"Peter Russell explores the problems science has explaining consciousness and proposes that consciousness is not created by the brain, but is inherent in all beings. He shows why mind is more fundamental than matter, and the the key to this shift is the revolution in our understanding of the light."
a very insightful talk into the nature of consciousness
learn something about yourself!
This free time is letting the obsessional part of me roam about, to dangerous levels.
I have a dream, and it's quite an obscure and strange one but it's a dream none the less.
That is to one day collate all the things i have read, learnt and seen into notebooks that will become cross-referenced and indexed, yep, thats right.
I suppose I hope that it will all lead to some interesting insights into how things are connected.
i like to know how things have involved, influenced and affected each other, i do it enough with people already as i'm constantly studying group dynamics and how individuals will react around different social groups, situations etc anyway.
yep, hi my names Ben and i'm completely fucking deranged.
But i'm happybonus right?
CECIL OTTER - REBEL YELLOW.
This album left me breathless, one of the most perfectly crafted collections of music i have heard in a long time.
This song in particular.
I haven't written a personal post in a while, so for those of you with hungry eyes towards my heart
this ones for you.
I took the big step of having my first councilling session this week, and I feel changed
I feel clean, i don't feel angry anymore, I feel better.
The business with my father had left me without energy towards anything, I can now mention him without wanting to throw myself into the path of a train.
The realisation and acceptance that I do indeed have quite a few problems due the way I have grown up, and that they are undoubtedly going to affect my behaviour in parts was the catalyst.
The very moment I let myself accept that instead of blindly denying it, It all fell away.
There is something inside me that wants to be normal, now you could rightly argue that there is obviously no such thing as 'normal' as it is entirely down to personal opinion.
I don't want problems anymore, I've grown bored of the wolves, i'm tired of feeling muddied and down.
I've spent the majority of my life being heavily 'alternative' but something is leading me away from there
and i'm actually happy about it.
I DONT FEEL SAD ANYMORE.
Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience.
let's get Metaphysical on this Wednesday afternoon shall we?
Nothing is devoid of hope, for all the colours radiate
all the everything has shape and brightness.
Hidden in neon signs and glaring billboards lies the one and only.
We are not far from knowing inwardness as Mondrian says, we have just forgotten how to look for it.
It lies in every external appearance and smiles back at me through a gentle breeze.
Saw Your Demise out of pure curiosity last night and they managed to thoroughly run my prejudices about them into the ground.
The Kids We Used to be marks an obvious departure from the previous works, but forges its own unique brand of Sinking Ships style hardcore with a tasty amount of meat behind it to allow the heavy edge to not be drowned out by the melody and become weak. A perfect mix of breakdown and emotion.
aside from this
i'm currently running over some thought patterns about the current state of hardcore with an insight to start writing some cultural theories on it, after a 5 hour discussion between me and friend which covered every aspect the past 5 years musical progression we've witnessed. Fashion wise especially Hardcore in particular has gained not only half a conscience, but one large enough to engulf the scene in some invisible rules regarding what you are wearing and how this relates to how you are perceived within the 'scene'. These invisible rules which not only cover fashion but status make hardcore an incredibly intriguing genre.
i'm excited.
My favourite time of day is the morning, when no-one else in my house is awake
and everything is peaceful
the world is waking up, and i am sat in my kitchen
most probably eating porridge,
watching it.
The multitudes of human personality and movement,
glittering gold as bright as the sun.
It makes me smile when people laugh, playing like children, thoughtless and free.
We grow up and forget the sandcastles, we grow up and become temp employees in jobs that aren't worth the money they exchange our personality for
we grow up and forget ourselves, but the great shaking laughter still resides in the soul
in the minds of what we wanted to be
our eyes filled with the wonder that follows a first kiss with someone whom you could run through wars with and know their grip on your hand will not falter.
Let me stay alive so that i may know moments forever, let the smiles never fade and the laughter become dull. Let me stay alive so the seconds that run by all too quickly slow and last for eternities.
Life is a brilliant, fleeting moment, on a normal day
that is stretched out for years and then suddenly eclipsed
like the peaceful shutting of an eye for sleep.
Everything is so much bigger than me
I went to Notre Dame and marvelled how humanity could construct such an amazing piece of architecture and imbue it with a history and aura.
I don't believe in religion but i was astounded at what man can create using his own sense of insignifcance
How someones innate fear of themself can be turned into such beautiful creativity through a feeling of that something larger is guiding you
I was doing a lot with this in the last semester, letting it control the paint when i made art
I learnt that it is a complete giving of the self to someone else
something that uses you
something playful and calm but filled with the energy of earths history.
As that's what everything is anyway, all energy manifesting is different ways
Nothing is everything
Everything is energy
And yet man builds his towers and makes his rules under the great guise that he can control it and name it under the word 'God' when he doesn't even scratch the surface.
Dropping a pebble in the ocean does not mean you command the waves
Now this idea has been around for thousands of years
in the Tao Te Ching we read 'The tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be spoken is not the eternal Name.'
It makes me ashamed of my own reliance in materialism, when all it really should be used for is a means to an end.
All i really need is mountains of books, the means to exercise and music.
To let knowledge fill my skull.
Not owning for the love of possessions
ghosts wraped in gold drapes.
Empty searching vessels that we are.
Oh dear we're droplets in the rain
and we were never meant at all.
I admire a heart that's not my own
I dont understand humanity
all is motive, all is pointless human endevour towards fleeting popularity.
Only sky above us
empty searching vessels that we are
i've been taught too much
and to much has torn my organs out.
when i go out, i'm not coming back
i'm becomming more disillusioned with the silence of the world and the way i try to be something when there is really nothing
nothing except the beauty of the world and the shallowness of personality and its simple efforts
we are not meant for this plain
you and i,
no dear, we're not meant at all.
"...In 1998 a similar case ripped through the University of Toronto and the affiliated Hospital for Sick Children - only this time, the researcher found the drug might actually be harmful to patients. Dr. Nancy Olivieri, a world-renowed scientist and expert on the blood disorder Thalassemia, entered into a research contract with the drug-company Apotex. The company wanted Olivieri to test the effectiveness of the drug deferiphone on her young patients participating in the trial and to alert other doctors in her field. Apotex pulled the plug on the study and threatened to sue Olivieri if she went public, pointing to an overlooked clause in the research contract that gave it the right to suppress findings for one year after the trials ended. Olivieri went ahead and published in The New England Journal of Medicine and, once again, the administration of both her university failed to defend the sanctity of academic research conducted in the public-interest. Adding further insult, in January 1999, they demoted Olivieri from her top-level research position at the hospital.. (After a long and public battle, the doctor eventually got her job back.)
Perhaps the most chilling of these cases involves an associate professor at Brown University in the Rhode Islandm who worked as an occupational health physician at the University-affiliated Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island in Pawtucket. Dr David Kern was comissioned by a local textile factory to investigate two cases of lung disease that he had treated at the hospital. He found six more cases of the disease in the 150-person plant, a startling occurrence since its incidence in the general population is one in 40,000. Like Dr. Olivieri, Dr. Kern was set to present a paper on his findings when the textile company threatened to sue, citing a clause in the agreement that prevented the publication of "trade secrets". Once Again, the university and the hopsital administration sided squarely with the company, forbidding Dr. Kern to publush his findings and shutting down the one-person clinic where he conducted his research."
- from No Logo by Naomi Klein
Jeremy Paxman observes that during his 16 years as host of University Challenge, he has found that contestants "know less and less about classics and the Bible, and more and more about science and computing".
Who can doubt it? But this modern lack of awareness of two fields that were regarded as essential to a good education for so long is little noted -- even though it must count as one of the greatest transformations in our culture in the past half-century.
When Enoch Powell made his infamous "rivers of blood" speech in 1968, he could have assumed that the wider audience would know that the quotation was from Virgil's Aeneid (Mary Beard analyses the reference brilliantly here).
Similarly, Tony Benn could still be certain that a sizeable number of his potential readers would understand why he titled his 2004 memoir Dare to be a Daniel; that they would be aware of the Old Testament prophet of that name, if not necessarily the Salvation Army hymn.
But that would have been the older proportion. For younger browsers, the first Daniel to come to mind would probably be the Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe. Benn acknowledges as much in his book: "I often forget that few people now have a biblical background or knowledge of the different Christian traditions. Biblical and religious references that slip into my speeches and articles are not necessarily always understood."
To lament the passing of these corpuses of knowledge out of the realms of popular discourse and their retreat into the citadels of scholars is not to make any comment about levels of religious belief: after all, a classical education was never intended to encourage consultations with oracles or sacrifices to Zeus. It is, instead, to mourn the breaking of a connection with millennia of history, references to which were the common currency of art, literature, music and even conversation.
Is speech the poorer for our no longer being able to assume familiarity with the works of Homer and the precise gradations of office in the Roman senate? Yes, I think so. More serious, though, is that a proper understanding of much of the fine art produced in Europe over the past 2,000 years is simply not possible without knowledge of the Bible. This not just about the subject matter, but about the positioning of people, objects, shadows -- all allusions lost on those unversed in Christianity.
Likewise, the joys of Handel's Messiah or Mozart's Requiem are severely impaired if one does not know why, as the countertenor aria has it, "He was despised, despised and rejected", or what the sounding of the trumpets in the "Dies Irae" -- the Day of Judgement -- are heralding. Questions of rights, philosophy, the existence of evil -- all these matters are frequently approached afresh, which may be a good thing in itself. What is less commendable is the latter-day ignorance about the Christian and classical thinkers who spent long decades pondering and writing about them. There just might be something to be learned there.
I am not suggesting that all need attain the easy expertise in the classics of a Boris Johnson or the ability to cite Old Testament chapter and verse possessed by my late grandfather, a Methodist who frequently spent a good couple of hours debating scripture on the doorstep when Jehovah's Witnesses came to call. But for these vast libraries to slip from the mind within a generation or two, and for no one to call "Stop!" and urge us to consider what we are losing, feels like carelessness of monumental proportions.
Does it really not matter that we no longer know what, until very recently, our ancestors took for granted?
This is Article poses some interesting questions,
i for one am not opposed to the idea that we are losing our religion, if anything i would argue for the abolishment of it entirely.
the old argument that if people would do things purely out of compassion and a want to help their fellow human beings rather than because they feel it is what a good religious person does still rings true.
if people were forced to confront life as it lies before them, in all its blazen glory and magnificently finite colour then i feel we would be forced to live more urgently. If death was led away from being something confusing that needed to be veiled in silk to something that was profoundly understood then we would maybe start to cherish each day not as a painting to be quietly appreciated from a measured distance, but as the firework like explosion it truly represents.
Enough weak knees from stooping at the alter, enough bowed heads leaving us looking at only the cracks, reverence of existence as a miracle in itself, no more false witness for a maker who hasnt turned up yet..
I feel an urge I can't ignore, like a magnet dragging me towards an unknown destination
I feel the coldness of space in every pore and cell wall
I hear the hum of conception and birth, life and adaptation, death and dissolution
I feel I am not myself, I feel like I have become something else
I have become colossus! treading far above the mountains
twitching with the great roar that reverberates from my heart strings, that bellows from the beginnings in the depths of long roads home and dark street corners on indestructable nights in broken down towns
"dissonance in Human form, what is man but that" - Nietzsche.
picture is The Colossus by Goya
"The hibernation of all animals, the suspension of life practised by a certain low forms of life, the marvellous vitality of the bedbug which lies endlessley in wait behind the wallpaper, the trance of the yogi, the catalepsy of the pathologic individual, the mystics union with the cosmos, the immortality of the cellular life, all these things the artist learns in order to awake the world at the propriotous moment. The artist belongs to the X root race of man; he is the spiritual microbe, as it were, which carries over from one root race to the other. He is not crushed by misfortune, because he is not part of the physical, racial scheme of things. His apperance is always synchronous with catastrophe and dissolution; he is the cyclical being which lives in the epicycle. The experience which he acquires is never used for personal ends; it serves the larger purpose to which he is geared. Nothing is lost on him, however trifling. If he is interrupted for twenty five years in the reading of a book he can go on reading from the page where he left off as though nothing had happened in between. Everything that happens in between, which is "life" to most people, is merely an interruption in his forward round. The eternality of his work, when he expresses himself, is merely the reflection of the automatism of life in which is obliged to lie dormant, a sleeper on the back of sleep, waiting for the signal which will announce the moment of birth.
The dissastifaction which drives one on from one word to another, one creation to another, is simply a protest against the futility of postponement.
The more awake one becomes, an artistic microbe, the less desire one has to do anything.
Fully awake, everything is just and there is no need to come out of the trance.
Action, as expressed in a creating a work of Art, is a concession to automatic principle of death.
Drowning myself in the Gulf of Mexico i was able to partake of an active life which would permit the real self to hibernate until I was ripe to be born."
- Henry Miller The Tropic of Capricorn 1938.
His strange, endless books which are still banned in the USA have been of great influence to me lately.
His doesn't use chapters and the plot line is well...disconnected at best but they are bursting with the most wonderful language I have seen.
Written 10 years before Kerouac and such had even begun to find their stride in the sea of Beat, Miller seemed to pre-empt and ironically surpass the writing that would draw him as a huge influence.
The beat generation owe a lot to his work.
In other news, I'm ill with a rather tasty looking throat infection; so posts will probably stick to quotes as I haven't really written anything lately.
I can only get to the internet in the public library / my dads, thus the reason for the sporadic posts.
yesterday I attended UKHC, a brilliant gig in Leeds which collected very nearly all of UK Hardcores up & comers.
Hang The Bastard pulled out at the last minute which I was disappointed about, as I was looking forward to getting my stoner-slow-double-horns-up-headbang-mosh on to their Black Sabbath / Electric Wizard infuenced hardcore. It really made me very happy to know that someone could get the lineup so perfect and thus offer a brilliant opportunity to see some Bands that will take the limelight this year.UKHC is currently bristling with bands from CCHC (Cardiff City Hardcore) and has a nice Dead and Gone records feel to it, which makes me feel very optimistic considering that labels demise certainly left a sizable hole in the Uk scene.But, all the new bands are certainly doing well in plugging it.
A full write-up soon when I have more time.
adieu.
.
MMX
"just take a fucking good look at just what you did
you set a raging fire in the heart of a kid
your words, and the message you sent
are held in my heart as they burn inside my head
it burns, burning inside my head"
Have Heart - Something More Than Ink
The most relevant song in my head recently, for more than one reason.
.
MMX
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!”
Jack Kerouac
My absolute idol (aside from the whole alcoholism...)
'On The Road'from which I think (if memory serves me correct) this quote is taken fromserves as an absolute epoch of 50's beat literature and should be compulsory reading for everyone.
I'm excited for my future
friends,
i think it's about time we became something.
It's about time that passion manifested itself in something external.
.MMX
The madness has grown
My energy has increased
I bubble and fizz and explode from myself
with a roaring laughter i hold my fists up to a sky which i don't understand
and scream with all the passion that holds deep its anchor in my stomach
that I know the secret
I have been taught it
I have read it
Life can be understood only as an "aesthetic phenomenon" (as Nietzsche says)
the whole view of the every day hangs as but a mimetic painting before our cautious eyes, we live fed on scraps in the depths of Platos cave
painting the shadows we see onto the wall in charcoal.
Dionysus, that great hero of wine and freedom
stands in the shadow knowing the true meaning
the forgetfulness of the individual and dissipation into eternity and the whole
he clasps in his hands
as we, the blind 'tragic' ants scurry beneath his feet
assigning meanings, judgments and values just to feel complete with our own egos.
we are sleeping giants dreaming our lifes games in black and white.
we need crushing.
we need that annihilation,
we need awakening
at the moment we are hostages.
It makes so much sense to me now
now that I have learnt
it is a tired cliche to say, but the veil is cast aside
the light of the sun is shining through
blinding with glorious effulgence
I am born anew under these two opposing Greek signs
how one is a stepping stone to the other
Henry Rollins & Henry Miller have made me fall in love with everything
I am in love with everything
I find pleasure in everything
I love that more than any other part of my personality at this present time
the naive, the ugly, the annoying, the lazy, the broken, the incomplete, the irrelevant
everythings personality is as tremendous as a new dawn.
I lay giddy in the gutters, studying the dirt.
The madness has increased
I have written 15 pages in 7 days and it doesnt look like its stopping.
the search has begun.
today I understood that i must seek out meaning physically
I must not just contemplate on how it can be found.
Eros, if I close my eyes will you guide me through?attach yourself to me as you did Mother Earthyou're all I need.you're all I see
.
MMX
I'm infected, and it's long since the chance of redemption reared it's ugly head.
I will die as a martyr
exploding in colorful disarray amongst the other kids who have fought to find their home amongst the crowd.
The shovels always hit concrete
The pickaxes always snapped
and i'm too full of splinters to carry on.
As the flood waters rise I still hold the promise of a cause aloftit shines too bright to be forgotten
still faded from all the false starts
Destination: Death or better days
a choir full of rats
thieves
and petty slaves.
.
MMX
ANOTHER MORNING
AND I AM THROWN HALF-CONSCIOUS UNTO THE BREACH!
unto the still mass of Humanity whos heartbeat pulsates beneath the veil.
whos perception hides the undercurrent
whos reason covers the abyss
whos everyday spreads thinly across the Ice! (just well enough for it not to break and have us all plunge into that cackling madness that comes with recognition!)
My moralism a weak front to retain order in a perfectly absurd existence.
An attachment to my exterior
A coloured lego shield clipped to a copycat plastic knight.
A garment for the safety of the populace!
.
MMX
