Bruce Eisner's Vision Thing

Wisdom 2.0 Summit Mt. View, CA April 30 - May1st -- Where the Wise Guys (and Gals) of Silcon Valley Gather

Link for this Post: Wisdom 2.0 Summit, Mt. View, CA

We knew that search engine advertising and Social Software sales could make you rich. But until now, we did not know that those revenues could equal wisdom.

After all the name Google is pretty close to God in the English Lexicon and you can play the Zen Enlightenment game on Facebook  . . . but I thought that was a scam. Until I got an email from Mallika Chopra telling me about Wisdom 2.0 to be held in Mountain View California at the Computer History Museum April 30 to May 1st.

Who is Maillika Chopra? Deepak Chopra’s daughter it turns out. We know what an enlightened guy he is, after all he is on the Larry King Show at least once a month. She is also a friend of the late Michael Jackson, someone who was practically synonymous with wisdom.

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.

Google Fast Flip Shows You the News

a Link for this Post: Google Fast Flip at Google Labs

As most of my readers know, Google plans to run the world by 2012. On their way to that goal, they have created Fast Flip, a visual front end  for news sources. As I write this, Fast Flip lives in Google Labs only

According to their Steve's Rubel's Lifestream in his post Google Fast Flip Nearing Launch , Fast Flip will be integrated with the popular  Google News feature. 

Heere is how my current Google Fast Flip page for my personal recommendations looks.

Timothy Leary Documentary on BBC (2000) -- Timothy Leary Video Archive

Links for this Post: Timothy Leary Video Archive and the video embedded above.

I discovered an collection of Timothy Leary themed videos available for online viewing or no cost download as part of the Internet Archive. I have seen a good chunk of them before but most are new. You have to dig a bit to get the entire list of videos which you can view here.

Embedded at the top of the post is the first one I watch, a BBC Documentary made about Leary in 2000. The video does not begin in a flattering fashion but is one of the best produced in the collection. If anyone sees another video that they think is worthy posting about, please add your comment on this post.

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.

More Beatles Covers -- rundangerously: cheap trick, "sgt. pepper live" album review

Links for this Post

 rundangerously: cheap trick, "sgt. pepper live" album review

Sgt. Pepper Live on Amazon

As I was saying in my last post, 9/9/09 set off some powerful Beatle vibes. Another exaple of the their enduring effect on art and music is a new release and live performance (here in Vegas) of Sg. Pepper's bt Seventies rockers Cheap Trick.

Here is a snip from a review on a blog called "rundangerously"

 ... cheap trick performed the entire album 2007 (at the los angeles bowl), on the 40th anniversary of the beatles' release of "sgt. pepper's lonely hearts club band," in 1967.in an extraordinary coup (or, maybe, a neat trick - ha), cheap trick enlisted Geoff Emerick, the producer and engineer (together w/george martin) of the beatles' release, to supervise the sound for "sgt. pepper live." the cheap trick release includes the backing of the new york philharmonic orchestra, the indian sitar band, and various guest artists on select tracks (notable is joan osborne on "lovely rita")

The Beatles Number Nine Again

Links for this Post

Can The Beatles: Rock Band Save the Music Business? by Richard Corliss at Time Magazine

September 9, 2009, could be a Beatles perfect storm by Daniel Terdiman on CNet

Report: Apple music event September 9 by Erica Ogg on CNet

Rock Band: The Beatles Trailer Video

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.

Wandering Mindless -- an Experimental, Visionary and Psychedelic Video by Larry Carlson

Link for this Post: embedded above WANDERING MINDLESS by Larry Carlson on Vimeo.

Back when I started this blog, I posted about Larry Carlson's Flash animation, Medijate.

More recently, Calson has been putting a lot of experimental, visionary and psychedelic high definition videos on the web.

The one featured above also deserves another adjective -- trippy!

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.

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

He Has Ridden -- Celebrating Bicycle Day 66

Links for this Post: Editorial: He Has Ridden by Bruce Eisner first published in published Island Views in the Winter of 1993.

Today is the 66th Bicycle Day, April 19, 2009 so I thought it would be appropriate to excerpt from article I wrote 16 years ago about this annual event celebrated by "psychelicists."

Sadly, the Island Group which I write about in the article is no more but otherwise the piece is contemporary:

We’re excited at Island Group because Bicycle Day is almost here. “Bicycle Day....what’s that?” you might be asking. Well on April 16, 1943, it will be fifty years ago that LSD was discovered. And three days after his amazing, chance discovery, on a spring day in 1943, Albert Hofmann took the first planned LSD session and soon found himself frozen in time on a bicycle ride from the Sandoz building in Basel, Switzerland to his home in the suburb called Rittimatte.

Video: Storm NLP with Brainwave Entrainment on YouTube (Plus How To)

Links for this Post and embedded YouTube Video

Storm NLP Plus Brain Wave Entrainment, How To Information on the Healing MindN Power Circle Blog

Mind Stereo Mind Media Player for Windows Version 1.0

I resonate with the YouTube video by Healing MindN (no pun intended) because of my personal background in psychology. I spent a year taking advanced classes in Ericksonian Hypnosis which Neurolinguist Programming (NLP) attempts to emulate. I also spent some time working with Timothy Leary at several workshops he presented in conjunction with NLP expert Robert Dilts.

I'm "XRanked" on Live.Com Search -- Link broken

Broken Link: X-Rank is based on a search algorithm of change in the volume of searches for various persons, ideas, places and things of interest to the public. I'm listed among 567 most-searched for bloggers on Live Search (and we all know how good Live Search is).

Actually I'm happy to have made the cut. Its probably only natural that I would be "XRanked" since I wrote the first book on "X" which is what we used to call Ecstasy when it was legal (way back when).

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.

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.

What Type Is My Blog? Find Out With Typealyzer!

Links for this Post:

Typealyzer Blog Personality Analysis

'What Am I Like?' personality test

Are you a regular Vision Thing reader and have been wondering about what I am really like? With Typealyzer you can find out almost instantly.

Typealyzer is an online application that can analyzer any weblog based on its content and assign a personality type to the blog. The personality type is based on the sixteen type model of Carl Jung which was popularized by several personality tests including the Myers-Briggs.

As you can see by the image at the top of this post, it turns out that Vision Thing is an INTP blog. Since the blog has only one author (that I know of), the personality of the blog probably reflects to a large extent the personality of the blogger who does the blog) 

The analysis is fairly accurate as I usually test out on Myers-Briggs as INTP.  It is interesting to speculate whether a blog done by several people would be classified as multiple personality disorder.

So if you want to find out your personality type, you have several choices. Among them is doing a blog (which is a lot of work) and then using the Typealyzer to find out.. Or you could take the BBC "What Am I Like Test" (link at the top of the post) which is a lot easier.

Note: Myers-Briggs Personality Type diagram by way of this site.

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.

We Can Be Together': American Countercultural Music, Film and the trappings of the mainstream

Link for this Post:We Can Be Together': American Countercultural Music, Film and the trappings of the mainstream Mike Leader on the Wild Tyme Blog

Here is an excerpt from Mike Leader's insighful essay:

The counterculture of the 1960s featured important innovations in the form and message of art. However, the means for production, promotion and wide distribution of such modes as music and film were in the hands of the major record labels or film production studios. This resulted in an intriguing, often conflicted, relationship between the necessarily provocative and inventive aspects of countercultural expression, and the ‘trappings’ of popular culture. Countercultural expression was often on a localised, individual, or minority scale, usually defined against the mainstream or dominant society; it was feared that actively courting with the mainstream, in the form of the music or film business, would result in compromising the message or expression itself. In the realm of music, the shift from performing as the primary avenue of dissemination, to record sales and marketing, presents a potential conflict in terms of the artist’s integrity as the ‘art’ shifts to ‘product’.

There was a similarly difficult situation in the film industry, where the dominance of the major film studios was seen to stifle the creativity of the medium. However, in the late 1960s, a series of films directed by younger directors, starring younger stars and about relevant issues, brought about a renaissance in Hollywood, and the old generation of studio bosses gave wave to a new group of producers more happy to grant freedom of expression to countercultural and visionary newcomers. This essay will primarily focus on the musical career of Bob Dylan, but, by way of comparison or contrast, further references will be drawn from both music and film.

Indeed, this complicated relationship between the popular and the countercultural is especially seen in Bob Dylan’s career. In fact, it can be argued that his shrewd and profitable courting with the mainstream has been subsumed by cult and myth. As one of the most influential artists in Western music of the 20th century, Dylan’s reputation in terms of furthering the form is secure; however, his public image is almost by nature conflicted. Wilfred Mellers displays this multi-layered image, introducing his study of Dylan by describing him as ‘a singing poet-composer, he is a quasi-folk musician, an artist and a commercial operator’ (1984, p.13). Dylan’s particular flashpoints of mythology and controversy have all involved the clash of the precious and the popular; the most prominent of these is his progression from acoustic, socially-minded folk music, to electrified rock with increasingly abstract, personal lyrics. The period between March 1965 and July 1966, during which time Dylan released the albums Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, and had landmark performances at the Newport Folk Festival and on tour in Europe, was one of the more controversial career moves in 20th century music. The hostilities that greeted the incorporation of electric guitars and rock-inspired arrangements were motivated by the apprehension that Dylan had abandoned ‘serious’ music, in favour of fame and fortune.

Continue reading and exploring this blog using the link at the top of this post.

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.

Create Instant Mindmaps From Wikipedia with WikiMindMap

Links for this Post:

Bruce Eisner Wikipedia WikiMindMap

WikiMindMap home page (make your own WikiMindMaps)

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"

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

Yes We Can Barack Obama Music Video on YouTube

Link for the Post: YouTube Video embedded below

My friend Will Penna sent me this Youtube Video by email.. I was surprised to get it from him since he was for Hillary last week.  He says with the email:

I have heard a lot of people say that Barack Obama is "Inspriation" vs Hillary's "Information." Well, guess what, Barack's "Inspiration" is also the "Information" a great many Americans cannot face, do not want to face, or are unwilling to face. It is time for real and serious "Change!"

Yes We Can - a vote for Barack Obama is truly taking back the country from a corporate monarchy to a true democracy. Yes We Can!

Psychedelic Healing in by David Jay Brown in Scientific American

Link for this Post: Click and download this PDF file Psychedelic healing?- Scientific American Mind

This Scientific American Mind Edition article on new scientific research on psychedelic compounds by my old

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!

Got Wis.dm? New Online Community Has All the Answers

Link for this Post: Visit Wis.dm through this link!

Wis.dm  is the latest online community  -- an interesting mashup of  Yahoo! Answers, MySpace and Digg.

Community members become resident experts to answer the steady onslaught of questions from new members/seekers. The community thus resembles ancient Greece with wise philosophers roaming the marketplace surrounded by their students.

 

Build A Hacked Macintosh Running Leopard from Off-The-Shelf Parts for Under $800

Link this Post: Hack Attack: Build a Hackintosh Mac for Under $800.

File this in the 'it finally had to happen" category but someone managed to build a "Macintosh" or ""Hackintosh"" as Adam Pash is a senior editor for Lifehacker describes his cloned Mac creation.

First we had the Fake Steve Jobs and now we have the Fake Mac. The real Steve Jobs is likely unhappy about this.

The spread of OS X Leopard to Intel Clone PCs was inevitable. Why? Because the components of each are interchangeable. Apple had to add extra security code to OS X so that it is tied to an extra piece of hardware in Apple-built Macs. That extra added little piece has no functionality except to prevent anyone from installing the mighty Leopard on their anesthetic white box PC.

Another motivating factor for the hackers is that Macintosh's cost more for the same features found on a non-Mac PC, 

The bottom line on all of this is that Jobs could probably capture a lion's share (no pun intended) of the entire PC operating system market if he would release the non-crippled version of Leopard at $99 per user.

In the meantime, visit Lifehacker through the link at the top of this post to get instruction on how to roll your own Mac.

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

Are Psychedelics Google’s Biggest Trade Secret?

Link for this Post: Reality Sandwich  Google and the Myceliation of Consciousness.

I'm not sure if this article is irrefutable proof of the idea that psychedelics are Google’s biggest trade secret but the author RoseRose has a gift for blarney second only to her hero Terrence McKenna. Here is a lengthy but only partial snip from this Reality Sandwich serving.

LSD Inventor Albert Hofmann Named No. 1 Among Top 100 living geniuses - Telegraph

Link:s for this Post

Top 100 living geniuses - Telegraph.

British brains dominate list of living geniuses By Aislinn Simpson Telegraph

I was pleased to see that my dear old friend Albert Hofmann, who turned 100 last year has been named the Number 1 Living Genius on the planet. He was the choice of 6 experts in

Here is an excerpt from the story that goes with the list:

Britain has more living geniuses per head of population than anywhere else in the world, according to a new survey which reveals the country's influence on science, technology, business and the arts.

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.

Getting Dug and Stumbled Upon

Links for this Post

Stumbled Upon Why We Get High

Why We Get High by Bruce Eisner on Bruce Eisner's Writings blog

We We Get High on Digg

Most of you know Digg and Stumbled Upon -- two social network communities that  share content with other members. Posts on Bruce Eisner's Vision Thing have been stumbled upon or dugg a number of time.  But a bit more than month ago, August 12th to be exact, I had an usual experience with Stumbled Upon and Digg. Usually if a post of mine is stumbled upon, the traffic goes up a few hundred visitors a day.

But on August 22, a reprint of an article originally published in the Island Views newsletter (circulation 2000) way back in 1994 got both Stumbled Upon and Durgg. The article has been there since 2004 and was written ten years ago.  Bruce Eisner's Writings is an occasionally updated archive for post writings and usually only gets about 100 page views a day. On August 22,  it the stats showed that there had been 5947 unique visitors.