|
11 Apr 2004 @ 18:07, by weneedadream. Ideas, Creativity
I wish to follow my "Easter Tears" poem with an "Easter Hope" poem. It is part of a dream and quest that emerged out of my despair. The complete dream will be unveiled in a new website later this month.
While initially targetting a single nation, it is intended to help our entire world transmute our worst nightmares into the dream of all time.
May it give you hope,
love,
and resurrection. More >
|
|
|
11 Apr 2004 @ 01:33, by ida. Visual Arts, Graphics
Vriji 2, Mixed Media, Quidnovi
More >
|
|
|
10 Apr 2004 @ 03:52, by magical_melody. Spirituality
I find it interesting how many of the modern religious and spiritual holidays and rituals were taken from the early Pagan traditions.
I have found the resurrection or ascension energy of Easter holiday to always be a profoundly powerful time, and so I celebrate it because my being resonates with the celebration of new life and the opportunities to transform anything that limits that life from expressing more fully and more joyously! More >
|
|
|
9 Apr 2004 @ 22:32, by skookum. Ideas, Creativity
More Than I Remember
By Marissa A Spencer
There before me was the Crystal City
All flashes, turns and shimmering flame
I joined the robed celebrants along the path
Communing with the fires of heaven’s wisdom
A tangible peace walked beside me
Taking my hand into the wellspring of love
A sweet sound rose from the sparkling air
Sacred choral chimes turning into light
I came upon a garden of prisms and fountains
Crystal floral harmonies tinkled softly
Watching the light play upon the water
I sat. Within me a growing sense of belonging
Was this my home, long since forgotten?
The spiraling towers rose above me.
I could not recall, yet part of me feels
That I know more than I remember
© April 9, 2004 By Marissa A Spencer More >
|
|
|
9 Apr 2004 @ 17:27, by ming. Futurism
Also posted at FutureHi.
A group of creative futurist thinkers tried to imagine the year 3000 within the framework of a conversation. It is somewhat interesting, I think, but mostly because the results are rather pathetic. Despite trying not to, they mostly end up imagining a little more of the same. As they mention, the people in the year 1000 would have made completely ridiculous predictions of the year 2000. They probably didn't even have a concept of "progress". Now, at least, we expect that lots of things will change in the future. But we have a hard time getting over just imagining a gradual evolution of the things we know. How would government be changed, and economy, and education, and shopping? Who says we'll have any? Anyway, one of the better statements from that conversation is this one from Bart Kosko:"What is Heaven? Heaven's a place where you can create worlds at will, and the ideal Heaven is where you run the whole thing yourself. The current means of getting to Heaven involve various supernatural systems for which, at this point, there's no scientific evidence. So I think we can reduce Heaven to an engineering project, which we're doing. The demand for Heaven is great--witness the desire of every human heart, from the people who built the ancient pyramids to modern society, to live beyond one's biologically allotted time. Our plan is ultimately to transfer human consciousness from the brain to bits of information in a computer chip, or some other kind of computational medium, so that just by thinking--that act of volition--we'll be able to create our own personal world. And I think the first stage of Heaven will be the sensory world, and beyond that I think we'd hit a higher, spiritual plane. Despite that I think that the project of transferring human consciousness into a computer chip is silly and misguided, I think he's got a good angle on it.
What will make all the difference is the disruptive events and technologies. I think there will be a whole number of those way before the year 3000, each of which will change everything. Like:
Open extraterrestrial contact. Thinking that extraterretrials are only folks we might meet once we've painstakingly developed intrastellar travel after hundreds of years is a little naive. They might well show themselves much earlier in the game. And nothing will be the same once we're dealing openly with races that are millions of years ahead of us in development. I'd guess we'd have joined the galactic federation long time before the year 3000.
Self-replicating nano-tech. If we can construct anything material simply by laying out the blueprint of how to make it, that changes everything. All stuff will be free, for one thing, and economy as we know it is no longer meaningful. Neither will a lot of the struggles we now have with the environment.
Multiple Parallel Universes. Once we realize conclusively and demonstrably that there are multiple versions of our universe, a close to infinite amount, and we can actually interact with them - everything changes. Quantum Physics is no longer just a bizarre, but interesting set of equations that theoretical physicists can play with.
Conscious Collective Intelligence. What if and when we realize conclusively that there are higher orders of intelligence than ours. My bet is not on artificial intelligence, but on the manifestation of collective natural intelligence. E.g. we discover that humanity has an intelligence that is way beyond our individual intelligences, but which includes all of our minds. And that intelligence starts acting more noticably and decisively. We can't quite think of ourselves the same after that. The Internet might possibly supply the initial wiring that helps this happen.
Virtual Reality more real than Material Reality. One way or another we'll develop immersive virtual reality that we can step into and which addresses all of our senses. The Holodeck. It might involve direct connections with our neurology and our brains, or it might be done with projections and sensory feedback on the outside. Either way, it will change our society dramatically if it suddenly is possible and practical for lots of people to live most of our life within virtual realities of our choice.
Information Singularity. At some point it becomes quite trivial to record everything that ever happens to everybody, and all meta-data that anybody can imagine applying to anything, and to make it thoroughly indexed and instantly available to anybody who needs it. It might no longer be meaningful to "search" for anything, or to keep secrets, or to pretend that things are any different from what they are, because anybody can check in an instant.
All of these are pretty much already on the program, and I'd expect them within the next 100 years, not the next 1000. And there are of course lots of things I might not even imagine, which will change everything even more. It is by its very nature very hard to predict surprisingly disruptive events. Even more so, a sequence of disruptive events, building upon one another.
There's a political and economical battle which will play out as to who should control all of this. We currently live in a political and economical system that will encourage and assist and reward certain people in power positions for keeping all of these things under their own exclusive control, and for keeping the rest of us in a more old-fashioned world that is manufactured by these very same technologies. Along the lines of "The Matrix". I.e. they might be the ones who make business deals with the extraterrestrials, and who will zip around in private hyperspace crafts, and who will keep the rest of us living in an immersive virtual reality where everything is pretty much the same, just a little fancier, where we still go to work and make money and watch TV and vote in elections, while they keep our every move monitored and catalogued and profiled.
The more important thing that needs to happen way before the year 3000 is something that is neither a technological change nor an external event. We as a species and as individuals need to realize where the real power is. We need to experience a grassroots revolution of consciousness where we discover without a shadow of a doubt that all the power in society comes from us, and that we're free to create something better, rather than just going along with what is presented to us. We need to go through a kartharsis, a transformation, after which it will be impossible for any small elite to control the rest of us by owning the information or the secret knowledge or the technology or the media. There's plenty of movement towards that in the mindsphere of the Internet at this point, but it is not nearly enough. It is hard to say exactly how it will look or how it will work. If we play our cards well and we wake up at the right time, and we figure out how to work together, a paradise of our own making will be ours, where wonders beyond belief are the routine of life. If we don't get it, or we're too late, we'll notice some day that we somehow only ended up with more of the same, and somebody else holds all the cards, and the cards are so powerful that we no longer have any opportunity for changing the system.
There's a window of opportunity that probably isn't all that large. It is an opportunity to evolve, individually and collectively, to be able to deal with a totally different world, as conscious and free and connected beings. The change will probably be within us, a psychological or spiritual change, but its emergent manifestation will be in the way we will be able to network and self-organize and collaborate on a wide scale. It is a matter of considerable urgency. More >
|
|
|
9 Apr 2004 @ 16:19, by jhs. Recreation, Fun
Today I joined Emperor Ming and his daugher Princess Maria-Theresa to the movies.
What is fitting for 'Good Friday' (as the Americans call the day before Eastern - hey, someone MUST have had a good time there after all!!! NOT!?)?
Well, you already guessed it: Mel Gibson's attempt of depicting 'The Passion of The Christ'.
One of the interesting parts (for me), was the way the movie starts with a zoom into the Garden of Gethsemane from outer space & above the clouds... More >
|
|
|
9 Apr 2004 @ 00:11, by nemue. Ideas, Creativity
Pull up a chair, snuggle down are you ready....
A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away there were all of these little light beings just hanging out enjoying life in that joyful & timeless dimension. And then one day a very large, magnificent angel came to them. He had a very serious look on his face. He was looking for volunteers for a
very important cosmic mission. More >
|
|
|
8 Apr 2004 @ 17:52, by jhs. Ideas, Creativity
I tried to remember how the name of this BLOG came about in the first place (It's not as obvious as it appeared later, hehe)..
So, resting my heels and pulminaries in Toulouse, France, at the Palace of Emperor Ming (you got that link by now, OK!?) , I found the original story that lend its name to this BLOG...
How A Great Little Lion Finally Found A Sacred Grove
A long, long time ago, in a future long forgotten, there lived a Little Lion who wanted to be the greatest of all the greatest Little Lions of all times. He worked very hard but... More >
|
|
|
7 Apr 2004 @ 10:36, by skookum. Ideas, Creativity
A Favorite for Rascal
By Marissa A Spencer
Rascal found himself licking his paws and wiping his face. His orange and white fur was silky smooth. Sure he was an enlightened being, but cleanliness you know, cats do pride themselves on that. The ship was very organic. The walls are semi-soft with moving flashing lights within. The colors range from soft orange to bright violet, with all the other colors in between There are even colors that were not on Earth. It is hard to tell where machinery ended and the living host began. More >
|
|
|
5 Apr 2004 @ 16:57, by ming. Transportation
From Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends. So, you didn't think a bicycle could have square wheels? Well, it all depends on the surface you're riding on.Stan Wagon, a mathematician at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., has a bicycle with square wheels. It's a weird contraption, but he can ride it perfectly smoothly. His secret is the shape of the road over which the wheels roll.
A square wheel can roll smoothly, keeping the axle moving in a straight line and at a constant velocity, if it travels over evenly spaced bumps of just the right shape. This special shape is called an inverted catenary.
A catenary is the curve describing a rope or chain hanging loosely between two supports. At first glance, it looks like a parabola. In fact, it corresponds to the graph of a function called the hyperbolic cosine. Turning the curve upside down gives you an inverted catenary -- just like each bump of Wagon's road. OK, so here's an idea: What about wheels that dynamically change shape quickly enough that they always fit whatever road surface you're going over, so that you can always have a smooth ride. And we might become less attached to smooth surfaces. More >
|
|
<< Newer entries Page: 1 ... 202 203 204 205 206 ... 279 Older entries >> |
|
These are news items gathered or contributed by NCN members
|
Categories
Activism (97)
Altered States (32)
Alternative Money Systems (17)
Broadcasting, Media (20)
Business (19)
Children, Parenting (28)
Communication (63)
Communities (71)
Conspiracy (34)
Counseling, Psychology (23)
Crime, Policing (7)
Death & Dying (14)
Developing World (19)
Economics, Financing, Banking (51)
Education (34)
Energy Sources (19)
Engineering (1)
Entrepreneurs, Money Making (19)
Environment, Ecology (123)
Exercise, Fitness (1)
Extraterrestrials (27)
Farming (14)
Futurism (13)
Globalization (29)
Government, Public Sector (46)
History, Ancient World (38)
Housing, Building, Architecture (10)
Ideas, Creativity (318)
Internet (49)
Inventions (6)
Investigation, Intelligence (23)
Knowledge Management (21)
Legal, Justice (24)
Liberty, Sovereignty (14)
Medicine, Healthcare (46)
Music (30)
Natural Health & Healing (27)
Neighborhood (12)
Networking (19)
Nutrition, Cooking (7)
Old Age, Retirement (4)
Organizational Development (12)
Paranormal (12)
Peace (35)
Performing Arts (9)
Personal Development (80)
Philosophy (94)
Politics (120)
Poverty (4)
Preparedness, Self-Reliance (12)
Privacy, Security (1)
Publishing (3)
Recreation, Fun (59)
Relationships (19)
Religion (40)
Science (48)
Sexuality (16)
Shared Purpose (30)
Social System Design (47)
Space Exploration (23)
Spirituality (391)
Systems Thinking (31)
Technology (37)
Transportation (9)
Travel (22)
Violence, War (103)
Visual Arts, Graphics (63)
|
Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|
|
|
|
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
26 |
27 |
28 |
29 |
30 |
|
Members can post news items and comments in the member area.
Information and opinions are the responsibility of the posters and do not represent any official position of NCN. Please do your own verification and make up your own mind.
Syndication
|
|