joymonk's shared items in Google Reader

SOA 2010 to be held at Brewery Arts Colony

philip — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 17:57:18 PDT

We are pleased to announce that we have secured the Brewery Arts Colony as a location for the 2010 State of the Arts event.

The Brewery Art Community is considered to be the world’s largest live/work art colony, accommodating well over 1200 artists and art-related businesses. Housed in a complex of 22 buildings on 23 acres, The Brewery is the site of structures dating back to 1888. They include the former Eastside Brewery (later, Pabst Blue Ribbon) and The Edison Power Plant (Los Angeles Power Station #3). Part of heart of Downtown Los Angeles, The Brewery’s artists share a rich history with their neighbors Olvera Street, Chinatown and Little Tokyo.

Artists at The Brewery express a full range of diversity in careers, media and cultures. Many are internationally recognized, award-winners and scholars, others are just starting their careers, while some are in the educational process. Media comprise the traditional – to the modern – to the avant-garde.

More information about the Brewery can be found at http://www.the-brewery.net/

We are excited about this location as it highlights one of the cultural icons of Los Angeles in the midst of the city-wide LA Opera Ring cultural festival, and in its international outreach, a beacon for a global community of artists and media makers.

pomes2

stosh — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:39:17 PDT

*qi gong in the park*
(for roberto sharpe)

the master wishes to be called
mister,
& does not refer to himself as
sifu

…you know he is a teacher,
because when he speaks;
you learn

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

*bled to this conclusion*

humanity, like matter; can be
neither created nor destroyed

…willful actions & non-actions by humans,
those that are evil, & those which are merely
less-than-good, are also indicative of humanity
-why, yes; very much so

…it is possible, probable,
& perhaps also likely, that those
who seem to have lost their
humanity at some point, never
actually had all that much in the
1^st place

How To Train Yourself To Be In The Mood You Want

Dave Navarro — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:26:57 PST

When you have major changes going on in your life, or you’re just frustrated about where you are, it’s easy to get trapped in a cycle of depression, bad moods and frustration. I know, I’ve been there … and when I’m not careful, I still get there more than I want to.

But lately I’ve had a particularly hard time, as I make some major (positive) changes in my life. I hit these moments where I’m in a foul mood, or I’m just feeling paralyzed, and I’m just stuck. Sometimes I just stew in that and stay there, but sometimes I actually get intelligent and pull my way out of it.

I’m going to outline the framework that I’ve been using over the last 30 days to really get myself resourceful and motivated (and in a better mood) when I’m feeling stuck. Hopefully it will help you, too, and if you do I truly hope you’ll share it with others.

First Up: Using A Framework to Escape From Paralyzing Emotions

When we feel bad, it’s hard to “feel good” again. You can’t just wish yourself better, and when you’re in a stuck place, you don’t generally have the mental energy to pull out. Willpower doesn’t help, and “positive thinking” sure as hell doesn’t help. But falling back on a framework of steps does help, because we humans function well when we have a set of steps to follow.

The reason for this is that steps take the emotion out of our situation and give us direction to simply act. Duck and Cover. Stop, Drop, and Roll. When you know with certainty what to do next, you’re in a much stronger position to take action, even when you’re panicking. (And it doesn’t have to be words, either – just think of Lamaze breathing, which expectant mothers practice well ahead of time so they can slip back into it during the stress of labor.)

You can call these verbal step-by-step tools anchors if you want, because they’re ways to anchor your emotional state to a time where you knew what to do and you felt prepared. So I’m going to lay out a framework that you can use as your own anchor when you need to reset your mood, and while it’s seven steps long, it’s hella effective at getting the job done.

The seven steps form the acronym ACT FAST, and I picked that because I felt that it was a pretty empowering term as it forces you to presuppose you have a workable course of action. So let’s dive in.

A: AGREE With Yourself That You Don’t Want To Be In This Mood Right Now.

This seems hokey, but it’s important for this reason: Once you agree with yourself that this is not the right mood for you, you’re revoking permission to stew in your own juices and keep the “pity party” going. Think about it: When we’re mad, the thing we hate the most is when someone tries to cheer us up, because on some level we want to be mad and stay mad, or be depressed and stay depressed.

And that’s not always a bad thing. Maybe we want to stay sad because on some level we know we need to hang out in this mental state and really look at what’s making us sad, to really connect with it and deal with it instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. Maybe we want to stay mad because we’re not finished processing our emotions and figuring out what our situation means and what we’re going to do about it.

So don’t take this as me saying “man up and stop crying.” What I am saying is that at some point if you want to move forward in a functional way, and not feel paralyzed, you need to agree that this stage of emotion has to be finite, it has to come to an end so you can deal with the solution that the emotion demands of you. When you’re ready to deal with it, you agree with yourself that you’re ready to shift gears.

Let’s say you’ve lost your job and you’re freaking out about what to do. You could tell yourself something like, “Okay, I’m ready to stop being scared of this situation now.” Then you move on to the second step.

C: CLARIFY The Mood or Emotion You Want To Move Towards

Now that you’re ready to change, you need to make sure that you know where you’re headed so you have something you can focus on. It’s not enough to say “I just don’t want to feel this way anymore,” because then you’re still swimming in the Sea of What You Don’t Want. You need to have a focus.

It could be as simple as defining the mood you want to be in with a single word or two. Resourceful. Confident. Infectiously Happy. Stable. Calm. Controlled. Helpful. Pleasant. Civil. Generous. Whatever it is, you need to give it a name.

Then you combine it with the last thought, so you can tell yourself something like “I’m ready to stop feeling scared and start feeling resourceful.”

There’s nothing magical about these words, and again, it’s not positive thinking. This is all about creating something you can say to yourself to pull the emotion out of your mental state and focus on what you can do next and what you can influence.

When you start getting scattered and lose track of where you are, and you’re stressing, you can fall back on your statement: “I’m ready to stop feeling scared and start feeling resourceful.” You’re putting yourself back in control and you’re ready for the next step.

T: TAKE Responsibility For Taking Immediate Action.

Now that you know what you want to move away from and what you want to move towards, it’s time to face reality: It ain’t gonna happen unless you make it happen. You’re going to have to consciously accept responsibility for getting yourself in a better state.

This is a big deal, because it means that you‘re going to have to revoke permission to blame other people so you can do this. Note that I’m not saying that you’re absolving other people of blame – if someone just screwed you over, then they’re still at fault, and you don’t pretend that didn’t happen.

But focusing on that isn’t going to help you get to your desired emotional state. You have to take full responsibility for what thoughts you’re going to focus on and what attitudes you’re going to reinforce, because no one is going to do it. No one is coming to your rescue.

You want out of this emotion? You’re going to have to do it yourself. the good news is you totally can do it yourself, and we’re going to cover that in the next four steps so you can get there.

So now our statement to ourselves gets a little longer – it’s something like, “I’m ready to stop feeling scared and start feeling resourceful, and I’m going to make that happen right now.”

We’re going to move into four questions right now, and you’ll need to memorize them so you can get yourself back on track instantly when you’re backsliding into the emotional state you don’t want to be in.

F: “What Would I Need To FOCUS On To Feel this Way?”

This question is a really empowering one, because it forces you to stop thinking about the things that are draining you and gets you to acknowledge that there are things you can focus on that will give you more mental and emotional energy.

When you ask yourself this question, you’re putting yourself on the spot – you’re saying, “Hey, if I wanted to feel resourceful (for this job loss example), what would I need to focus on?” You’re presupposing the answer is available to you rather than saying “How do I get out of this funk?”, which is an open ended question that invites an “I dunno …” response.

Think about it. If you were feeling resourceful in this job loss situation – imagine that you were for a second – what would you be focusing on in order to feel resourceful? Would you be thinking of all your contacts and references, about renewing old work relationships? Would you be taking stock of all the online job boards, or maybe sites like LinkedIn? Or would you be revisiting your skills and experience and seeing if another career would be more fun?

Ask yourself this question, and write down the answers. You’ll need that written note to look back on when the painful emotion you’re moving away from resurfaces. Have a written library of answers to this question and you can benefit from it when you’re feeling emotionally unable to conjure up answers later.

Sometimes the answer can be external as well. The first part of my career was spent in software testing, and that’s some boring stuff. It’s frustrating to test the same thing 100 times and not feel totally unmotivated. But I’d focus on something external – like the road trip I was going to take with this week’s pay – and that would keep me going.

In one case I was testing training Army courseware for avoiding/disarming landmines, and after the 1,000th retest I was so bored out of my skull I wanted to scream. But I told myself that if I focused on testing it until it was 100% ready, then it would save people’s lives in the field. Someone’s Dad would be coming home because they didn’t trip a landmine or trigger a roadside bomb. That didn’t make the job less boring, but it gave me a sense of purpose and a better emotional state.

So think: What would you have to focus on to move towards the mood you want? There’s always an answer. Find it and write it down.

A: “What Would I Need To ACT On To Feel The Way I Want To?”

Now that you’ve established what you need to focus on, you need to address what kinds of actions you need to take to build up that feeling. If you’re depressed and you want to feel happier, maybe you ask yourself, “How can I help 3 people today?” and you do something simple like send an encouraging email, or meet them for lunch, or just send $25 to a charity of your choice in someone else’s name.

Action is important because it’s extremely difficult to feel your way into a different way of behaving. You know this, or you wouldn’t be stuck in the first place. When you’re feeling scared or mad or depressed, you can’t just manufacture emotion to get yourself going.

But if you do something – if you take action – you can behave yourself into a different way of feeling. And it doesn’t have to be directly related to your own issue if that’s causing you friction. If you hate your life situation and you can’t figure out how to make it better, then focus on helping 5 other people feel better. Be an encourager, and that will help you pull out of that sense of depression. Trust me, it works, because it breaks your pattern of feeling helpless and connects you with other people.

But that’s just the start – it’s all well and good to take external actions to get your emotions jump-started, but you also need to get a sense of the actions you need to take relative to your own problems. In the FOCUS step you will probably come up with things you need to not only focus on, but actually do, and you need to make a list of those actions and start running with them.

Sometimes that’s hard to do – the motivation wanes – and that’s when you fall back on the FOCUS step again. It will help you get in a better frame of mind to take action.

Moving on, you’ll also need to ask yourself,

S: “What Would I Need To SURROUND Myself With To Feel The Way I Want To?”

This is an overlooked concept when it comes to mood change. Your surrounding environment plays a huge factor in your mood, and if you don’t consciously take control over it, you’re leaving power “on the table.” When you arrange your environment in ways that empower you, the chances of you keeping the mood you want to be in go through the roof.

Right now I’m writing this while listening to epic soundtrack music – I personally find that isolating my ears via headphones and keeping high-adventure music going keeps me focused and motivated. It’s hard to feel complacent when listening to instrumental tracks like “A Storm Is Coming” and “Rise of the Destroyers” are drowning your ears in epic symphonic goodness.

I know that this kind of music helps me kick ass, but you’ll have your own environmental triggers. Maybe it’s classical music or R&B, or maybe it’s just the silence of an empty room (or noise-cancelling headphones). Maybe it’s a clean desk, or maybe it’s a desk littered with action figures and crazy stuff. Maybe it’s wearing your favorite hat, brewing a certain kind of coffee or lighting some incense.

It doesn’t matter what it is - it just matters that you become aware of it, and you leverage it to help create the emotional state you want. Whether it’s keeping the counters clean, making the bed, soaking in hot bath or cranking up Aerosmith, get a feel for what makes it easier to be in the moods you want to be in. Then make it easy to build that environment when you need it.

T: “What Would I Need To TELL Myself To Feel The Way I Want To?”

This is where it all comes together – the part where the rubber hits the road and you have to fight against the emotions you want to move away from. This is where the previous steps all kind of combine and you create this little script you can say to yourself, a litany of conscious choice, as it were, to recalibrate yourself when you’re struggling.

Maybe it’s something like this for the freaking-out-about-the-job-loss example:

“I’m ready to stop feeling scared and start feeling resourceful, and I’m going to make that happen right now. I’m going to focus on the resources I have, like the 50 past co-workers who can get me leads, the job boards online and the in-demand skills I can show on my resume. I have everything I need to make this crazy time less crazy and I know what to do next.

I’m going to make a plan for getting (or creating) the job I want and set aside 3 hours a day to take serious action. I’m going to neaten up my home office so I can think straight, and make it a relaxing place to work in the meantime.”

If you read this over and over again, what do you think would happen? Would you keep freaking out about your job? Or would you start feeling a little bit better?

Yeah, This Takes Some Work, But What The Hell Else Are You Doing?

Most people, if they’ve read this far, will say, “That’s too much work, Dave.” But seriously, if you’re paralyzed and feeling terrible, you have time on your hands already. You’re just using that time to stew in the emotion instead of making it finite and taking action. I know how it feels, I fight it all the time.

But this is a way out – or at least the beginning of the way out for you. And it’s easier than you think, because once you understand this process, 9 times out of 10 you won’t have to use all of it. You’ll just be sitting there stewing and say to yourself, “What would I have to focus on right now if I wanted to get my ass up and exercising?” or “What would I need to change about my surroundings right now to feel a little bit happier?” and that will be enough to get moving.

The quality of your life revolves around the quality of the questions you ask yourself on a minute-by-minute basis.

If you ask yourself, “Why me?” or “What can I possibly do?” you‘re going to be paralyzed.

If you ask yourself “What can I do next, from where I am, with what I have,” you’re going to put yourself in a position of strength.

Ask better questions. Train yourself to be the sculptor of your moods, rather than being tossed about by urgency and externalities you can’t control.

You can do it. I hope this helps.

My best to you,

Dave

PS – I think this article can help a ton of people. Please link to it and spread it on social media sites right now if you agree, even before you leave a comment.

5 Fundamentals to Building a Business You Can be Proud of

noreply@blogger.com (hellomynameisscott) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:07:00 PST

1. Hissing is the echo of awesomeness. Accept the fact that approximately ten percent of the people you encounter in life will not like you. Get over it. Screw the ten and stick with the ninety. Pick a side, put a stake in the ground and polarize people purposely.

And remember that if everyone loves you, you’re doing something wrong. Besides, you’re nobody until somebody hates you. At least that’s what my parole officer tells me. How much hatemail have you received this week?

2. Inertia is the slaughterhouse of success. Jon Kabat-Zin’s book Wherever You Go, There You Are, explains this beautifully:

“If you can make some time early in the day for BEING, with no agenda, it can change the quality in the rest of your day. By affirming first what is primary in your own being, you get a mindful jump on the whole day and wind up more capable of sensing, appreciating and responding to the bloom of each moment.”

Beware of inertia. How can you arrange your day so you become unstoppable?

3. Inexperience is the machete of fear. Why are children more creative than adults? Because their sense of curiosity and innocence hasn’t (yet) been suffocated by wet blanket of adulthood. Lesson learned: Innocence and ignorance overcome fear and lead to curiosity, creativity and knowledge. Your challenge is to temporary suspend your adult habit of self-criticism and do it anyway.

The first step is to write the following five words on a sticky note: “Yeah, but I can’t just…” Remember: As Jeff Bridges said in the movie Tron, “You keep doing what it looks like you’re supposed to be doing – not matter how crazy it sounds.” Are you willing to look stupid on the road to immortality?

4. Mistake is the mentor of man. First of all, they’re not mistakes – they’re lessons. Catalysts. So, practice attending to your errors with a mindset of personal growth, life-long learning and never-ending improvement. By approaching failure with this attitude, disappointment will slowly dissipate.

Secondly, listen to the way you speak to yourself when you make mistakes. Instead of berating yourself, try asking questions like: Is this a new mistake or repeat mistake? Why did the universe want me to make this mistake? How many different ways can I embrace, incorporate and ingeniously leverage this mistake in my life? And what would I have to learn about this mistake to make it no longer a mistake?

Remember: Failure IS an option – not learning from that failure isn’t. How are you exponentially growing from your screw-ups?

5. Suffering is the sandpaper of life. “If you could do it all over again, what would you do differently?” I get that question a lot – especially during media interviews and after speeches. And my answer is always the same: Nothing. I would do everything exactly the same way.

Here’s why: I am eternally and unregretfully grateful for everything that’s ever happened to me – good AND bad. Especially the bad. After all: From great suffering comes from great awakening. And the person I’ve become is the summation of all that stuff. It made me who I am. And I love who I am.

Think about it: Consider the three most powerful lessons you’ve ever learned in your life. EVER. Odds are, at least two of the three stemmed from some form of pain, didn’t they? And that’s a beautiful thing. That’s how we learn and grow. So, your mission is to put all the bad stuff to good use. To use suffering – even if it’s minor – as sandpaper. To smooth out the edges of your life like a pinewood derby car, cruising to the finish. What made you into you?

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
Are you building a business you can be proud of?

LET ME SUGGEST THIS…
For the list called, “40 Questions Every Unemployed Professional Needs to Ask," send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *
Scott Ginsberg
That Guy with the Nametag
Author, Speaker, Coach, Entrepreneur
scott@hellomynameisscott.com

Never the same speech twice.
Always about approachability.

Watch The Nametag Guy in action here!

Timothy Leary’s Dead (but he’d have turned 89 today if he was still with us)

(author unknown) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:45:06 PDT

Timothy Francis Leary was born on this day in 1920. Leary lived one of the most out-sized lives in all of human history and his story is the story of the latter half of the twentieth century. He was a brilliant psychologist, philosopher, author and of course, the man who turned on the world with LSD. Was Leary a great man? He was too complicated to be called a great man, but he was a great revolutionary. Nixon called him the “most dangerous man in America” and Leary most certainly lived up to that description. It’s been said of historical figures, especially controversial ones, that it takes 100 years after their deaths before history can properly judge them. If you divorce Leary the man (a charming Irish con man, basically) from the vast cultural changes he and other hippie leaders ushered in and all of the doors they broke down for future generations to live freer, more fulfilled lives, you’ll get a better perspective on how important of a character he was. He is a pivotal figure of the greatest era of social change in history, a spiritual revolutionary in the most profound sense. Bonus clips: Timothy Leary meets Cheech and Chong and Pee-wee Herman! Timothy Leary in Folsom Prison

Three Great Books on Mystic Freemasonry

(author unknown) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 12:30:09 PDT

Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol is catalyzing a massive surge of interest in Freemasonry (even bigger than when, um, National Treasure came out). I admit to reading some of the book, it’s actually pretty fun. Full of occult Masonry, “Noetic science,” magic and all kinds of other crowd-pleasing topics. Since the general opinion of the “mystic” side of Freemasonry (i.e., what are those old guys up to, really??) generally comes from the pen of either Dan Brown or David Icke, it might be useful to have a few guidebooks to what weird stuff “actually” goes on in the Craft. Try these three books, all of which are even more bizarre roller-coaster thrill rides than any fictional book on the subject: The Meaning of Masonry by W. L. Wilmshurst. This is the all-around classic on the subject. Describes the process of the individual’s inner change as progressing through the Craft. Like all three of these books, it outlines Masonry as a science of progressive dignification of the soul, with a Gnostic element thrown in: that we are fallen gods recovering our internal divinity through the survival of ancient Mystery School rites. The Lost Keys of Freemasonry by Manly P. Hall. The revered author of The Secret Teachings of All Ages, an honorary 33º Mason, tackles the subject from a fully cosmic angle, and gives what is likely the most fully initiated perspective on the subject I have seen, even though he was never a fully active member. Hall’s take on the subject will be the most clear to students of other Hermetic traditions (Thelema, for instance). Hidden Life in Freemasonry by C. W. Leadbeater. This is the most technically precise book on the esoteric inner workings, delving into chakras, spirits, ranks and orders of angels, Cosmic Rays and all kinds of other great Magic: The Gathering style mayhem. Leadbeater was one of the primary Theosophists and also one of the conspirators behind the whole Krishnamurti affair; along with Annie Besant he was an honorary 33º. Dodgy territory on this one (I wouldn’t trust these people over Hall, for instance) but the technical information is pretty out there. Happy reading!

Witches on drugs

David Pescovitz — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:14:26 PDT

Paul Devereux's book "The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia" presents the fascinating story of psychedelic use before the Hoffman/Leary era that we're all familiar with. Devereux travels way back, exploring shamanism, 'shrooms in rock art, the oracle at Delphi, the pre-Incan construction of the Chavín de Huántar temple, etc. In honor of Halloween, the Daily Grail's Greg Taylor, who republished The Long Trip last year, presents an excerpt from the book about possible links between medieval witches and hallucinogenic substances. Special bonus broomstick trivia is after the jump. From The Long Trip:

A Belgian witch called Claire Goessen confessed in 1603 that she had flown to sabbats several times on a staff smeared with an unguent. In northern France in 1460, five women confessed to receiving a salve from the Devil himself, which they rubbed on their hands and on a small wooden rod they placed between their legs and flew upon "above good towns and woods and waters." Swedish witches in 1669 rode "over churches and high walls" on a beast given to them by the Devil who also issued them with a horn containing a salve with which they anointed themselves. Members of Somerset covens admitted to smearing their foreheads and wrists with a greenish ointment "which smells raw" before their meetings...

...Folklorist Will-Erich Peuckert of Göttingen, for example, mixed an ointment made up of belladonna, henbane and Datura from a seventeenth-century formula and rubbed it on his forehead and armpits, bidding his colleagues to do likewise. They all fell into a twenty-four sleep. "We had wild dreams. Faces danced before my eyes which were at first terrible. Then I suddenly had the sensation of flying for miles through the air. The flight was repeatedly interrupted by great falls. Finally, in the last phase, an image of an orgiastic feast with grotesque sensual excess," Peuckert reported. Harner emphasises the importance of the greased broomstick or similar flying implement, which he suggests served as "an applicator for the atropine-containing plant to the sensitive vaginal membranes as well as providing the suggestion of riding on a steed, a typical illusion of the witches' ride to the Sabbat."

"A characteristic feature of solanaceae psychosis is furthermore that the intoxicated person imagines himself to have been changed into some animal, and the hallucinosis is completed by the sensation of the growing of feathers and hair," Erich Hesse claimed in 1946. In 1658, Giovanni Battista Porta informed that a potion made from henbane, mandrake, thorn apple and belladonna would make a person "believe he was changed into a Bird or Beast." He might "believe himself turned into a Goose, and would eat Grass, and beat the Ground with his Teeth, like a Goose: now and then sing, and endeavor to clap his Wings." Animal transformation is a primary aspect of the hallucinogenic experience, whether it is an American Indian shaman in the Amazon turning into a jaguar, or a Western subject in a psychological experiment.

Witches' Brews (Daily Grail)

The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia (Amazon)

Freemasonry, Dan Brown, and the New New Age

Arthur Goldwag — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 05:59:07 PST

Freemasonry and the New Age Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

On September 15, 2009, THE LOST SYMBOL came off press. Fans of THE DA VINCI CODE, with more than 80 million copies in print perhaps the bestselling novel of all time, were thrilled--they had been waiting for Dan Brown to write another book for six years. Random House, B&N, and Amazon were delighted; they moved more than a million copies in twenty four hours and another million copies by the end of the week; two months later, it still sits high atop the bestseller lists.

The Masons breathed a sigh of relief, because, even if Brown had sensationalized their secret rites and made them look a little silly (drinking wine out of skulls and all that--which come to think of it, is a lot less demeaning than donning fezzes and driving miniature cars in parades, which members of the Masonic fraternity called the Ancient Arab Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, better known as the Shriners, do right out in public), he portrayed them as men of reason, and implied that their ranks are still as crowded with the powerful and the wealthy -- Cabinet secretaries, plutocrats, Senators, Museum directors -- as they were two centuries ago, when they could count Goethe, Mozart, George Washington, Lafayette and Paul Revere among their members.

I was guardedly hopeful myself. With all those Masonic symbols on its cover, I figured that CULTS, CONSPIRACIES AND SECRET SOCIETIES stood a small chance of being captured by THE LOST SYMBOL's commercial gravity, much as a tiny planetesimal can get pulled into a gas giant's orbit. But happiest of all was Lynne McTaggart, the real-life author of THE FIELD and THE INTENTION EXPERIMENT, whose books and research in the field of Noetic Science are specifically cited in THE LOST SYMBOL's pages.

No one has ever accused Dan Brown of being a literary stylist; he's too easy to parody. His narrators natter on like chatty tour guides, bludgeoning us with trivia and heavy-handed exposition. His hero Robert Langdon seems to suffer from a testosterone deficiency; his celibate bad guys, with their bulging muscles and self-mortified flesh, are creepily fetishized. But ANGELS AND DEMONS, THE DA VINCI CODE, and now THE LOST SYMBOL do more than merely lead their legions of readers on merry chases; they exhort them to reconsider their world view. Though the answers he provides may be trivial and sometimes historically inaccurate, the questions Brown asks us to consider are worth pondering. Does the church misrepresent Christianity? Is history filled with mysteries and intrigues that mainstream chronicles elide? Are science and religion converging?

Brown earnestly wants us to expand our view of human potential, to open ourselves up to a whole new paradigm--one that is more capacious and filled with possibilities than either secular scientism or the traditional Judeo-Christian world view. In a very broad sense, that was the Masons' philosophical program as well. Stripped of all its pageantry and mumbo jumbo, Freemasonry (which, despite its claims of ancient provenance, can't be dated back any further than the early 18th century) celebrates the rational, non-dogmatic, individualistic values of the Enlightenment. God-the-Architect is a Deist idea. The Masonic openness to Rosicrucian arcana, alchemy, and Kabbalah is an attribute of the same unfettered, non-judgmental curiosity that led to the scientific and technological breakthroughs of the early industrial era--and for that matter to the rise of the bourgeois merchant class and the overthrow of entrenched Aristocracy. Masons did play the outsized role in the French Revolution that their enemies accused them of; Adam Weishaupt's Bavarian Illuminati envisioned an age in which Kings and Catholicism would no longer hold sway. Augustin Barruel and John Robison's 1798 exposes of the Illuminati conspiracies sparked a transient panic in the United States that anticipated 1950s-style McCarthyism; a second wave of anti-Masonic paranoia swept the country in the late 1820s. It's ironic that the prospect of world revolution so frightened the post-colonial Americans, since they were revolutionaries themselves. Not only had they thrown off the shackles of king and church, they had thrived because they did so.

Benjamin Franklin -- a reluctant but eventually an ardent revolutionist -- is the very type of the American Freemason. Inventor, scientist, and entrepreneur, he was a mass of contradictions: a sententious moralizer and codifier of bourgeois virtues, he attended séances at the hedonistic Hellfire Club in England; homespun and self-educated, he was a familiar in the royal courts and academies of Europe. He was our Leonardo Da Vinci, except he couldn't paint or sculpt. And like most of our founding fathers, he had a healthy skepticism of democracy.

Just as we worry about what less advanced nations will do with nuclear technology today, the men of the Enlightenment worried about what the ignorant masses would do with the incredible powers -- philosophic, economic, political, technological and scientific -- that they were unlocking. Their fears were not misplaced... we are living with some of the consequences of their discoveries today. Much of our planet is poisoned; its climate is changing; we live under the shadow of weapons of mass destruction.

Esoteric Masonry acknowledges -- as do all the mystery religions and philosophies, going back to Egyptian Hermeticism and Pythagoreanism--that some things are best kept within a select circle. That doesn't mean the Masons were secret aristocrats or magi; only that they knew how dangerous it could be when complex ideas were trivialized, debased, and distorted by people who didn't understand them. Back in the eighteenth century, the boundaries between science and magic were still porous; chemists were still trying to turn lead into gold; physicians were practicing medicine without the benefit of germ theory; physicists were only just beginning to move away from Aristotle's world view towards one that we would now call Newtonian (Newton himself -- a devout, mystically-inclined Christian and a practicing alchemist -- lived into the 1720s).

The fact that the early Masons were as intrigued by ancient esoterica as they were doesn't mean that they were Gnostics or Zoroastrians or Rosicrucians, any more than their knowledge of Latin and Greek classics made them pagans. One legacy of the Enlightenment is our ability to unravel science and superstition, to draw distinctions between theology and natural science, and between ancient wisdom and ancient ignorance. Those boundaries are so clearly demarcated today that many people have come to believe that science and religion are mutually exclusive.

Dan Brown's THE LOST SYMBOL mixes them up again. In its telling, the Freemasons were the keepers of the embers that cutting edge Noetic scientists are fanning into flame--a philosophic technology that will bring us wonders like ESP and teleportation, and that one day might even conquer death. Noetic science takes some of the spookier discoveries of quantum physics--that particles can remain "entangled," even when they are separated by vast distances--and extends it to the "big, visible" world.

There really is an Institute of Noetic Sciences, in Petaluma, California (Obama's much-reviled ex-Green Jobs czar Van Jones is a member of its board; other famous names are Desmond Tutu, Dean Ornish, and Deepak Chopra). And as I noted, there really is a Lynne McTaggart. "All matter in the universe exists in a web of connection and constant influence," she writes, "Which often overrides many of the laws of the universe that we used to believe held ultimate sovereignty....The significance of these findings extends far beyond a validation of extrasensory power or parapsychology. They threaten to demolish the entire edifice of present-day science." McTaggart's Intention Experiment is a web-based project that recruits volunteers to beam thought energy at objects and people and measure the results. Click here for the protocols of some of the early experiments.

For all of her references to quantum physics and her nods to falsifiability and the scientific method, McTaggart mostly hearkens back to nineteenth century New Thought--Phineas Parkhurst Quimby's "mind cure" movement that inspired Christian Science, the Power of Positive Thinking, and the "Think and Grow Rich" philosophy of Napoleon Hill. In 1888, in a biographical sketch of his father that he published in the New England Magazine, Quimby's son George summarized the essential tenets of New Thought: "That 'mind' was spiritual matter and could be changed'; that we were made up of 'truth and error'; that 'disease was an error, or belief, and that the Truth was the cure.'"

Rhonda Byrne's bestselling THE SECRET is infused with New Thought and Noetic Science; one of its "stars" is James Arthur Ray, whose self-improvement empire is teetering on the brink in the wake of the sweat lodge disaster that took three lives in Sedona, Arizona last month.

The crown jewel of the experiments that the Noetic Scientist heroine of the THE LOST SYMBOL had secretly carried out was one in which she weighed a dying man immediately before and after his death, proving that his departed soul had physical mass. This same experiment was really carried out by a Dr. Duncan MacDougal in 1907 (he determined that it weighed 21 grams). MacDougal also killed a bunch of dogs and concluded, with equal scientific authority, that they didn't have souls. As it happens, I also believe that human beings have souls (dogs too), but I don't think they can be weighed and measured. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the soul is precisely that part of us that can't be dissected or quantified.

Like Brown and his Masons, I agree that we have much to learn from the ancients: from esoterica like Hermeticism, Gnosticism, and the Kabbalah, from canonical authors like Plato and Aristotle, and mainstreatm religious scriptures like THE BOOK OF THE DEAD, the Bible, and THE UPANISHADS. Shamans and herbalists know things that scientists are only now acknowledging; we are only just beginning to appreciate Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine. But I somehow doubt that the materialized spirituality of Noetic Science is the bridge to the future that Brown makes it out to be; one can be open-minded without embracing pseudoscience.

Historically, the Masons have stood for the spirit of free inquiry and, their heartily reciprocated detestation of Roman Catholicism aside, religious tolerance. It's nice for a change to see them portrayed as idealistic good guys instead of sinister oligarchs presiding over a malign New World Order. But the Masons aren't New Agers. For all of Dan Brown's earnest talk of a new paradigm, I feel like he's urging us -- and them -- to take a giant step backwards.

Greenest Place in the U.S.? It's Not Where You Think.

Yale Environment 360 — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:19:15 PDT

By David Owen

Green rankings in the U.S. don’t tell the full story about the places where the human footprint is lightest. If you really want the best environmental model, you need to look at the nation’s biggest — and greenest — metropolis: New York City.

In 2007, Forbes picked Vermont as the greenest state, a choice consistent with conventional thinking about low-impact living. Vermont has an abundance of trees, farms, backyard compost heaps, and environmentally aware citizens, and it has no crowded expressways or big, dirty cities. (The population of Vermont’s largest city, Burlington, is just under 40,000.) Vermont also ranks high in almost all the categories on which Forbes based its analysis, such as the proportion of buildings certified by the U. S. Green Building Council’s increasingly popular eco-rating system, which is called Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), and the implementation of public policies that encourage energy efficiency.

But Forbes’s ranking was unfortunate, because Vermont, in many important ways, sets a poor environmental example. Spreading people thinly across the countryside, Vermont-style, may make them look and feel green, but it actually increases the damage they do to the environment while also making that damage harder to see and to address. In the categories that matter the most, Vermont ranks low in comparison with many other American places. It has no truly significant public transit system (other than its school bus routes), and, because its population is so dispersed, it is one of the most heavily automobile-dependent states in the country. A typical Vermonter consumes 545 gallons of gasoline per year — almost a hundred gallons more than the national average.

Is there a better U.S. environmental role model than Vermont? There are many — and the best of them, I believe, is New York City.

This choice may seem ludicrous to most Americans, including most New Yorkers, because for decades we have been taught to think of crowded cities as one of the principal sources of our worst environmental problems. In the most significant ways, though, New York is a paragon of ecological responsibility. The average city resident consumes only about a quarter as much gasoline as the average Vermonter — and the average Manhattan resident consumes even less, just 90 gallons a year, a rate that the rest of the country hasn’t matched since the mid-1920s. New Yorkers also consume far less electricity — about 4,700 kilowatt hours per household per year, compared with roughly 7,100 kilowatt hours in Vermont and more than 11,000 kilowatt hours in the United States as a whole. New York City is more populous than all but 11 states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank 51st in per-capita energy use.

The key to New York City’s relative environmental benignity is the very thing that, to most Americans, makes it appear to be an ecological nightmare: its extreme compactness. Moving people and their daily destinations close together reduces their need for automobiles, makes efficient public transit possible, and restores walking as a viable form of transportation. (Dense urban cores are among the few places left in America where people still routinely go around on foot; in the suburbs, you seldom see anyone walking who is actually traveling to a destination rather than merely moving between a building and a vehicle or trying to lose weight.)

Metropolitan New York accounts for almost a third of all the public-transit passenger miles traveled in the United States, and it has, by far, the nation’s lowest rate of automobile ownership. (Fifty-four percent of New York City households — and 77 percent of Manhattan households — own no car at all. In Vermont and the rest of the country, the percentage of no-automobile households is close to zero.) Eighty-two percent of employed Manhattanites travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That’s 10 times the rate for Americans in general, eight times the rate for workers in Los Angeles County, and 16 times the rate for residents of metropolitan Atlanta.

Population density also lowers energy and water use in all categories, constrains family size, limits the consumption of all kinds of goods, reduces ownership of wasteful appliances, decreases the generation of solid waste, and forces most residents to live in some of the world’s most inherently energy-efficient residential structures: apartment buildings. As a result, New Yorkers have the smallest carbon footprints in the United States: 7.1 metric tons of greenhouse gases per person per year, or less than 30 percent of the national average. Manhattanites generate even less.

Americans tend to think of dense cities as despoilers of the natural landscape, but they actually help to preserve it. If you spread all 8.2 million New York City residents across the countryside at the population density of Vermont, you would need a space equal to the land area of the six New England states plus New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia — and then, of course, you’d have to find places to put all the people you were displacing. In a paradoxical way, environmental groups have been a major contributor to residential sprawl, for organizations like the Sierra Club, whose anti-city ethos has been indivisible from its mission since the time of John Muir, have fueled the yearning for fresh air and elbow room which drives not only the preservation of wilderness areas but also the construction of disconnected subdivisions and daily hundred-mile commutes. Preaching the sanctity of open spaces helps to propel development into those very spaces, and the process is self-reinforcing because, as one environmentalist said to me, “Sprawl is created by people escaping sprawl.”

Wild landscapes are less often destroyed by people who despise wild landscapes than by people who love them, or think they do — by people who move to be near them, and then, when others follow, move again. Henry David Thoreau’s cabin near Walden Pond, a mile from his nearest neighbor, set the American pattern for creeping residential development, since anyone seeking to replicate his experience needed to move at least a mile farther along.

At an environmental presentation last year, I sat next to an investment banker who was initially skeptical when I explained that New Yorkers have a significantly lower environmental impact than other Americans. “But that’s just because they’re all crammed together,” he said. Just so. He then disparaged New Yorkers’ energy efficiency as “unconscious,” as though intention were more important than results. But unconscious efficiencies are the most desirable ones, because they require neither enforcement nor a personal commitment to cutting back. New Yorkers’ energy consumption has always been low, no matter what was happening with the price of fossil fuels; their carbon footprint isn’t small because they go around snapping off lights.

I spoke with one energy expert, who, when I asked him to explain why per-capita energy consumption was so much lower in Europe than in the United States, said, “It’s not a secret, and it’s not the result of some miraculous technological breakthrough. It’s because Europeans are more likely to live in dense cities and less likely to own cars.” In European cities, as in New York, in other words, the most important efficiencies are built-in. And for the same reasons.

New York City looks so different from so much of the rest of the country that its environmental examples aren’t easy to apply — and even New Yorkers tend not to appreciate their power. (No one is more surprised than a Manhattanite to be told that Manhattanites are the nation’s lowest per-capita energy consumers.) But dense urban centers offer one of the few plausible remedies for some of the world’s most discouraging environmental ills, including climate change. Anti-urban naturalists like Thoreau and Muir make poor guides for anyone struggling with the increasingly urgent problem of how to support billions of mobile, acquisitive, hungry human beings without triggering disasters that can’t be contained.

The world’s population is projected to increase to 9 billion during the next 30 years — an increase of seven times the current population of the United States, or roughly equal to the current population of India and China combined. We won’t be able to accommodate that change by making the world look more like Vermont.

This article originally appeared on Yale Environment 360.

Image Credit: Mario Tama, Getty Images

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Yale Environment 360 in Urban Design and Planning at 3:19 PM)

Hallucinations in sensory deprivation after 15 minutes

vaughan — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:00:00 PDT

Sensory deprivation lasting only 15 minutes is enough to trigger hallucinations in healthy members of the public, according to a new study published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.

The researchers were interested in resurrecting the somewhat uncontrolled research done in the 50s and 60s where participants were dunked into dark, silent, body temperature float tanks where they subsequently reported various unusual perceptions.

In this study the researchers screening a large number of healthy participants using a questionnaire that asks about hallucinatory experiences in everyday life. On the basis of this, they recruited two groups: one of 'high' hallucinators and another of 'low' hallucinators.

They then put the participants, one by one, in a dark anechoic chamber which shields all incoming sounds and deadens any noise made by the participant. The room had a 'panic button' to stop the experiment but apparently no-one needed to use it.

They asked participants to sit in the chamber for 15 minutes and then, immediately after, used a standard assessment to see whether they'd had an unusual experiences.

After a twenty minute break, they were asked again about perceptual distortions to see if there were any difference when normal sensation was restored.

Hallucinations, paranoid thoughts and low mood were reported more often after sensory deprivation for both groups but, interestingly, people already who had a tendency to have hallucinations in everyday life had a much greater level of perceptual distortion after leaving the chamber than the others.

This study complements research published in 2004 that found that visual hallucinations could be induced in healthy participants just by getting them to wear a blindfold for 96 hours.

However, my attention was grabbed by the researchers use of a 'panic button'. The effect of having a panic button in sensory deprivation experiments was specifically studied in 1964 by psychologists Martin Orne and Karl Scheibe. They also asked about hallucinations and compared two groups of people.

One group was met by researchers in white coats, given a medical examination and told to press a 'panic button' if they wanted out. The other was met by researchers in causal clothes, weren't given medical checks, and told to knock on the window if they wanted the experiment to stop.

The actual sensory deprivation part was the same, but the group with the panic button reported many more hallucinations, likely owing to 'demand characteristics', or, in other words, their expectations of what might happen.

We also know that an increase in anxiety also increases the likelihood of hallucinations, and having a 'panic button' during an experiment, I suspect, is likely put most people a little more on edge.

So we can't be sure that the effect was purely due to sensory deprivation, but it does chime with various other studies showing that when we reduce our normal sensations, the brain has a tendency to 'fill in' with hallucinations.

Link to PubMed entry for sensory deprivation study.

Cheese, dreams and drugs

vaughan — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 01:00:00 PDT

A common belief says that eating cheese causes vivid dreams or nightmares. However, I couldn't find any support for the idea in the scientific literature except for one bizarre case study.

Although the case report really tells us nothing about the link between cheese and dreaming, it's lovely to read because it's from a bygone day where doctors could write into medical journals with their strange and idiosyncratic observations.

From a 1964 edition of the British Medical Journal:

I have lately seen a patient with moderate essential hypertension who because of various side-effects with other drugs was changed to pargyline, 25 mg every morning; this gave satisfactory control and within a fortnight the patient volunteered that he felt much less depressed, but was having nightmares.

Inquiry produced the fact that he habitually ate one or two ounces (30-60 g) of Cheddar cheese with his supper every evening. The nightmares were of a horrifying nature, and curiously they were concerned not with his immediate family or friends but with people such as his workmates, with whom he was not in any particular emotional relationship. He dreamt of one, terribly mutilated, hanging from a meat-hook. Another he dreamt of falling into a bottomless abyss. When cheese was withdrawn from his diet the nightmares ceased.

I am, etc. J. CHARLES SHEE, Bulawayo, S. Rhodesia.

The mentioned drug, pargyline, as well as being used for hypertension is in the same class of drugs more commonly used as antidepressants.

These are monoamine oxidase B inhibitors (MAOIs) which prevent the breakdown of the monoamine neurotransmitters serotonin, epinephrine and norepinephrine. However, they also prevent the breakdown of the chemical tyramine which occurs naturally in some foods, such as cheese, some soy bean products, processed meats and some fruit and nuts.

A build up of tyramine can cause an increase in blood pressure which can cause headaches, heart problems and increases the chance of stroke (blood vessel blockage or bleeds in the brain). Hence, people taking MAOI antidepressants have to avoid foods high in tyramine to prevent these potentially lethal side-effects.

Interestingly, the fact that the UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was apparently avoiding similar foods led to internet rumours that he was on these antidepressants, which caused a media flap when the BBC questioned him about his mental health and use of "pills" to "get through".

Link to PubMed entry for case study with full text option.

Monkey brain surgeon

vaughan — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:00:00 PDT

Online t-shirt company Psycho Reindeer have this fantastic monkey brain surgeon t-shirt with which you can proudly display your brain tinkering tendencies.

It's only $14 and looks kinda funky.

If you do have a monkey by the way, it's best not to let them do neurosurgery with a screwdriver as the t-shirt suggests.

I always make sure that they're involved purely in an advisory capacity.

Link to monkey brain surgeon t-shirt.

What Human Business And the Social Web Are About

chrisbrogan — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 22:18:52 PDT

I want to share my take on how human business works, and what the social web is all about. When I talk about these things, they might not line up with what you’ve thought about, but that’s okay. We see things differently. To me, this is a large tapestry and we’re weaving the fabric of new stories together a little at a time. It’s okay if you don’t see it this way yet. I just want to share my perspective, if only to give you a fuzzy squint into what I believe is here, and what I think is coming with all this. Your thoughts and additions to this are welcome. Or this might not resonate at all. I’m open to your ideas, either way.

Relationships Matter

Human business resets the core building block from “customer” to “relationship.” We accept that “relationship” includes non-customers, prospects, customers, customers who are leaving, former customers, potential reclaimed customers (to name a few).

Business Structures Matter

Human business recognizes that businesses and their practices are porous and more like fabric than like a machine. We accept that good ideas come from outside the company, too. We accept that our employees and other relationships have lives outside the company, and that our business is actually a bunch of clusters that form, dissolve, and form again, instead of some kind of rigid tree structure.

Small Powerful Networks Matter

The social web gives us a new dialtone, a new TV station, a new newspaper, a new magazine, and we all have one. We are all voices waiting to be heard, and all businesses must now think about a customer base that broadcasts, that networks, that voices its opinions loudly, in the open, and with rapid-paced interactions between loosely-joined clusters of like-minded types.

Gatejumping Matters

Human business doesn’t have to follow the traditions that came before it. The social web amplifies different aspects of these businesses. There are different centers of power. In a world where we know Paula Berg from Southwest Airlines, Frank Eliason from Comcast, Jenny Cisney from Kodak, but not the senior team, we have a new kind of power, we have a new hierarchy, a new kind of relationship-centric communications method.

Alternative Economies Matter

These tools help us with awareness, reputation, and trust: currencies that were in such low demand before, but that now seem to be more important than ever. We can buy spots on TV, but no one notices. We can pay for shiny clothes, but we can’t buy a reputation. Trust isn’t something that one picks up at the store. And yet, we can transact a lot of exchanges that use those three things as part of the payment mechanism.

Further Definition

This is not utter chaos. This is a redefinition to better align with organic and social sculptures that make sense to all of us, whether or not we were willing to acknowledge this before. Example: when our old encyclopedias stopped mattering, we wrote our own. Example: when we ask the social web for a hotel, the social web answered back.

This is not a new marketing channel. This is not a new technology. This is not a movement.

It’s more. And yet, it’s so easily misappropriated and malformed and co-opted that it could just as easily be brushed aside. This isn’t the battle of who “gets it” and who doesn’t. It’s the battle to shape these new pathways with the help of these new tools and methods, before some other rigid structure pushes itself in place.

Or, it’s just a bunch of feel-good nobodies tweeting and facebooking.

You say?

Photo credit kalandrakas

Mystery School

Mitch Horowitz — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:43:52 PDT

Boing Boing guestblogger Mitch Horowitz is author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation and editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin publishers.

One of the weirdest and most wonderful sites on the map of spiritual Los Angeles is the Philosophical Research Society (PRS). Occult scholar Manly P. Hall (1901-1990) opened this Mayan-Egyptian-art-deco campus in the Griffith Park neighborhood in 1934. Hall was the author of the legendary encyclopedia of occult lore, The Secret Teachings of All Ages (quoted in the epigraph to Dan Brown's latest novel), and he designed the Philosophical Research Society, or PRS, as his sanctum and school. I'm speaking at PRS this coming Saturday, October 3rd and Sunday, October 4th, at 2 p.m. daily on the history of the occult in America. I'll be considering everything from the career of Manly P. Hall to the growth of "mind power" mysticism. From Occult America:

Hall fancifully spoke of modeling his headquarters after the ancient mystery school of Pythagoras. More practically, PRS provided a cloistered setting where Hall spent the rest of his life teaching, writing, and assembling a remarkable collection of antique texts and devotional objects. His small campus eventually grew to include a 50,000-volume library with catwalks and floor-to-ceiling shelves; a 300-seat auditorium with a throne-like chair for the master teacher; a bookstore; a warehouse for the many titles he wrote and sold; a wood-paneled office (complete with a walk-in vault for antiquities); and a sunny stucco courtyard. Designed in an unusual pastiche of Mayan, Egyptian, and art-deco motifs, PRS became one of the most popular destinations for L.A.'s spiritually curious, and remains so.

Philosophical Research Society

Esoteric classics: a list of books

Mitch Horowitz — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 22:20:58 PDT

Boing Boing guestblogger Mitch Horowitz is author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation and editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin publishers.

(Mitch will be speaking in Los Angeles at the Philosophical Research Society this coming Saturday, October 3rd and Sunday, October 4th, at 2 p.m. daily on the history of the occult in America. Details here.)

Below is a rundown of books that were unique sources of inspiration to me as I was working on Occult America. Some of these authors are not esotericists at all; others cover topics that I fleetingly reference. But each work represents a carefully researched, keenly reasoned, and pioneering effort at comprehending occult topics and personas without lapsing into the kind of excessive credulity or a knee-jerk nay-saying that often clouds our ability to evaluate fringe movements. Each is a triumph of that rarest of traits: clear thought.

Al-Kemi by Andre VandenBroeck
A window into the intellectual and spiritual world of esoteric Egyptologist RA Schwaller de Lubicz, with an appreciative foreword by Saul Bellow. Posits intriguing ideas about the connections between Ancient Egyptian philosophy and the modern West - and also exposes the ethical failings of this brilliant intellect.

Hidden Wisdom by Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney
A 360-degree survey of modern esoteric beliefs by the editors of the legendary Gnosis magazine (the most fondly missed journal on the planet). Their tone is unfailingly judicious, thoughtful, and shrewd.

The Tarot by Robert M. Place
Perhaps the sole guide to Tarot that synthesizes a scholarly exploration of Tarot's roots in the Middle Ages with an understanding of the mystical allegory of its images.

The Rosicrucian Enlightenment and The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age by Frances A. Yates
Probably the most authoritative works ever written on the occult mood of Europe in the late Renaissance period. Yates was a world-class historian, a tireless scholar, and a uniquely empathic observer of religious/philosophical movements.

The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Hall
The occult classic published in 1928 by the twenty-seven-year old auteur. This encyclopedia esoterica stands up remarkably well - its passages on Pythagorean mathematics, alchemical symbolism, and the competing histories of Rosicrucianism are especially sturdy.

Alchemy by Titus Burckhardt
A uniquely sensitive, subtle, and compact survey of the misunderstood history and ideas behind this ancient spiritual art.

Edgar Cayce by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick
The landmark historical biography - unparalleled in detail and breadth - of the grandfather of the New Age. This is journalistic historical writing at its finest.

Edgar Cayce in Context by K. Paul Johnson
A brilliant and engaging study of how the influential seer related to the spiritual trends around him. The author exhibits a rare combination of academic depth and spiritual understanding.

The Dawning of the Theosophical Movement by Michael Gomes
A vivid, precise, and deeply intelligent history of this enormously influential occult organization at its inception in America.

Each Mind a Kingdom by Beryl Satter
A beautifully written and highly original exploration of New Thought (or positive-thinking) as a progressive religious and political movement.

Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons edited by Robert A. Hill and Barbara Bair
The Rosetta stone to understanding the Black-nationalist pioneer in a different light: as a spiritual-mystical thinker.

Pioneer Prophetess by Herbert A. Wisbey. Jr.
A painstakingly researched biography of one of the least-known but widely influential occult figures in American history: the Publick Universal Friend, a spirit channeler who became the nation's first female religious leader in 1776.

Spiritual Merchants by Carolyn Morrow Long
Wonderful insights into the growth of the African-American magical system called hoodoo. Likewise, see the comprehensive (and wondrous) work of hoodoo teacher-scholar-curator Catherine Yronwode at Lucky Mojo.

The American Soul by Jacob Needleman
The most incisive understanding of the collective spiritual search in America.

Early Mormonism and the Magic World View by D. Michael Quinn
Quinn employs rigorous scholarship to reveal the occult and esoteric influences on the life of Joseph Smith. A brave, thoughtful, and irreplaceable work.

Women of the Golden Dawn by Mary K. Greer
Fast-moving as a Dan Brown novel and filled with fascinating detail on the life and work of the women who shaped the 19th and 20th century occult culture in America and Europe.

They Have Found a Faith by Marcus Bach
Bach, who published this exploration of alternative faiths in 1946, was America's greatest religion journalist: A reporter who could go anywhere, venture into any belief system, and place himself at its center in order to grasp the values and aspirations of its participants (which is the only way to understand a religious movement). He was my journalistic hero.

Woman gives birth in pool with dolphin, internet gives birth to meme.

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:46:03 PDT

(Update: From a French documentary film, says this 2004 snopes item.) This minute-and-a-half long YouTube video appears to show a mommy giving birth to her baby in a pool of water, while a curious dolphin swims and pokes around. What I don't know: Is this real life? Is it viral marketing? A film trailer? Fodder for some new furries fantasy site? Is the idea of a dolphin poking around the mom's ladyregions cute or disturbing? What does the infant think? How long can infants breathe underwater while connected via umbilical cord? Where did the video come from? Why can't I stop watching? Discuss. (via @tara, and others)

The Kybalion by "Three Initiates"

Mitch Horowitz — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 22:17:26 PDT

Boing Boing guestblogger Mitch Horowitz is author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation and editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin publishers.

One of the oddest and most enduring occult books of modern times is called The Kybalion. Dan Brown mentions it twice in The Lost Symbol. The book exists in a multitude of editions and claims to be an ancient work of practical occult wisdom. Its pages brim with canny advice on how to get what you want from life. The "author" of The Kybalion is a hidden entity called Three Initiates. Speculation rages online that one of these Three Initiates was a twentieth-century magician, occultist, and writer named Paul Foster Case. Case, so the theory goes, co-conceived the popular book in early twentieth-century Chicago, a city bustling with occult impresarios. I consider the Case connection and The Kybalion in Occult America:

Chicago was a great city for a budding occultist in the early twentieth century. It was home to the influential New Thought teacher Emma Curtis Hopkins and hosted bustling subcultures in "mental science" and metaphysical publishing. A Chicago lawyer named William Walker Atkinson produced an imaginative array of occult books from his Yogi Publication Society based in the twenty-two-story Masonic Temple Building, once a jewel of the city's skyline and later demolished. Atkinson himself wrote many books, under the pseudonyms Yogi Ramacharaka, Magus Incognito, and, most famously, Three Initiates. The Chicagoan used the last of these aliases in 1908 to publish his most successful book, one of the occult classics of the twentieth century: The Kybalion.

This compendium of "lost" Egyptian-Hermetic wisdom read a lot like New Thought principles recast in antique language but nonetheless enthralled readers, partly due to the secrecy of its authorship. A long-standing rumor, which now abounds online, named Paul Foster Case as one of the Three Initiates. But The Kybalion reads to the letter like Atkinson, and it was published before the two men would have been likely to meet. The Kybalion is often misdated to 1912. But the copyright and first edition were actually from 1908, when Case had barely arrived in the city. The error arose from a 1940 edition in which the publisher listed the initial registration as 1912, almost certainly in an attempt to reassert control over a copyright that had fallen into public domain after failing to be renewed at the required 28-year interval.

Whatever its authorship, The Kybalion is an enticing guide to wise-living. I publish a new, redesigned edition at Tarcher/Penguin, which is probably the first to specifically credit Atkinson on the about-the-author page. The Kybalion

Sabotage on the Large Hadron Collider?

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:55:22 PDT

Sabotage...from the future?

That's the theory being put forward by two top physicists. Even they admit it's a little weird. The idea could be groundbreaking. Or, it could be a valuable lesson that even scientists can fall prey to the very human tendency to see patterns in actually random events.

Some people have this experience and come away believing in astrology. Instead, Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have ended up with the theory that the Future is trying to stop us from creating a Higgs boson particle.

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an "anti-miracle."
...While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn't be trying to make one.

Banned Books week window display returns!

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:55:49 PDT

Adrienne from the Henrico County, Virginia Public Library sez, "Every year we participate in National Banned Book Week, a week that celebrates the written word and the free exchange of ideas, as outlined in the First Amendment to our Constitution. We invite you to volunteer as a reader of a banned or challenged book. This is our way of celebrating that our community has the right to read freely. The Banned Book Reading Room will be open for three weeks (September 26--October 17, 2009), longer than the National Banned Book Week, because last year's Room was so popular! Ever since the written word has existed there have been those who would prevent others from reading material considered "objectionable" -- everything from the Harry Potter series to the American Heritage Dictionary. Join us as a volunteer reader! Call 364-1400 x5 for more information."

The Banned Book Reading Room at Twin Hickory Library! (Thanks, Adrienne!)

Previously:

Human, All Too Human

vaughan — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 05:00:00 PDT

I've just discovered that probably one of the best series ever produced on philosophy is available on Google Video. The BBC series Human All Too Human includes three fantastic programmes on Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger - a trio of controversial thinkers who massively influenced 20th century philosophy.

It's an interesting choice as all had fascinating and turbulent lives - Nietzsche ending his life in insanity, Heidegger a unrepentant Nazi defended by a Jewish ex-lover, and Sartre who walked the line between free love and womanising.

All had a huge influence on psychology at various stages, and you can clearly see how many struggled with concepts of mind and society.

The programmes tackle both the characters and their theories and are some of the most engaging and gripping programmes I've ever seen on philosophy, an essential subject that usually gets little more than satire or lip service from mainstream media.

They're an hour each and worth every minute. Put some time aside, find a comfy chair and enjoy.

Link to programme on Jean Paul Sartre.
Link to programme on Martin Heidegger.
Link to programme on Friedrich Nietzsche.