Hank's Blog
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Sunday, November 28, 2004
November 18 post from the Future Hi blog:
Party People at the End of Time
As a perceptual organism embedded in 4 dimensions, I record existence. My recording range is only limited by the range of the senses. Whether memory is total or fragmentary I continuously receive and categorize data, tagging memories with associative relationships to smells, emotions, feelings, etc... and logging them into the holographic library of experience. Yet there is some evidence to suggest that the brain records everything that's perceived, filling huge volumes of memory with even the most minute details. Who knows what the storage capacity of the holographic brain might be but it surely dwarfs even the greatest giga-terabit computers. It may even be infinite.
The material world exists in 3 dimensions: XYZ. Each succesive dimension is coplanar with the prior dimension. They are coexistent in the same space. In other words, dimensions are additive and coincident - you can't experience one without all of those that precede it. Tipped on its side and rolled into motion, the 3-dimensional structure of matter is given a 4th dimension: Time. Again, all 4 dimensions exist simultaneously and isotropically. Time is meaningless without form.
The 5th dimension exists, no doubt. String theory suggests there are 11 dimensions - 7 more intepenetrating our own 4. Our senses are simply limited and don't perceive these other layers or modes of reality. As all higher dimensions are simply extensions of the previous levels, the 5th dimension would be additive to our currently perceived world. It might be the ability to move effortlessly through time. Or perhaps the capacity to manifest imagination directly into being. But it would not negate our current frame of reference. It would merely expand it.
And as the dutiful recording devices we are, as our senses expand to perceive higher dimensions, we'll record them, witnessing the evolution of creation and archiving the data into the universal mind. We, and all conscious beings, are literally the eyes of the world. We are the witnesses of creation. The astounding miracle of life unfolds before us as we give it context, meaning, and mythology.
The argument of reincarnation lends a certain persistence to the vast catalog of data comprising the collective experience of creation by conscious beings. Postulating reincarnation invokes a degree of immortality, or at least a sort of read-write access to the Akashic Record. Our recorded experiences would surely include our identities and selfhoods down to our deepest, darkest fears and desires. Although such demons might be shadowy and amorphous, nothing escapes the psyche. And yet it would seem foolish (or at least extraordinarily liberal for a thermodynamically conservative universe) to exterminate the data of history with the entropic decay of the corporeal body. Either the camera moves from one incarnation to another, or the records lie somewhere more fundamental and eternal than simply within our ephemeral minds. Perhaps in the deep recesses of our internal holographic memory banks lies the quantum plenum, singular and infinite like a universal film being slowly exposed over vast amounts of time. Perhaps witnessing the complete exposure from beginning to end is the experience of the 5h dimension.
As 2012 approaches (only 7 more years), the framerate of our cameras and the resolution of our lenses will continue asymptotically up the curve towards singularity, as finer and finer degrees of perception narrow our focus to the point of unity, simultaneous with the widening aperture relentlessly converging on the infinite. As above, so below, all things renewed by fire. Through it all resides the singular witness, I, watching and recording the great congress of Shiva and Kali manifest into spacetime.
Terence McKenna occasionally imagined the singularity as a vast disco ball at the end of time, casting reflections of itself back through history like spinning lights on a dancefloor. If that's the case, then the apocalypse is really just a great big graduation party, fittingly drunk and emotional, nostalgic and fearful, idealistic and hopeful.
Shall we dance one more time?
Thursday, November 25, 2004
I got this email from geo @ randomplace.com:
dearest of randomites and others not so
food for thought
today i was puttering around my mind and my apartment in nyc on the 20
floor looking down at the world as i do and tend to do everyday wondering
who we are and what we are doing and what the future would say about us
today and and thinking since we live in an upside down world anyway maybe
we should be celebrating life and giving thanks for what we have and don't
have -
and i thought about all those people who are worse off than me and those
who missed being born and were cut down early in life and who are
suffering under fear and oppression and i hear echoes of louis armstrong
singing in my ear "what a wonderful world it could be" and children
singing "row row row your boat life is but a dream" and i think to myself
every day should be a day of giving thanks - so i give you my thanks for
being
and so i thought you might also find this more food for thought
It takes your brain 20 minutes to realize you are full
be well
geo
art of living is making your life an art
art = caring for the imagination
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Wednesday, November 24, 2004
www.brasilinspired.com
The idea of a book about Brazilian graphic designers became a 144 page book that illustrates what international contemporary graphic artists think of the world's fifth biggest country. It later evolved into a website that attempts to showcase the best of Brazilian art, design and culture in general.
Brasil - Inspired has been an on going project of Nando Costa since early 2001, but it was only in the middle of 2004, back at his home town of Rio de Janeiro, that its most ambitious phase started to take shape. The purpose of this website is to eventually become a powerful marketing tool for the country. One that speaks of Brazil as one of the world's leaders in visual arts by showcasing the work of an endless list of respected professionals of the area.
The idea of a book about Brazilian graphic designers became a 144 page book that illustrates what international contemporary graphic artists think of the world's fifth biggest country. It later evolved into a website that attempts to showcase the best of Brazilian art, design and culture in general.
Brasil - Inspired has been an on going project of Nando Costa since early 2001, but it was only in the middle of 2004, back at his home town of Rio de Janeiro, that its most ambitious phase started to take shape. The purpose of this website is to eventually become a powerful marketing tool for the country. One that speaks of Brazil as one of the world's leaders in visual arts by showcasing the work of an endless list of respected professionals of the area.
Thursday, November 18, 2004
THE ADVENT OF AHRIMAN - Robert Mason (from the BOOK OF LIES - published by Disinformation):
GOOD AND EVIL
... The conflicts of human and spiritual life do not derive from a simple, two-sided war between good and evil. It was one of the great insights of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) to renew the ancient teaching of the "Golden Mean," of good as the middle way between opposing extremes. Lucifer is too warm, too flighty, too unstable; he inspires human fanaticism, false mysticism, hot-bloodedness, and the tendency to flee earthly reality for hallucinatory pleasures. Ahriman (the inspirer of amoral, atheistic, mechanistic materialism, and the kind of cleverness that goes with it... Ahriman opposes increased consciousness but promotes intelligence and science) is too cold, too hard, too rigid; he tries to make people dry, prosaic, philistine, materialistic in thought and in deed - and hardens what would be healthily mobile, supple thoughts, feelings, and even bodies...
Christ, as the Exemplar of the regular Gods, represents the middle way between the too-much and the too-little, holding the opposites in balance - and leading mankind to find the healthy middle way. Seen this way, Lucifer and Ahriman are not purely evil; they both bring to human and earthly evolution forces that are needed for good, healthy development and the fulfillment of the Gods' plans. Evil results only when events get out of balance and run to extremes. However, neither do Lucifer and Ahriman simply oppose each other; in a sense, they work together in opposition to the Gods' intent for evolution; they both work to prevent mankind and the earth from progressing together to the New Jupiter...
... this is not to imply that we would be justified in doing evil with the rationalization that good would result: "...it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!" [Matthew 18: vii]
buy THE BOOK OF LIES on Amazon.com !!!
Sunday, November 14, 2004
Vernon Reid & Masque
Known Unknown
(Favored Nations)
Reid, who packed funk and rock guitar for Living Colour, here serves as ringmaster for bassist Hank Schroy, keyboardist Leon Gruenbaum and drummer Marlon Browden (formerly with John Scofield). In the center of this colorful, flying electric circus, Reid's guitar howls and growls like a magnificent, fearsome beast.
Reid especially roars through the blues-based Time, at slow blues tempo, and faster through his quick whipping of The Slouch, while Down and Out in Kigali and Freetown crackles and pulsates with a dangerous-sounding jungle beat.
Points of jazz interest include the nimble ensemble dash through Outskirts and two of what Reid calls "fractured standards", frenetic covers of Lee Morgan's The Sidewinder and Thelonious Monk's Brilliant Corners. Reid's solo in Corners wildly scratches like a death row inmate clawing desperately at the dirt to escape from lockdown; Gruenbaum's piano solo scrambles but keeps pace with its frantic tempo. Twice as fast, this updated and electric Sidewinder sounds more like a roadrunner but still packs plenty of bite.
Sort of hoped that DJ Logic might have rocked a little more loopy and funky as he twists and turntables a guest spot in Voodoo Pimp Stroll. (Reid and Logic teamed to release Front End Lifter as the Yohimbe Brothers in 1992.)
Reprinted with permission. Copyright 2004 AllAboutJazz.com and Chris M. Slawecki .
Known Unknown
(Favored Nations)
Reid, who packed funk and rock guitar for Living Colour, here serves as ringmaster for bassist Hank Schroy, keyboardist Leon Gruenbaum and drummer Marlon Browden (formerly with John Scofield). In the center of this colorful, flying electric circus, Reid's guitar howls and growls like a magnificent, fearsome beast.
Reid especially roars through the blues-based Time, at slow blues tempo, and faster through his quick whipping of The Slouch, while Down and Out in Kigali and Freetown crackles and pulsates with a dangerous-sounding jungle beat.
Points of jazz interest include the nimble ensemble dash through Outskirts and two of what Reid calls "fractured standards", frenetic covers of Lee Morgan's The Sidewinder and Thelonious Monk's Brilliant Corners. Reid's solo in Corners wildly scratches like a death row inmate clawing desperately at the dirt to escape from lockdown; Gruenbaum's piano solo scrambles but keeps pace with its frantic tempo. Twice as fast, this updated and electric Sidewinder sounds more like a roadrunner but still packs plenty of bite.
Sort of hoped that DJ Logic might have rocked a little more loopy and funky as he twists and turntables a guest spot in Voodoo Pimp Stroll. (Reid and Logic teamed to release Front End Lifter as the Yohimbe Brothers in 1992.)
Reprinted with permission. Copyright 2004 AllAboutJazz.com and Chris M. Slawecki .
Friday, November 12, 2004
salon.com: How Arafat will go down in history:
...It is understandable that Americans have never found it easy to think about Arafat -- and not just because his goal of Palestinian independence challenged the myth that Israel's creation was innocent. (It remains perhaps the most painful moral irony of our time that history's ultimate victims, the Jews, victimized another people in the process of creating their state.) His career defies comfortable moral assumptions. He was a statesman and a terrorist, a guerrilla leader and a politician. The idea that terrorism, seen from a historical perspective, could serve a legitimate political purpose is not easy to swallow -- and to argue that position has become taboo after 9/11. Yet our position has no moral consistency. We claim to subscribe to Kant's categorical imperative, to treat humans as ends, not as means, but we live in a world of ends where the bloody traces of the means are quickly forgotten. We celebrate French Resistance fighters, or Mandela's African National Congress, or the Jewish terrorists who would later become Israeli statesmen, like Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, or any other "terrorist" group whose cause we support and who ends up victorious. But this is not easy to acknowledge. How much easier simply to denounce Arafat as a terrorist and murderer.
read more...
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
GRADUATE FACULTY TO HOST FORUM ON THE ELECTION
The Graduate Faculty invites the University community to join them in a
public forum entitled "What Happened?"
on Wednesday, November 10 from 2:00 - 3:00 p.m.,
at the Graduate Faculty, Swayduck Auditorium,
65 Fifth Avenue. (Manhattan)
Panelists will include Jose Casanova, Simon Critchley, Jeff
Goldfarb, and Ann Stoler. Each panelist will make a brief statement,
followed by discussion. The event is sponsored by the Departments of
Anthropology, Philosophy, and Sociology.
Andrew Arato (Paris, 11/3/04):
In almost no recent American elections have our deep political cultural
antinomies yield such neat contrasts: nation vs. democracy; imperial
aspiration vs. the rule of law; rhetoric vs. rationality; incarnation vs.
persuasion; will vs. judgement; symbolism vs. interest; particularism vs.
universalism; millenarianism vs. pragmatism...I could go on and on. In
wartime it will be said, or as others may prefer, in an imperial system
not yet defeated, the national-imperial-rhetorical-plebescitary-particular
pole will always win. Yet thanks mainly to the efforts of a grass roots
mobilization on behalf of the other America we came very close, and might
have just succeeded. In reality, we should have won easily against one of
the worst administrations in U.S. history.
Eli Zaretsky (Berlin, 11/4/04):
Few people have noticed that the causes of Bushs victory were the same
that Gibbon gave for the fall of Rome: Christianity and barbarism.
For more information, call 212-229-5777.
The Graduate Faculty invites the University community to join them in a
public forum entitled "What Happened?"
on Wednesday, November 10 from 2:00 - 3:00 p.m.,
at the Graduate Faculty, Swayduck Auditorium,
65 Fifth Avenue. (Manhattan)
Panelists will include Jose Casanova, Simon Critchley, Jeff
Goldfarb, and Ann Stoler. Each panelist will make a brief statement,
followed by discussion. The event is sponsored by the Departments of
Anthropology, Philosophy, and Sociology.
Andrew Arato (Paris, 11/3/04):
In almost no recent American elections have our deep political cultural
antinomies yield such neat contrasts: nation vs. democracy; imperial
aspiration vs. the rule of law; rhetoric vs. rationality; incarnation vs.
persuasion; will vs. judgement; symbolism vs. interest; particularism vs.
universalism; millenarianism vs. pragmatism...I could go on and on. In
wartime it will be said, or as others may prefer, in an imperial system
not yet defeated, the national-imperial-rhetorical-plebescitary-particular
pole will always win. Yet thanks mainly to the efforts of a grass roots
mobilization on behalf of the other America we came very close, and might
have just succeeded. In reality, we should have won easily against one of
the worst administrations in U.S. history.
Eli Zaretsky (Berlin, 11/4/04):
Few people have noticed that the causes of Bushs victory were the same
that Gibbon gave for the fall of Rome: Christianity and barbarism.
For more information, call 212-229-5777.
Friday, November 05, 2004
Adam Parfrey, dilettantepress.com essay:
... In the era of Novus Ordo Seclorum, only a few Islamic countries adhere to old-style religion. New World Order devotionals are hawked by digital avatars who sell faith as a method by which followers can enrich themselves (e.g. Deepak Chopra, Creating Affluence and The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success). Those who despair of locating a believable human shepherd subscribe to media-sponsored scriptures of angels, or aliens, or angelic aliens. In a universe where all is for sale, the dollar sign remains the sole remaining index of belief. The more dollar signs we collect behind our names the more we earn respect, even devotion.
In in the novel 1984, George Orwell wrote of "Doublespeak," the state language designed to inspire fear by the evasion and confusion of meaning. In the Supranational Corporate State, language has become a tool by which true intent is disguised or disavowed.
Corporate aphorisms-like "Just Do It!" -are devised to be unencumbered by common usage or distracting connotations. The tagline must encourage active behavior-such as extracting cash from one's pocket-and be instantly recognizable, a mnemonic device that imprints the conscious mind every time it hears or views the endlessly repeated mantra.
New World Order ideology is Doublespeak mind control, in which ideas, meaning and belief are forgotten, overlooked or overwhelmed. An ideology deprived of ideas or ideals is most deviously manifested through culture-Pop Culture.
The huzzah of entertainment provides important distraction from corporate subterfuge. Actual news stories are now written-off by ministers on the mass market payroll as "paranoia" and "conspiracy theory."
Movie stars. Sports stars. Murderers. Tabloid gossip. Pop culture noise is so ever-present and overwhelming that it removes the ability of the masses to believe-let alone think about-anything. The inability to read, to contemplate, to consider, is in fact a new epidemic known as dyslogia, a disease caused by the devastating overflow of information.
The supranational corporate system controls the mind so imposingly that nearly all its serfs are deprived of understanding their total immersion in the system. The doctrine is spread through trance of the everyday, battering the mind with a hyperkinetic confusion of words and images aimed at depriving the psychic slave of instinct and self-protection. Or belief. Without a sense of self and self-respect, the individual reaches for a placebo among the never-ending array of corporate products.
read more...
Wednesday, November 03, 2004
BOO.
"It's Not Who Votes, It's Who Counts the Votes that Counts" - Stalin
"The spirit of 1776 is not dead. It has only been slumbering. The body
of the American people is substantially republican. But their virtuous
feelings have been played on by some fact with more fiction; they have
been the dupes of artful maneuvers, and made for a moment to be
willing instruments in forging chains for themselves. But times and
truth dissipated the delusion, and opened their eyes."
- Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Lomax, 1799
"We must make our election between economy and liberty, or
profusion and servitude."
-Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816
"Government as well as religion has furnished its schisms,
its persecutions, and its devices for fattening idleness on
the earnings of the people."
-Thomas Jefferson to Charles Clay, 1815
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."
-Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1788
"Whenever our own dissensions shall let [monarchism and Anglicism] in
upon us, the last ray of free government closes on the horizon of the
world."
-Thomas Jefferson to William Duane, 1811
"It's Not Who Votes, It's Who Counts the Votes that Counts" - Stalin
"The spirit of 1776 is not dead. It has only been slumbering. The body
of the American people is substantially republican. But their virtuous
feelings have been played on by some fact with more fiction; they have
been the dupes of artful maneuvers, and made for a moment to be
willing instruments in forging chains for themselves. But times and
truth dissipated the delusion, and opened their eyes."
- Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Lomax, 1799
"We must make our election between economy and liberty, or
profusion and servitude."
-Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816
"Government as well as religion has furnished its schisms,
its persecutions, and its devices for fattening idleness on
the earnings of the people."
-Thomas Jefferson to Charles Clay, 1815
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."
-Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1788
"Whenever our own dissensions shall let [monarchism and Anglicism] in
upon us, the last ray of free government closes on the horizon of the
world."
-Thomas Jefferson to William Duane, 1811
Monday, November 01, 2004
From its dubious beginning to its fear-mongering, vote-suppressing end (one hopes), the Bush era has been a perfect storm in which all the worst aspects of our national temper -- insularity, empty swagger and ignorance -- have come together. - from Salon.com, "American Nightmare"
