Bruce Eisner's Vision Thing

Robert Anton Wilson's Maybe Logic

Browsing the New World Disorder blog, I found myself reading a short interview (with a long title) with Robert Anton Wilson -- "President Hannibal Lector & the Thing That Ate the Constitution" on Falcon Press's Digital Falcon.

One thing lead to the next and soon I discovered that  DVD version of the documentary Maybe Logic which I had blogged about a few months ago finally has been released. I've known Robert A. Wilson for just about thirty years now and he never ceases to amaze me with a blizzard of words. When I was younger, I read the first ten books he wrote although I'm not sure if I could give you a full accounting of them. He continues to pour forth words and the documentary Maybe Logic is a flattering filming of his story.

The Intoxicaton Instinct

 

Ideas from Ronald K. Siegel and Susan Blackmore are spotlighted in the feature article in last week's The Scientist -- "The Intoxication Instinct" by Helen Phillips and Graham Lawton.

Siegel, an old friend of mine from those wilder days of the Seventies and Eighties came up with the notion back then that intoxication was a native human drive. He called intoxication, "the forth drive" placing it after hunger, thirst and sex.

I visited these ideas a decade ago when I wrote Why We Get High. The New Scientist article does furnish some new data. Especially interesting is Siegel's work teaching monkey's to like DMT. However the article goes a bit overboard in ascribing monkey motivations to people.

Susan Blackmore, the memetics expert who has recently demonstrated an interest in psychedelics is given a sidebar section called Windows to the Mind. It is included in the link at the beginning of this post to map.org's republication of the New Scientist article. There also is an extended version on her website that you can read here.

 

Pain, Sex and Time by Gereld Heard -- Huxley Friend's Classic Book Reissued

The people at the Offical Gereld Heard site sent me an email telling me about Pain, Sex And Time: A New Outlook On Evolution And The Future Of Man ia reissue of a book orginally published in 1939 .The webmaster there must know that I have been facinated with Gereld Heard for more than a decade, when I first was introduced to him by Professor  John Codey of USF.

Here is what Cody said about Heard:

" An Anglo-Irish historian, philosopher, BBC science journalist, novelist and mystic seer, Heard (1889-1971) wrote over 30 books in the fields of science, history, religion, philosophy and fiction. A learned advocate of exploring taboo areas of nonconsensus reality, including psychic research, mysticism, pacifism, UFOs, synchronicity, homosexuality, terror, madness, and criminality, he saw these offbeat topics as sharing a common link to the mysterious role played by consciousness in molding our bewildering variety of reality maps, a view we may call "postmodern."

"Heard, who lived his last 34 years in Los Angeles, was also one of the first to interpret psychedelics as harbingers of this postmodern cultural breakthrough. He viewed mind-altering drugs, along with psychical research, the New Physics, ecology, holistic field theory, Gestalt psychology, semantics, and the sociology of knowledge, as part of a larger cultural mutation, a profound epistemological revolution in our postmodern psyche. Heard was convinced that only through research and ongoing experimentation can we test the significance of consciousness-changing drugs for society, therapy, education, invention, discovery, and religion."

Paul Cohen, the publisher wrote to me in July and told me the book has been out of print for nearly 60 years. and that "Pain, Sex and Time" has a new foreword by Huston Smith. The book was an early influence on Huston Smith as it precipitated his conversion from scientific materialist to mystic. He later went on to write the best-selling book on religion, The World's Religion, which has been for many years the most widely used text to teach religion.

I'm still waiting for my reviewiers copy. You can get the book through Amazon.

Nation's Poor Wins Another Election for Nation's Rich -- The Onion Reports

Nation's Poor Wins Another Election for Nation's Rich -- The Onion Reports.

WASHINGTON, DC—The economically disadvantaged segment of the U.S. population provided the decisive factor in another presidential election last Tuesday, handing control of the government to the rich and powerful once again.

Above: Bush and Cheney accept victory.

"The Republican party—the party of industrial mega-capitalists, corporate financiers, power brokers, and the moneyed elite—would like to thank the undereducated rural poor, the struggling blue-collar workers in Middle America, and the God-fearing underprivileged minorities who voted George W. Bush back into office," Karl Rove, senior advisor to Bush, told reporters at a press conference Monday. "You have selflessly sacrificed your well-being and voted against your own economic interest. For this, we humbly thank you."

Added Rove: "You have acted beyond the call of duty—or, for that matter, good sense."

The strange thing about this piece is that it almost sounds like it could be true. Read the rest on "The Onion."

New MSN Search Allows Relvancy Tweaking

A story, "MSN Search Beta  Allows Relevancy Tweaking" by  Matt Hicks was updated today with  details of the new beta MSN search that just went upon a new and seperate site from the regular MSN search here. He reports, "Microsoft Corp.'s MSN division officially launched a beta of its new search engine Thursday as it attempts to make inroads into Google Inc.'s dominance in the search market.." The changes mostly involve allowing the user to adjust the search by tweaking link popularity, recency and precession and more.

After trying the search out I have to agree with  a comment featured in the article by Andy Beal, vice president of search marketing at WebSourced Inc. who says:  "It's got a little bit of bells and whistles, but in terms of the actual index, there's nothing I've seen there that's better than Google or Yahoo,"

Counterculture Though the Ages Released Today

I received an email from long-time friend Dan Joy. He wrote, "Today is the official publication date for , the book that Ken Goffman (a.k.a R. U. Sirius) and I finished writing earlier this year --Counterculture Through The Ages: From Abraham To Acid House. It's already on bookstores shelves, and can also be obtained from Amazon. In related news, we just got another very positive review, this time from the American Library Association BOOKLIST, which called the book 'Always engaging, often inspiring, and certainly not just for nostalgic boomers.And we're anticipating reviews at The Washington Post And Nerve.Com. Also, we've just opened up a new dimension of the project in cyberspace at http://www.counterculturethroughtheages.com

I gave some preview material about this book on this blog in August. One additional special feature of the book is a "Preface by Timothy Leary written when the book was first being worked on during the long party at Leary's house preceding his death. Here is some excerpts from Leary:

Counterculture blooms wherever and whenever a few members of a society choose lifestyles, artistic expressions, and ways of thinking and being that wholeheartedly embrace the ancient axiom that the only true constant is change itself. The mark of counterculture is not a particular social form or structure, but rather the evanescence of forms and structures, the dazzling rapidity and flexibility with which they appear, mutate, and morph into one another and disappear.

Counterculture is the moving crest of a wave, a zone of uncertainty where culture goes quantum. To borrow the language of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ilya Prigogine, counterculture is the cultural equivalent of the third thermodynamic state, the nonlinear region where equilibrium and symmetry have given way to a complexity so intense as to appear to the eye as chaos.

Participants in a counterculture thrive in this zone of turbulence. It is their native medium, the only clay malleable enough to be shaped and reshaped fast enough to keep pace with the flashing of their inner visions. They are adepts of flux, chaos engineers, migrating in step with the ever-traveling wavefront of maximum change.

In counterculture, social structures are spontaneous and transient. Participants in countercultures are constantly clustering into new molecules, fissioning and regrouping into configurations appropriate to the interests of the moment, like particles jostling in a high-energy accelerator, exchanging dynamic charge. In these configurations they reap the benefits of exchanging ideas and innovations through fast feedback in small groups, affording a synergy that allows their thoughts and visions to grow and mutate almost the instant they are formulated.

Counterculture lacks formal structure and formal leadership. In one sense it is leaderless; in another sense, it is leader-full, all of its participants constantly innovating, pushing into new territory where others may eventually follow.

Counterculture may be found in (sometimes uneasy) alliances with radical, even revolutionary political groups and insurrectionary forces, and the memberships of countercultures and such groups often overlap.

But the focus of counterculture is the power of ideas, images, and artistic expression, not the acquisition of personal and political power. Thus, minority, alternative, and radical political parties are not themselves countercultures. While many countercultural memes have political implications, the seizure and maintenance of political power requires adherence to structures too inflexible to accommodate the innovation and exploration that are basic to the countercultural raison d?'tre. Organization and institution are anathema to counterculture.

Counterculture, as this book demonstrates, is a perennial phenomenon, probably as old as civilization, and possibly as old as culture itself

You can order a copy of Counterculture Throught the Ages here.

Douglas Ruskoff Today on PBS -- "The Merchants of Cool"

Douglas Ruskoff  on his weblog today says:"Want to understand what really happened in these elections? Watch my new documentary! PBS Frontline, November 9th, at 9pm in most places. It should be streamed online a few weeks later."

The program can be found  on PBS Frontline's website here. It will be on about six hours after this post.

IQ and Politics

If you thought that the results of Tuesday's Presidential Election was stupid, you were closer to the truth than you might have suspected. The page "IQ and Politics" says:

 

"Wow, what can I say, in the past 24 hours over 540,000+ people have visited this page, and I will probably have to take it down soon due to bandwidth issues. I originally posted this to a few friends on a forum, using information from a list just like this creatd after the 2000 election. The list was carried by the St. Petersburg Times and the Economist, amongst others. The IQ data was originally attributed to the book "IQ and the Wealth of Nations", though I checked and couldn't find them in the current edition, I posted saying such at the bottom of the table. The tests and data were said to have been administered via the Raven's APT, and the The Test Agency, one of the UK's leading publishers and distributors of psychometric tests."

Early Exit Polls Show Landslide for Kerry Were Off the Mark -- with Current Trends Showing a Bush Victory

Updated:Early exit polls reportedly Kerry winning the Whitehouse were widely off the mark. Results of the actual voting as of this update indicate that the actual votes differed from these polls taken by voters leaving the polls by varied margins, but mostly favoring incumbent Bush. If current trends continue, Bush will be reelected.

Early exit polls are beginning to show what appears to be a landslide for Kerry. Slate shows Kerry leading Bush by three points in early national exit polls and also ahead in key battleground states including Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, New Mexico and Michigan.

Wired News features a Reuters release: "Web Election-Watchers Say Exit Polls Tilt to Kerry" By Eric Auchard