In a case of life imitating art, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) reported today that they had successfully reversed mental retardation in mice, just as scientists did in the classic 1966 novel Flowers for Algernon. In the book by Daniel Keyes, scientists use experimental surgery—first tested on a mouse named Algernon—to dramatically boost the intelligence of a mentally retarded janitor named Charlie Gordon. Now M.I.T. scientists report in Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences USA that they ameliorated brain damage in mice caused by a genetic disorder known as fragile X syndrome by blocking an enzyme involved in cellular development.

Fragile X affects one in 4,000 boys and one in 6,000 girls. It is caused by a mutation in the fragile x mental retardation 1 gene (FMR1)—located on the X sex chromosome— that results in the loss of the fragile x mental retardation protein (FMRP). The resulting illness is characterized by hyperactivity, attention deficit, repetitive behavior, anxiety and cognitive difficulties ranging from learning disability to mental retardation.

More here

Linguistics and Cultural Surroundings connected

The New Yorker posted a great article about a new theory of linquistics that defies Noam Chomski‘s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformational_grammar as defined in his break through book, Logical Structure of Linguistic. Chomsky (the Einstien of modern linquistics) has revised his theory over the decades. But the basic premise is the same. The theory states that the way in which the human brain creates meaning is instinctual. As such, all of the world’s languages must have the same basic structure. The most fundamental part of this universal structure is the ability to make recursive sentences – the ability to string many different beads of thought into one large continuous bead of thought. For example: The hat is red. The man is wearing a hat. AND IN MOST LAGUAGES YOU CAN THEN TAKE THAT SENTENCE AND SAY: The man is wearing a red hat.

Then came Dan Everett. Dan has been interacting with an isolated Brazilian tribe known as the Pirahã who don’t fit into Chomskian theory. They don’t use their language recursively. So it can be argued that it is not their brains that have shaped the structure of their language but the culture that shapes language. Could this be true of every person?

Dan Everett’s theory reminds me of what Ken Wilber says about how much influence our culture has over how we interpret reality. There is nothing to fear as far as Chomsky being wrong… That is the beauty of science. Newton was right about gravity but Einstein’s theories explain certain things that Newtons classic view of the universe can not. And now modern physics theories can explain some things that Einstein’s view could not.

Chomsky’s theories are providing a look into how the brain processes language and our innate ability to concoct meaning from the words we create while Everett’s theory introduces the impact that culture has in shaping our language.

Science of the Soul? ‘I Think, Therefore I Am’ Is Losing Force

here is a cool article from the NYtimes. Its good to see people with a different idea about the human soul and evolution:

“Evolutionary biology shows the transition from animal to human to be too gradual to make sense of the idea that we humans have souls while animals do not,” wrote Dr. Murphy, an ordained minister in the Church of the Brethren. “All the human capacities once attributed to the mind or soul are now being fruitfully studied as brain processes — or, more accurately, I should say, processes involving the brain, the rest of the nervous system and other bodily systems, all interacting with the socio-cultural world.”

Therefore, she writes, it is “faulty” reasoning to want to distinguish people from the rest of creation. She and Dr. Haught cite the ideas of Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century philosopher and theologian who, Dr. Haught said, “spoke of a vegetative and animal soul along with the human soul.”

“Everything we know about the biological sciences says that life is a phenomenon of physics and chemistry, and therefore the notion of some sort of spirit to animate it and give the flesh a life really doesn’t fit with modern science,” said Dr. Miller, a Roman Catholic whose book, “Finding Darwin’s God” (Harper, 1999) explains his reconciliation of the theory of evolution with religious faith. “However, if you regard the soul as something else, as you might, say, the spiritual reflection of your individuality as a human being, then the theology of the soul it seems to me is on firm ground.”

NYTimes Article, “Science of the Soul?..”

Dream Sharing Web 2.0 site

Found a cool dream sharing site: http://www.dreamcrowd.com/

You share your dreams with others. The site also interprets some key dream words on the fly. Although, I’m not really big on someone else interpreting my dreams, I must admit it is a cool feature.

Of course the mother of all dream sites is still the Dreamviews forum

Dream of Prison (questioning reality)

I dreamt that I was in prison.

I was in prison for a terrible crime which I did not commit (reminiscent of a real life situation that has happened to my cousin). The emotions in this dream were absolutely real. When I woke up in my comfortable bed, I was very relieved that it was not real, but then I started to ask myself: how do I know that this bed is real? How do I know that my so called “waking life” is real?

Why do we so willingly accept our present situation as absolutely real? In my dream, I didn’t question the reality of my situation just as I do not typically question my waking life. How do any of us know what we see as “real” is not a dream?

Perhaps our minds makes this place real and conveniently misses the discrepancies of our reality such that we have no need to question it.

Neo: I thought you said it wasn’t real
Morpheus: Your mind makes it real
- the matrix

I’ve been reading a Padre Pio book. Padre Pio was a great Catholic Friar with remarkable dedication. At his level of dedication and devotion, he would pray for Jesus let him to help bear his cross. In essence we was asking for unimaginable suffering.

I am perplexed at the positive light given toward suffering. Catholic saints such as St. Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and Mother Teresa revered suffering as it was an emulation of christ’s suffering on the cross (his suffering is considered a sacrafice to save the souls of all mankind – John 3:16 KJV Bible, for those who what more info). But if this world is illusion, what good is suffering? Why not just pass through never to return? Or come and go as one pleases and collect knowledge to become like a god. In the Bible the Devil “tempts” Jesus with something like this, to which Jesus replies, “Get behind me Satan.” No matter how good it looks, its still illusion.

In his book, The Yogas of Dreams and Sleep, Tenzin Wangyal mentions rising above both pleasure and suffering as they are each of Samsara, part of the great illusion of this world. In Hinduism, this is called Maya, the illusion of our self being separate from everything else.

The word Islam actually means “submission to God” in Arabic. All these religions address suffering as something that should be submitted to or allowed to happen not resisted but observed and in some cases even honored.

SUFFERING SUCKS
I don’t know about you but Suffering really, really pisses me off and I suppose that is not very holy of me. I am just saying how I truly feel at times. I hate seeing people around the world suffering (especially children). It makes me mad at humanity and mad at god. Sometimes I can’t help but think that a lot of it is just not necessary.

We don’t really have to suffer…

SUFFERING = GOOD/EVIL
But the more I learn about what science has discovered about physical reality, the more I realize that suffering really is apart of this reality. The duality of this reality (good/evil, light/darkness, valley/mountain) is why there must be suffering. It is in the fabric of everything here and there is nothing we can do about it but suffer. And I suppose that is why the saints embrace it and why sages of the east don’t resist it any more than they praise pleasure. Because it is an illusion (as a dream) compared to a truer more holistic place that is not afflicted with duality. These saints and sages see all physical reality as a type of dream for preparation of a greater here and now.

I attribute all suffering to ignorance (not knowing our true nature not so much stupidity). I believe it is the greatest atrocity humanity will ever have. Ignorance of our physical, subtle and spiritual true selves. Perhaps that is why we are here, to graduate from ignorance.

… YEAH BUT
Why doesn’t an omniscient/omnipotent God simply instantly give us a deliverance from ignorance and its symptom, suffering, rather than growing into some greater realization?

A: If a rose never blooms, can it still be considered a rose? Perhaps, we are here to experience the blooming of humanity.

Chinese and the Islamic Fundamentalists vs. Social Evolution

This post is completely OFF TOPIC – I started off writing about the Great Fire Wall of China and then went on an insane religious and political tangent. I started asking myself, “Why does the chinese government and other nations repress the cutting edge of human social evolution?” And here is what I came up with.

There are a few cultures hopelessly fighting against the social evolution of humanity. the Chinese government and the Islamic fundamentalist are among the largest and potentially most influential. In a relatively short period of time humanity has gone from tribalism to nationalism and now to globalism. Each stage in social evolution has happend faster and faster and now globalization is happening so fast that it is hard to keep up. Almost every nation is facing immigration, refugee, and security issues as third world conflicts and economic situations leave impoverished people behind forcing them to seek stability in other countries. So called “first world” countries face immigration issues and are greatly influenced by the globalized economy.

Technology, trade and travel have merged humanity and there is nothing any of us can do about it. To their detriment, the Chinese government and the Islamic fundamentalists are really trying to resist portions of this inevitable social change.

The Chinese trade globally and are clearly a leader in the commodities market. But the chinese government represses its people by greatly filtering the exchange of ideas. Some how they don’t understand that it is the ideas of the people that are the greatest and most revolutionary asset in any globalized society… or perhaps they do understand this as certain ideas are a threat to their level of communistic control over the people. They have created what has been coined the Great Fire Wall of China in which they filter certain ideas from the public. Keywords like “tank man” and “freedom” are blocked. The greatest part of globalization is the free exchange of ideas. In the US, this exchange of ideas is making a new breed of middle class who are self-sufficient and becoming very wealthy very quickly.

Contrary to many elitist beliefs the Arab and Islamic world have made many contributions to science, medicine, mathematics, and technology. In fact, Arab muslim Ibn al-Haytham is knows as the Father of optics because he formulated “the first comprehensive and systematic alternative to Greek optical theories”. Many of their contibutions occured between 600 A.D. and 1200 A.D, a period known as the Islamic Golden Age. All this was done when Europe was still in the Dark Ages. Many of there discoveries were passed on and further developed by the Europeans during the Renaissance. (Note: of course, many of the arab/muslim innovations were built on the systems and inventions of the people they conquered… as is the case with the europeans which makes up we know as modern western civilization. We owe the bulk of the origins of western civilization to the greeks and egyptians who the Roman got most of their innovations from).

Bernard Lewis put out a book shortly after 9/11 called, What Went Wrong? which talks about the clash betwen Islam (civilization based in islam not the Religion itself) and Modernity in the Middle East. In a discussion about Bernard’s book, Joanne Myers says:

[Bernard] takes the reader on a journey through history, from the time when Islam was the world’s greatest, most enlightened, and most powerful civilization, to modern times when it has failed to adjust to the challenges brought about by the reformation and the scientific and political revolutions in the West.

In the discussion Bernard points out that the question “What went wrong?” is so pronounced in the Islamic world that many muslim leaders in the last few hundred years have asked the question. The answers they’ve come up with range from “There are too many infidels” to “We have not kept up with modernity”.

Different things have also been tried in the world of Islam to change:

Now, for the first time, in Iran they are carrying out what I might describe, without intending any disrespect, as the “Christianization” of Islam, using the word to indicate not doctrines, not morality, but institutions. What you now have in Iran, for the first time in Islamic history, is the functional equivalent of a papacy, a college of cardinals, a bench of Bishops, and, most important of all, an inquisition, and, inch’Allah, they will soon have a reformation too.

Bernard Lewis does not state a single reason why Islam (as a civilization) has failed to keep up with modernity. I think Ken Wilber and Robert Keegan are the closest to an explaination when they discusses the the Many faces of Terrorism and Integral politics. They place the Islamic fundamentalists (particularly fundamentalist) in the Amber stage of consciousness which means that they are ethnocentric conformist. I would go even further and suggest that they are glued together with flecks of Red (tribalism, sects controled by Imams) Considering their stage of consciousness it seems that (unlike the old dominating amber roman catholic christianity) they have not been broken up diluted enough to accept the bleeding edge of human development. That is not to say the individuals and small groups within the Islamic world (such as the Bahai’a and Sikhs) are not at the cutting edge. The core is true hard core amber.

I digress a little, the Islamic world HAS been broken up (Sunnis vs. Shia, etc) but it has not been sufficiently diluted yet. Christianity broke up into Catholic and Protestants. At one time those were large warring factions of Christiandom (societies built on christianity) but now those two have been broken in to hundreds of denominations and spin-off belief systems. Islam has different factions but not as diluted and broken up as Christianity.

Religious denominations are usually created when a member of a certain faith has a spiritual awakening that is so profound they express it to others and start to get a following. Islam seems to have such a strong fundamentalist (solid Amber and Red) core that any new development is stamped out like a camp fire threatening to become a forest fire. I believe that reform is happening right now within the Islamic world the result is constant relentless violence.

Post Modern Art Mistaken for a Murder

When everything is a decaying symbolic copy of a copy, it becomes natural to be apathetic toward everything because nothing is real.

ISAAC Newton 2060 End of the World

ISAAC Newton calculated the end of the world no earlier than 2060. 

JERUSALEM (AP) — Three-century-old manuscripts by Isaac Newton calculating the exact date of the apocalypse, detailing the precise dimensions of the ancient temple in Jerusalem and interpreting passages of the Bible — exhibited this week for the first time — lay bare the little-known religious intensity of a man many consider history’s greatest scientist.

Newton, who died 280 years ago, is known for laying much of the groundwork for modern physics, astronomy, math and optics. But in a new Jerusalem exhibit, he appears as a scholar of deep faith who also found time to write on Jewish law — even penning a few phrases in careful Hebrew letters — and combing the Old Testament’s Book of Daniel for clues about the world’s end.

More on CNN

Ayatollah revives the death fatwa on Salman Rushdie (integral)

The Ayatollah and other extremist are up in arms about Salman Rushie’s being Knighted by the Queen of England.     

A FATWA against the author Salman Rushdie was reaffirmed by Iran’s spiritual leader last night in a message to Muslim pilgrims.

British officials anxiously played down comments after Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told Muslims making the annual pilgrimage to Mecca that Rushdie was an apostate whose killing would be authorised by Islam, according to the Iranian media.

BBC:

His book The Satanic Verses offended Muslims worldwide and led to Iran issuing a fatwa in 1989, ordering Sir Salman’s execution.

These extremists are at an Amber - ethnocentric stage feeling a need to use violence and force to protect their traditions.  The pressure on these extremists primarily comes from organge – ethno to worldcentric rational stage Western culture which has become globalized.  The Amber extremists (be they muslim, christians or otherwise) are fighting evolution which is like trying to Ice skate up hill.    

No truth, no meaning — words betray us

We often ask: why are we here? What is the meaning of life?

Some people have the answer to this. They express it in their religion or philosophy or reasoning. But I think that our language structures betray us. Perhaps our reasoning, meaning and philosophical understandings are the very cages that keep us from any deeper realization of something beyond us.

Any concept we create becomes an idol hindering us from the true expression of something beyond anything we can even pretend to comprehend. Something so incomprehensible that it renders everything we think we know about life and death meaningless and irrelevant. Often we get caught up and swept away by the words and dogma. We settle for our concepts of God rather than something beyond any type of superficial description or noble language adorned with wise quotes from this or that book.

As a species, that is where we are and right now all we can do is understand things how we understand things, but I am certain we are as small as a one celled organism in a petri dish being examine by something incomprehensible.

p.s. when i say beyond god, I’m addressing the fact that we need to address our concept of what it is. We need to realize that our concepts no matter how grand or clever do not even come close to what maybe beyond.

Next Page »