Accordiing to The Atlantic, Jason Silva is a ''full-time walking, talking TEDTalk." Being exposed to his ideas has, for me, been akin to a Zen type of immediate satori enlightenment. Finally the universe and everything in it begins to make some sort of cosmic sense.
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I had been here in Thailand for some time when the first shipment of my books arrived. Precious cargo indeed. Many, like nomadic children, had followed me from my home in California to my new home in the state of Veracruz, Mexico. Then more than a decade later they had reversed the process and patiently waited in California for eventual shipment to Thailand, on the other side of the planet.
But one book in particular carried its own special secrets.
In 1973 I purchased “In My Own Way”, the autobiography of Alan Watts. During the 60’s and 70’s I lived in Mill Valley’s Blithedale Canyon, on the densely forested slopes of Mount Tamalpais. It was there on one of my evening walks that I first met Alan, and later had the pleasure of having a number of conversations with him. We had a number of things in common, not the least of which was a mutual near obsession with oriental culture and Zen Buddhism in particular. He had written extensively about Zen, and in mid-50’s I had spent a year as a Buddhist monk at the Soto Zen Eiheiji Temple in western Japan.
As with many of my books I had underlined favorite passages and made specific page notations in the back of the book. Some years later I discovered that this particular treasure had disappeared. And when I attempted to replace it, I was informed that it was no longer in print.
More than 20 years later, in 1997, during the summer vacation from the university in Mexico where I was teaching, I visited friends in Sebastopol, California. While poking around in a used bookstore I ecstatically discovered a used, slightly battered copy of ‘In My Own Way’. As I rapidly flipped through the pages it smelled slightly musty, but pleasant.
Later that evening I opened to the familiar last chapter ‘The Sound of Rain’ and discovered on page 422 that someone else had been taken by, and marked a particular passage which I had encountered during my reading many years before. In reference to the chanting of Zen sutras Alan had written:
“For the antiquity and mystery of those gongs and the chant is not so much from a backward direction in time as from a vast depth inside the present, from a level of my own here-and-now being, as ancient as life itself. … Why do Buddhist rituals and symbols evoke in me a sensation of the mysterious and the marvelous far more enthralling than any Christian equivalent, more even than astronomical revelations about the scope of distant galaxies?”
And at the bottom of the page there was the penned note, “Remember this?” It was in my handwriting and was in reference to one of our conversations. It was at that moment, like the flash of a mini-Satori, that I realized that though I now lived in Mexico thousands of miles distant, and countless years had intervened, I had somehow wandered into a previously unknown bookstore some 50 miles from where I had peviously liived and lost this book and encountered the very same book that I had lost an untold number of years before.
Of course when I found it at the bookstore earlier in the day, I could have opened to the inside cover where my name was written as bold as life itself. I can still sense Alan, who loved a humorous story or good joke, slyly and enigmatically, from whatever realm he might now be inhabiting, smiling down at me.
[a reposting of my 2004 article at the insistence of a bibliophile friend]
I recall the pleasure with which I discovered my first TED Talk on Youtube. At last something substancial and worth watching on YouTube.
TED, globally known as a showcase of ideas, hosts “fascinating thinkers and doers” who occupy a stage for 18 minutes or less to share their ideas with a global audience. Started in 1984, TED began as “a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader.”
TED’s mission statement reads:
“We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we’re building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other.”
Imagine my dismay when recently I disovered that two TED talks had been posted, and then removed from YouTube.
TED, the popular conference organizer, recently censured two contributors for their TEDx talks, and cancelled an upcoming TEDx event due to the participation of two others. The four share an interest in the possibility that consciousness extends beyond the brain. In an open letter, Ken Jordan, Reality Sdandwich's publisher and editorial director, invited TED's curator, Chris Anderson, to an online forum to explain his action.
I may, or may not, agree with Dr. Sheldrake's assertion that 'consciousness extends beyond the brain', but more importantly I feel that I have the right to make my own decision about his view of science.
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake's TEDx talk censored by the 'scientific board' of TED and removed from YouTube. It was later reposted by someone not associated with TED Talks.
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Dr. Rupert Sheldrake talks about his banned TED talk on Skeptiko with Alex Tsakiris
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"Christopher Michael Langan (born c. 1952) is an American autodidact whose IQ was reported by 20/20 and other media sources to have been measured at between 195 and 210. Billed by some media sources as "the smartest man in America", he rose to prominence in 1999 while working as a bouncer on Long Island. Langan has developed his own "theory of the relationship between mind and reality" which he calls the "Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)"
Mr. Langan lives a simple life on a horse ranch in Missouri with his wife and numerous animals.
Langan has said that he does not belong to any religious denomination, explaining that he "can't afford to let [his] logical approach to theology be prejudiced by religious dogma", yet he does believe in God. He has stated that that "we all exist in what can be called "the Mind of God", and that our individual minds are parts of God's Mind. They are not as powerful as God's Mind, for they are only parts thereof; yet, they are directly connected to the greatest source of knowledge and power that exists. This connection of our minds to the Mind of God, which is like the connection of parts to a whole, is what we sometimes call the soul or spirit, and it is the most crucial and essential part of being human".
Live Moderated Chat: Christopher Langan
Interview with Chris Langan - Part 1 of 3
Hypatia [ca. AD 350–370] was the daughter of Theon of Alexandria, who was a teacher of mathematics with the Museum of Alexandria in Egypt. A center of Greek intellectual and cultural life, the Museum included many independent schools and the great library of Alexandria.
Hypatia studied with her father, and with many others including Plutarch the Younger. She herself taught at the Neoplatonist school of philosophy. She became the salaried director of this school in 400. She probably wrote on mathematics, astronomy and philosophy, including about the motions of the planets, about number theory and about conic sections.
Hypatia corresponded with and hosted scholars from others cities. Synesius, Bishop of Ptolemais, was one of her correspondents and he visited her frequently. Hypatia was a popular lecturer, drawing students from many parts of the empire.
From the little historical information about Hypatia that survives, it appears that she invented the plane astrolabe, the graduated brass hydrometer and the hydroscope, with Synesius of Greece, who was her student and later colleague.
Hypatia dressed in the clothing of a scholar or teacher, rather than in women's clothing. She moved about freely, driving her own chariot, contrary to the norm for women's public behavior. She exerted considerable political influence in the city.
Orestes, the governor of Alexandria, like Hypatia, was a pagan (non-Christian). Orestes was an adversary of the new Christian bishop, Cyril, a future saint. Orestes, according to the contemporary accounts, objected to Cyril expelling the Jews from the city, and was murdered by Christian monks for his opposition.
Cyril probably objected to Hypatia on a number of counts: She represented heretical teachings, including experimental science and pagan religion. She was an associate of Orestes. And she was a woman who didn't know her place. Cyril's preaching against Hypatia is said to have been what incited a mob led by fanatical Christian monks in 415 to attack Hypatia as she drove her chariot through Alexandria. They dragged her from her chariot and, according to accounts from that time, stripped her, killed her, stripped her flesh from her bones, scattered her body parts through the streets, and burned some remaining parts of her body in the library of Caesareum.
Hypatia's students fled to Athens, where the study of mathematics flourished after that. The Neoplatonic school she headed continued in Alexandria until the Arabs invaded in 642.
When the library of Alexandria was burned by the Arab conquerors, used as fuel for baths, the works of Hypatia were destroyed. We know her writings today through the works of others who quoted her -- even if unfavorably -- and a few letters written to her by contemporaries.
Hypatia and Alexandria 1/5
Hypatia and Alexandria 2/5
Hypatia and Alexandria 3/5
Hypatia and Alexandria 4/5
Hypatia and Alexandria 5/5
This week the New Yorker presents a lengthy profile of Lana and Andy Wachowski. those award winning filmmakers who produced the Matrix films, and the forthcoming 'Cloud Atlas'.
Beyond the Matrix
"The Wachowskis travel to even more mind-bending realms.
On the monitor screen, Tom Hanks’s eyes, in extreme closeup, flickered through a complicated sequence of emotions: hatred, fear, anger, doubt. “Cut!” Lana Wachowski shouted. The crew on Stage 9 at Babelsberg Studio, near Berlin, erupted in a din of professional efficacy, preparing for the next shot, while Hanks returned to his chair to sip coffee from an NPR cup. Lana and her brother, Andy, who are best known for writing and directing the “Matrix” trilogy, were shooting “Cloud Atlas,” an adaptation of David Mitchell’s 2004 best-selling novel of the same name.
The novel has six story lines, and the Wachowskis and their close friend the German director Tom Tykwer, with whom they’d written the script, had divided them up. They were shooting at Babelsberg, using the same actors, who shuttled between soundstages, but Tykwer had an unplanned day off. Halle Berry had broken her foot while on location in Mallorca and he needed to wait for her full recovery to shoot a chase scene. And now there was another problem: the actor Ralph Riach, who played a small but crucial role in one of the story lines that Tykwer was working on, had fallen ill and been hospitalized, and his state was progressively worsening. Tykwer had been on the phone with Riach, and the prognosis was, at best, unpredictable. Tykwer, with a bad cold and a large scarf around his neck which resembled a Renaissance millstone collar, had stopped by the Wachowskis’ set to discuss the situation. . . . . "
...“Cloud Atlas’ is a twenty-first-century novel,” Lana said. “It represents a midpoint between the future idea that everything is fragmented and the past idea that there is a beginning, a middle, and an end.” As she spoke, she was screwing and unscrewing two halves of some imaginary thing—its future and its past—in her hands. If the movie worked, she continued, it would allow the filmmakers to “reconnect to that feeling we had when we were younger, when we saw films that were complex and mysterious and ambiguous. You didn’t know everything instantly.”
The film opens on October 26.
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Bill Moyers: Back With a New Series
"Dear Friends,
You already may have heard that I'd be coming back in January with a new series on the public television station nearest you. But you may not have heard exactly why. It's not just that I lack retirement skills, as my wife and co-editor, Judith, keeps reminding me. Or that the squeaky rocking chair on the front porch got on my nerves. I'm coming back because in tumultuous times like these I relish the company of people who try to make sense of the tumult. These are the people I'll bring to our new broadcast, Moyers & Company.
Journalism has long been for me a continuing course in adult education. Given what's happening in this country, it's time to sign up for more classes. The lack of civility and common sense that has paralyzed our democracy, the vast economic and social inequality that sends both left and right raging into the streets, the corrosive influence of money in politics - we're in a tailspin with little hope for a course correction from our elected leadership or corporate-dominated media. The need for voices of reason, simple and eloquent, has rarely been stronger. ,,,"
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One item that many place implicit faith in is the "Big Bang Theory," which tells us that the universe began 15-20 billion years ago from a single point. Who can prove to us the reality of a phenomena that took place tens of billions of years ago? There's no instant replay when we're dealing with life and time. We can't be shown what happened that far in the past. There may be some evidence and reason to believe that this is how it happened, but at the end of the day we can't know for sure and that's where 'faith' comes in
In an article, in the U.S. News and World Report, physicist Roger Penrose theorized that the Big Bang might be one in a cycle of such events, suggesting that the universe has had multiple existences. This is common knowledge to one familiar with Vedic philosophy and cosmology, which very clearly indicates that the universe has had many births and deaths.
The centuries-old wisdom of the Vedic texts doesn't stop there. They claim that our universe is just one of many universes, a concept entertained by modern science and referred to as "the multiverse theory." The description given is that our universe is one mustard seed in a bag full of a practically uncountable number of mustard seeds.
"Hinduism is the only relgion whose timescales corespond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology. A night of Brahama is 8.64 billion years long - about one half of the time since the Big Bang." It is said that men may not be the dreams of the gods, but rathere that the gods are the dreams of men."
Carl Sagan talks about "the gods." This clip is from Carl Sagan's Cosmos, episode 10, "The Edge of Forever."
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What is possibilianism?
"Possibilianism is a philosophy which rejects both the idiosyncratic claims of traditional theism and the positions of certainty in atheism in favor of a middle, exploratory ground. .....
"Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I'm hoping to define a new position -- one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story."
An adherent of possibilianism is called a possibilian. The possibilian perspective is distinguished from agnosticism in that it consists of an active exploration of novel possibilities and an emphasis on the necessity of holding multiple positions at once if there is no available data to privilege one over the others. Possibilianism reflects the scientific temperament of creativity, testing, and tolerance for multiple ideas. ...."
As frequent visitors to his site well know my personal position regarding 'religion vs science' has always been in favor of science. However I have never felt that I could, with any certainty, comfortably call myself an atheist. Would I consider labeling myself a 'Posibilian'???
TEDxHouston - Dr. David Eagleman
Dr. Eagleman holds joint appointments in the Departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at the Baylor College of Medicine. His areas of scientific expertise include time perception, vision, synesthesia, and the intersection of neuroscience with the legal system. He directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action, and is the Founder and Director of Baylor College of Medicine's Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. Dr. Eagleman has written several neuroscience books, including Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia and Dethronement: The Secret Life of the Unconscious Brain. He has also written an internationally bestselling book of literary fiction, Sum, which was named a Best Book of 2009 by Barnes and Noble, New Scientist, and the Chicago Tribune. Dr. Eagleman has written for the New York Times, Discover Magazine, Slate, and New Scientist, and he appears regularly on National Public Radio to discuss both science and literature.
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I can't remember when I first encountered the works of Jorge Luis Borges, since for countless years I have felt that they have always been a part of my being. As much as I am me, Borges and his incredible writing is an integral part of that persona.
He was Argentina’s favorite son, one of the great South American writers of the last century (along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa), and the winner of 46 national and international literary prizes.
Borges was the master of the postmodern short story.
"The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941) presents the idea of forking paths through networks of time, none of which is the same, all of which are equal. Borges uses the recurring image of "a labyrinth that folds back upon itself in infinite regression" so we "become aware of all the possible choices we might make."[65] The forking paths have branches to represent these choices that ultimately lead to different endings. Borges saw man's search for meaning in a seemingly infinite universe as fruitless and instead uses the maze as a riddle for time, not space. [Wikipedia].
By the late 1950s, he had become completely blind. The irony of his blindness as a writer and lover of the written word was expressed in 'Seven Nights':
Nadie rebaje a lágrima o reproche
esta declaración de la maestría
de Dios, que con magnífica ironía
me dio a la vez los libros y la noche.
No one should read self-pity or reproach
Into this statement of the majesty
Of God; who with such splendid irony,
Granted me books and blindness at one touch
Borges was born in 1899, and to celebrate his 100th birthday (though he died in 1986), Philippe Molins directed the documentary, Jorge Luis Borges: The Mirror Man.
The film’s major strength is that it’s a bit of everything – part biography, part literary criticism, part hero-worship, part book reading, and part psychology. But most importantly, it is Borges.
Jorge Luis Borges: The Mirror Man - 1/6
The Modern Word, a favorite site for browsing, has a large section devoted to Borges.
