The Fool Abides

Tales from the kitchen of Thailand’s most gruesome baker

Artist Kittiwat Unarrom bakes bread in the shape of bloody body parts to portray his religious beliefs, and they taste really good too.

Article here: http://www.cnngo.com/bangkok/play/tales-kitchen-thailands-goriest-baker-510619

Death and food are, after all, intimately related.

STEPHEN FRY: WHAT I WISH I'D KNOWN WHEN I WAS 18

What I wish I might come to know more deeply now.

http://vimeo.com/11414505

Mirror Neurons

From Adbusters:

Fourteen years ago neuroscientists introduced the world to a captivating new idea about the way our brains might work: they discovered the existence of specialized brain cells in the brains of macaque monkeys that are activated both when a monkey performs an intentional action (e.g. grabbing a banana) and when it sees another monkey performing that same action. They called these special brain cells mirror neurons since the monkeys mirrored in their own minds the actions of their neighbors. Scientists learned that at the brain level, monkey see was not so different from monkey do.

Even before researchers confirmed the existence of similar mirror neurons in human brains, which they did in 2007, the idea had worked its way into the zeitgeist and become a potent new way of seeing ourselves in relationship with each other. People have begun to wonder if mirror neurons could be responsible for language, culture, empathy and even morality. Where Darwinian survival of the fittest has heretofore imagined us as the strong pitted against the weak in a fatal struggle for food and sex, the mirror neuron suggests the importance of social strengths: that we are hardwired for empathy, that we are naturally interested not only in our own needs but also in the interests of others. As noted philosopher A.C. Grayling has said: “The essential point is that mirror neurons underwrite the ability to recognize what helps or distresses others, what they suffer and enjoy, what they need and what harms them.”

—Andrew Tuplin

This is yet another example of science showing us that we are social creatures, that selfishness does not make one "fitter" or more likely to survive. In primates, alphas who hoard all of the resources are set upon by the rest of the group. I saw an article recently saying that the most successful CEO's are those who are humble and not flashy. Or as the Tao sez, lead from behind.

Would it be safe to say that intelligence is largely a matter of understanding the interconnectedness of all things and being able to act as part of the whole?

Bhang Your Head!

They're getting that old time religion in northern India, as the annual Holi festival, an extravagant Hindu spring celebration of colors, is observed with potent marijuana milk shakes.

 Full article here: http://www.tokeofthetown.com/2010/03/bhang_bhang_your_head_hindu_holi_festival_celebrat.php

I can has peace of mind?

Breathe gently. Look within. Let what is both empty and full devour you like a human hot dog.

Fuck Pavement (Not the Band)

No More Pavement! The Problem of Impervious Surfaces

 Recent research, according to the New York Times, indicates that urban areas are about to get hotter – much hotter. Not exactly what blistering New Yorkers want to hear after one of the more brutal, record-breaking heat waves in memory.

Article here: http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/water/2010/07/13/no-more-pavement-the-problem-of-impervious-surfaces/

Quantum entanglement holds together life's blueprint

THE most celebrated molecule in biology - the DNA double helix - might owe its shape to a mysterious quantum property called entanglement.

 Article here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727694.100-quantum-entanglement-holds-together-lifes-blueprint.html

I saw what you were doing.

Tongal

a sad clown riseth

i woke early
to dress as a mountain
with Parsifal's grinning vaporous
skull as my cap
walking only in valleys
my stillness dancing on magician's
purple shadows breathing
puffing chaos pipes with
flower maidens behind rocks shaped
like kings of another world
a world vivid as dirt

oh what a feast of fools
unconscious and magnetic
chewing to a brilliant pulp
those who forgot how to
love their own death
to laugh and riverrun
toward the snuff of holy discord
sun and moon sinking into travel
staining void with clarity
breathing in a man
in circles that protect
dragonflies in a rippling
textured magick whole

i wake early
before bristling housecats lose
interest in their
own gnostic poetry
i wake to power in
lakes' sunken depths
where life and death are one
dressing for the day
affixing wings of earth
a skull of clay

Carl Jung's Life/Death Parabola

Carl Jung:

"Life is an energy process. Like every energy-process, it is in principle irreversible and is therefore directed towards a goal. That goal is a state of rest. [...] The end of every process is its goal.

"With the attainment of maturity and at the zenith of biological existence, life's drive towards a goal in no wise halts. With the same intensity and irresistibility with which it strove upward before middle age, life now descends; for the goal no longer lies on the summit, but in the valley where the ascent began. The curve of life is like the parabola of a projectile which, disturbed from its initial state of rest, rises and then returns to a state of repose.

"The psychological curve of life, however, refuses to conform to this law of nature. Sometimes the lack of accord begins early in the ascent. The projectile ascends biologically, but psychologically it lags behind. [...] Our psychology then loses its natural basis. Consciousness stays up in the air, while the curve of the parabola sinks downward with ever-increasing speed.

"Natural life is the nourishing soil of the soul. Anyone who fails to go along with life remains suspended, stiff and rigid in midair. [...] From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life. For in the secret hour of life's midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal. The negation of life's fulfilment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die. Waxing and waning make one curve.

[...]

"Like a projectile flying to its goal, life ends in death. Even its ascent and its zenith are only steps and means to this goal."

Carl Jung, "The Soul and Death", pp. 405-408, from Volume 8 of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche

bum yerself

to know such a taste
of sweetwine in summer lightness
summer beings broken up into
hunks of wet fungus on the earth
ass-drunk on wilderness
floating over jungles in silver discs
touching the world as you touch yourself
lightly
ever so lightly
to know such a giddy arc
a happy ghost rescued from a dark west
we enter this sacred hut
rattling tin heads
along the way

andagain

rainagain
shuddering green gay folds ecstatic
washes me deeply
walking in neon filth
is good for legs you don't see

Flights diverted, delayed as UFO detected hovering

An unidentified flying object (UFO) disrupted air traffic over Zhejiang's provincial capital Hangzhou late on Wednesday, the municipal government said on Thursday.

Article here: http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90782/90872/7058628.html

Looks like a flaming fire truck to me.

Wikiquotes: Timothy Leary

•  We always have urged people: Don't take LSD unless you are very well prepared, unless you are specifically prepared to go out of your mind. Don't take it unless you have someone that's very experienced with you to guide you through it. And don't take it unless you are ready to have your perspective on yourself and your life radically changed, because you're gonna be a different person, and you should be ready to face this possibility.
  • Documentary CBC: "How To Go Out of Your Mind: The LSD Crisis" (1966)

• People use the word "natural" ... What is natural to me is these botanical species which interact directly with the nervous system. What I consider artificial is 4 years at Harvard, and the Bible, and Saint Patrick's cathedral, and the sunday school teachings.
  • LSD: Methods of Control (1966)

• Art's certainly made a lot of money, and got on a lot of shows — he got himself into the Nixon White House riding on the death of his daughter. And I think that's ghoulish! That's ghoulish.
  • In a Stanley Siegel interview (c. 1977), with phone commentary by Art Linkletter who blamed his daughter's death on her involvement with LSD.

• I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen.
  • As quoted in Shout! (1981) by Philip Norman, p. 365; and in An Encyclopedia of Quotations about Music (1981) by Nat Shapiro, p. 303

• If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people.
  • Changing My Mind, Among Others (1982)

• "Turn on" meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. "Tune in" meant interact harmoniously with the world around you — externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. Drop out suggested an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. "Drop Out" meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean "Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity."
  • Flashbacks (1983)

• Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
  • As quoted in Third and Possibly the Best 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (1987) by Robert Byrne, #40

• We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. They are a hundred times better educated than their grandparents, and ten times more sophisticated. There has never been such an open-minded group. The problem is that no one is giving them anything fresh. They've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.
  • Interview by David Sheff in Rolling Stone Twentieth Anniversary Issue (1987)

• Think for yourself and question authority.
  • Timothy Leary's track on Sound Bites from the Counter Culture (1989)

• That’s the left wing of the CIA debating the right wing of the CIA.
  • Discussing CNN’s Crossfire as quoted in Rolling Stone (14 December 1989)

• I have always considered myself, when I learned what the word meant, I've always considered myself a Pagan.
  • At the Neo-Pagan Starwood Festival (July 1991), recorded on Timothy Leary Live at Starwood (2001) by the Association for Consciousness Exploration ISBN 1-59157-002-6

• The universe is an intelligence test.
  • As quoted in Cosmic Trigger : Final Secret of the Illuminati (1993) by Robert Anton Wilson, p. 170

Our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos...

• Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities — the political, the religious, the educational authorities — who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing — forming in our minds — their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself.
  • How to Operate Your Brain (1994), a guided meditation spoken by Timothy Leary and set to music.

• I am 100 percent in favor of the intelligent use of drugs, and 1,000 percent against the thoughtless use of them, whether caffeine or LSD. And drugs are not central to my life.
  • Chaos and Cyber Culture (1994)

The drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

• A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.
  • The Psychedelic Experience (1995)

• Monotheism is the primitive religion which centers human consciousness on Hive Authority. There is One God and His Name is _______ (substitute Hive-Label). If there is only One God then there is no choice, no option, no selection of reality. There is only Submission or Heresy. The word Islam means "submission". The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling. Thy will be done.
  • The Intelligence Agents (1996)

You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind.

• Each religion has got their own way of making you feel like a victim. The Christians say "you are a sinner", and you better just zip up your trousers and give the money to the pope and we'll give you a room up in the hotel in the sky.
  • Timothy Leary's Last Trip (1997)

• We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the twenty-first century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s. On this space colony we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art.
  • On the Castalia Institute in Millbrook, New York; quoted in Storming Heaven : LSD and the American Dream (1998) by Jay Stevens, p. 208

• You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind.
  • As quoted in Office Yoga : Simple Stretches for Busy People (2000) by Darrin Zeer, p. 52

• In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show.
  • As quoted in The Best Advice Ever for Teachers (2001) by Charles McGuire and Diana Abitz, p. 57

• Why not?
  • Said repeatedly, with various inflections, these were among his last words before his death (31 May 1996), as quoted in "Timothy Leary's Last Moments" by Carol Rosin. Some have stated his final intelligible word was "Beautiful".

• At one point consciousness-altering devices like the microscope and telescope were criminalized for exactly the same reasons that psychedelic plants were banned in later years. They allow us to peer into bits and zones of Chaos.
  • As quoted in Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia : How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings (2005), by Rob Brezsny, p. 8

• Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.
  • As quoted in Still Casting Shadows : A Shared Mosaic of U.S. History (2006) by B. Clay Shannon, p. 376

• I've left specific instructions that I do not want to be brought back during a Republican administration.
  • On being brought back to life, during the period in which he considered putting his body into cyronic suspension, as quoted in The Nastiest Things Ever Said About Republicans (2006) by Martin Higgins, p. 130

• Seven million people I turned on, and only one hundred thousand have come by to thank me.
  • Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club (2010), p. 202

The Shining Abyss of a Language

WHEN Walter Spies arrived in Bali, he found a culture completely devoted to art, yet to which the notion of art for art's sake was alien. The Balinese have no word for "artist"; painting, carving stone and wood, weaving, playing a musical instrument, and, above all, dancing were just what one did when not fishing or working in the rice fields.

Happeh Fnord of Jubilee

The DEA Took My Future Drugs Away

In the cyberpunk comic book Transmetropolitan it is many years in the future and the DEA is forbidden from banning drugs that don't yet exist, but new substances are being created and distributed constantly by machines called Makers that intelligently reorganize matter. Though it takes the DEA only 20 minutes to ban a drug after its creation, there are always new drugs on the market. Anything that is more than a few hours old is considered archaic and inferior.

Though this comic was written in the 90s, it does seem to have predicted our current drug trends. I just hope that the DEA never has the ability to outlaw non-existent chemicals based on molecular association. Perhaps the worst thing would be for them make it illegal to merely develop a compound based on its similarity in chemical structure to something that was already needlessly banned. At that point, the mere intention to bring various arrangements of atoms into being becomes a thought crime and they have far, far too much power.

Now that we've fully committed the crime of outlawing nature as we know it, the next step is to outlaw all these alien forms of gnosis before they even have a name. Not only are we at war with known elements of the world that bring us to terms with the unknown, we are now at war with the unknown itself. This is a logical, albeit twisted and very unfortunate, progression for those in power of collective fear. Because anything in the realm of the unmanifest can be a catalyst for the kind of social upheaval that could usurp those in power, they are trying to build their walls closer and closer to the source of all possibility, to isolate and eventually eradicate chaos.

When will we learn that the goddess can not be chained? Our laws are merely creating a ritual, and not a particularly enjoyable one at that, by which we sacrifice ourselves to chaos.

Steady State Economy

"...a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the art of living, and much more likelihood of it being improved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on."

-John Stuart Mill

Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_state_economy

Michel Houellebecq vs. William Burroughs (Quotes)

From: http://thoughtcatalog.com/2010/william-burroughs-michel-houellebecq-quotes/

Michel Houellebecq — the misanthropic, caninophilic French novelist — and William Burroughs both deploy thorough visions of the world. They proffer more or less elaborate cosmologies, ethics, and particularly critical assessments of humanity. And both view the act of writing in general, and their own writing in particular, as an active force doing some kind of battle, performing some kind of negotiation, with the powers of stupidity, evil, greed, and banality. Both understand the human universe as being at the mercy of non-human laws — for Houellebecq, it’s all species, biology, physics; for Burroughs, it’s biology, physics, magic.
But whereas Houellebecq sees a world of absolute bleakness, Burroughs sees a world of plenitude — filled with shit and bile and semen and stupidity and cruelty but full nonetheless. If Houellebecq offers a world heading to zero, Burroughs offers a world of infinite complexity.

On Society

Houellebecq
I don’t like this world. I definitely do not like it. The society in which I live disgusts me; advertising sickens me; computers make me puke.
Burroughs
America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.

The Future of Humanity

Houellebecq
Few beings have ever been so impregnated, pierced to the core, by the conviction of the absolute futility of human aspiration. The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. A figure in transition toward chaos. That is what will finally prevail. The human race will disappear. Other races in turn will appear and disappear. And human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movements of the elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, sentiments? Pure ‘Victorian fictions.’ All that exists is egotism. Cold, intact, and radiant.
Burroughs
Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

Youth and Dreams

Houellebecq
Adolescence is not only an important period in life, but that it is the only period where one may speak of life in the full sense of the word.
Burroughs
As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.

Influence

Houellebecq
I’ve lived so little that I tend to imagine I’m not going to die; it seems improbable that human existence can be reduced to so little; one imagines, in spite of oneself, that sooner or later something is bound to happen. A big mistake. A life can just as well be both empty and short. The days slip by indifferently, leaving neither trace nor memory; and then all of a sudden they stop.
Burroughs
I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it. My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits.

Sex

Houellebecq
In a perfectly liberal sexual system, some people have an exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.
Burroughs
There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.

Love

Houellebecq
Love binds, and it binds forever. Good binds while evil unravels. Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit.
Burroughs
Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller. What there is. LOVE.

Shaman or Shy Man?

Unseen Chaos

Unseen Chaos (po-te-kitea)
Unpossessed, Unpassing
Chaos of utter darkness
Untouched & untouchable
--Maori Chant

Osho: Strange Consequences