Bruce Eisner's Vision Thing

Memes for Making A New Culture -- A Work in Progress Part 1

In my post in November about my mother’s passing Remembering My Mother, I related about how a dream at age four provided as way of thinking about those early years of my life, the ones that hardly anyone remembers anything about.

I am going to be 62 in February and so I have gone through a lot of my life, much of which seemed like endless mid-life crises and reached maturity. In terms of The 12 Stages of Life by Bruce Carnahan, I have arrived at Stage 9 called which he calls Reflection.

I was at a New Years party last night put by my DJ friend EROCx1. He’s 34 and most of his friends are in their mid-thirties. Shortly after the clock hit 12, I talked one one of those friend who I had met a another of Eric’s parties exactly a year before, “That year sure went by fast. “ He replied, “yeah they seem to go by faster and faster every year.”

This is the secret that all of those of us who have reached “maturity” share. We experience each day we live now as somehow feeling the equivalent of an hour when we were in our mid-twenties. The days fall off the calendar the way that they do in a film montage that shows the days and years passing by ever faster.

Psychedelic Transhumanists in RU Sirius's Online H+ Magazine

Links for this Post

H+ Magazine as PDF (opens in new browser and needs PDF viewer installed)

H+ Magazine Website

RU Sirius, editor of famed cyberculture magazine of the late Th Century has released issue 3 of his new oon-line magazine +H (stands for humanity plus).

The H+ website developed by Infoswell Media makes available free two versions of magazine including a flash and an optimized PDF  which I prefer and link to above so you can look at the article which is the subject of this post.

This issue has a lot of short but nevertheless interesting articles and essays on on a spectrum of topics related to psychedelic futurism.

. One that caught my attention is "The Psychedelic Transhumanists" by Michael Garfield. The four featured members of Garfield's newly coined world view are two recently diseased counterculture luminaries Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna and two current idea makers Eric Davis (who I posted about recently) and Mark Pease.

Techgnosis Essays on Cyberculture and Mysticism by Erik Davis

Link for this Post Technosis by Erik Davis

Erik Davis published his first book Techgnoisis Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information over 20 years ago and has been part of the psychedelic cyberculture scene ever since.

If you've been looking for a chance to find out more about his ideas, his recently updated Techgnosis website will give give you a chance.

The amount of content here is more than substantial and includes an anthology of over 20 eassys.

Cyberculture, Technoculture, Future Culture

Link for this post: Cyberculture, Technoculture, Future Culture

This site has been around awhile but its worth taking a look at if you have not seen it before. Here is an excerpt:

This definition is from the Future Culture Manifesto: Cyberculture is a here-and-now reality that grew out of the science fiction movement of "cyberpunk". Look at the word "cyberpunk" -- broken down you have "cyber" and "punk" which roughly translates to people using technology and information in ways that deviate from the expected norms and mores and laws of society.

High-tech Paganism-Digital Polytheism By Timothy Leary on Spiral Nature

Link for this Post: Load and Run High-tech Paganism-Digital Polytheism by Timothy Leary and Eric Gullichsen republished on Spiral Nature

An excerpt from this rough-draft essay originally part of an unpublished book by Tim.

The Personal Mythology

So you search and research your very own genetic memory banks, the Old Testaments of your DNA-RNA, including, if you like, past incarnations and Jungian archetypes. And funky pre- incarnations in any future you can imagine!

You write your very own Newest Testament, recalling that voluntary martyrdom is tacky and crucifixions, like nuclear war, can ruin your day.

You can do anything the great religions, empires and racial groups have done in the name of their God #1. and you’re certain to do it better because… well, look at their track records. There’s no way your Personal State could produce the persecutions, massacres and bigotries of the Big Guys.

Neuromancer (the novel) at 25 - PC World Author Looks at What It Got Right and Not

Neuromancer at 25: What It Got Right, What It Got Wrong by Mark Sullivan on PC World

I remeber spending time with Timothy Leary back in 1985 shortly after Neuromancer had been published in paperback. Tim pulled it off his shelf and handed it to me.

"Bruce, this is what the future is all about,"Tim smugly proclaimed..

I took the book home and read as much of it as I could. It was hard for me to get into it, because the future while full of new technology, still depicted human behavior as pretty much the same. My cherished notion at the time was that we would become better (less violent and more ethical).

I suupose that is because while change in technology has accelerated an almost exponential rate, we are pretty much the same human animal as we were 10,000 years ago, before history began. 

Still the novel is prophetic of a world in which I participate in more than most, the world of plugging into the web on a daily basis for long hours.

Now that 25 years have gone by, its probably time for me to go back and take another try at Neuromancer.

Timothy Leary Narrates Jim Morisons Trip in in the 1991 Oliver Stone Movie

Link for this Post: The Doors Movie on  [Blu-ray]

Oliver Stone's movie about my generation made a a full  generation ago (1991)  is on HBO in HD. As I turn it on,  Morison played by Val Kilmer is in front of my old Hollywood Hangout, the Whiskey A Go Go or a reasonable facsimile.

He leaps on top of one of the cars that cruised up and down Sunset Blvd as Hippies played guitars and shook tambourines. 

Morison has eaten some acid and as he looks down at the hippies on the street, he asks them "Is there anyone here who really knows how to feel."

He is transported to the desert where words straight from the words of Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzer from their classic LSD albums, invoking the Tibetan Gods and Bardos.

Since many of you are tweeing what you are up to tonight, I thought I'd share my encounter with the fictional verion of the raw soul of who young Irish Jim Morrison was.

Future Organic Technology -- The Visionary Art of Paul Laffoley

Link for this Post: Intro to Paul Laffoley and Future Organic Technology

A couple of days ago, I found a site called Miquel.Com "Your Favorite Source of Random Information." Actually the information is not a "random" as advertised but along the lines of stuff you might see on this blog.

Among the interesting eclectic information found on the site is a virtual visionary art expo by an artist named Paul Laffoley. One of his images adorns the top of this post. Here is how the artist describes his exhibit:

Immensely detailed mandalas of geometrical systems, thought symmetries, machines of the future, bioengineered living structures, methods of creating time-machines and dimensional wormholes are just the beginning!

There are many images up there and it would be worth your while to go there and take a look around.

Are Smart Drugs the Answer to Bad Moods—and a Bad Economy? Discover

Link for this Post: Are Smart Drugs the Answer to Bad Moods—and a Bad Economy? by Sherry Baker in Discover Magazine.

This is a wide ranging article about "smart drug's" that covers a set of topics much broader than its title would suggest. Rather than excerpt one section and have you read the article. I will list a few of the highlights and then let you read it.

• Recently introduced attention enhancing drugs such as Provigal and Modafinil
• Current and future memory enhancement drugs including a group called the " ampakines"
• The creativity enhancing qualities of psychedelic compounds
• transcranial magnetic brain stimulations to produce novel states of mind for creativity
• Futurists and their interest in the potential of brain-changing compounds for future evolution

This is brief outline of an article that probably should be three chapters in a book with some words connecting the dots

Adam Cheyer and the Intelligent Software Assistant

 

Links for this Post:

TR10: Intelligent Software Assistant Adam Cheyer is leading the design of powerful software that acts as a personal aide" By Erica Naone in the Technology Review Published by MIT

Adam Cheyer Home Page

Information overload is something many of us know quite about about. Probably too much.

For many of us, computers with amble multitasking abilities and the ever increasing quantity and bandwidth of information coming in from the web make it hard to get anything done. Wouldn't it be nice if the same medium that serves us up  this glossolalia of data and tower of babel of ideas could also be the medium which simplifies it and points out what is relevant?

The concept of the intelligence computer assistant has existed in the popular mind for at least as long as the Sixties, with the introduction of Hal in the movie 2001. Adam Cheyer has taken up the cause of making Intelligent Software Assistants a reality.

Recession Over by the End by 2009 -- Another Opinon Based on NY Fed Model

Link for this Post: NY Fed's Model Predicts End of Recession in 2009 by Mark J. Perry on his Carpe Diem blog

In my last post, I wrote about the opinion of "Dr. Doom" Nouriel Roubini that the current ecomomic crisis will continue until the end of 2010. Here is another view published on the blog of Mark J. Perry, a Professor of Economics and Finance at the University of Michigan.

Based on a usually reliable predictor of future economic activity, a model based on trends in the spead between interest rates  of 10 year US Treasury bonds and 3 month US Treasury bills -- the recession should be over before the end of the year.

Remember you read it here first.

Mattel Will Release Neurofeedback Brain Game -- Brain Flex -- CBS Video on YouTube

Links for ths Post include embedded video below plus:

Mind Flex Like Basketball for Your Mind on Gizmodo

Odball Gadgets: Mattel Mind Flex by Melissa Perenso on PC World

Video: Mattel Mind Flex hands (and heads) on Engadget

The Mattel toy company (which is also releasing its 50th Anniversary Barbie Doll this year) announced a new "adult" game at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. The game called Mind Flex, scheduled to be release in the next month or two features a brainwave guided ball which you maneuver through an obstacle course. 

Actually you control the ball with a combination of plain old hand-eye coordination but with the addition of additional control through EEG biofeedback. Your brainwaves are measured by a headset supplied with the game and your ability to control your brainwaves contributes to your success in guiding the ball through the course and to its goal.

The technology behind the Brain Flex is made by Neurosky. I first wrote Neurosky in my March 2006 post on the Mindware Forum, NeuroSky: Convert Your Brainwaves & Eye Movements Into Useful Electronic Signals To Communicate With Electronic Devices Such As Your Phone or PC

In the CBS news video below, Daniel Sieberg speaks with Mattel's Jim Sheridan about their new mind control toy.

Digitizing Timothy Leary YouTube Video

Link for this Post: YouTube Video on the Project to Digitize Timothy Leary

I posted several weeks ago The New Timothy Leary Archives Website -- Plus YouTube Video Interview with Webmaster of Leary.Com about an event which occured on February 8th. I was unable to attend the event due to an ongoing back problem. After watching the video, I realized that I should have tried to this event, which was a coming together of the Leary tribe that vanished frojm my life 12 years ago, when Leary died. It left a void which has not been filled.

  Supporters of the work of Timothy Leary attended a reception February 8.2009 in San Francisco. The goal was to find patrons and a place to build a Timothy Leary museum to house about 400 boxes of archives and to digitize the material.

Gaia - The future of politics -- YouTube Video

Gaia - The future of politics (embedded below)

I've been digging through my email bin trying to reach the bottom. It is getting closer or so I believe.

I found a video sent to me late last year via this email:

Dear Bruce, we just published a new video on the Future of Politics: how communication, knowledge and organization are changing through the Internet and what this means for the politics we know today.  (subtitles in English and Spanish) I'd love to have a comment from you on it.

 Best, Davide Casaleggio (video follows:)

Heal The Planet, Live Forever, and Travel The Stars by Paul Hughes --- Updated Link

Link for this Post Heal The Planet, Live Forever, and Travel The Stars

My friend and fellow psychedelic blogger Paul Hughes, founder of the pioneering FutureHi weblog has written another of his extensive essays. This one is about us humans living up to our potential and creating a better future.

The link at the top is to the first part of the essay about "healing the planet." Its a logical place to start because if we do not create better cultural memes, the "living forever and traveling the stars" part would not be possible.

Paul has a wide ranging knowledge of new technologies with the potential to create a sustainable and ecological civilization his essay is worth your attention.

The New Timothy Leary Archives Website -- Plus YouTube Video Interview with Webmaster of Leary.Com

Link for this Post: The New Timothy Leary Archives Website

My long-time friend Dennis Berry along with an assemblage of Timothy Leary's friends including Joi Ito,  Ken Gofmann (RU Sirius), Joey Cavella and Chris Graves  (the later two featured in the video below)  has launched a new Timothy Leary site which promises to replace the void left when Leary.Com went off-line a in the late Nineties.

Denis Berry is a woman who Timothy Leary entrusted to be the excectuor of his estate. She set up the Futuiqe Foundation to overlook Leary's heritage. The new website is their first public gesture but they have been networking privately for a while now.

The new site has the outlines of a living Timothy Leary site with sections on media, video archives, people and events with a blog as the front end. The latest feature on the blog is an interview with Joe Cavella and Chris Graves, Leary's creative team. I posted the Youtube video of the first portion of the interview below.

Let's Party Like Its 1999!

Barack H. Obama becomes the 44th President of the United States

Links for this Post:

BarackObama.Com

Cable Network News

I have not posted in several weeks. I've been having problems with the computer network in my home and decided to get to the root of the disorganization that is behind it. I figure I'll be doing a lot of writing now that our country has had its second "somewhat" peaceful revolution in the past first decade of the Third Millennium.

The far right had seined the moment of opportunity created by the attack by religious fanatics on New York that occurred shortly after ascension  then to high office by someone who served as counterpoint to this point in our history. We are all happy that we do not have to put up with him anymore.

A few months before Ronald Reagan office, the now late comedian Richard Prior said that everyone would get a high and have as much sex as possible because when Republicans take office, sex and drugs usually become more scarce. 

But Reagan was a wild-eyed liberal compared what we experienced under George THe last eight years have made it seem like the in the millennium, the spirit of playfulness had disappeared from the repertoire of human  behavior.

So as the artist formerly known as Prince sings, "Let's Party Like Its 1999!"

OBAMA Anatomy of a World Leader by Visionary Artist Alex Grey

 

Link for this Post:Obama Anatomy of a World Leader -- the making of a portrait by psychedelic artist extraordinaire Alex Grey

My long-time friend Will Penna sent me a link to a portion of artist Alex Grey's site which is both about Grey's personal feelings and insights about our new "World Leader" and an illustrated and fascinating description of the process that the paining depicted above was formed.

I have the pleasure of having met and corresponded with Alex Grey during those times back in the Nineties when I spent so much time developing Island Foundation. I am proud to say that he is a member of Island Foundation and among a small group of consciousness luminaries which also included Alan Ginsbeg, Timothy Leary, Tom Robbins, Albert Hofmann, Ram Dass and Albert Hofmann.

Here is an excerpt from Grey's comments (quoted):

 "After hearing Barack Obama's speech in Berlin, and noting the degree of excitement and hope that he generated throughout many countries besides the US, I started to see him as one of the first true "world leaders." This may be partly because of his extraordinary childhood and political life that has bridged many cultures. Obama's restraint and intelligence, exhibited as foes were bating him throughout the campaign, his heartful clarity coming through in his talks are all qualities of a highly evolved person."

"We need to consider our planetary citizenship, because solving the world's ecological and economic problems, and creating a culture of peace and reconciliation will require the co-operation of all nations."

"Perhaps you can use this symbol of Barack Obama to send him a prayer of support, to send all the loving hopeful healing and creative energy that we can focus on him so that he can perform the task of leadership in the most effective and powerful way for the greatest good, for the greatest number." (end of quote)

I've been on the planet a bit more than six decades and I cannot remember so much hope since Kennedy was elected back in 1960. (As a kid, I loved politics and remember staying home from school at age 13 so I could see his famous Berlin speech on TV.).

If the five generational cycle theory described in the book Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics which I posted about in Millennials: Tipping the Scales Toward Change on Future Blogger turns out to be accurate, Obama may be more in the mold of Franklin Delano Roosevelt than John Kennedy. Like Roosevelt, he faces the twin dragons of economic crisis and a world filled with war. If he turns out to the the great communicator (Roosevelt not Reagan was the real Great Communicator) that we believe he will be, then the next decade may be the most exciting of our lives.

Read the Online Version of the New Tranhumanist Magazine h+ edited by Mondo 2000 founder Ken Gofmann AKA RU Sirius

Link for this Post: Read the Free Online PDF Version of the New Tranhumanist Magazine h+ edited by Mondo 2000 founder Ken Gofmann AKA RU Sirius

Many of you remember Mondo 2000, the Berkeley based magazine published by Alison Kennedy and edited by RU Sirius. I got a note today from Ken about a new "print" magazine that he is editing. He says:

Are you ready to be fitted for your Ironman suit? Is it time to stop aging, upload your memories onto silicon and engineer your progeny to be happy geniuses? Can we get you a real hamburger that wasn't made from a slaughtered cow? (And do you want fries with that)? Well, roll over Anderson Cooper and tell Perez Hilton the news.

h+ magazine has arrived and the future already looks different.

Humanity Plus (formerly the World Transhumanist Association) – in collaboration with former Mondo 2000 editor RU Sirius -- is pleased to present h+. A web-based quarterly magazine, h+ covers the scientific, technological, and cultural developments that are challenging and overcoming human limitations. Recently, there has been a growing and evolving public discourse about new technological trends and possibilities. Scientists and edge thinkers are talking about– and working on  -- slowing or ending aging; body and brain enhancement; biological control of the genome and the evolutionary process; and the possibility of a technological singularity brought on by AI… to name just a few of the interests and obsessions of this new edge tech culture. h+ magazine is all over it.

Beautifully designed by virtual worlds artistic legend D.C. Spensley (AKA DanCoyote in Second Life), h+ is accessible, stylish, contemporary, and sometimes playful. h+ aims to provides an entry point for intelligent people to develop an awareness of this new technological paradigm, while also providing an outlet and a voice for those who are already hooked in to the "transhumanist" vision.

You can read the new issue online at the link at the top of this post.

The Buzz from Burning Man 2008 The "American Dream"

Link for this Post: Burning Man 2008 -- "The American Dream" Offical Site

The theme of this year's Burning Man is the American Dream, which is appropriate since many at the Democratic convention noted that the American Dream seems to be slipping away.

The image on the post is from the Burning Man 2008 Offical site linked at the top. Here is how they describe the man's current incarnation:

This year Burning Man will stand atop an obelisk. This imposing monument, emblazoned with the images of flags, will represent the countries of the world. Ranging from Canada to Chad, from Brazil to Burundi, from Vatican City to the Republic of China, these emblems will shine brightly in the night, gleaming like illuminated gems that stud a giant jewel box. A double-helix, like a strand of DNA, will form a staircase. Twining around the axis of this tower, it will spiral through a series of viewing platforms. The topmost tier will stand directly underneath the Burning Man.

I'm not going to Burning Man this year. Those of you who read my reports from Burning Man in 2006 know that I have a hard time with dust. For those of you going this year, I'd love to hear some reports.

Future Internet: Duncan Campbell examines the technology that will one day bring about the “thinking Web”.

Link for this Post: Future Internet - Internet - NetGuide

I liked the picture that is featured at the top of this article by Duncan Cambell on the future of the Internet so I republished it at the top of this post. It shows an artists conception of what our computer interface will look like in the year 2018.

Freud said a century ago that humans have an unconscious instinctual desire to return to  womb. As a psychologist trained a long time ago in old school psychology, I would have to say that the woman in the picture looks like she has done exactly that.  Her fetal position is also similar to that imagined for the "enslaved" humans in the movie, the Matrix immersed in their virtual reality pods. Except that the woman looks alert and working rather than vegetative.

She looks extremely comfortable. The only thing that looks like it might not be needed is her fingers at the keyboard. Hopefully by 2018 that speech recognition or even brainwave recognition  will have advanced far enough to the need for repeated pressing of fingers.

Here is a snip from the post that I thought was particularly interesting:

Up in the clouds: “Web 3.0 will not just be using the data in innovative ways, it will be abstracting away things formally done on individual computers,” suggested a forum posting at Resourceful Idiot. “Cloud computing will become more common and you will see the Internet become a much more mature medium.”

Cloud computing is fundamentally about the location of storage, services, operating systems and information. All this data has to go somewhere and if the future Internet is going to be intuitively interactive, it’ll have to be readily accessible. Plus, individual users may not wish to have large (and expensive) storage systems in their home.

Online storage systems are already widely available; a Web-based email system is a simple example. The system provider allocates you storage space with your email address so you can save material for future reference (some email services no longer put limits on storage space). As more and more data is created, computing facilities whose physical location is irrelevant will be the points of access.

“You don’t necessarily know where services are coming from; you don’t even care as long as you get a certain quality of service,” says Nick Jones.

Virtualisation comes into play here; cloud systems will contain virtual networks of computers that don’t require hardware because they’re actually data stored on larger computers (known as servers). For a fee, you can store all your information in these networks with password-controlled access. It frees you from the expense of upgrading your computer hardware periodically to add storage space, and also means you can access your information from any computer with a Net connection.

You can read the entire article at the link at the top of this post.

Exploring Life Extension a video documentary from the Immortality Insitute on Google Video

A full feature movie from the Immortality Institute, intruducing the vision and prospects of life extension.

I found this vidio by way of K21st - 21st Century Must Have Knowledge a transhumanist blog.

Aldous Huxley: Mike Wallace 1958 Video Interview

Note: Clicking on the picture does not start a video, it takes you to the University of Texas at Austin Page where you can watch the video.

Links for this Post:

Video Aldous Huxley: The Mike Wallace Interview.

Transcript of the Interview

Mike Wallace interviewed a wide ranging selection of the most important people of his times in the Mike Wallace Show broadcast 50 years ago on CBS. Aldous Huxley was one of those important people and the warnings and cautions he discusses with Wallace seems prescient.

I remember that when I was a child watching the Mike Wallace Show with my parents. In those days, it was the cool, intellectual thing to smoke and so Mike Wallace puffed up a storm in this video.

Here is an excerpt from the transcript  at the beginning of the interview:

WALLACE:  This is Aldous Huxley, a man haunted by a vision of hell of earth. A searing social critic, Mr. Huxley, twenty-seven years ago, wrote "Brave New World," a novel that predicted that some day the entire world would live under a frightful dictatorship. Today Mr. Huxley says that his fictional world of horror is probably just around the corner for all of us. We'll find out why, in a moment.

Good evening. I'm Mike Wallace. Tonight's guest, Aldous Huxley, is a man of letters as disturbing as he is distinguished. Born in England, now a resident of California, Mr. Huxley has written some of the most electric novels and social criticism of this century. He's just finished a series of essays called "Enemies of Freedom," in which he outlines and defines some of the threats to our freedom in the United States; and Mr. Huxley, right off the bat, let me ask you this: as you see it, who and what are the enemies of freedom here in the United States?

HUXLEY:  Well, I don't think you can say who in the United States, I don't think there are any sinister persons deliberately trying to rob people of their freedom. But I do think, first of all, that there are a number of impersonal forces which are pushing in the direction of less and less freedom, and I also think that there are a number of technological devices which anybody who wishes to use can use to accelerate this process of going away from freedom, of imposing control.

WALLACE:  Well, what are these forces and these devices, Mr. Huxley?

HUXLEY:  I should say that there are two main impersonal forces, …the first of them is not exceedingly important in the United States at the present time, though very important in other countries. This is the force which in general terms can be called overpopulation, the mounting pressure of population pressing upon existing resources. …This, of course, is an extraordinary thing; something is happening which has never happened in the world's history before. I mean, let's just take a simple fact that between the time of birth of Christ and the landing of the Mayflower, the population of the earth doubled. It rose from two hundred and fifty million to probably five hundred million. Today, the population of the earth is rising at such a rate that it will double in half a century.

I invite you to post your comments about the video here.

How to Operate Your Brain by Timothy Leary Updated Now on YouTube

Link for this Post:

See You Tube Video Below

Timothy Leary made this video, How to Operate your Brain more than a decade ago. The 28 minute 58 second video was produced by Chris Graves and the other folks at Retinalogic.

It is the best in a series of multimedia documentaries Leary made in his desire to get his message out in a form where it could be understood non-verbally as well as verbally. We used to sell the movie through Island Foundation but I was pleased to see on YouTube.

You can find part two of the How to Operate Your Brain Video here and part three of How to Operate Your Brain here.

Findings - Futurist Ray Kurzweil Sees a Revolution Fueled by Information Technology - NYTimes.com

Link for this Post: Findings - Futurist Ray Kurzweil Sees a Revolution Fueled by Information Technology - NYTimes.com.

Here is a bit from the beginning of this piece.

Do you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.

Worried about greenhouse gas emissions? Have faith. Solar power may look terribly uneconomical at the moment, but with the exponential progress being made in nanoengineering, Dr. Kurzweil calculates that it’ll be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.

FutureHi Founder Paul Hughes New Site on the Web

Link: Paul Hughes' Site on the Web.

Paul Huges who started the lively FutureHi blog back in 2003, which was a MUST READ for those of us interested in psychedelics, altered states of consciousness and the future of humans, our planet and the universe has started and new and more personal blog which can be visited via the link at the top of this post.

Paul stopped posting to the FuturHi blog at the end of 2006 and most of the activity on that website has moved to their lively forum.

Here is a bit about what Paul does personally from his bio:

I'm a body psychotherapist, writer, yogi, teacher, philosopher, composer, artist and juggler. I'm currently working on my PhD in Clinical Somatic Psychology. I spend part of my year traveling and conducting intensives and workshops on personal transformation for individuals and groups. The tools of my trade include vivation, yoga, tantra, bodywork, reiki, aromatherapy, shamanic journeying, and dynamic meditation.

Here is how Paul describes his interests which are reflected in his blog and the collection of essays available on his new site:.

I'm fascinated with the history and evolution of human culture, consciousness, and our understanding of our place in the cosmos.  Comparative anthropology, psychology, philosophy, religion, alchemy, history, science, astronomy, biology, cosmology, physics, technology, culture, politics, language, economics, spirituality... I think that pretty much covers everything... How did we get here?  Where are we going?  What is the nature of self, of god, of consciousness?  Are we alone in the universe? Are there other universes?  Does it go on forever?  Is there life after death?   How can we fix the current mess we got ourselves into?   How can we survive our own adolescence?  How can we achieve immortality?   When my thinking cap is on, these questions are usually behind my inquiries.

I'm sure that readers of my blog who also followed FutureHi will be interested in Paul's new weblog.

Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising FREE eBook Download

Link for this Post:  Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising.

Robert Anton Wilson passed on last year but his ideas live on in large number of books, essays and interviews. Prometheus Risingwas one of his most influential books during his life and now has been made available to the public in an online version.

Prometheus Rising introduced Timothy Leary's  8 Circuit Model of Consciousness to a much wider audience than Leary himself in any of his books on the subject.

Much as Russian Philosopher P. D. Ouspensky explained in more simple words and thus popularized the work of his teacher mystic George Gurdjieff, Robert Anton Wilson does in this book with the ideas of Leary.

Here is how Wikipedia describes Prometheus Rising:

Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson is a guide book of "how to get from here to there", an amalgam of Timothy Leary's 8-circuit model of consciousness, Gurdjieff's self-observation exercises, Alfred Korzybski's general semantics, Aleister Crowley's magical theorems, Sociobiology, Yoga, Christian Science, relativity, and quantum mechanics amongst other approaches to understanding the world around us. It claims to be a short book (nearly 300 pages) about how the human mind works and how to get the most use from one. Wilson describes it as an "owner's manual for the human brain".

I first found the book in the public domain on Scribed which allows you to read the book on line or download it as a PDF with free registration at the link at the top of this post. It is also available with no registration via the Fans of Robert Anton Wilson webite as a PDF download (click here).

The Search for A Female Aphrodesiac Continues

Link for this Post: The hunt for '"pink" Viagra -- in the St. Peters Times.

Sigmund Freud once said,

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is "What does a woman want?"

While psychology has not yet come up with an answer for that, pschopharmacologists have been hunting for a pill that they hope might provide a partial answer for Freud's question.

The article linked at the top, while containing mostly philosophical musings, the mention of PT-141  which I posted about in  Will The Soon-To-Hit-The-Market Uber-Aphrodisiac PT-141 Become the Biggest 'Club-Drug' Ever? back in October 2006.

When I wrote that post PT-141, a drug patented by  Palatin Technologies was in development. According to the article, the FDA has raised concerns about some instances of blood pressure increases in male subjects. This got me to updating my file about the drug.

When I looked at the Palatin site, they discuss the problems with the FDA allowing them to go beyond Phase II clinical trials..

It also turns out that they PT-141 now has a name, Bremelanotide which is now on Wikipedia

In the clinical trials, there are several quotes by subjects. Here is one of the male patients"

"On the five point scale, I’d score the erection I had as a six.”  - Patient 41

So while there is no evidence that Bremelanotide is what women want, it may turn out to be what quite a few men want.

Note: Image at the top of from the Washington Post via the St. Petersburg Times.

The Dream Machine Online

Link for this Post: The Dream Machine Online  Note; Be sure to close your eyes when you view the dream machine.

Three years ago, I wrote Remembering Brion Gysin Among Gysin's works was the concept of the Dream Machine.

The main link at the top of this post is to a website the attempts to render the Dream Machine concept as an online web application.

A Dream Machine according to Wikipedia:

The dreamachine (or dream machine) is a stroboscopic flicker device that produces visual stimuli. Artist Brion Gysin and scientist Ian Sommerville created the dreamachine after reading William Grey Walter's book, The Living Brain.

In its original form, a dreamachine is made from a cylinder with slits cut in the sides. The cylinder is placed on a record turntable and rotated at 78 or 45 revolutions per minute. A light bulb is suspended in the center of the cylinder and the rotation speed allows the light to come out from the holes at a constant frequency, situated between 8 and 13 pulses per second. This frequency range corresponds to alpha waves, electrical oscillations normally present in the human brain while relaxing.

A dreamachine is "viewed" with the eyes closed: the pulsating light stimulates the optical nerve and alters the brain's electrical oscillations. The "viewer" experiences increasingly bright, complex patterns of color behind their closed eyelids. The patterns become shapes and symbols, swirling around, until the "viewer" feels surrounded by colors. It is claimed that viewing a dreamachine allows one to enter a hypnagogic state. This experience may sometimes be quite intense, but to escape from it, one needs only to open one's eyes.

A dreamachine may be dangerous for people with photosensitive epilepsy or other nervous disorders. It is thought that one out of 10,000 adults will experience a seizure while viewing the device; about twice as many children will have a similar ill effect.

Who is Brion Gyson?

Brion Gysin (1916-1986) was a multimedia artist and mystic most famous in his lifetime for inventing a system called The Cut Ups, often credited to his best friend and soul mate the Beat writer William S. Burroughs. Traversing many nationalities, Gysin was a Sufi initiate, Secret knowledge. Dream Machine 1960 at the Beat Hotel after experiencing flicker near Marseilles tried everything to market and sell his ticket.

This description of him comes the makers of a  2008 feature documentary 'FLicKeR' by Nik Sheehan. about Brion Gysin and the dream machine  . This is the Flicker website and here is some more info about the film (and an image I used).

Below and completely unrelated is The Dream Machine film on YouTube which says that it is, "based on Dave Arnold's design copy of artist and alchemist Brion Gysin's DREAMACHINE developed in the 1950s from an original design of the 'Flicker Machine' invented by the mathematician Ian Sommerville, a close friend of William Burroughs."

Note: Image at top from painting by Paul O'Donovan on the Interzone Site, Western Lands. Title: "The rebirth of Ra-Atum-Khepri, occurring during an Interzone Coffee-break T.V. commercial, causing a partial eclipse over the Westernlands"

Millennials: Tipping the Scales Toward Change on Future Blogger

Link for this post:Millennials: Tipping the Scales Toward Change on Future Blogger.

I have been hearing about the new Millennial Generation but did not know that much about it until I found this post on a weblog called FutureBlogger. Complete with two web videos, the post got me up and running on the Millennial Generation concept.
The post also got me interested in a new book, Millennial Makeover: YouTube, MySpace and the Future of American Politics by Mike Hais and Morley Winograd. I clipped an interview with them from the Future Blogger post and embedded it below along with a snip from the beginning of the post.

A new generation of Americans, born in 1980-2000, is making a grab for the reins of culture, business and politics.  This Millennial Generation, dubbed a Civic generation by scholars who study generational patterns, is irreverent and highly pro-active, in contrast to the vocal Baby Boomer generation that was not given the tools to accomplish the widespread change they sought to effect.

Note: I found future blogger by way of Hedweb

The Longevity Meme -- Ideas and Actions for Longer, Healthier Lives

Link:for this Post The Longevity Meme -- Ideas and Actions for Longer, Healthier Lives.

Having just headed into a decade of my life, the idea of slowing the aging process becomes increasingly more interesting. Here is a log with a variety of topics and resources around this theme. Here is how the blog describes itself:

Aging is an enemy. It saps our strength, cripples and eventually kills us. The lack of information, advocacy and awareness of anti-aging and healthy life extension research is a terrible thing. Much of the general public thinks of aging as inevitable and natural, rather than as a medical condition that may one day be curable.

Comparatively few people know that the effects of aging can be slowed with diet and lifestyle choices, just as for many other medical conditions. Presently ongoing research aimed at repairing known types of age-related cellular damage - aimed at true rejuvenation, in other words - does not receive the widespread publicity and support it deserves.

Visit the longevity meme at the link at the top of this post.

The Hivemind Aesthetic, Instopix and Other Art

Links for this Post

The Hivemind Aesthetic.

Luke Stanley on Stumble Upon

Luke Stanley's Blog

Instapix

I stumbled upon a young fellow from England a couple of years ago, who is working on a semantically sensitive software program that adds into Microsoft Live Messenger called Instopix.

The program creates a stream of pictures and idea associations based on the words it detects in your chats  that float on your screen as you chat. Luke calls the technology behind Instopix the Thoughtrail Semantic File System.

Luke also likes to play with words and images in his art and poetry. The poem at the top is an example of a poem with image and there are some more examples there as

Awakening the Divine Within -- Enthogen TV on YouTube

Link for this Post: Awakening the Divine Within  -- embedded YouTube video below

Here is the YouTube description of this video:

Terence McKenna, Alex Grey, and Stanislov Grof are among the people that speak here in this inspiring piece put together by Entheogen.TV. The question remains, will we climb out of barbarism and into some form of legitimate civilization or will we die and take Earth with us?

Info for this video comes via Juxtaposeur on Memes.org

Dude, Where’s My Driverless Car? Consumer Electornics Show Vegas

Link for this Post:  CES: Dude, Where’s My Driverless Car? on All things Digital

While New Hampshire was busy giving Hillary Clinton a come-from-behind win, in Vegas, we were busy checking out cutting edge technology at the Consumer Electrics Show.

The Image to the right is s prototype of a driver-less car developed by General Motors. Here is what GM CEO and Chairman Rick Wagner said about them:

Autonomous driving means that some day you’ll do your email, eat breakfast, read the newspaper–while commuting to work. Essentially, you could do all the things you do right now while commuting to work, except you could do them safely

With the way people drive in Vegas, I'm ready for the change!

The Six Wives of Timothy Leary

Links for this Post:

The Six Wives of Timothy Leary reviewed in The Stage

The Six Wives of Timothy Leary - reviewed by John Higgs

MySpace profile of The Six Wives of Timothy Leary

Here is an interesting take on Timothy Leary's life. The Six Wives of Timothy Leary is a play which examines his life from the perspective of the six women he married during his adventure-filled life.

Both review links  are from the play's debut in a one month run in London which ended December 9th. I also included a MySpace profile for the play which has a lot of images and bits of blogged information about the play:

I Upgraded to Englightenment 2.0 -- Beyond Belief

Link for this Post: Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0

It looks like some people are thinking the same thoughts I am. The above link is to a conference focusing on the recent trends in our society away from science and reason and toward religion and belief.

here is a snip from the intro to the conference which was held this last

The Current Global Crisis and the Future of Humanity Stan Grof on Reality Sandwitch

Link for this Post: The Current Global Crisis and the Future of Humanity by Stan Grof on Reality Sandwich

The essay I am posting about is  by Dr. Stanislav Grof, who needs no introduction to most readers.

The subject of the essay is something close to my own passion, the idea that advanced techniques and technologies of consciousnesses change could play an inportant part in dealing with the multiple crisis currently threatening the planet and the life that depends on it.

Here is how he describes the context in which the presentation of the ideas in the essay were

Neurofeedback for Peak Performance Video on YouTube

Link for this Post: Neurofeedback on the Brain blog (video is embedded below)_

I found this video by way of the Neurofeedback on the Brain blog. Dr.Karen Shue posted this video and says about it:

I thought you might enjoy it as it shows what the process of neurofeedback using the CARE model looks like and talks about the importance of learning to be Present to our own experiences in order to be in Flow more of the time.

Here is the video

Actress Mariel Hemingway Hosting Fund-Raising Dinner November 9th for Alex Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in New York -- Consciousness Cafe

Link for ths Post: Consciousness Cafe.

Here is an excerpt from this post:

Academy Award- and Golden Globe-nominated American actress Mariel Hemingway will host a fund-raising dinner November 9th for Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (CoSM) in N

Alex's art is multi dimensional and my interest in opening to different dimensions especially the fourth/ the heart is my passion.

The Chapel and Alex have created space and work where the world as we see it, is open to a world that we can feel and experience differently, perhaps a world we are not familiar with. We are on an integrated path and the combination of the music art dance and fine art is the window into dimensions that are Bigger than us. Alex has opened this door.
- Mariel Hemingway

Tichets are $250 for the evening. Please visit the post through the link at the top to find out more.

Google's Orkut: A World of Ambition -- Business Week

Link for this Post: Google's Orkut: A World of Ambition Seizing on Orkut's momentum in Asia and Latin America, Google moves to revamp its social networking site and take aim at Facebook and MySpace by Olga Kharif

When Google first offered Orcut back i in 2005, I developed an online persona there as did many people I know from the cybculture days of the Nineties.

Those were the days after Friendster had inspired a series of clones including Tribe.net,and then MySpace, the 800 Pound Gorilla of social networks until recently.

Connect Your Brain to the Game Using an Emotiv Systems EEG Neurofeedback Cap -- YouTube Video

Links for this Post:

YouTube Video "Stonehenge Demo' embedded below

Connecting Your Brain to the Game Using an EEG cap, a startup hopes to change the way people interact with video games by Kate Greene in the MIT Technology Review

Emotiv Systems

Using an EEG cap, a startup hopes to change the way people interact with video games.

Joi Ito's Web: "My Timothy Leary"

Link: Joi Ito's Web: My Timothy Leary.

The picture to the left is from Joi Ito's website. For thos who don't know who Joi Ito is, his Wikipedia entry is instructive.

I met Joi in the early Nineties at Timothy Leary's home in Beverly Hills. Timothy had just returned from one of several trips to Japan and raved about his new friend Joi Ito.

In this post, Joi discusses Timothy in a variety of contexts. One thing that is certain is that these are far more "conservative" times than those optimistic days of the late last century after the Berlin Wall had fell.

URTH.TV Consciousness Movement Social Network

Link for this post: URTH.TV Consciousness Movement Social Network.

I discovered Urth.TV  last week and joined immediately. I used to speak at the Whole Life Expo in the 1980s, both myself and with Timothy Leary. I'm already a member of at least a dozen social networks and usually pass on new memberships but URT.TV is interesting and worth a look. Here is an excerpt from URT.TV's history and mission:

In early 2006, a group of conscious entrepreneurs led by Ayman Sawaf , Rowan Gabrielle and Joey Shepp bought the assets of the Wholelife expos and conferences with plans to take the Wholelife experience online-24/7 to the global market -thus the birth of Urth.tv

Singularity Summit 2007 Complete Audio Downloads And Kurzweil Video

Link for this Post: Singularity Summit 2007 | The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

Futurists includ Ray Kurzweil,  Rodney Brooks and Dr. Peter Norvig's head of research at Google were among more than a dozen presenters The Singularity Summit last week. The Singularity to a hypothetic future period of human history in which the ever increasing rate of technological change reaches a tippping point. Dramatic new technoogies such as smarter-than-human machines, naonrobots and other techologies not currently predicatble lead to a period in which change 

The concept of the Singularity was described by  statistician I.J Good in 1965: 'Let an ultra-intelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultra-intelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.'

There are audio tapes of the major presentations at the San Fransco Event held Sept 8-9th which can be foud by the link at the top of this post.

This post comes by way of GPOD

Parallel Universes, Alien Religions and Carl Jung: An Interview With Clifford Pickover on alterati

Link for this Post: Parallel Universes, Alien Religions and Carl Jung: An Interview With Clifford Pickover by Jason Lubyk on the alterati  blog.

I've posted about Clifford Pickover several times before. This science fiction writer and noteworthy oddity blogger is certainly worth several posts. In this latest, Pickover is interviewed by Jason Lubyk. Here is an

Communes make a comeback . . . in Australia

Link for this post : Communes make a comeback . . . in Australia  - Brisbane Times.

Here is an excerpt from the beginning of this Brisbane Times article:

Teepees, dope, nudity and lashings of idealism. These were the essential ingredients for Australia's first hippie communes, which sprouted up illegally along the NSW north coast in the seventies.

Thirty years on, communal living is back in vogue, and a respect for nature and human values runs deeper than ever in these circles.

But with high-speed broadband, high-tech sewage treatment, architect-designed housing and consultant psychotherapists who hold workshops on living together, communes have grown up.

They are no longer run by hippies, anarchists and potheads but a much more familiar breed: the suburban professional concerned about climate change and soaring house prices; the cashed-up city slicker seeking a simpler life; and parents wanting space for their kids to play.

And forget about calling them communes. They are now "intentional communities" -

Read the entire article at the link at the top of this post.

Note: image above from Transformational Society.

 

alterati The Yellow Sign: Timothy Leary's Neurocomics and More -- Plus Info on Leary Biopic

Link for this Post: alterati » The Yellow Sign: Timothy Leary's Neurocomics & Promethea by Alan Moore. by Wes Unruh.

This alerati post is interesting from a variety of perspectives. I actually own one of the Neurocomics. Timothy gave it to me during one of my visits to his home way back when.

It is also interesting because the author mentions the Timothy Leary biopic which i have posted about in April 2006 in two separate posts, The Race For The Timothy Leary Biopic -- Inside Entertainment and the appropriately titled More on Timothy Leary Movie Biography. In the second post, I actually use a different image of the Neurocomics as the post image.

In the post, a phrase jumps out.

. . . George DiCaprio.  (George DiCaprio is, of course, the father of film star Leonardo, who just happens to be scheduled to play Dr. Leary in an upcoming pic. (It all fits together in an acid sort of way.)

The pic link is to the Wikipedia entry on Leanardo DiCaprio. Go to the the Filmography and the Leary film biography is listed. According to this information, DiCaprio is going to play Leary!

Here is a more extended excerpt from the Yellow Brick post:

One of my old roommates boasted a collection of Dr. Timothy Leary’s works that included nearly every single work in first printing that he had published, including a beat-up old copy of Start Your Own Religion, a well-thumbed What Does Wo/Man Want?, and a rather abused copy of The Politics of Ecstasy, but he didn’t have Dr. Leary’s comic book. It was at the end of the seventies that Neurocomics (1979) was released in a print run of 10,000. It’s not even listed on the wikipedia entry of his works, and seems overlooked by most Dr. Leary’s fans. So when I was pointed to the torrent of this lost work, I was ecstatic. Download Timothy Leary’s Neurocomics neuocom.jpgfrom Alterati’s torrent tracker to check it out.

I’ve read a vast amount of Dr. Leary’s writings and of all of his work the most important seems to be the model he developed for consciousness, that is applicable both to the individual and to society. Other writers such as Antero Alli, Dr. Hyatt, and the late Bob Wilson carried the application and discussion of the 8 circuit model into today, and it remains a very stable framework onto which an individual can map their own experiences. But before those writers brought their knowledge to his model, detailing the importance while getting the ideas across simply was of paramount importance. That’s where this comic comes into play…

This work, while in black and white, was years ahead of the modern pop art comic of the time. The black and white line drawings and illustrations are easy to digest and allowed the amazing depth of information Dr. Leary had synthesized to be delivered in 33 pages of psychedelic imagery and concise language. Other than Timothy, the creative talent involved included Pete Von Sholly, Tim Kummero, S. Riley, L. Ochi, B. Clark, and George DiCaprio. (George DiCaprio is, of course, the father of film star Leonardo, who just happens to be scheduled to play Dr. Leary in an upcoming pic. It all fits together in an acid sort of way.)

Read the complete post at the link at the top.

Apocalypse - Maya - Armageddon - Rapture - End of Days -- New York Times Magazine

Link for this Post: Apocalypse - Maya - Armageddon - Rapture - End of Days - New York Times.

I'm not sure how to characterize this New York Times. It's theme is apocalyptic predictions in general and ones around 2012 in particular. It features some characters I recognize including radio show host George Noory noted host of radio's “Coast to Coast AM” as well as  Daniel Pinchbeck.

It is a long piece and not entirely conclusive about the nature of apocalypse. I must admit I remain agnostic over the issue.

Prometeus - The Media Revolution on YouTube

Link for this post: YouTube Inbed: Prometheus - The Media Revolution This video is a bit like Epic 215 about Googlezon but takes things a bit further and introduces "the prosumer." That's you hopefully.

Spinning a New Island Web

Link for this Post: The New Island Web: A Work in Progress

As regular readers know, I'm a writer by trade rather than a web design or coder. However since I have had several sites that have been on the web since its early days., I have slowly learned to become semi-self relent in developing my websites. This includes a bit of design and even installation as well as attempts at customization of server-side software.