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how'd you know you are alive unless you've once been dead

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwMu6Y10naU

quite clearly now

I see quite clearly now that life is nothing but passing experiences, and my thoughts are just one more category of things I experience.

~dave@raptitude

James Kent

"Human beings craft representations of their Gods based on the technological paradigms of their era. Over time, our Gods have evolved from primal personifications of nature; into clans of tribal warriors and elders; into a single wizened old sorcerer; into a clever cosmic clockmaker; and most recently, into a plastic universal field of morphic energy. Could it be that all of these characterizations are correct, and that the lens of our technology only makes the nature of God clearer through time? If so, what's next?"

James L. Kent knows his shit. read his super interesting book on the science of tripping, Psychedelic Information Theory: Shamanism in the Age of Reason.

"The intent of old mythologies to integrate the individual into his group, to imprint on his mind the ideals of that group, to fashion him

according to one or another orthodox stereotype, and to convert him thus into an absolutely dependable cliché, has become assumed in the modern world by an increasingly officious array of ostensibly permissive, but actually coercive, demythologized secular institutions. A new anxiety in relation to this development is now becoming evident, however, for with this increase, on one hand, of our efficiencies in mass indoctrination and, on the other, of our uniquely modern Occidental interest in the fostering of authentic individuals, there is dawning upon many a new and painful realization of the depth to which the imprints, stereotypes, and archetypes of the social sphere determined our personal sentiments, deeds, thoughts, and even capacities for experience."

¬Joseph Campbell

intelligence = self teaching

1.) Intelligence is Self Teaching.

2.) Intelligence is Self Referring.

3.) Intelligence is Self Transcending.

the source of modern alienation

"When, for the first time, a nine-year-old barefoot boy and a wild crawfish encounter each other by surprise in a cold spring creek, there is nothing like it in the world. The boy's life is changed. And if he explores this watery world and the woods that surround it for the length of a long summer, he will have taken the whole ancient biosphere into his soul, never to be forgotten. The imprint is for a lifetime.
But if those imprintable years are allowed to pass for a boy or girl with only vicarious, mediated experience of nature, it is likely that as adults they will never be able to understand why a mountain forest is anything more than a pretty scene for a postcard or potential boardfeet or pulpwood for the commodities market." Tyrone Cashman

"""Objectivity and subjectivity were traps that people fell into. I prefer the terms "insanity" and "outsanity." Insanity is your life inside yourself. It's very private and you don't allow anybody in there because it's so crazy. Every so often I find somebody that I can talk to about it. When you go into the isolation tank outsanity is gone. Now, outsanity is what we're doing now, it's exchanging thoughts and so on. I'm not talking about my insanity and you're not talking about yours. Now, if our insanities overlap then we can be friends."""

~Dr Lilly

in-toxic-ating energy

"The beast of prey seizes hold of him and soon makes him forget that he is a human being. His animal affects hamper any reflection that might stand in the way of his infantile wish-fulfillments, filling him instead with a feeling of a new-won right to existence and intoxicating him with the lust for booty and blood."

~C. G. Jung.

“The older we get, the more likely we are to experience these moments of ‘cognitive dissonance,’ when self-image and reality contradict each other. Though this conflict is uncomfortable, it is a clear window into the place where we are clinging, and where we need to pay attention. Just as physical pain alerts us to trouble in the body, mental pain alerts us to where we need to be more conscious. In other words, our frustrations, anger, delusions, and so on become our greatest helpers in freeing ourselves from suffering. They point to where the Ego is trapped, and remind us to begin to shift our identity to the Soul level. They show where we are resisting change, where we are time-bound, and where we need to grow beyond past conditioning.”
~ Ram Dass

When we truly hate what’s happening, our instinct is to flee from it like a house on fire. But if we can learn to turn around and enter that fire, to let it burn all our resistance away, then we find ourselves arising from the ashes with a new sense of power and freedom.
~Raphael Cushnir

A herd of zebras scattering to avoid a predator will also represent to that predator a confused mass of vertical stripes travelling in multiple directions making it difficult for the predator to track an individual visually as it separates from its herdmates, although biologists have never observed lions appearing confused by zebra stripes.

Funny? In my wikipedia?

what the hell, I'm adding quotes by me also.

Suffering is underrated.

~Φιλιππος

"Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite discarded. How to regard them is the question—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes, though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region, though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality."

—- William James

There are no passengers on spaceship earth.

We are all crew.

~Marshall McLuhan

"The characteristic property of hallucinogens, to suspend the boundaries between the experiencing self and the outer world in an ecstatic, emotional experience, makes it possible with their help, and after suitable internal and external preparation... to evoke a mystical experience according to plan, so to speak... I see the true importance of LSD in the possibility of providing material aid to meditation aimed at the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality. Such a use accords entirely with the esSence and working character of LSD as a sacred drug."
-Dr. Albert "Lord of Lysergic acid Diethylamide" Hoffman

Of Perception...

...to be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness - to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves. Meanwhile, however, there are gratuitous graces in the form of partial and fleeting realizations. Under a more realistic, a less exclusively verbal system of education than ours, every Angel (in Blake's sense of that word) would be permitted as a sabbatical treat, would be urged and even, if necessary, compelled to take an occasional trip through some chemical Door in the Wall into the world of transcendental experience. If it terrified him, it would be unfortunate but probably salutary. If it brought him a brief but timeless illumination, so much the better. In either case the Angel might lose a little of the confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning and the consciousness of having read all the books. Near the end of his life Aquinas experienced Infused Contemplation. Thereafter he refused to go back to work on his unfinished book. Compared with this, everything he had read and argued about and written - Aristotle and the Sentences, the Questions, the Propositions, the majestic Summas-was no better than chaff or straw, For most intellectuals such a sit-down strike would be inadvisable, even morally wrong. But the Angelic Doctor had done more systematic reasoning than any twelve ordinary Angels, and was already ripe for death. He had earned the right, in those last months of his mortality, to turn away from merely symbolic straw and chaff to the bread of actual and substantial Fact. For Angels of a lower order and with better prospects of longevity, there must be a return to the straw. But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

--Huxley

Laboratory Notes (1943)

I suddenly became strangely inebriated. The external world
became changed as in a dream. Objects appeared to gain inrelief;
they assumed unusual dimensions; and colors became more glowing.
Even self-perception and the sense of time were changed. When the
eyes were closed, colored pictures flashed past in a quickly changing
kaleidoscope. After a few hours, the not unpleasant inebriation,
which had been experienced whilst I was fully conscious, disappeared. What had caused this condition?
--Albert Hofmann

"I HAVE BUT RECENTLY RETURNED FROM THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH. I'M RAPTUROUSLY BREATHING IN ALL THE ODORS AND ESSENCES OF LIFE. I'VE BEEN TO THE BRINK OF TOTAL OBLIVION. I REMEMBER AND FERMENT THE DESIRE TO REMEMBER EVERYTHING."

No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for

drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
--P. J. O'Rourke.

Searching for an exit

My pain is constant and sharp, but I do hope for a better world for everyone. In fact, I want my pain to serve as an example to others. I want everyone to comprehend and learn. I admit this because I had a catharsis. My punishment continues as I gain deeper knowledge of myself, I am a reflection to others and knowledge can be extracted from my telling.

Has this confession meant something?