring forth a rabbit out of a hat. We see it happening but we cannot explain it; so we call it Maya or illusion.
Maya is a strange phenomenon which cannot be accounted for by any law of Nature. It is incapable of being described. Its relation to Brahman is like that of heat to fire. The heat of fire is neither one with it nor different from it.
Does Maya really exist or not ? The Advaitin gives this reply: “This inscrutable Maya cannot be said either to exist or not to exist”.
If we know the nature of Brahman, then all names, forms and limitations fall away. The world is Maya because it is not the essential truth of the infinite Reality – Brahman. Somehow the world exists and its relation to Brahman is indescribable. The illusion vanishes through the attainment of knowledge of Brahman. Sages, Rishis and scriptures declare that Maya vanishes entirely as soon as knowledge of the Supreme Self dawns.
Brahman alone really exists. The Jiva, the world and this little “I” are false. Rise above names and forms and kill the false egoism. Go beyond Maya and annihilate ignorance. Constantly meditate on the Supreme Brahman, your divine nature.
The world is unreal when compared to Brahman. It is a solid reality to a worldly and passionate man only. To a realized sage it exists like a burnt cloth. To a Videhamukta (disembodied sage) it does not exist at all. To a man of discrimination it loses its charm and attraction.
Do not leave the world to enter a forest because you now read that the world is unreal. You will be utterly ruined if you do this without proper qualifications. Be first established in the conviction that the world is unreal and Brahman alone is real. This will help you to develop dispassion and a strong yearning for liberation. Stay in the world but be not worldly; strive for liberation by the practice of Sadhana Chatushtaya.
Jnana Yoga of Brahma Vidya or the science of the Self is not a subject that can be understood and realized through mere intellectual study, reasoning, ratiocination, discussion or arguments. It is the most difficult of all sciences.
A student who treads the path of Truth must, therefore, first equip himself with Sadhana Chatushtaya – the “four means of salvation”. They are discrimination, dispassion, the sixfold qualities of perfection, and intense longing for liberation – Viveka, Vairagya, Shad-Sampat and Mumukshutva. Then alone will he be able to march forward fearlessly on the path. Not an iota of spiritual progress is possible unless one is endowed with these four qualifications.
These four means are as old as the Vedas and this world itself. Every religion prescribes them; the names differ from path to path but this is immaterial. Only ignorant people have the undesirable habit of practicing lingual warfare and raising unnecessary questions. Pay no attention to them. It is your duty to try to eat the fruit instead of wasting time in counting the leaves of the tree. Try now to understand these four essential requisites for salvation.
Viveka is discrimination between the real and the unreal, between the permanent and the impermanent, between the Self and the non-Self. Viveka dawns in a man through the Grace of God. The Grace can come only after one has done unceasing selfless service in countless births with the feeling that he is an instrument of the Lord and that the work is an offering to the Lord. The door to the higher mind is flung open when there is an awakening of discrimination.
There is an eternal, changeless principle amidst the ever-changing phenomena of this vast universe and the fleeting movements and oscillations of the mind.
The aspirant should separate himself also from the six waves of the ocean of Samsara – birth and death, hunger and thirst, and exhilaration and grief. Birth and death belong to the physical body; hunger and thirst belong to Prana; exhilaration and grief are the attributes of the mind. The Soul is unattached. The six waves cannot touch Brahman which is as subtle as the all-pervading ether.
Association with saints and study of Vedantic literature will infuse discrimination in man. Viveka should be developed to the maximum degree. One should be well established in it.
Vairagya is dispassion for the pleasures of this world and of heaven. The Vairagya that is born of Viveka is enduring and lasting. It will not fail the aspirant. But the Vairagya that comes temporarily to a woman when she gives birth to a child or when one attends a funeral at a crematorium, is of no use. The view that everything in the world is unreal causes indifference to the enjoyments of this world and the heaven-world also. One has to return from heaven to this plane of existence when the fruits of good works are all exhausted. Hence they are not worth striving for.
Vairagya does not mean abandoning one’s social duties and responsibilities of life. It does not mean abandoning the world, for life in a solitary cave of the Himalayas. Vairagya is mental detachment from all worldly objects. One may remain in the world and discharge all duties with detachment. He may be a householder with a large family, yet at the same time he may have perfect mental detachment from everything. He can do spiritual Sadhana amidst his worldly activities. He who has perfect mental detachment in the world is a hero indeed. He is better than a Sadhu living in a Himalayan cave, for the former has to face innumerable temptations every moment of his life.
The third requisite is Shad-Sampat, the sixfold virtue. It consists of Sama, Dama, Uparati, Titiksha, Sraddha and Samadhana. All these six qualities are taken as one because they are calculated to bring about mental control and discipline, without which concentration and meditation are impossible.
- Sama is serenity or tranquillity of mind which is brought about through the eradication of desires.
- Dama is rational control of the senses.
- Uparati is satiety; it is resolutely turning the mind away from desire for sensual enjoyment. This state of mind comes naturally when one has practiced Viveka, Vairagya, Sama and Dama.
- Titiksha is the power of endurance. An aspirant should patiently bear the pairs of opposites such as heat and cold, pleasure and pain, etc.
- Sraddha is intense faith in the word of the Guru, in Vedantic scriptures and, above all, in one’s own self. It is not blind faith but is based on accurate reasoning, evidence and experience. As such, it is lasting, perfect and unshakable. Such a faith is capable of achieving anything.
- Samadhana is fixing the mind on Brahman or the Self, without allowing it to run towards objects. The mind is free from anxiety amid pains and troubles. There is stability, mental poise and indifference amid pleasures. The aspirant has neither like nor dislikes. He has great inner strength and enjoys unruffled peace of mind, due to the practices of Sama, Dama, Uparati, Titiksha and Sraddha.
Mumukshutva is intense desire for liberation or deliverance from the wheel of births and deaths with its concomitant evils of old age, disease, delusion and sorrow. If one is equipped with the previous three qualifications (Viveka, Vairagya and Shad-Sampat), then the intense desire for liberation will come without any difficulty. The mind moves towards the Source of its own accord when it has lost its charm for external objects. When purification of mind and mental discipline are achieved, the longing for liberation dawns by itself.
The aspirant who is endowed with all these four qualification should then approach the Guru who will instruct him on the knowledge of his real nature. The Guru is one who has a thorough knowledge of the scriptures and is also established in that knowledge in direct experience. He should then reflect and meditate on the inner Self and strive earnestly to attain the goal of Self-realization.
A Sadhaka should reflect and meditate. Sravana is hearing of Srutis, Manana is thinking and reflecting, Nididhyasana is constant and profound meditation. Then comes Atma-Sakshatkara or direct realization.
There are seven stages of Jnana or the seven Jnana Bhumikas. First, Jnana should be developed through a deep study of Atma Jnana Sastras and association with the wise and the performance of virtuous actions without any expectation of fruits. This is Subheccha or good desire, which forms the first Bhumika or stage of Jnana. This will irrigate the mind with the waters of discrimination and protect it. There will be non-attraction or indifference to sensual objects in this stage. The first stage is the substratum of the other stages. From it the next two stages, viz., Vicharana and Tanumanasi will be reached. Constant Atma Vichara (Atmic enquiry) forms the second stage. The third stage is Tanumanasi. This is attained through the cultivation of special indifference to objects. The mind becomes thin like a thread. Hence the name Tanumanasi. Tanu means thread – threadlike state of mind. The third stage is also known by the name Asanga Bhavana. In the third stage, the aspirant is free from all attractions. If any one dies in the third stage, he will remain in heaven for a long time and will reincarnate on earth again as a Jnani. The above three stages can be included under the Jagrat state. The fourth stage is Sattvapatti. This stage will destroy all Vasanas to the root. This can be included under the Svapana state. The world appears like a dream. Those who have reached the fourth stage will look upon all things of the universe with an equal eye. The fifth stage is Asamsakti. There is perfect non-attachment to the objects of the world. There is no Upadhi or waking or sleeping in this stage. This is the Jivanmukti stage in which there is the experience of Ananda Svaroopa (the Eternal Bliss of Brahman) replete with spotless Jnana. This will come under Sushupti. The sixth stage is Padartha Bhavana. There is knowledge of Truth. The seventh stage is Turiya, or the state of superconsciousness. This is Moksha. This is also known by the name Turiyatita. There are no Sankalpas. All the Gunas disappear. This is above the reach of mind and speech. Disembodied salvation (Videhamukti) is attained in the seventh stage.
Remaining in the certitude of Atma, without desires, and with an equal vision over all, having completely eradicated all complications of differentiations of ‘I’ or ‘he’, existence or non-existence, is Turiya.
Purify the Chitta by doing Nishkama Karma for twelve years. The effect of Chitta Suddhi is the attainment of Viveka and Vairagya. Acquire the four qualifications (Sadhana Chatushtaya), – Viveka, Vairagya, Shad Sampat and Mumukshuttva. Then approach a Guru. Have Sravana, Manana and Nididhyasana. Study carefully and constantly the twelve classical Upanishads and Yoga Vasishtha. Have a comprehensive and thorough understanding of the Lakshyartha or indicative (real) meaning of the Maha-Vakya ‘Tat Tvam Asi’. Then, constantly reflect over this real meaning throughout the twenty-four hours. This is Brahma-Chintana or Brahma-Vichara. Do not allow any worldly thoughts to enter the mind. Vedantic realization comes not through mere reasoning but through constant Nididhyasana, like the analogy of Brahmarakita Nyaya (caterpillar and wasp). You get Tadakara, Tadrupa, Tanmaya, Tadiyata, Talleenata (Oneness, identity).
Generate the Brahmakara Vritti from your Sattvic Antahkarana through the influence of reflection on the real meaning of the Maha-Vakyas, ‘Aham Brahma Asmi’ or ‘Tat Tvam Asi’. When you try to feel that you are infinity, this Brahmakara Vritti is produced. This Vritti destroys Avidya, induces Brahma Jnana and dies by itself eventually, like Nirmal seed which removes sediment in the water and itself settles down along with the mud and other dirty matter.
Retire into your meditation chamber. Sit on Padma, Siddha, Svastika or Sukha Asana to begin with. Relax the muscles. Close the eyes. Concentrate on or gaze at the Trikute, the space between the two eyebrows. Repeat ‘Om’ mentally with Brahma-Bhavana. This Bhavana is a sine qua non, very very important. Silence the conscious mind. Repeat mentally, feel constantly:
All-pervading ocean of Light I am OM OM OM
Infinity I am OM OM OM
All-pervading infinite Light I am OM OM OM
Vyapaka Paripoorna Jyotirmaya Brahman I am OM OM OM
Omnipotent I am OM OM OM
Omniscient I am OM OM OM
All Bliss I am OM OM OM
Satchidananda I am OM OM OM
All purity I am OM OM OM
All glory I am OM OM OM
All Upadhis (limiting adjuncts such as body, mind, etc.,) will be sublated. All Granthis (knots of heart, viz., Avidya, Kama and Karma – ignorance, desire and action) will be cut asunder. The thin veil, Avarana, will be pierced. The Pancha Kosha Adhyasa (superimposition) will be removed. You will rest doubtless in Satchidananda state. You will get highest Knowledge, highest Bliss, highest Realization and highest end of life. ‘Brahma Vit Brahmaiva Bhavati’. You will become Suddha Satchidananda Vyapaka Paripoorna Brahman. Nasti Atra Samsayah’, there is no doubt of that.
There is no difficulty at all in Atma-Darshan, in Self-Realization. You can have this within the twinkling of an eye as Raja Janaka had, before you can squeeze a flower with fingers, within the time taken for a grain to fall when rolled over a pot. You must do earnest, constant and intense practice. You are bound to succeed in two or three years.
Now-a-days there are plenty of ‘Talking Brahman’. No flowery talk or verbosity can make a man Brahman. It is constant, intense, earnest Sadhana and Sadhana alone can give a man direct Aparoksha Brahmic realization (Svanubhava or Sakshatkara) wherein he sees Brahman just as he sees the solid white wall in front of him and feels Brahman, just as he feels the table behind him. Practice, practice, practice and become established in Brahman.
http://www.dlshq.org/teachings/jnanayoga.htm
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Erowid Yoga Vault: Jnana Yoga
the yoga of knowledge or wisdom
requiring strength of will and intellect
Taking the philosophy of Vedanta the Jnana yogi uses his mind to inquire into its own nature. We perceive the space inside and outside a glass as different, just as we see ourselves as separate from the spirit. Jnana Yoga leads the devotee to experience his unity with the spirit directly by breaking the glass, dissolving the veils of ignorance. Before practising Jnana Yoga, the aspirant needs to have integrated the lessons of the other yogic paths, for without selflessness and love of all, strength of body and mind, the search for self-realization can become mere idle speculation. Jnana Yoga techniques and paths include:
- Viveka – The technique of intellectual discernment or discrimination of the true self from distractions.
- Neti-neti – The technique of discarding, one by one, thoughts and distractions which are not the true self.
- Vicara – The tecyhnique of internal examination and reflection.
- Vairagya – The practice of dispassion or detachment.
- Shad-sampat – The path of the six virtues.
- Mumukshutva – Intense longing for liberation.
http://www.erowid.org/spirit/yoga/yoga_jnana.shtml
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jnana yoga: the yoga of knowledge
Jnana Yoga is practical Philosophy/Metaphysics.
It is both theory and practice.
Jnana Yoga uses the intellect as a tool to understand that our true Self is behind and beyond our mind. It is, however, a mistake to think the Source could be found with the intellect alone. For the purpose of Self-discovery, Jnana Yoga probes the nature of the Self through the question “Who am I?” Thus Jnana Yoga may be called the Quest for the Self or the Inquiry into “who we are.”
Who practices Jnana Yoga?
Some seekers, who do not require tools like Jnana Yoga, already have a strong belief in God and Spiritual survival and require no other system than to believe in God and love God with all their heart. That is the path of main stream Religion and that of Bhakti Yoga. Other seekers feel they need to do good and self-less deeds. That is also the path of Religion as well as the path of Karma Yoga. Some seekers have their belief but need a more systematic approach. Generally, they like systems like: Raja, Ashtanga, or Kriya Yoga. At times, seekers feel they need more outside assistance; they are good candidates for Religion, Shaktipat, and Siddha Yoga.
Finally, there are seekers who want to believe but have a greater need to understand; they have lots of questions and need all of them answered. These seekers are the best candidates for Jnana Yoga. Jnana Yoga is not alien to other systems or religions. One could say that the beginnings of Jnana Yoga are found in Vedanta, the philosophy of Vedic Scripture. These writings are even older than the Bible and there are scholars who see the origin of all major religions in these ‘revelations of Truth.’ The relationship between the Bible and Vedanta was also pointed out by Ramana Maharshi, who once said that the whole Vedanta is contained in the two Biblical statements: “I am that I AM” and “Be still and know that I am God.”
Is Jnana Yoga a mere intellectual exercise?
Definitely not. Practically all questions may be answered intellectually but not final questions like:
Who or what is God? Or, who or what is the Self? The answer to “who is the Self,” must be the Self by ‘It-Self’. The answer to “who is God”, must be God by Him\She\Itself. As a first result of Jnana Yoga or introspection, we can intellectually realize that God’s nature must be pure Beingness or pure Awareness, or we may realize that at the center of our Being is pure Beingness and that this is the real Self – but to know the Self we must be the Self. To know Beingness, we must be Beingness or pure Awareness. This could be compared with an orgasm: We may hear in detail what it feels like but to really know what it is we must have the actual experience. In order to have the experience of God’s omnipresence, we may intellectually realize, what Jnana Yoga and Religion has taught all along, that we should not produce a single thought in the otherwise pure Awareness (Psalm: “Be still and know that I am God”), but to be still is not an intellectual exercise; that is done with Meditation. The meditation in Jnana Yoga is to concentrate on the answer to the question: “Who am I?” Or, to simply hang on to the first of all thoughts which is “I”. That might sound strange and egotistical, but every thought we produce is added to “I”, is following the “I”.
Thus we may say: I see you, I do this, and so on. First comes I – then everything else. If we concentrate on “I” until the thought can be held, then we are already at the root of all problems and errors. In time, even this thought will disappear leaving nothing else but pure Awareness. That is the omnipresence of God. It should be quite clear that we still continue to exist without thinking.
We must also realize that such a thoughtless condition must be possible. However, if one simply tries to stop thinking just for a moment, we encounter the resistance of our ego. Since the ego cannot consist of anything more than thoughts, it is constantly weakened by our meditation, as long as we really try to stick with our Mantram, which for a Jnana Yogi may simply be “I”. The best promise of the Jnana Yoga system is the possible culmination into Sahaja Samadhi; that is when the natural condition of the Self continues even during regular activities, free of worries and anxiety.
Shankara and, more recently, Ramana Maharshi are the classic authorities concerning Jnana Yoga. Like Hatha- and Radja Yogis, Jnana Yogis also acknowledge the relationship between breathing and thinking. However, they found out that breathing slows automatically through the concentration on the “I-AM.” Through persistent probing, fixing our attention on the source of our Being, we regain our real Self; we remember who we are.
The inquiry, as the result of practising Jnana Yoga, leads us towards clear Awareness by removing our attention from that which we are not. Along with Bhakti Yoga (Devotion), Jnana is listed among the best approaches for becoming aware of the eternal Self (God).
See “Self-Knowledge,” a short outline based on Shankara’s treatise, as an introduction to Jnana Yoga.
See Ramana Maharshi as the ultimate source for instruction in the tradition of Jnana Yoga.
http://www.self-realization.com/articles/yoga/jnana_yoga.htm
Alex welcomes reality MTV stars Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag to discuss their awakening to the New World Order.
http://www.myspace.com/heidibringsbac… [[ MTV STAR HEIDI MONTAG:OVER MY DEAD BODY WOULD I TAKE A MICROCHIP ]] Paul Joseph Watson Prison Planet.com Tuesday, June 30, 2009
http://www.infowars.com/mtv-star-heid…
Star of MTVs The Hills Heidi Montag appeared on The Alex Jones Show today with her fellow co-star husband Spencer Pratt to discuss how some nightclubs are introducing implantable identification microchips to allow customers to access VIP areas. Montag told Jones, You would have to kill me before I get a chip.
Montag said that as a Christian she had always been aware of the mark of the beast and the content of the book of Revelations but over the last month she and her husband had arrived at a new awakening concerning what is going on in the world after one of her music producers showed them Alex Jones latest documentary The Obama Deception.
You would have to kill me before I get a chip, that would never happen, said Montag, referring to implantable microchips.
The fact that people are even already OK with this is sickening, I could throw up right now, she added, A chip? are we dogs? Not even dogs deserve chips.
Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia Trailer
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jesco white
http://www.myspace.com/jescorama3000
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Jesco White: The Dancing Outlaw — The legend lives on
July 11, 2008
THE OTHER SIDE: By Jeff Stover
Register-Herald Senior Copy Editor
http://www.register-herald.com/features/local_story_193145931.html
Editor’s note: Since Jesse “Jesco” White’s dialect is so unusual, his quotes are written as they were spoken in order to capture the full essence of his personality. It’s written this way not to poke fun at Jesco, rather to share his unique way of explaining things to those who will listen. Be aware some content is adult in nature. Reader discretion is advised.
MADISON — Most folks got to know Jesco White from the West Virginia Public Broadcasting series “Different Drummer” in a 1991 documentary titled “The Dancing Outlaw” where he shows off his dancing prowess and talks about his family, Elvis and life in general.
Today’s generation also knows him by one of his most famous quotes from the documentary: “I’m tired of eatin’ sloppy, slimy eggs,” which was directed toward his wife’s apparent difficulties with cooking fried eggs. The video clip of this segment is now popular on YouTube.com.
In that medium, his MySpace page, “jescorama3000,” which is maintained by a friend, describes him as an “Appalachian Shaman” and the “King of the Wild Mountain Dancers.”
But after an interview in his small, but tidy, Madison apartment, it appears that he is all that — and a whole lot more. He’s sincere, moody, personable and funny — though sometimes irreverent — but most of all, he’s real. He suffers hard times, but has a good bit of fun along the way.
Being taken advantage of and “The Miracle Woman”
He has gathered a loyal following over the years, being named in numerous songs and appearing in plenty of movies and music videos.
Most of the songs, he says, mention him without his permission — and with no compensation. But one of the most recent songs, “Legend of D. Ray White” by Hank Williams III, is about Jesco’s father — a famous mountain dancer in his own right. The Hank III song was with his blessing, Jesco said.
He’s certainly not shy about his displeasure of others making profits from his name and talents. “Yeah, and I mean it’s not goin’ nowhere. It just ends up in a big partyin’, laughin’ time and carryin’ on, and that’s all that comes out of it. And I’m thinking I’m goin’ to go higher and bigger and stuff and it don’t go nowhere. It’s like a dog chasin’ its tail in a circle. I’m back where I started, man, and it hurts me now — I’ve got beautiful talents to dance and stuff — like the plaques and stuff I made …”
He creates talented woodburnings, some of which he had made for his recently departed mother, Bertie Mae White, known as “The Miracle Woman,” who passed away June 1. He had also created hand-carved canes from native Boone County woods, two of which were for his ailing mother before she died. He said she never used them, just admired them and showed them off to visiting friends. He now has either sold them or has them in a nearby shop for sale, ” ’cause I can’t stand to look at ‘em knowin’ my mom’s gone — that I made them for her, and she’s not here to enjoy ‘em. And it makes my depression worser knowin’ my hands made them for my mother and she’s not here to use ‘em,” he said with his voice trembling, adding, “but I kept her laughter, though, ’til she died — ’til the end.”
By the way, she was called The Miracle Woman by folks who knew her because of the loss, grief and lingering sadness she had to endure while not losing her exceptional sense of humor.
Becoming “famous”
When he made his television debut in the PBS documentary, he explained, “That was really true, everything in it. ‘Cept they didn’t understand what I was tryin’ to produce — somethin’ that had my talent in it. And it was like a nightmare in hell to produce somethin’ that everybody else wants to take advantage of because you have a lack of education. The only education I’ve got is what I’ve learned the hard way.
“What little help I did get, what people did help me with, made it worser instead of better because it wasn’t enough to do anything with — just make the problems worser. And I’ve not been doin’ no performin’ for a long time — just maybe go out to a beer joint now and then and try to make a few dollars or drink or hang out with friends,” he said, sighing, “and it’s hard to even do that because of the alcohol killing you that way, so it’s just like any way you’re turnin’ you’re screwed.”
He does wish someone could do something about folks taking advantage of him, saying, “It’s goin’ to keep me in depression and misery and angry over it ’cause no one’s tryin’ to help me — protect me. I should have rights as a legend or citizen or somethin’. Now, I’ve never made it nowhere and I’m still livin’ in a honky-tonk jail,” he said, chuckling.
But Jesco carries on.
“I’ll make it — All I can say is this cat’s a hustler,” he laughed.
And, as proclaimed in the documentary, he said, “I’m three people. I can do the talent like, I’m a comedian — I tell dirty jokes. I dance a little bit of the bluegrass music or about anything, as far as that goes, if I’ve got a good buzz. Then, the other part, I do Elvis songs and stuff. Hey, we have a good time, but it’s like they want to drive you crazy with it. And sometimes a person’s gotta dry out and rest, man, you know. But they don’t believe in that, son, they believe ‘rock on down,’ you know, ’til they fall, I guess.” He then mused, “Who wants to be like a cockroach on hot shots staggerin’ through life?”
“The gas prices is gettin’ scary”
The Dancing Outlaw also is observant about the troubled economy. “Everything’s goin’ up,” he complained. “The gas prices is gettin’ scary.”
To illustrate his point about money getting tighter and tighter, he told a story about going to a “value-priced” store recently and not finding what he expected. “I got a loaf a bread. I was gettin’ ready to check out and it had a little bit of mold on it. Not very much. I don’t know if it was an old loaf they’d forgot to change out or what. I said, ‘Damn, man, there’s enough mold on here to kill everyone in this store.’ I said, ‘You could bounce a 30.06 off this slice of bread. I can’t eat that.’ She said ‘Oh, Jesco, I’m so sorry about that. Go back there and get you another loaf.’ I said, ‘You crazy’ I’m gonna go get another damn loaf and it might be greener than this one.’ I said, ‘I’m outta here. I’ll go somewhere else.’ She said, ‘Now don’t be mad; I’ll get you a fresh loaf.’ She was scared — afraid I was goin’ to turn her in to the manager. I said, ‘No, I ain’t goin’ to say nothin, honey; I ain’t a rat. But I just can’t eat green bread.’ “
Jesco’s personality “distorder” and MTV
“I’m just a miracle, I guess, from God to live with the anger that I’ve carried, and depression. But I can’t depend on the doctor helpin’ me. They can help you, but what’s the use to help me, givin’ me medicine to treat my personality distorder (disorder) when I’m turned back loose in the damn jungle. I can’t control all this and I’m just feelin’ the way I do inside and I’m honest about myself. But I do pretty good takin’ care of myself,” Jesco said.
“I’m 51, but I’m not rich or nothin’ like that. I just hustle to get by the best I can. And if I don’t do it, man, I’m goin’ to have it harder and harder, ’cause it ain’t goin’ to get no easier if you don’t. And they want me to go out tonight a little bit and have a little bit of fun. I hope I don’t get 10-foot-tall and bulletproof and then come home as a midget.”
The “goin’ out” Jesco was referring to was shooting by an independent filmmaker for another documentary called “The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia,” produced by Storm Taylor, which, he says, is expected to be purchased by MTV for release sometime next year. They’ve filmed in the Madison area three times in the past few months, documenting the life of Jesco and his family. They even filmed his mom while she was in the hospital before she passed away — something Jesco said he wasn’t all too happy about. The crew has followed him and his family to several locations around Madison to film different segments. He said “if the documentary makes it,” he’ll get paid one time for his parts in the film.
He said in one shoot, he was dancing on the back street behind his apartment. “Then the law pulls up and asks us what we’re doin’ down here. I told them they’re workin’ on a documentary down here. He said, ‘Well, Jesco, we’re goin’ to give you 15 more minutes to video, then clean these beer bottles up, and you’ve got to dance us one.’ They turned on the police lights on the car and let me dance a bluegrass song to ‘em.”
“The King”
Jesco is a huge fan of Elvis Presley and proudly performs his songs at concerts, bars and the like, or when asked — especially when some sort of contribution is offered.
While showing off Elvis art hanging on the walls of his apartment, he pours a glass (jelly jar) of Elvis Presley wine and says, “It’s one of my collection wines. It’s 5 years old, from California — good grape wine.”
Then he tells about gathering Elvis memorabilia — and the loss of most of it when a fire destroyed his “Prenter Holler” home. “They burnt my home down. $50,000 worth of Elvis pictures and stuff. That’s the only thing that kept me a goin’ and happy was collectin’ that stuff ’cause Elvis was my favorite singer.” He said that episode sent him into another, deeper bout of depression.
Hank III
These days, his popularity seems to be on the rise again, thanks to the World Wide Web and some parts in various films. Plus, his appearance with Hank Williams III in a music video has caught the attention of more than a few.
He praised the youngest of the Williams clan — an “outlaw” in his own right — and was happy to have a part in the video.
“I met Hank III. He’s an awesome friend and a nice person, like we are, you know, as people. But when he’s on stage, he’s a whole differnt character. He does some of his own stuff, a little bit of his daddy’s music — mix it kindly up. He’s an awesome entertainer and I’ve performed with him, too, with the French harp. I said I looked like a giant wood roach. I had that big coat on and hat. — I just done the best I could. I can’t even play the harp, I was just playin’ it on the way I felt. Just backin’ him up and stuff, just for a little bit, and I felt real good about it. It helped because he helped me out a little bit with a little bit of money to get coal and wood with ’cause I lived over there in the holler. And he’s just a beautiful person that you could meet as a friend.”
He was quick to praise a couple of Hank III’s songs in particular. “I love that one he made up about my dad, Way Down in West Virginia. Man, that’s a killer song. And I dance to that one he plays too, The Mississippi Mud. It says, ‘As I take my shot straight from the jug, I like to do a little dance in the Mississippi mud.’ Man, it’s right. I just love the music to that, the way he made that song. It is awesome. And that kind, that’s got rhythm in it that’s not too fast or slow so I can dance to it.”
Jesco’s family
His father, D. Ray White, a well-known mountain dancer who had appeared in the PBS documentary “Talking Feet,” was shot and killed in 1985. His documentary led filmakers to discover Jesco, who says he got his talent from his father and misses him dearly. When Jesco was in his wilder days, he remembers his dad coming to get him from the local courthouse. “He’d always tell us boys, ‘Now, buddy, I’m tired of comin’ down here and gettin’ ya’ll outta jail.’ He said, ‘Now the next time you get out, you get out yourselves. I just ain’t got the money to bail you out. Damn, you done broke the bank up gettin’ you out,’ ” Jesco said, laughing.
Jesco’s sister Mamie, who’s likely best known for her four-wheeling escapades in an old blue Ford pickup truck in the original PBS documentary, is still around and joins Jesco on many of his adventures. “She’s wilder now than she’s ever been, man,” he said. She’s been known to break up fights at some of the venues where Jesco has performed. “In big towns that’s what they get a thrill out of, man,” he said, laughing out loud. “What’s bad, I’m just afraid somebody’s gonna get killed.”
As mentioned before, his mother Bertie Mae, “The Miracle Woman,” passed away June 1 after suffering a stroke in mid-May. That was one of the most devastating losses in his life, Jesco said. “I sure loved my mom.”
Plus, his wife, Norma Jean, is now suffering several illnesses and has been “moved into a home” in Charleston, he said. Jesco hasn’t seen her in a while and reckons he will never see her again. But, he said, she told him to carry on without her. “My wife always told me when it got that bad for me to go on and have my life any way I wanted it and enjoy it. But I’ll never take this wedding band off as long as I live — ’til when she passes on. Then, I’ll take it off.”
A movie idea of his own
Since The Dancing Outlaw has been working around and appearing in movies and television, he said he’s finally come up with an idea of his own for a movie about his life (now, don’t steal this, folks. Jesco would get mad).
He said, “It’s a movie about Charlie Daniels and Hank Jr. They’re bounty hunters, right? Like Dog is, that detective on TV? … this’ll be in a western is what I’m thinkin’ of. I dreamed this up myself — and they’re bounty hunters and Elvis Presley’s the sheriff and they’re goin’ out after Big and Rich for stealin’ Jesco’s name. And Jesco, since he’s a legend and has got a clean record, he can sue them boys and it’s the law’s job to get his name back that they stoled. — Then I’m goin’ to be in the part sittin’ on a jackass with a big Mexican hat on that says Git-R-Dun — Warner Brothers movies might buy that.”
Be sure to keep an eye out for that to make the big screen.
The future
Jesco has hopes that MTV will, indeed, purchase the documentary and it will be popular. He thinks its airing will lead to more, and better, entertainment career opportunities.
He and his family also appear in Hasil Adkins: My Blue Star, a documentary set to be released this fall, about Hasil “Haze” Adkins, another famous Boone County entertainer.
Plus, you might find him tapping away at a Boone County watering hole on a Saturday night — if he feels like it. He says he does that for his fans. “I don’t know what they get out of it. But they sure seem to like it.”
And if you’re in Madison some day, keep an eye out for Jesco and say hi if you see him. He might just tap out a tune for you — especially if you have a little spare cash.
On the Web
There’s plenty more about Jesco, his videos, music and family on the Web. Just search YouTube or Google for “Jesco White” and you’ll find plenty to get your fill of the world-famous “Dancing Outlaw.”
— Stover is a lifelong resident of Raleigh County and enjoys observing the unique personalities living in southern West Virginia. He is a senior copy editor for Beckley Newspapers, where he has worked for more than 20 years. E-mail: jstover@register-herald.com
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Miracle Woman Obituary
Current mood:
melancholy
Current mood:
melancholy
Mircle Woman obituary from the Charleston Gazzette.
Birtie Mae White, 85, “The Miracle Woman” of Madison died June 1, 2008, at her home.
She was born Feb. 23, 1923, at Davis Creek and was a daughter of the late Dick and Mamie Estep Selbea. In addition to her parents, she was preceded in death by her husband, Donald Ray White; children, Ona F., Donald M., Roberta A., Virginia A., Dorsey R., Billy R., and Minis R. White.
She is survived by her children, Zetta Clark of Ohio, Louise Rowe of West Virginia, John Gullett of Minnesota, Mamie Warner, Jesco White, Jerry White, Bernadine Cook, Sue White and Annie Davis, all of West Virginia; 34 grandchildren; and 48 great-grandchildren.
Funeral service will be 11 a.m. Wednesday, June 4, at Martha Freewill Baptist Church, Bandytown, with Leslie White and Johnny Baire officiating. Burial will follow in Green Cemetery, Bandytown.
Friends may call one hour prior to the service at the church.
Handley Funeral Home, Danville, is in charge of arrangements.
You may express your condolences to the family at www.handleyfh.com.
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Birtie Mae White … Maw ….. Gone but not forgotten
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right click to view larger and readable images
Hypnagogic pop is music that reaches beyond its performers’ abilities. It refashions 80s chart pop-rock into a hazy, psychedelic drone. It is listening to Beverly Hills Cop and hearing the music of the spheres. It is the sound that remains after the boys of summer have gone. - David Keenan(Writer and critic. Regular contributor to The Wire. Author of England’s Hidden Reverse. Founder of Volcanic Tongue record store/mail order. Available for talks/lectures/commissions etc.)
(from the previous bashar blog)
Meet the Funkmeyers is a short film made for the 2008 Elevate Film Festival by Chris Bradley. Meet the Funkmeyers is the story of Jenny and Otis Funkmeyer, two kindred spirits who met on the spiritual path and decided to walk together.
The Funkmeyers are a group of people who following their excitement, moment to moment, from here to eternity.
You can be a Funkmeyer too!
Visit us at funkmeyers.com
Also, visit Elevate at elevateexperience.com
Bashar is a multi-dimensional being who speaks through channel Darryl Anka from what we perceive as the future.
Bashar explores a wide-range of subjects with great insight, humor and a profound understanding of how reality creation occurs.
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Bashar is a male member of a 5th dimensional civilization called the Essassani. This is an “informal” concentrated summary by Iasos of some of the core concepts of Bashar, based on his books “Quest for Truth” and “Bashar: Blueprint for Change” and also based on listening to many audio/video recordings of channeled evenings where Bashar responds to questions from the audience. The entire Essassani civilization is based on unconditional love, ecstasy, fun, following your excitement, being totally non-judgemental, and giving validity and equality to each individual in the society. Bashar, as experienced from the tapes of the channelings, is extremely enthusiastic – almost to the point of seeming cartoon-like! And yet he has an incredibly fast mind, an amazing wit, a loving heart, and of course a profound understanding of reality. -http://iasos.com/metaphys/bashar
Meeting With Bashar 1/19/07
I discovered Bashar one late night in December, 2006. I brought all my friends to a private session at Darryl’s house (the guy who channels Bashar) a few weeks later after I was SHOCKED and discovered that he lived in the same city as me, LA. Within 2 months this information had COMPLETELY CHANGED MY LIFE. I gave away all my possessions and tested the powers of reality “selection” (it’s a holographic universe so you don’t actually CREATE anything). Every since that point, my life has expanded in the most amazing ways.
Two films have been made about this progress and they are both pretty special: http://vimeo.com/2434635 & http://vimeo.com/2497823
I love Bashar so much and I find so much inspiration day after day, week after week, year after year from this material. I think it is the most profound information that has ever hit Earth–if you find anything better, PLEASE E-MAIL ME from our website! I tried to tell April from the start that putting videos like this on the internet would be great for spreading the information and getting people into Bashar. I’m glad to see it’s happening! To me, the BEST way to start with Bashar is this summary. I think this is the best explanation of the nature of reality that has ever been created. http://iasos.com/metaphys/bashar And me, I’m Otis Funkmeyer. Check out our website for Bashar-inspired inspiration: SHIVAI!!! (you’ll understand once you get really into Bashar) -Otis Funkmeyer – www.funkmeyers.com
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Bashar 20 yrs ago
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big love to Eddie Bravo for this
i was tryna tell a nigga…
