Everybody, of course, will end up asking the obvious question, "Does the world really need another social networking app?".

That remains to be seen. What we have here is a kind of filtering mechanism. The other social networks have their own flavours of inhabitants, but this filter is set a little differently, to catch up a somewhat more uncommon type of molecule/person.

If it enhances mating, both actual physical mating, and a more virtual kind, well, that's a powerful enough of a benefit, a "value added" that it just might grow for a while.

If it crashes and burns, well, so what, what doesn't? Think of it as a party. While the booze and grass are flowing, and the music is playing, enjoy it.

Is it way too straight, and way too foo foo? Hell yeah. But, whattya want? This is the population we have to work with. So lighten up. ;-}

I wanted to say Thanks to Jordan, who operates http://www.enlightenment.com/  , and is a good friend of many years, for sending me the link to zaadz, despite his knowing that it was inevitable that I would ask, does the world need a new 'spiritual types' networking app?

Everything has to start somewhere.

Something happened to me recently that was pretty intense.

I live in the country, and I'm lucky enough to have a nice trout stream as the front border of my property, pretty much right in my front yard. The public road crosses over the stream, along a berm and over a bridge, about 18 feet above the water's surface.

Late at night, about 1am, I'm working online, my wife is asleep. Suddenly I hear a giant metal screech and a series of crashes. Really loud.

Well, I go to see what the heck this is. And I discover that a pickup truck has come flying over the edge of the bridge, fallen 18 feet,  and landed, top down, in the middle of the creek. The lights are on, and the truck is clearly very smashed up, even from 75 feet away with a flashlight I can see this is a very very bad situation.

I run back into the house, and frantically get offline and start trying to call 911. At this point Marisa has woken up, and I hand the job of calling the police off to her, I grab more lights and a crowbar, and run out to see if whoever is in the truck was still alive.

I walk into the freezing stream, and pound on the truck with the bar, shouting "can you hear me? Are you okay?". No answer.

I run back to the house and tell Marisa to call 911 again and say there is no response from the driver and that he or she might be badly hurt.

I go back out, and work more at opening the doors with the crowbar. I walk around the truck, no easy task in 20 inches of rushing water, and see a mans butt sticking out of the crushed window of the truck. Not moving, except in reaction to the water slamming into the side of the truck. It really looked like he was dead.

I keep trying to open the door, altho it is clear the crushed top of the truck won't let it open.

I'm yelling at the body, more "Can you hear me? Help is coming." type stuff. About this time the first cop car arrives, but it's not so easy to get down to the stream, I yell to the cop "Over here, over here", etc.

Just as the cop figures out how to get down to the stream I can see the guy in the truck is moving, and can hear him start to say "help, help". Which is a big relief, because i thought for sure he was dead, the way he had been stuck there, nothing but his butt showing, obviously bent double, and totally not moving.

The cop takes over the crowbar, and I hold his light and mine to light things up as well as possible. But the crowbar isn't accomplishing much. Finally more cops show up, but nobody has any tools. All this crazy stuff is happening, too much to mention here.

I say to these cops , "Do you want a pickaxe?", because it's the strongest leverage tool I have close by. They don't answer. After a few minutes, I just go get the pickaxe and a shovel, which works much better at smashing the door open. More minutes pass, and suddenly it's like every cop and fireman in the county is there, huge light trucks turn blazing lights on us, I'm holding two flashlights up high to light the situation, and two cops and a fireman are using my tools to bash open the truck door. Funnily enough, despite the fact that there are maybe fifty people here at that point, and the sky is blazing with cop lights, they don't have any other tools with them except two bolt cutters.

Long story short, the door of the truck is battered open with a pickaxe and the guy is hauled out. My feet are freezing, I'm in sweat pants and a shirt, no coat, but so adrenalized I don't feel the cold, except for my feet.

I lost a great flashlight which fell into the water and was washed downstream, too. ;-}

So now my wife Marisa thinks I'm a hero. Which ain't a bad thing at all.

It was 4am before they finished hauling the truck out of the stream

I left out a bunch of stuff - it was just too frackin crazy for words.

But the guy is alive, apparently.

I am so frackin glad I didn't have somebody dying on me there in my nice quiet little trout stream.
 
Pretty wild, eh?
 
Bill

As a postscript, I got a nice call from the policeman who had been standing next to me helping get the fellow out of the wreck, and he thanked me and said I might well have saved the guys life by reacting so quickly. The guy was okay, cracked sternum and ribs, but he was very very drunk, and not wearing a safety belt. Which may have saved his life, because he was unconscious during the wreck, and he would have drowned if he'd had his bealt on. I gather he's going to be going around to the local schools as one of those "Don't Drink and Drive or this will happen to you" speakers.

 

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/03/11/nepal.missing.ap/index.html

KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) -- A teenage boy in Nepal whose followers believe he is the reincarnation of Buddha is missing after 10 months of meditation, allegedly without food or water, officials said Saturday.
...

Buddhist priests who visited him said the boy was not the incarnation of Buddha but believed he had been meditating for months.

Buddhism teaches that right thinking and self-control can enable people to achieve nirvana -- a divine state of peace and release from desire. Buddhism has about 325 million followers, mostly in Asia.
---
It's not every day you see the headline "Teenage Buddha Missing" on CNN, so when it happens you just have to be interested. I'd heard before about the meditating boy who didn't eat or drink, the story has been making the rounds, but the interesting new twist is that he has disappeared. Not poof into the air in front of witnesses disappeared, that would be a whole 'nother story, but disappeared in the night, when he is normally concealed from the admiring crowds with screens.

I hope he's okay. Religion like this is big business all around the world, which means money, which means the fellow isn't that safe, because money makes people do crazy things (not the least of which is to commit frauds to attract the attention of religious crowds, that still happens every day.)

I thought it was interesting that in Nepal a meditating boy who doesn't seem to need to eat or drink excites the interest of the crowds - while here in the US it's usually the image of the Virgin Mary in a window or on a wall or a tortilla somewhere.

I wonder wether a meditating boy here in this country could excite as much interest?

There was an interesting new york times article about the reclusive "V For Vendetta" author Alan Moore recently, which makes some oblique references to his practice of modern 'occult' magic. The article quotes him as follows...

...a firm believer in magic as a "science of consciousness." "I am what Harry Potter grew up into," he said, "and it's not a pretty sight."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/movies/12itzk.html?_r=1&adxnnl=0&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1142129407-tQD0P8MXmESYUr8R8Bv+fg&pagewanted=all

From the article:

"V for Vendetta" (illustrated by David Lloyd), published in America in 1988-89, about an enigmatic freedom fighter opposing a totalitarian British regime - Mr. Moore helped prove that graphic novels could be a vehicle for sophisticated storytelling. "Alan was one of the first writers of our generation, of great courage and great literary skill," said Paul Levitz, the president and publisher of DC Comics. "You could watch him stretching the boundaries of the medium."
---

Today, he resides in the sort of home that every gothic adolescent dreams of, one furnished with a library of rare books, antique gold-adorned wands and a painting of the mystical Enochian tables used by Dr. John Dee, the court astrologer of Queen Elizabeth I. He shuns comic-book conventions, never travels outside England and is a firm believer in magic as a "science of consciousness." "I am what Harry Potter grew up into," he said, "and it's not a pretty sight."

Actually, he more closely resembles the boy-wizard's half-giant friend Hagrid, with his bushy, feral beard and intense gaze, but those closest to Mr. Moore say his intimidating exterior is deceptive. "Because he looks like a wild man, people assume that he must be one," said the artist Melinda Gebbie, Mr. Moore's fiancée and longtime collaborator. "He's frightening to people because he doesn't seem to take the carrot, and he's fighting to maintain an integrity that they don't understand."
---

Here's my comment:

Western "Magic" is one of those wierd topics that is certain to strike a nerve in almost everyone. This is because we are the inheritors of a society in which alternative mystical and knowledge systems were mercilessly hunted down and exterminated by the religious authorities, which were in most cases the Catholic Church, altho after the Reformation the Protestant churches continued the practice. So, for us here in the west, "Magic" is almost always disreputable.

Curiously enough, many modern westerners have no problem with, for example, Tantra, or, as another example, various flavors of Sufism. We tend to see these mystical systems as some of the finest examples of the mystical thougt and art of their regions. What we don't know is that, in their areas and in their times, Tantras and many types of Sufism were regarded with as much disgust, and persecuted just as much, as "Magic" was here in the west.  

Magic is the Tantra of the west. It's a system to stimulate and release creativity and transcendent experiences, a mental technology for creating genius. It's broken and fragmentary, the product of a history of savage repression, but it's also rather beautiful.

It's interesting to see a reference to it in the news. 

In case it's not clear, the title of this post is kind of a joke, as in, we are still so far away from a unified theory of consciousness that you can only really say those words with a bit of a sarcastic smile on your face...

Here's a conversation to consider, something that could become very significant over the next 20 or so years - the role of what we will call "Synchronicity" in non-ordinary mind experiences and social mind experiences. Jeff Mishlove is starting to talk about this in his zaadz blog here:

http://jeff.zaadz.com/blog/2006/3/the_sixth_sense_is_not_a_sense

What is "synchronicity"? It's 'meaningful coincidence'. What is "meaningful coincidence"? Well, that's the big question. Is the coincidence meaningful because we impose meaning on it, or is it meaningful because somehow it reflects some hidden domain of information flow? Is it the invisible hand of the quantum soup in action, or a function of the brain's unmapped abilities to extract meaning out of noise?

The friend who invited me here, Jordan Gruber of www.enlightenment.com , and I have been discussing the synchronicity model for many years. Long ago in one of our conversations we invented the model of "sychronicity bending" to explain why so many strikingly odd and unusual coincidences occur around people who are doing ritual and meditative practices to induce spiritual experiences or to celebrate 'sacred' principles.

The idea is, that if you concentrate the mind, and especially a group of minds, in a certain way or group of ways, you create an effect that looks as if it works like a lens, to bend sychronicity, that is, to bend meaningful coincidences, and make them more likely to happen.

This attempts to explain _why_ odd events tend to happen around meditators and groups of meditators, and it also explains something else very important - why are these odd coincidences that happen during meditations or spiritual disciplines so 'wierd'? 

Take as an example of a wierd event - a group is meditating, and at a critical point in the meditation an electric bulb burns out with an especially loud 'pop'.  (many meditation practicioners will have seen this kind of thing happening relatively often.) It seems crystal clear to everyone involved that this is a meaningful event, but it's weird, just what does it mean exactly?

The idea of "synchronicity bending" attempts to explain something about this. The mental effort makes it more likely that _some_ kind of meaningful coincidence will occur, and that we will stimulated to see meaning in it, but the event itself is created out of the background noise, guaranteeing that it's meaning will be ambiguous and in some way a little bizarre.

This led Jordan and I into further conversations about the idea of the "Conservation of Synchronicity" - the idea that there is only so much synchronicity possible at any given moment, such that you have to save up synchronicity to 'make' any big coincidence to occur. But that's another story...

I started out exploring the topic of non-ordinary experiences, psychic phenomena, and the like in a state of maximum credulity.

I was eleven years old and ready and willing to believe anything, anything at all, was possible.

I started out doing occult rituals and meditations I found in various books, as experiments, to see if they worked. And I instantly discovered altered consciousness, altho I didn't know that was what I had discovered at the time, I only knew that if I did certain things I got these various types of feelings in the body, and that my mind would race, filled with images, thoughts, and ideas. And that I rather liked it.

So I studied more and more, and did more and more practices, exercises, rituals, and that type of thing. I was able to see auras, do astral projection, concentrate 'energies' in my 'energy body' and make other people feel them, and apparently cause this and that kind of effect with those 'energies'. I learned to communicate with entities, angels, gods and goddeses, the 'higher self', aliens, all the usual suspects. Talking with God was effortless. Complex Visions were commonplace. At the very least I had proven to myself that with the right type of training non-ordinary experiences could be had by almost anyone.

One principle guided me thru all of this. "Be true to the experience". Look directly at the experience itself, and not the descriptions from books or from other people, and try to understand the experience as it was, not as I wanted it to be.

This is still the most powerful Yoga I know. Be True to the Experience. Be truthful to yourself about the experience.

And now, 38 years later, because it is my displine to be true to the experience, I have a new practice, the Yoga of Skepticism.

Most people interested in the spiritual experience are afraid of skepticism. (except when it is applied to the brands of yoga they don't happen to like.) They are afraid that skepticism will collapse the delicacy of the non-ordinary experience, that it will dispell the "willful suspension of disbelief" that is in some ways the secret of all spirituality.

It doesn't. Skepticism is the mystic's closest friend. It purifies and exalts the true. It cleanses the experience of the storylines and folklores which contaminate it's meaning. It reveals the Self and the No-Self and orients them in the center of a real universe.

Skepticism is the most beautiful and sublime of Yogas.

Be True To Your Experience. Look at it directly, without trying to make it fit any mold. Don't believe anything, one way or the other, just see for yourself. Be skeptical of the old storys and the trdaitional answers. This practice leads to amazing wonders.

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Sorry to get all mystical and shit on everybody here, occupational hazard.... ;-}