Great Mckenna Interview

I read this awhile ago and its greatly influenced my thinking on a lot of things, particularly the fungal spore theory of how life was seeded on this planet:

http://www.intuition.org/txt/mckenna.htm

Highlight:

"Jung's criticism of Christianity was that it had not made a place for what he called the shadow, and he said the productions of Christian culture will always be neurotic because the shadow has not been included, so there's a lack of psychic balance. "

"Perhaps the UFO carries compensatory psychic energy from the realm of the shadow. Some people are very frightened of it. Some people see it as an almost millenarian salvational hope, the savior of mankind. I think that it's very powerful, that it haunts time like a ghost, that the messianic anticipations of Fundamentalist Christianity and Islam are in fact a picking up on the shock wave that the image of the flying saucer casts backward through time -- that this image of the New Jerusalem, the four-gated city descending from the sky to whisk the elect away to a better place, is a kind of prophecy yearning toward a fact in the act of becoming. You know, Christianity and Islam are the most history-obsessed of all the world's major religions.

MISHLOVE: Along with Judaism.

McKENNA: Along with Judaism. And all three of them have this notion of the transcendental object at the end of time. And alchemy in the sixteenth century was an outbreak of an expectation of a transcendental object in the nearby here and now, that would cure --

MISHLOVE: The omega point of history, so to speak.

McKENNA: Yes, it would cure all ills, confer longevity, fertility, virility, immortality. And I think that the flying saucer is an airborne philosopher's stone -- the sophic hydrolith of Paracelsus haunting the skies of modern America, with a promise of mandalic cohesion for the future, that science has not given us. Science has been a very sadly disappointing religion in the realm of the heart. The flying saucer comes from the heart, but it bears the very strange energy of the other in its manifestation as planetary goddess."

Slowly But Surely

Resolutions from months pass come to pass, two steps forward three steps back

Heideggar Figured it out First

Or I guess his Jewish buddy figured it out first: Jews have gotten there first on many occasions in History-but I guess we got a head start.

Here's Hawking and his buddy waxing philosophical on "what is real" from http://www.toequest.com/forum/vbcms-comments/5441-hawking-mlodinow-no-theory-everything.html (toequest is a great site)

In a quantum world, particles don't have definite locations or even definite velocities until they've been observed. This is a far cry from Newton's world, and Hawking/Mlodinow argue that - in light of quantummechanics - it doesn't matter what is actually real and what isn't, all that matters is what we experience as reality.

Heideggar saying pretty much the same thing:

....

well, couldn't find it; instead i went on a harrowing search through heideggar and nazism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidegger_and_Nazism

this site SORT of says the same thing

http://philosophyandpsychology.com/?s=BP

here's a quote, they it also went on about philosophical numonism and realism and mediated reality and doxology and kant and...well, my mind is so unorganized these days. it could be my sleep patter (i seem to stay up for 24-48 hour increments) or it could just be habit or it could be that i don't have anything to ground me. whatever. here's a quote i might find interesting someday:

Along with Dasein as being-in-the-world, entities within-the-world have in each case already been disclosed. This existential-ontological assertion seems to accord with the thesis ofrealism that the external world is really present-at-hand. In so far as this existential assertion does not deny that entities within-the-world are present-at-hand, it agrees – doxographically, as it were – with the thesis of realism in its result. But it differs in principle from every kind of realism; for realism holds that the Reality of the ‘world’ not only needs to be proved but also is capable of proof. (BT 251)

So yeah. Take it as you will.

P.S. I've did say not too long ago (within the past year) that what Genes you have is about as important as your astrological chart:

The relationship between genes and visible traits is very different from the way in which it is usually presented to the public. The idea that a gene is a sequence of DNA that codes for a product, and variations in the DNA sequence can cause a difference in the product and hence in the phenotype, is just too simplistic. Coding sequences are only a small part of DNA, and DNA is just a part of the cellular network that determines which products are produced. When and where these products are produced depends on what goes on in other cells and what the environmental conditions are like. Cellular and development networks are so complicated that there is really no chance of predicting what a person will be like merely by looking at their DNA. Although it has considerable rhetorical and marketing power, the dream of genetic astrology is just that – a dream.

~Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life, p. 67

A Poem A Plan (very rough draft)

i've been up all not but i'm FEELING FINE. yes, and this could be a GOOD or a really BAD sign. OR it just could BE.

when i'm like this it feels like my whole metabolism has sped up. i don't know if its my brain that's doing the churching, but every part of my body, every joint, every sinew, every pain, every pleasure, every desire, every will within comes so alive in this state and i feel *almost* that, if i were to look at the universe from this vantage point in just the right way, at just the right angle and just the right calm, i, like ram dass' guru, would truly kNOw EVERYTHING...

or perhaps it would all be an optical allusion.

for the time being, this is all neither hear nor there. now i seek to listen to my body'ss hum, to find her rhythm, to stroke ( ;-) ) her just right so that she comes alive like rose blooming for all to see.

but i can imagine this will take a long time. and maybe i'm past my prime. but as you know, once a rose blooms, that's it, kaput. it dessicates slowly and dies so, so lovely and falls to the ground to mingle with dirt and return to the earth from which she came.

but ah, so be a flower, blooming to the sun.

and perhaps i'm a ROSEBUSH that will have many blooms-i sure do have thorns-but for now i remind myself, calmly but sure to ENJOY LIFE AND LIVE IT!!!

but only in the right measure and only in the right time.

perhaps i'm not the bush or the rose-perhaps i'm the gardner, descendent of cain. if that's the case, i guess i have not been the best of gardners-i've let my anger get in the way, i've been distracted while prickly weeds grow-but hey, i'm a young one and learning to garden takes time (especially when you're both the plant AND the gardner)

so i'll tend me with care and water me regularly and make sure i get enough sun. but this plant is hardy ((s)he's proven this much) so i won't fret at the fungus are yell at the weeds. i'll just take it slow and learn what i can from the earth and her mysteries, from the books in their libraries, and from friends and from family and whoever will talk to me!

i'll learn and discern and dissect and construct and hope that in this chaos, this mess, good ideas reach the top and that'll i'll have the fortitude to actually pick them up.

because maybe, just maybe, if i pick up enough good ones, and act with intention with my heart tethered tight, this garden will glow and shining white light so others will say "huh, look at that" and come over to peek at roses and maybe have a chat. and who can say what will happen from that. all one can do is pray that there aren't many rats. though a few here and there can sure livin' things up.

so yes, that's a plan, a plan with some spunk behind. metaphor and reality mixing their medley. will it come to anything or not? either ways okay. because i shall always be here, yes always here shall we stay.

Moby Dick

I'm finally getting around to finish Herman Melville's magnum opus and I'm getting a lot out of it. I was clued in to this wonderful Hungarian poet, Mihály Babits, by my Ukrainian-Hungary friend named Emilia Gal. I found a pretty good website with his poems http://www.c3.hu/~eufuzetek/en/eng/14/index.php?mit=babits and in honor of Moby Dick I repost a good one about Jonah and his Whale. Its sort of a microcosm of the deep depression I've been in for the few months, a depression that I just learned might have permanently shrunk my brain. Yikes. But I'm young-I should bounce back!

On that note, I offer up this beautiful prayer to anyone who might stumble upon in a moment of need or otherwise.

JONAH'S PRAYER

Abandoned by my words I'm left alone
or I've become an aimless overflown
drifting river and in my murky mud
I drag the flotsam washed up by the flood:
old idioms exhausted vain pretences
like broken hedgerows signposts maybe fences.
Oh would the Master wisely grant the force
that channels deep, to lead a steady course
toward the sea, and would He fit the rhyme
to fringe my verse perfectly every time
ready for use by me the good disciple,
(for prosody I'd read His holy Bible),
as lazy Jonah shirked to no avail,
and then for three days rotted in the Whale,
I too went down and shared those deadly bays
of hot throbbing pain, but for thirty days,
for thirty years or three hundred, who knows,
to find, before my book will firmly close
and an even blinder and eternal
Whale shall swallow my last departing journal,
my real voice, to marshal every true
word into action, as He gives the cue,
to speak up loud as it is right and fitting
for all to hear (my sickly throat permitting)
until the powers, cosmic and Ninevean
will silence me and send me to oblivion.

Amen.

Been Awhile...

I'm not even sure that I want to be the Pineapple Mushroom Man any more. I want to be Max. I don't think I've been truly Max since I was 10. So if I start now, it may take me till I'm 32 to be truly Max again. For now, I'll just be and not fight what I've been.

Tonight feels like a night for Debussy. Though as I listen to his Symphonic swells, it feels as if there's some piece of the melody misses. He stirs emotions in me and brings them to conclusions, but the conclusions seem somehow unfinalized. I'm going through his pieces on youtube, but they somehow none of them give me any closure. They simply keep the emotion, or the feeling, swirling up and up. I wonder if it will ever come down, if Debussy will ever give me that sense of closure...

I've always loved this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlvUepMa31o&feature=related

Edit:I'm just listening to it now. I think this may be what I was looking for.

Depressing

http://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/20/2/244

I was looking for that strange case in the ESP enigma where there was a young man missing his prefrontal cortex and I found that. I like the quotation marks around "willed action," acknowledgment either that real will does not actually exist or that that is a name of a region that we don't really understand a bit or both. Or maybe it is just standard practice? Probably not. Most scientists are pretty intelligent.

He sounds like such a depressed and sad young individual. Exposed to a litany of tests and given hard medication and I can't help but read a DFW plot onto the whole thing.

I'm sad. Right now. Yet what makes me the most sad is that I should be happy and that there are those that have it so much worse than me.