Author: synthum molyart

body surfing somatics cognition moshido praxis matrix

Chris Hitchens joins attack on obsolete "religions"

Interview by Laura Sheahen

Your book discusses the problems with the Abrahamic faiths, but then says Eastern religion is not the answer. It seemed like your main criticism of Eastern religion wasn't so much about its tenets so much as one sex abuse scandal at one ashram.

Oh, no. My objection was to the sign [at the entrance to one tent] saying, "Shoes and minds must be left at the gate." It's the idea that the whole effort of meditation is to try and dissolve your mind, which is the only thing you've got that's unequivocally worth having.

But don't you sometimes get sick of your mind running on and on–and want to calm it a little bit?
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/218/story_21800_1.html

Jeffrey J. Kripal talks about "Esalen, America and the Religion of No Religion"

This book is pretty amazing…the transition from Torture on the Cross to Yab-Yum Yummy yum yum maithuna tantric copulation. quite an extreme cultural reversal!
sample chapter here from publishers site
"Darwin, Tantric sex, cold war physics, psychedelic drugs, golf, and, of course, religion all come into play in a book that can only be described as monumental. Esalen is a prehistory of our nation's current fascination with Eastern religions, our steadily growing acceptance of the supernatural in everyday life–and a surprising page-turner."
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/220626.ctl

FINDING MY RELIGION
Author Jeffrey J. Kripal talks about "Esalen, America and the Religion of No Religion"

David Ian Miller
Monday, May 21, 2007

Esalen is a place "where miracles not only happen but where they happen all the time" — at least according to the Esalen Institute's Web site, which also describes the institute as home to a 40-year Olympiad of body, mind and spirit.

Sans the superlatives, the Esalen Institute, founded by Michael Murphy and Dick Price in 1962, is a world-renowned retreat and learning center on the beautiful Big Sur coast. It's been portrayed as the birthplace of the human potential movement, and it is a place where people come together to raise their spiritual awareness, expand their minds and get in touch with their bodies.

Gamer Theory! by McKenzie Wark is Online now!

McKenzie Wark has his new book, Gamer Theory, online! check it out! Post Hakim Bey, post Baudrillard. Seems like a new combo-medium where the book is created online with the users before publishing a "temporary at this time" a hard-copy book.

So by all means necessary, be a gamer, but be a gamer who thinks – and acts – with a view to realizing the real potentials of the game, in and against this world made over as a gamespace. One might start with the curious gap between the games one loves and an everyday life which, by the light of the game, seems curiously similar, and yet somehow lacking.

http://web.futureofthebook.org/mckenziewark/gamertheory/?cat=1&paged=5

Impeaching Cheney First

BREAKING: Today, April 24, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) introduced three Articles of Impeachment against Dick Cheney.

George Bush and Dick Cheney have lied the nation into a war of aggression, are spying in open violation of the law, and have sanctioned the use of torture. These are high crimes and misdemeanors that demand accountability. Since Congress doesn't seem to get it, on April 28 Americans from Miami, Florida to North Pole, Alaska are going to spell it out for them: IMPEACH! It's time to say NO to impunity for lying, spying, and torture.

Use the new ImpeachMap below to find out what's going on in your area, post a new action, or find people to team up with. Complete instructions beneath the map. Click here for a full-size version.

 http://www.a28.org/

another reason to keep one's name off the 'Net!

LSD as Therapy? Write about It, Get Barred from US

BC psychotherapist denied entry after border guard googled his work.

View full article and comments here http://thetyee.ca/News/2007/04/23/Feldmar/

By  Linda Solomon

Published: April 23, 2007

TheTyee.ca

Andrew Feldmar, a well-known Vancouver psychotherapist, rolled up to the Blaine border crossing last summer as he had hundreds of times in his career. At 66, his gray hair, neat beard, and rimless glasses give him the look of a seasoned intellectual. He handed his passport to the U.S. border guard and relaxed, thinking he would soon be with an old friend in Seattle. The border guard turned to his computer and googled "Andrew Feldmar."

The psychotherapist's world was about to turn upside down.

 http://thetyee.ca/News/2007/04/23/Feldmar/print.html

Why Aren't There Any Millionaire's in Russia? I thought everyone got 1000 shares of RussPetrol?!

Moscow's suburb for billionaires
By Rupert Wingfield-Hayes
BBC News, Moscow

Most people in Britain are now familiar with the scruffy, boyish and invariably unshaven features of Roman Abramovich, owner of Chelsea football club, and Russia's most famous billionaire.

This week we learned that Mr Abramovich is one of a growing list of hyper-rich Russians.
According to Forbes magazine Russia now has 60 billionaires.

A mile down the road, firmly back in Russia, I went to see Mrs Rima. The 75-year-old showed me around the one-room shack she built with her own hands.

She survives on a pension of £60 a month.

I asked her what she thinks of the rich people who live behind the high green walls.

"They're all thieves," she said. "All that money is stolen from the people."

It's a view millions of Russians would agree with. Fifteen years ago everything in Russia was owned by the state. Today a quarter of Russia's economy is owned by 36 men.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 21 April, 2007 at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.

Three Ways to Listen From BBC.

Summer of Love +40 years PBS Mon. PM

Turn on, Tune in, Drop Often!

The Year of the Hippie
In the mid-1960s, young people who embraced a non-traditional lifestyle began moving into the Haight neighborhood of San Francisco. As had earlier groups like Beatniks and Hipsters, they rejected mainstream society, but their taste for rock music and wild colors was new. Some tagged this group as junior-grade Hipsters — "hippies" for short. An underground newspaper, The San Francisco Oracle, chronicled the movement, often with psychedelic flair.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/love/sfeature/timeline.html

Sinister New "internet" Perps Conspiring a New Panopticon

Federally Funded Boffins Want To Scrap The Internet
Seeking further funding from Congress for "clean slate" projects
by Steve Watson
Global Research, April 18, 2007

Researchers funded by the federal government want to shut down the internet and start over, citing the fact that at the moment there are loopholes in the system whereby users cannot be tracked and traced all the time.

Time magazine has reported that several foundations and universities including Rutgers, Stanford, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are pursuing individual projects, along with the Defense Department, in order to wipe out the current internet and replace it with a new network which will satisfy big business and government:

http://tinyurl.com/34skd8

MediaChannel news from DAVOS 07 on the future of the Internet

With Net Neutrality and Internet governance a global issue, what are the participants at the elite Davos meeting in Switzerland saying about it?

By MediaChannelJeff Jarvis (among many others) blogs about Internet governance discussions at Davos:

I'm sitting in the front row for a panel on internet governance with future guy Paul Saffo, internet godfather Vint Cerf, Oxford Jonathan Zittrain, John Markoff, ITU Secretary General Hamadoun Toure, and Michael Dell. Yes, Michael Dell (more on that later; I met him last night). And yes, I have my Mac laptop open. Liveblogging a bit"¦..

Markoff says that "unless we find a way to police the commercial internet, it won't survive"¦. (or) we'll have to walk away from the internet and leave it like you'd leave a bad neighborhood."

http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2007/01/25/davos07-and-the-future-of-media/

new twist on Peak Oil effects "…Civilization is being boiled out of existence…" by Hugo Salinas Price

October 7, 2006.

The evaporation of civilization

Hugo Salinas Price

All human societies are being destabilized by the energy that is injected into them. As societies are constituted by human beings, we can clearly observe how the more "developed" a society, the greater the physical and mental activity of its population; the population has no option to being in incessant activity. Like it or not, the energy in the societies in which we live propels us: motion, both physical and mental, becomes imperative for each of us, just as motion is imperative for the water molecule in a pot of boiling water. Each American consumes – I'd rather say, "is being boiled by" – 27 barrels of oil per year. The figure for Mexico is 7 barrels per year per person. China is down around 2.

The vaporization of money

The institution of money has completely vaporized! We no longer use money anywhere in this world. What humanity uses as money is a simulation of money, simple vouchers which are used everywhere as a means of exchange.

However, these vouchers are not actually money – money defined as a thing of value the delivery of which, in an exchange, constitutes payment. Money in today's world is not a thing; it is a non-thing, a simple number whether printed on a bill, stamped on a coin, or a number represented by bits on a computer disk. Since money is not a thing, but only a non-thing, tendering it in an exchange cannot, and does not, constitute payment.

What happened to money?

http://www.plata.com.mx/plata/plata/comHSP72a.htm

Pennebaker film article and link to oeuvre for sale

His filmography (much of which is available for purchase from www.pennebakerhegedusfilms.com) reads like a who's-who of the past four decades. Pennebaker has hung out with the mighty and the fallen; he's the ever-present shadow making public the private moments of people who should have known better. In 1964, he filmed Timothy Leary's wedding to Nena Von Schlebrugge, which became the 12-minute You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You. In 1971, Pennebaker documented the outrageous women's-lib debate between, among others, Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer at Town Hall in New York City; the film, Town Bloody Hall, sat unreleased for years, until Hegedus came in one day and edited the thing together in, more or less, an hour (it was the fledgling couple's first film together). From 1979 to '81, Pennebaker and Hegedus documented John DeLorean's quest to design the perfect car, which became nothing less than a stainless-steel Edsel. And in 1990, the two released their film about Jerry Lee Lewis, which charted the oft-seedy life of one of rock's pioneers.

leary 1964

After Nena divorced Leary she married a Tibetan scholar, Dr. Robert Thurman and her daughter Uma is Uma the actress. Dick Alpert became his own guru, Baba Ram Dass and achieved a sainthood of his own.

Barlow on Human Rights in Action; Lessig on our right to copyright!

Barlow:

[…]If you wanna share something – share it. If you wanna use something – use it. Try to do so ethically in the sense of don't take things without attribution.[…] Pay no attention to these people when it comes to being creative. Go ahead and do the stuff that Larry showed in the beginning of his talks and do lot of it. And every time they put a lock on – break it. And every time they pass a new law – break that.[…]

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/04/barlow_on_hackerinfr.html

embed Lessig talk here>

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7661663613180520595&q=23c3

Lessig video at googleVideo

new Year Predictions: Impeach Cheney first, get new V-P, then 'peach Bush!

Congress might impeach Cheney first so Republicans can get a new Vice-President and then they can impeach Bush and not have the job go to Pelosi in the House…the trade off would be Republicans would pick new lame duck President… What a month & year this one is going to be! ms