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10 Jan 2006 @ 15:46, by shreepal. Philosophy
Instincts, impulses, desires and all sorts of cravings are the motive-force of creation. These are full of life-energy. Without them there is no reason for life to manifest in varied forms. Though the universe as a whole is an ordered apparatus, without these forces there was no scope for this ordered apparatus to come into being. All beauty, love, passion and urge to go ahead in life emanate from desires, and also all ugliness, hate and dark impulses have their origin in desires.
The raison d'être of the creation ranging from this universe to life in its highest form is desire. If there is no desire there is no reason for life to exist. In human beings, if all traces of desire are eradicated by persistant efforts, as various spiritual disciplines for gaining self-control and mastery over one-self prescribe, the man would not only die like a dry leaf comes off a branch of tree but he would not be born again.
But we find there is this universal creation and therefore there is a wish, a desire that made this creation possible. We associate desire with human being but this force of creation, the force of an urge, is not dependent on any human agency. Though this universal force of creation is received and identified in human beings as desire. This whole universe in its present ordered state is a creation (it is not the creation out of nothing but merely a transformation from one state to another in a cyclic manifestation) and therefore it is driven by desires. The whole Creation is a grand desire. Within this whole there are infinite numbers of self-sustaining and independent constituent parts of desires that are beautifully integrated into this whole. And, not only the grand desire but also these constituent desires that are integrated with this grand urge exist as a hard realty. These have their own world and own rules. These cravings are formed and transformed, and received and transmitted by living creatures, though the creatures themselves merely feel them a part of their own consciousness. Is it true to state that desires exist in universe independent of human beings who feel them? Also, as we have said earlier, is it true to state that thoughts exist in universe independent of human beings who are conscious of them? Let us give an analogy to understand the truth of the matter in this respect. We human beings perceive colours, beautiful and of various hues. Do these colours exist in universe independent of human beings? Yes, they exist. But they do not exist in the form of ‘colours’ as we perceive them. The colours are the corresponding sensations in the bain of human beings of particular frequencies of electromeganetic radiation. Colours exist in nature, though not as colours but a corresponding reality. Our universe is an apparatus that is full of order and logic, if there is a human being to search and sense these harmonious structure. Even if there is no human being there to sense and ‘certify’ this orderliness of universe, it still exists there as a hard reality. Our universe is a beautiful creation that is still continuing to grow. Our desires are its reflection in our consciousness and even if we are not there to feel them, they exist there.
The Desire body of human being is an independent formation and remains interwoven with the physical body during the life-time of human being. After his death, this body is released into a world of Desire-World. After this release, this Desire body remains emotionally attached to the dear ones of the dead person and does not wish to leave the company of these realatives. However, it is not always possible for this Desire body to get connected with the people living in the physical world. Under certain conditions, like receptivity and open willingness of the living dear ones, this body some times gets connected with them. Then, these persons are said to talk with the dead soul (but it is not soul, depending on the definition of soul). This body remains intact in its Desire World for a certain length of time, like we live for certain period in this physical world. Also, some time, this intact body is assimilated completely by a new born baby and then the child ‘remembers’ his past birth.
It is rebirth of desire body, that remained intact under suitable conditions, like strong desires, demands, revenge, love and innumerable other circumstances. The Desire bodies in the Desire-World, spend their appointed lives. Some times, they happen to come into contact with the physical world of human beings, under suitable conditions and they are perceived as ‘strange beings’ by human beings. These beings have real existence. Within ourselves, we all have our such beings. After death, our desire bodies are released into the world of these beings. On completion of its appointed period, the Desire body also gets disintegrated into its constituent elements. These disintegrated elements of desires are again absorbed by growing children in our physical world. Thus the cycle of transformation of desires goes on in nature.
In fact, we ‘receive’ desires, though we feel as if we are desiring. We human beings are meeting place of various forces, desires, thoughts etc. We not only receive desires from other sources, but also we generate and transmit them to others. It is a subject of complexity much more than the the problem of Grand Unifification of Fundamental forces of physical Nature. So far as it is relevant for human beings to understand and utilise their conclusions in day to day life, this subject has been beautifully dealt with by Lord Buddha and Lord Jesus Christ in their prescriptions.
Under certain conditions and in certain places, we sometimes get chocked with certain kind of desire, say desire of hate, or love, as we are simply receiving them as receivers.
As we possess desire body, the great persons (like Jesus Christ, Gautam Buddha etc.), have taught human beings to channelise desires in a particular direction to gain mastery over them and ultimately eradicate them (by dedicating them to certain ideal or other suitable means).
Like physical body, Desire Body also is an instrument of Eternal Element and exists only because there is this Eternal Element. The Desire body is never destroyed, it is simply disintegrated, recycled, absorbed, assimilated and transformed in cyclic manner. More >
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 9 Jan 2006 @ 18:35, by judih. Ideas, Creativity
when words have their own sense of urgency More >
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 7 Jan 2006 @ 12:57, by bapty. Social System Design
I have already posted an article on Leadership, Authority and Government. Now I want to emphasise criticism of the principle of leadership. More >
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 6 Jan 2006 @ 18:35, by jmarc. Recreation, Fun
"...Pull down the blinds,
bring fiddle and clarionet
That there be no foot silent in the room
Nor mouth from kissing,
nor from wine unwet;
Our Father Rosicross is in his tomb...."
-W.B. Yeats
"The Mountain Tomb"
I've been poking around
down in the MP3 blog mines,
picking out the good bits,
the strange bits,
and throwing them on
.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.the conveyor belt of the interweb,
in the hopes of
making obscure sounds
accessible to the masses
and myself.
Consider this
a record
of my day's pickings.
Enjoy. More >
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6 Jan 2006 @ 15:00, by rayon. Ideas, Creativity
This poem was written after the devastating storm of 1991 when thousands of trees were uprooted around England by the gales and storms. I went to Richmond Park then and some 6 months later, close to home then, and stared at the giant trees with their roots silouetted, all around me. It was a hollocaust. At the same time I had just interviewed the most contraversial experimental architect in Japan, Montozuma for whom I had to research the history of Japanese religious thinking, as his architecture was mythological and culturally symbolic. This architect was a Metabolist, obsesseed with constricting and repetitive factory like robotic shapes, which were hugely disturbing. More >
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 6 Jan 2006 @ 14:31, by jhs. Altered States
Let's kick off 2006 with an article for Polar Dynamics 2:
Adjacent Energy Emanations and Stray Polarities
In the model of the co-created Universe a Being shares its own Universe with that of other Beings. The portion which is shared is commonly called 'reality'.
Tell me who your friends are...
Beings assess the qualities of another Being via the perception of the energy emanations that appear to arrive from the direction of that other Being.
It is often difficult or even impossible to detect the true ownership of these emanations. Close associations with other Beings may lead to evaluations based on "who your friends are". This can be observed on all three major levels of existence, the superconscious realms of the spiritual forces (Orisha), the subconscious level of the "soul", and, of course, the mental, conscious, or "rational" level.
... More >
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 6 Jan 2006 @ 00:49, by ming. Ideas, Creativity
Edge asks the Annual Question to a bunch of smart people. Last year they asked "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" Here is what I wrote about that. A great question. But, in short, it was a bit surprising how narrow-minded a lot of the answers were. This year the question is "What is your dangerous idea?" An equally great question, trying to inspire people to give their outside-the-box thinking, their most potent ideas that might change everything. At least that's how I would like to define "dangerous" in this context. Something that can upset the status quo catastrophically, but in a good and interesting way. Not all of them use it like that.
A lot of the answers are interesting in various ways. But most of them are not very dangerous. They stay within very safe territory for scientists. And, actually, the underlying subtext is the same as last year for a lot of them. It is obvious that for a lot of these guys THE most dangerous ideas in the world are Religion, God and Consciousness. Meaning, they bend over backwards to insist that it is insane to believe in a God, and that it is a hopeless fantasy to imagine that you actually exist, as anything other than some chemical processes in a brain. And that what we really ought to accept, if we thought it through properly, is that everything is the result of unconscious evolutionary processes, we have no free will, and life is without meaning. Great.
There's a certain kind of circular reasoning that many materialist scientists suffer from, which is similar to religious reasoning like "God exists because the Bible says so, and the Bible is true because God wrote it." But here you find it in versions like John Horgan mentions in connection with his idea "We Have No Souls":"In his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, the late, great Francis Crick argued that the soul is an illusion perpetuated, like Tinkerbell, only by our belief in it." You know, like, "You don't really exist, you just think you do!". To some people that sounds really clever, and there's no Logic 101 that will make apparent the craziness of such argumentation. Who's the "we" who have beliefs? Who's the agency that wonders whether it exists or not? Who is it that is unsure whether it has free will or not? It is just an illusion? Just a chemical reaction in a brain? Who's concluding that? Is it just turtles all the way down?
There are, however, some nice entries from people who don't just fall into the same circular reasoning trap. Like, Rudy Rucker, with the idea "Mind is a universally distributed quality"Panpsychism. Each object has a mind. Stars, hills, chairs, rocks, scraps of paper, flakes of skin, molecules — each of them possesses the same inner glow as a human, each of them has singular inner experiences and sensations.
I'm quite comfortable with the notion that everything is a computation. But what to do about my sense that there's something numinous about my inner experience? Panpsychism represents a non-anthropocentric way out: mind is a universally distributed quality.
Yes, the workings of a human brain are a deterministic computation that could be emulated by any universal computer. And, yes, I sense more to my mental phenomena than the rule-bound exfoliation of reactions to inputs: this residue is the inner light, the raw sensation of existence. But, no, that inner glow is not the exclusive birthright of humans, nor is it solely limited to biological organisms.
Note that panpsychism needn't say that universe is just one mind. We can also say that each object has an individual mind. One way to visualize the distinction between the many minds and the one mind is to think of the world as a stained glass window with light shining through each pane. The world's physical structures break the undivided cosmic mind into a myriad of small minds, one in each object. There are some folks who actually can engage in a bit of self-criticism as scientists, and think about where scientific beliefs really come from. Like Marcelo Gleiser in "Can Science Explain Itself?":What if this is all bogus? What if we look at science as a narrative, a description of the world that has limitations based on its structure? The constants of Nature are the letters of the alphabet, the laws are the grammar rules and we build these descriptions through the guiding hand of the so-called scientific method. Period. To say things are this way because otherwise we wouldn't be here to ask the question is to miss the point altogether: things are this way because this is the story we humans tell based on the way we see the world and explain it. Or, Thomas Metzinger, in "The Forbidden Fruit Intuition":Is there a set of questions which are dangerous not on grounds of ideology or political correctness, but because the most obvious answers to them could ultimately make our conscious self-models disintegrate? Can one really believe in determinism without going insane? Some present the revolutionary idea that scientists might just need to actually catch up to what science already has established, like "Carlo Rovelli" in "What the physics of the 20th century says about the world might in fact be true". You know, if quantum mechanics actually were how we experienced the world to work, rather than just some bizarre math equations.
Stephen Kosslyn goes the furthest in "A Science of the Divine", to present a way to reconcile science and religion:Here's an idea that many academics may find unsettling and dangerous: God exists. And here's another idea that many religious people may find unsettling and dangerous: God is not supernatural, but rather part of the natural order. Simply stating these ideas in the same breath invites them to scrape against each other, and sparks begin to fly. To avoid such conflict, Stephen Jay Gould famously argued that we should separate religion and science, treating them as distinct "magisteria." But science leads many of us to try to understand all that we encounter with a single, grand and glorious overarching framework. In this spirit, let me try to suggest one way in which the idea of a "supreme being" can fit into a scientific worldview. There's a surprising entry from Michael Nesmith, you know, from "The Monkees", who eloquently argues that "Existence is Non-Time, Non-Sequential, and Non-Objective", and I think I agree.
Several people talk along the lines of Andy Clark's "The quick-thinking zombies inside us" about how most of our decision making, our "free will", really happens at a sub-conscious level, in ways we don't at all understand, so we fool ourselves concerning how much in control we are.
Several people argue for free market economies. Get governments out of the way, and let the invisible hand of the free market sort things out.
Which is an underlying theme here. Humans having figured out that there are complex mechanisms that make things happen. Complex mechanisms that make our decisions. Complex mechanisms that carry on the evolution of life. Complex mechanisms that make economies work. More complex than we simple humans easily can understand. More smart and efficient than any of us consciously can be.
But at the same time we here have a number of well-respected big names in science who claim that they've understood all of that well enough to conclude decisively that these complex mechanisms that are smarter than us aren't intelligent at all. They're just simple random processes with no meaning or purpose or intelligence, that came together completely randomly for no good reason. Confused? Well, you should be. You need to become good at circular reasoning to explain that away.
The real dangerous idea, which most people with scientific credentials apparently are afraid of thinking, is, in my words:
Life the universe and everything is all one system, which is self-organizing, intelligent and eternal. There's no outside to it. Nothing is separate from it. Whatever happens inside of it happens because it is in its nature to happen. It has no outside meaning, but it can create meaning. Its latent qualities might or might not get expressed, but when they do, it is because they're there. So, if something finds itself having self-reflective consciousness, it is because the whole system possesses the potential quality of self-reflective consciousness. Duh. If oxygen and hydrogen mix and become water, that's because they already had the property of being able to do so. If something evolves, it is because the system knows how to evolve. If something is alive, it is because the system is alive. If somewhere in the system time and space exists, and at some "time" a scientist evolves and he decides that he has understood it all and it is all really dumb and random and meaningless and consciousness only exists in brains, except for that it doesn't really exist, well, he's right, makes no difference. It is all natural. Luckily it isn't that scientist, or some guy with a grey beard on a mountain, who's responsible for keeping the whole system working, or it really wouldn't last long. The whole system is much smarter than any brain that comes along at some point and has a short-lived fit of self-importance. Doesn't matter what you call it. You can call it God, or Universe, or Physics, or Nature, Evolution or Mind or Consciousness. It is you, buddy! If you think not, you've become a bit confused by derivatives of your own abstract thoughts. Take a step back and touch Reality. Be conscious. Be very conscious! But don't get cocky. That little point of self-reflective awareness that you identify with, and which is enough to spin yourself into circles, is way, way, way smaller and more ephemeral than the big you who is all of existence, all of evolving spacetime, any dimension, any physical phenomenon, any potential phenomenon, all simultaneously, all forever. It is a lot smarter at running things than your little localized conscious focal point. You're not in control. But if you catch a ride on natural law, and go with the flows, you can go far, very quickly. Because the system works really well. It is self-regenerating. It is open source.
Well, that was my rant. But that maybe doesn't give you anything very practical to do with it. A truly dangerous worldchanging idea would be a meme you let loose, and it just breaks down the old fixed structures, and it guides the self-organization of something new and better. They don't come along all that often, but when they do, it doesn't really matter much what you think about it, as it pretty much happens by itself. It might be time for some ideas that actually change how we perceive ourselves and the world, where nothing will be the same again.
Lots of people have commented on the Edge dangerous ideas thing. Like, I just noticed Dave Pollard's Blinded by Science. He wasn't very impressed either with the dangerousness of those ideas, and he has some alternative suggestions. More >
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 5 Jan 2006 @ 14:00, by bapty. Social System Design
Human world society is clearly insane.
There are many attempts to better the world by changing the hearts of people but leaving the basic structure of society the same.
It is vital that structure and heart be changed at the same time, for we cannot be moral in an amoral framework of life More >
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4 Jan 2006 @ 20:48, by vaxen. Government, Public Sector
THE VISION OF THE FRIENDLY SOCIETY
While the politicians of the republic think up new crimes to charge Americans with, the Nationalists are pushing ahead with a positive agenda. Americans are acculturated to being pitted against each other, so the idea of a united friendly society is a fundamentally alien notion. However, anyone who brings up the possibility that a less hostile social system is even possible is laughed out of the dialogue by a cynical press, under the influence of a cynical bureaucracy.
The biggest fear of the bureaucracy of the republic is that the American people will find a common cause, in which they will find the strength to retire the republic. To postpone that inevitable impulse towards a genuine national unity, the bureaucracy constantly seeds the various ethnic groups that collectively constitute the "American people," with suspicions of each other. Often the very programs that are designed to create rivalries and jealousies carry such lofty sounding names as Affirmative Action and Desegregation. This is not an attack on the noble ideals underlying Affirmative Action or Desegregation, it is rather an acknowledgment that the programs of the republic are named in a misleading fashion, so as to distract the illiterate masses from the underlying strategy of divide and rule. More >
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 4 Jan 2006 @ 17:09, by silviamar. Ideas, Creativity
A little and simple poem to start the new year. Bring a smile to your face, and it will be embraced by your soul :-)
More >
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