Robert W. Gray has formatted the entirety of R. Buckminster Fuller?s Synergetics into web form, offering quick linking to indexed scenarios and figures. Each section can also be downloaded in pdf form.
via FutureFeeder
“The Greeks had a word for it,” we used to say, when stumped for the precise way to describe something. Now, thanks to Adam Jacot de Boinod and his collection of bizarre foreign words, we discover that the Malays, Hawaiians and Sumatrans had, and still have, words for it too. There is a word for the fold of skin under your chin (alang – it’s Nicaraguan). There is a word for the ring you put in the nose of a calf in order to stop it suckling its mother (oorxax, and, as you know, it’s from the Khakas region of Siberia). There is, thank God, a word that sums up that annoying thing you do when your taxi is 20 minutes late and you’re too restless to wait for the doorbell to ring. It’s iktsuarpok – “to go outside often to see if someone is coming.”
Cultures live and die by where they choose to live their emotional lives. Dying cultures dream of the glories of the past and yearn to travel backwards, reclaiming the safety of a mythical golden age. Living cultures look forward to building futures better than any past they?ve ever seen. Our first choice after 9/11 and the corporate crash of the early 21st Century was to look backward. We feared the next bit of bad news and asked the wrong questions-who?s accountable, who?s to blame, who can we pin our woes on, and who can we cast out and shame.
We should have asked what lessons can we learn, what can we invent, what can we upgrade and create? What new twists of culture, of technology, of insight and technique will help us leapfrog over our assailants and carry us forward toward new ways of being? How can we take the values of our Founding Fathers to even higher peaks? How can we loft the best that?s in us into the next two centuries?
Welcome to a future where everybody’s happy. Independent thought and feelings have been banished and genetic engineering, brain washing and drugs keep the population docile and comfortable. But several characters dare to ask the question, “Wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in your own way?”
Huxley has isolated the fundamental conflict in Human History—the conflicting impulses towards Security and Freedom. In the Brave New World, the impulse towards Security has won and there is no Freedom.
The problem for advocates of Freedom is that it includes the freedom to be unhappy. For this reason, many find it unattractive and the fight for Freedom is always an uphill struggle. At the time that Huxley and George Orwell were writing, it seemed entirely possible that Socialism, Communism & Fascism and all of the ism’s that promise Security would vanquish Freedom. We are fortunate to live at a time when Freedom is resurgent, but Brave New World is a cautionary tale about what’s at stake in the struggle.
Final novel by Hermann Hesse, published in two volumes in 1943 in German as Das Glasperlenspiel, and sometimes translated as Magister Ludi. The book is an intricate bildungsroman about humanity’s eternal quest for enlightenment and for synthesis of the intellectual and the participatory life. Set in the 23rd century, the novel purports to be a biography of Josef Knecht (“servant” in German), who has been reared in Castalia, the remote place his society has provided for the intellectual elite to grow and flourish. Since childhood, Knecht has been consumed with mastering the Glass Bead Game, which requires a synthesis of aesthetics and scientific arts, such as mathematics, music, logic, and philosophy. This he achieves in adulthood, becoming a Magister Ludi (Master of the Game).
Psychedelic Information Theory: Shamanism in the Age of Reason is a landmark text in the field of psychedelic study. Written by James Kent, former Editor of Psychedelic Illuminations and Publisher of Trip Magazine, Psychedelic Information Theory spans the chasm between science and mysticsm and fully deconstructs the magic of the psychedelic experience in a way that promises to satisfy both skeptics and true believers alike. James Kent has been studying psychedelics, mysticism, neuroscience, and psychedelic culture for over 15 years, and now presents the culmination of his research in one epic volume. In addition to the most complete neurologic deconstruction of various psychedelic mind states ever compiled, Kent also provides an exhaustive analysis of the way information is generated within the psychedelic state, and how that information transcends the personal mind and influences human culture at large. Finally, Psychedelic Information Theory examines the scientific basis of traditional shamanic powers and techniques, and frames a new model for shamanic practice and clinical therapy in the modern world. Destined to become a classic within the field, Psychedelic Information Theory blows the lid off the psychedelic experience and demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt the impact pscyhedelics continue to have on global culture. If you ever wished for a single book that described exactly how psychedelics worked and just why they are so important, then this is the book you have been waiting for!
1. Live Consciously
This requires us to be fully in the present moment. And for most, this takes a bit of practice, because many of us are conditioned to disown the here and now, to survive what we have thought that we cannot handle.
2. Accept Yourself
Yes. You have flaws and attributes. You also have the opportunity to enhance who you are, by accepting everything about yourself. In fact, the only way to enhance who you are is to accept yourself.
3. Take Responsibility for Your Experiences
Decide and affirm what I will and will not experience. This is quite liberating not only to myself, but also to my interlocutor.
4. Assert Who You Are
Honor what you think, feel, believe, need and want. Yes, for many readers this may be a challenge. But the results of accepting this challenge are wonderfully fulfilling.
All human beings, all persons who reach adulthood in the world today are programmed biocomputers. None of us can escape our own nature as programmable entities. Literally, each of us may be our programs, nothing more, nothing less.
Despite the great varieties of programs available, most of us have a limited set of programs. Some of these are built in. In the simpler forms of life the programs were mostly built in from genetic codes to fully formed adultly reproducing organisms. The patterns of function, of actionreaction were determined by necessities of survival, of adaptation to slow environmental changes and of passing on the code to descendants.
Eventually the cerebral cortex appeared as an expanding new highlevel computer controlling the structurally lower levels of the nervous system, the lower builtin programs. For the first time learning and its faster adaptation to a rapidly changing environment began to appear. Further, as this new cortex expanded over several millions of years, a critical size cortex was reached. At this level of structure, a new capability emerged: learning to learn.
After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in – ? global embrace, abolishing both space ace and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man – the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be “a good thing” is a question that admits of a wide solution. There is little possibility of answering such questions about the extensions of man without considering all of them together. Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex.
The role of the media in contemporary politics forces us to ask what kind of a world and what kind of a society we want to live in, and in particular in what sense of democracy do we want this to be a democratic society? Let me begin by counter-posing two different conceptions of democracy. One conception of democracy has it that a democratic society is one in which the public has the means to participate in some meaningful way in the management of their own affairs and the means of information are open and free. If you look up democracy in the dictionary you’ll get a definition something like that.
THIS BOOK explores an unrecognized but mighty taboo?our tacit conspiracy to ignore who, or what, we really are. Briefly, the thesis is that the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East?in particular the central and germinal Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. This hallucination underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man’s natural environment and, consequently, its eventual destruction.
We are therefore in urgent need of a sense of our own existence which is in accord with the physical facts and which overcomes our feeling of alienation from the universe. For this purpose I have drawn on the insights of Vedanta, stating them, however, in a completely modern and Western style?so that this volume makes no attempt to be a textbook on or introduction to Vedanta in the ordinary sense. It is rather a cross-fertilization of Western science with an Eastern intuition.
Shamanism, humankind’s oldest spiritual and healing tradition, is in many cultures dominated by men, and Western skeptics often debunk its effectiveness.
In a groundbreaking new book published last month by Random House, however, Barbara Tedlock, professor of anthropology, challenges the historical hegemony of the male shamanic tradition, restores women to their essential place in the history of spirituality and celebrates their continuing role in the worldwide resurgence of shamanism.
Tedlock’s book, “The Woman in a Shaman’s Body,” also presents empirical studies that find common shamanic practices to be very effective in medical terms and discusses why this is the case.
Imagine trying to make sense of Timothy Leary’s eight neurological circuits, G.I. Gurdjieff’s self-observations exercises, Alfred Korzybski’s general semantics, Aleister Crowley’s magical theorems, and the several disciplines of Yoga; not to mention Christian Science, relativity, quantum mechanics and many other approaches to understanding the world around us. That is exactly what Wilson does in Prometheus Rising. In short, it is a book about how the human mind works and what you can do to make the most of yours. Readers have been known to get angry, cry, laugh, and even change their entire lives. Practical techniques to break free of your “reality tunnels.”
Get your free pdf here.
CybDemite Ramez Naam’s book More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement was released this week, and it has been getting great reviews in, for instance, the LA Times, the Washington Examiner and NuSapiens Review. And MTH reached 1000 on Amazon this week. Excellent news for progressive transhumanism. NuSapiens has also posted a great interview with Mez:
NuSapiens: Part of your argument in More Than Human is that these technologies need to be available to everyone, not only people living in certain nations, and not only the rich. What steps can society take to ensure equal access to enhancement?
Ramez Naam: Really there are two key things. The first is to keep these technologies legal. One of the best ways to limit something to the rich is to ban it. When you do that, you create a black market. On the black market, prices rise, quality and safety suffer, and the legal punishments tend to get applied far more frequently to the poor than the rich. This is what we see in the War on Drugs today, or what we saw in Prohibition in the 20s.
The second is to recognize enhancement technologies as investments in the most valuable natural resource we have – people. Governments support these sorts of investments already. We give out scholarships and guarantee student loans. We provide free primary and secondary schooling. We immunize poor children for free. All of those steps actually pay for themselves and more in the long run – they prevent later health care costs or they produce citizens who contribute more to the economy after they’ve grown up and entered the work force.
In the US alone, a 1% reduction in health care costs would save almost $200 billion over 10 years. And a 1% productivity boost would earn the country $1 TRILLION over 10 years. If we could achieve that by subsidizing the cost of using biotech to slow the aging rate or boost mental capacity, wouldn’t it be worth it?
via CybDem
Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new form of journalism in books like ``Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’’ fatally shot himself Sunday night at his Aspen-area home, his son said. He was 67.
``Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family,’’ Juan Thompson said in a statement released to the Aspen Daily News.
Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, a personal friend of Thompson, confirmed the death to the News. Sheriff’s officials did not return calls to The Associated Press late Sunday.