Gaia Community: Bill's Blog

Mourning and missing a wonderful being

http://telesterion.gaia.com — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 17:58:57 GMT

The kitten we brought home from the shelter last year was killed.

From the way he lay, I'm sure he died instantly.

I cried and cried.

I'm so glad we found him and could bring him home to sleep.

We are burying him today.

He was such a wonderful, wonderful guy.

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SICKO is online - this movie is AMAZING - you got to watch it!

http://telesterion.gaia.com — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 04:10:41 GMT

This is close to being one of the most intense documentary experiences I've ever had - and on a tiny pixelated computer vid screen.

It's probably better to click this link and watch it at google video.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9006414844032752909

Even tho I knew almost all of the information presented, I'm still amazed, especially at the scenes of health care in other countries.

I'm stunned. Watch it - it's kinda long, but worth it.

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The Blasphemy Challenge - I'm behind the curve, still sweet tho

http://telesterion.gaia.com — Sat, 05 May 2007 19:42:54 GMT

The Blasphemy Challenge

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Jody Radzik of Guruphiliac - RU Sirius Podcast

http://telesterion.gaia.com — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 06:33:10 GMT

Everybody knows RU Sirius, right, from the old MONDO 2000 and Reality Hackers days. He interviews Jody Radzik who writes the guru critique blog Guruphiliac, which is always full of interesting entries.

I wrote a bit of a review with some extracts here, there are also of course links to the mp3 and blog: http://www.telesterion.com/jody-radzik-of-guruphiliac-interviewed-by-ru-sirius.htm

I imagine a fair number of people here might not like Jody and his writing on gurus, but I think he's an insightful and sympathetic observer of the scene, with a good amount of personal knowledge and a practice of his own, and that he's simply describing what are obvious problems with the popular phenomenon of the guru business.

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Good Advice for Creatives

http://telesterion.gaia.com — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 23:15:50 GMT

I liked this video, found it on a site I visit daily, http://boingboing.net/

Dick Dale Interview - Don't sign with labels, learn to market you

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Neurotheology

http://telesterion.gaia.com — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 23:10:42 GMT

An entry about a CNN article on how the brain is involved in religious and spiritual experiences, the sense of awe, oceanic feelings of oneness, and the like.

http://www.telesterion.com/neurotheology-is-the-brain-built-to-produce-thoughts-of-god.htm

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UG Krishnamurti has died

http://telesterion.gaia.com — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 00:36:06 GMT

He died on thursday, March 28th, in Italy.

http://www.telesterion.com/ug-krishnamurti-one-of-my-favorite-enlightened-dudes-has-died.htm

From the wiki:

From 1947 to 1953, U.G. regularly attended talks given by Jiddu Krishnamurti in Madras, finally beginning a direct dialogue with J. Krishnamurti in 1953. U.G. describes one of their meetings as follows:

"We really didn't get along well. Whenever we met we locked horns over some issue or other. For instance, I never shared his concern for the world, or his belief that his teaching would profoundly affect the thoughts and actions of mankind for the next five hundred years--a fantasy of the Theosophist occultists. In one of our meetings I told Krishnamurti, 'I am not called upon to save the world.' He asked, 'The house is on fire--what will you do?' 'Pour more gasoline on it and maybe something will rise from the ashes,' I remarked. Krishnamurti said, 'You are absolutely impossible.' Then I said, 'You are still a Theosophist. You have never freed yourself from the World Teacher role. There is a story in the Avadhuta Gita which talks of the avadhut who stopped at a wayside inn and was asked by the innkeeper, "What is your teaching?" He replied, "There is no teacher, no teaching and no one taught." And then he walked away. You too repeat these phrases and yet you are so concerned with preserving your teaching for posterity in its pristine purity.'"

- (Krishnamurti, U.G.; Arms, Rodney, Ed. [Third Edition, 2001]. Mystique of Enlightenment. Part One. from [2])

Their dialogues continued, but finally came to a halt. U.G. describes the final discussion as follows:

"Again I asked him if there was anything behind the abstractions he was throwing at me, 'Come clean for once.' Then he said with great force, 'You have no way of knowing it!' Then I said, 'If I have no way of knowing it and you have no way of communicating it, what the hell have we been doing! I have wasted seven years listening to you. You can give your precious time to somebody else. I am leaving for New York tomorrow.'"

- (Krishnamurti, U.G.; Arms, Rodney, Ed. [Third Edition, 2001]. Mystique of Enlightenment. Part One. from [3])

After the break with J .Krishnamurti, U.G. went to the United States seeking medical treatment for his son, and stayed there for 5 years.

Tags: enlightenment, death, UG Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti

Some Sad News - Terence McKennas Notes and Library Destroyed

http://telesterion.gaia.com — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 22:09:11 GMT

terrence-mckenna

This was written by Erik Davis...

"For those who knew Terence or enjoyed his library, the fire is a tragedy, and not simply because it consumed his private papers. Terence's library reflected the multidimensional facets of his own mind: mysticism and history, drugs and dreams, science fiction and systems theory, natural history and art. Terence was a head who fed his head with books more than the drugs he became known for. I will never forget the sheepish look he gave me six months or so before his death, as he forked over a fistful of twenties for a copy of Empson's Cult of the Peacock Angel, a rare book on the Yezidis that he bought from an esoteric book dealer I knew. It was a look that said, Please don't tell my girlfriend. "

http://www.telesterion.com/sad-new-terrence-mckennas-notes-destroyed-in-a-fire.htm

I'd have loved to have read that Peacock Angel book. I'd have loved to browse McKennas library. And the loss of his notes and working papers is a real shame.

Tags: Terence McKenna, library.books, psychedelics

Alfred Korzybski and The Significance of Timebinding.

http://telesterion.gaia.com — Sat, 06 May 2006 08:34:40 GMT

There is a _word and an idea_, invented many years ago by a Polish count, which can be revolutionary and explosive for people who are interested in the human mind.

That word is "Timebinding".

If someone ever asks you what the meaning of human life is, you can tell them - "Timebinding. It's that simple.".

Try reading "Science and Sanity" by Alfred Korzybski. It's not easy to read. It's not easy to understand. But, it was and is a revolution in the way we humans understand words and thoughts.

Think of it as a challange, like skydiving, or climbing a mountain.

Here's a link to a blog entry of a Zaadz member writing about Korzybski:

http://grayraven.zaadz.com/blog/2006/4/the_hammer_of_2_valued_logic

And remember the word - "Timebinding".

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They Gave Me An Award

http://telesterion.gaia.com — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 06:40:45 GMT

In my blog, in the "You Wanna Hear A Crazy Story" entry, I described the night when a guy crashed his truck into my stream. Well, the township gave me an award for that. Here I am with some policemen getting the award. In case it's not obvious, I'm the big guy at the right end of the row of policemen.

The Cheif of Police started calling me, out of the blue, last week. leaving messages on my answering machine, saying they wanted me to come to an awards ceremony with the policeman and fireman who helped save the guy. At first I ignored it, but she kept calling me, so I gave in. This is a picture of the award ceremony which happened this past monday.

http://telesterion.zaadz.com/blog/2006/3/wanna_hear_a_crazy_story

What the hell, how often do you get an award? the water wasn't waist deep tho, they fibbed a little about that, it was about two feet deep. The certificate is in a nice frame, but I only scanned the document.

http://telesterion.zaadz.com/photos/view/14553

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Actual "Now", Experiential "Now", and the "Zone".

http://telesterion.gaia.com — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 04:01:21 GMT

We've been having discussions about the "ego" and the "now" in the Ego Hunting Pod, and I ended up trying to make a diagram to illustrate an series of concepts that I've been using to think about the "Now" experience. I thought I would post them in this blog and see if they can stimulate more discussion. This text might be a little disjointed, because it's copied and reassembled...

Well, I don't know if this is true for everyone, but as far as I can tell, my ego, or rather, the part of my mind I call my ego, can't function in the now. I'm not sure it can even enter it.

I experience my ego as following behind the now, trying to think of something to say.

I sometimes think people mistake the 'now' state for the 'flow' or 'zone' state that people talk about with sports and creativity. I'm not sure those two states are the same.

I say that because the more in the 'now' I am, the less I seem to want to do or communicate or create.

Anyway, to explain it, this is the model I have of the "Now".

The actual, physical now is forever unreachable.

It takes a certain fraction of a second for the brain and mind to process experience and display it as sensation. We can guess that on the average that short interval of time is about 1/30th of a second or less. Why? Because of movies. A movie is actually a series of still images, but when they are played at 30 frames a second or faster, we experience them as a seamless whole. There is reason to believe that we can actually process sensation in milliseconds, thousandths of a second, but we rarely do so.

So, the "experiential now" is as close as we can get, in these human bodies, to the actual "Now" of the physical universe. That happens when we turn off as much interpretive thought as possible, and are immediately and directly in our bodies, experiencing the universe as closely as our eyes, ears, skin, and other sensory organs are capable.

(I like that state a lot, but, like I suggested earlier, the deeper I am in it the less I'm interested in acting or communicating. The experience itself is so rich, and frankly pleasurable, that I'm totally satisfied just absorbing sensation.)

I have been thinking that the "Zone" is _just a little distance_ behind the experiential now. Close enough to direct sensation to allow maximum responsiveness, but there is still room for certain parts of the mind to make plans, project into the future, and make strategic and tactical choices. (A tennis player in the "Zone" still is able to plan how to make the next shot and position themselves in the optimum spot on the court, for example.)

And the ordinary ego spends it's time some distance behind the experiential now.

What's your experience of the 'now' state?

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The Yoga of Skepticism

http://telesterion.gaia.com — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 23:43:52 GMT

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.... ;-}

Tags: magic, meditation, practice, skepticism, yoga

Synchronicity and a Unified Theory of Conciousness

http://telesterion.gaia.com — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 08:23:23 GMT

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...

Tags: magic, meditation, practice, skepticism, synchronicity, brain, Jung

V For Vendetta Author A Practicing Esoteric Magician?

http://telesterion.gaia.com — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 07:15:38 GMT

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."
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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."
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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.

Tags: christianity, magic, religion, sufism, tantra, magick, comics

Teenage Buddha Missing, or, We See The Gurus We Expect

http://telesterion.gaia.com — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 00:24:44 GMT

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.
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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?

Tags: meditation, religion, buddha, nirvana, nepal

Wanna Hear A Crazy Story?

http://telesterion.gaia.com — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 21:41:21 GMT

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.

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Everything has To Start Somewhere....

http://telesterion.gaia.com — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 08:14:26 GMT

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.

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