inception

I saw Inception and I thought it was pretty good. If you are obsessed with dreams and love to question reality, then you will be in heaven for about 2 hours… it’s a long movie.

A good analogy that would explain the concept behind the movie is a technology behind virtual machines. A virtual machine or VM as we call it in IT is a simulation of an operating system that can run on top of another operating system.

The main idea of “Inception”: if you run a VM inside a VM inside a VM inside a VM, everything will be very slow –
myzt

For example, Window XP could run inside of Windows 7 or even in Red Hat linux. In the movie Inception, a dream is happening within a dream within a dream. So it is like, Windows 7, within Windows XP, within Linux within Windows Vista. Each time you run another VM inside another it runs slower and slower. In Inception, each time the characters go deeper (dream with a dream) time slows down.

The interesting thing about this is that I can recall having 3 – 4 dreams at a time similar to the movie. The coolest concept in the movie is the idea of “mutual dreaming” or two people participating in the same dream. I have never had a mutual dream (or at least not that I am aware of). And you don’t find much about it online. What surprises me is that more people are not obsessed with lucid dreams and reality.

Patriot Riders vs westboro baptist

Imagine you are at the funeral of your loved one. Maybe your mother or father has recently passed away. Or perhaps, you have out lived your child. Maybe your son or daughter was killed in I a conflict on the other side of world. For you and those closest to the dearly departed it is a time of mourning, remberance and grieving. They are not ever coming back and you have to live with that separation.

Right in the middle of the eulogy, a group of protesters arrive at the funeral. They are cursing your deceased loved one and the country from which he or she was born. They are yelling and ranting and raving about your loved ones life. They are saying that God is punishing them for their countries sins.

This would be a paragraph of twisted fiction about a sick alternate America if it weren’t based on truth. There is a group of far right wing Christian conservatives how travel the country to protest the funerals of fallen soldiers. They are called, Westboro Baptist Church. Their rationale is that God is punishing America for its acceptance of gays in the military. “God Hates Fags” and your sons and daughter are dying because America is being punished.

This is so crazy that I don’t even know what to say. I don’t know whether to be mad at religion, stupidity, or just Westboro Baptist Church. Regardless of your feelings of the politics behind any conflict we take part in or the state of the U.S. military past, present or future, I would not soil the dignity of a families right to grieve their dead. If the decrease was Jeffrey Dahmer or Hitler or some other psychotic mass murder, I might not have feelings either way about a funeral protest. But fallen soldiers?!

Apparently, there are a group of counter protestors that show up to some of these funerals known as the Patriot Guard Riders. Now even though I did serve in the U.S. Armed Services, proudly in more than one conflict, my healthy mistrust of any government prevents me from being very patriotic. That being said reading about the Patriotic Guard Riders, brought tears to my eyes.

I think it’s the fact that they are champions of basic human dignity that did it. Its very simple need for respect of the living and dead. For me, its not about patriotism just basic human dignity. Something extremists convince themselves to forget. Maybe someone should protest their funerals with signs that say, “God Hates Stupid People”.

the day magic dies

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” — Arthur C. Clarke, “Profiles of The Future”, 1961 (Clarke’s third law)

One day technology will seem more magical than the myth of magic. In fact, the very idea of magical power will seem weak, unimaginative and one dimensional compared to what is ahead. It will be the faded equivalent of a 100,000 year old print of a hand on a wall. Things that we cannot yet imagine are just beyond the horizon.

From our current early 21st century understanding looking at future progress, physical reality itself will be the tool of choice commanded at the whim of awareness. Religion and myth will be cherished ornaments and magic will be replaced with a series of unfathomable miracles seemingly from nowhere. I could call this miracle science, math, or technology but our current ideas of what those things are will not apply; for it is something closer to what magic is supposed to be.

Only futurists, inventors and brilliant mathmeticians have been able to catch a glimpse of the coming revolution. Some have been driven mad by its implications (ted kazinski), some driven to fear the future and others call it the Singularity (Ray Kurzweil).

Technological Singularity – The technological singularity is a theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress, caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence.

When the singularity comes, infinity will be our collective bitch!

If human consciousness can really leave the body and operate without a brain then everything we know in neuroscience has to be questioned. If people could really gain paranormal knowledge then much of physics needs to be rewritten. This is what is at stake. Add to that the fact that most people in the population believe in some kind of life after death, and many desperately want it to be true, then you have a strong case for this research – even if the chances of success are vanishingly small. — Susan Blackmore (guardian)

I’ve got great news!! Science now knows for an absolute fact that we are the only intelligent life in the universe (so we are the center of the known universe), there is absolutely NOTHING faster than the speed of light, we know the exact moment of the big bang, there is no God, and you have no “soul”. Isn’t that awesome! There are no mysteries!

Whoo-hoo! Now I can sleep at night. All knowledge has been acquired.. our quest it over. Charles Darwin & Einstein figured it all out so we can now build churches in their names. ha!

All sarcasm aside, as awesome as science is We (the human race) don’t know shit! We really really don’t. We don’t even know 1% of shit.

Don’t jump to conclusions, I am not a creationist and I don’t’ subscribe exclusively to any ONE religion or philosophy. I am someone who believes that there is some value in religion, philosophy and science. I respect and use each of their strengths in all parts of my life where they are relevant (i.e. I don’t use science to help me explain philosophy or religion to help me explain how light works.

The great thing about science is that is grows and evolves despite the conservative establishment that see it as some sort of dogma. What I like about science is that it gets better. The theories no matter how great continue to develop the complexity and order needed to describe more of what we do know. Intrepid mavericks like Galileo, Descarte, Newton and Einstein challenge the status quo and go off the beaten path and into the previously unknown.

I think there are a lot of unexplained phenomenon that deserves our full attention and funding. One thing that bothers me about mainstream scientists is there dogmatic response to the improbable. It makes them sound as one-dimensionally boxed in as your average religious fundamentalist.

I suppose we all have our limits of what we can accept as real. Even Einstein fought the fundamental (probabilistic) ideas of quantum mechanics that are now not only fully accepted but proven and used.

For me the mystery is the beauty of our 99.999999 percent unknown universe. The conquest of each piece of this infinity puzzle is pure orgasmic rapture.

To that unknown, I say bring it on! When the singularity comes, infinity will be our collective bitch!

No Country for Old Men: meaning?

No Country for Old Men is based on the Cormack McCarthy novel of the same name. The Cohen Brothers really add something to the gritty, dark perspective of this deep story. The whole time I watched I thought about postmodernism.

The bad guy in the movie Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Borden, is a sociopathic killer who’s been sent to retrieve drug money is a very memorable, shadowy character that is so merciless that he is more like a plot device than a character.

I really liked this movie. It was really the story line that kept asking the question, “what does your life mean?” “all the choices you’ve made have brought you to this point.. what do think about that” (or something to that effect) The killer Chigurh asks the question before he kills people and the protagonist Sheriff Ed Tom Bell played by Tommy Lee Jones is introspective about the question of why? Why is there so much violence? What was the purpose of the victims deaths? And he can’t answer it at all.

The story was so compelling that It makes me want to read the book & and buy the movie. Because I’ve been plagued by the same questions my whole life. An like the story, I’ve got no answers… just questions and reflections.

In the end, the view is left with the killer not merely getting away but succeeding in killing and innocent protagonist victim. It’s a “pull the wings off of a fly” moment, but the killers reasons are that he “made a promise”. The kicker is that as he is driving away from the victim’s house he broadsided by a station wagon. He is hurt badly. He’s got a compound fracture with a bone sticking out of his arm. He pays a couple of kids to shut their mouths about seeing him walk away from the accident.

For me, this was a powerful scene because it underlines that NOBODY is exempt from mortality and seems to be the authors way of saying that violence has no explanation, it just happens. Even the Anton Chigurh’s existence as a merciless killer, it just happened. I don’t know if I completely agree with that, but it is a very interesting perspective on reality.

Ignorance is Our Only Enemy

Nations go to war for greed, fear, ‘protection of assets’ and sovereignty. Neighbors argue and feud over domestic issues and friends sever over misunderstandings. Confrontation seems an essential part of human nature. Evolutionist would say conflicts and aggression has been necessary to the survive as a species, and creationist would say the conflicts is how God sometimes tests and teaches us.

Regardless of belief, faith or scientific method our real enemy is ignorance. No matter how foul our nemesis, whether terrorist, communist, imperialist and no matter what tactic “they” choose nothing will defeat “us” like our own ignorance.

Wisdom favors untainted facts. But too often a nation, a man, a woman, an organization, an establishment chooses to build up their wisdom on myths, half-truths and bias; a house of matches in the middle of a forest fire. The real enemy is our own ignorance. Any perceived enemies are only the puppets and pawns of ones own master, ignorance.

Even forces of nature and states of human suffering are not the enemy. Famine, poverty, sickness can all be defeated with the proper knowledge of “how”. What defeats us is lack of knowledge, ignorance.

The human species is capable of knowing but we project our enemies outside of our selves. The real enemy is within… it is ignorance. There is not a single person, place or thing, no force of nature more cruel and unforgiving as our own unchecked ignorance.

Why do we continue to serve this callous master? Sufferings seems limitless and our ignorance is no excuse. Above all hypothesis, and bias, and prejudging assumptions and long held beliefs, factual information is the greatest ally of humanity.

some thoughts on marriage

I have been married for 12 years.

I truly believe that it is the people that make the marriage. Its the individuals that make a good relationship or a bad relationship… realistically the marriage is just a legal document and the ceremony turns into a memory. Another thing is you really can’t believe what you think you see because you just never know what is going on behind closed doors. Sometimes it looks bad, but its two people who are truly, madly deeply in passionate love and other times it looks good but its rotten to the core. My wife and I have out lasted most of our friends and have become freaks among a generation of divorce. I’m definitely not bragging…

And I would NOT say its been easy. It has been one of the hardest thing I have ever done in my life… and I had a pretty rough childhood. If I told you the shit that has happened you’d be riveted to my words. It would read like a pornographic Tyler Perry story (the ones without Madea). I’d be lying if I said its all good. After about 5 years some things get old.. REALLY old. Some things become so comfortable you can’t even imagine ever having been without it.

If nothing else, when you give everything, when you put it all on the line, all of your fears, all of your vulnerability, all of your pain on display for your mate and when they can face that VERY human element when the glowing teenage infatuation is gone and still love what is left, then you’ve found a pretty special person because not many people are up to that task. Even less are ready for the truth; in fact, they avoid it like the plague.

When you really open up and really learn to trust, it is like a roller coaster ride, its scary, and exciting and passionate. It scary because there it a real fear of being hurt, tossed out and dashed on the rocks, betrayed and killed. After a while it can make you sick. When its all over you can walk away a whole lot wiser, but only if you were true to yourself. And that is what I’ve learned about life, love and marriage.

“Above all else, to thine oneself be true” — Shakespeare

spiritual meaning of numbers

Those who subscribe to religion, occultism and metaphysics have assigned spiritual values to numbers. For example:

1 = strong will; unity, purity
2 = duality, harmony (Yin/Yang)
3 = magic, intuition (Holy Trinity)
4 = stability, grounded (nature)
5 = travel, adventure, journey
6 = Sincerity, love, truth
7 = magic, mystery, enlightenment

I have always believed that meaning is defined within the context of a person experience. So although 7 might mean good luck to you, it may mean hate and lust to me because of my experiences with that number.

Each culture attributes meaning to numbers: Chinese numerology

Biblical numerology

Vedic numerology

More examples of spiritual meaning of numbers
THE NUMBER 7 IS EVERYWHERE

NUMEROLOGY:
Life path number – signifies intellect and an introspective, analytical mind. Considered to be a spiritual, sacred, and this is evidenced by the fact that there are seven days in the week, and ancient texts propose that the earth was formed in seven phases.
BIBLE:
In the Hebrew, seven ([b’v, – Sheh’-bah) is from a root word meaning to be complete or full.
It is known as the number of God’s seal.
Example: in Revelation 1:16 — “and He had in His right hand seven stars, ” alluding to the seven churches of Asia.
It is used throughout the Old and New Testament repeatedly with deliberate pattern.

The metaphysical use and meaning of numbers are completely at the mercy of interpretation. As such, it is all over the place with little practical application. That is a shame (as with all metaphysics) its talks around some of the most critical aspects of reality but fails to nail anything down. It is easy to see the influence of culture on the meaning attributed to numbers. The tragedy is that the imposed meaning ends up telling us more about the people and/or culture than the subject they are talking about. Here is a new system that relies less on prescribed meaning, focuses exclusively on the actual perspective of the person which in turn give meaning an absolute path.

Here is an Entirely Different Take on the Spiritual Meaning of Numbers.

We are the numbers. Our point of view, our perspective is the equation, the function through which constant values are passed to produce various results, or meaning.

Essentially, meaning is relative to perspective.

Out of western psychology, eastern spirituality and postmodern philosophy there is a new way to use numbers as a way to navigate awareness itself, the cradle of meaning. How much more enhanced is our meaning if we know its source? Its called Integral Mathematics of Primordial Perspectives. To be fair, it less about numbers than it is about perspectives, so numerology is forever safe.

Integral Mathematics of Primordial Perspectives

Oversimplified description:
Created by philosophical genius Ken Wilber, Integral Mathematics of Primordial Perspectives, we’ll call it integral mathematics, is a comprehensive method of referring to natural points of view that we all have. For example, my first-person perspective would be written as 1p (1-p). 1p = my, 1-p = first-person perspective, but there are other perspectives that I can have from my point of view: 2p = your perspective, 3p = his/her/it perspective.

So, from my perspective, I see that you have a first-person perspective:
1p(1p) x 2p(1-p)

I can also be aware of you from a third person perspective:
1p(1-p) x 1p(3-p) x 2p(1-p)

This means I’m observing your from an objective perspective, this could mean I’m using some theory or some measure or book like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) to evaluated you.

Pathology: Perspective Mathematics

Consider multiple personality disorder (aka Dissociative Identity Disorder). This would be me objectively looking at your multiple personalities:

1p(1p) x 1p(3-p) x (2p(1-p)/n)

n = number of personalities
This may be written wrong, but what I’m trying to express is my first-person perspective (1p(1-p)) view of an objective perspective (1p(3-p)) of your first person view that is (2p(1-p) that is divided by “n” personalities. The slash maybe wrong because Wilber uses “/p” to define something else. By interacting with each of the fractional parts of your first perpective, I can better understand why it has been partitioned. What are you protecting yourself against? What is the common ground of the personailities? One can also explore each personalities perspectives on itself and relationships to the world around it. The end equation could end up looking like the most beautiful monster you have ever seen.

Lucid Dream & Altered States: Integral Math

I had a lucid dream in which I was trying to fly years ago. Once I was aware of my being in a dream, I became peripherally aware of my body. I was able to hold the heavy feeling of my body at bay while I continued my lucid dream. In integral mathematics I would describe it like this:

1p(1p) x 1p(1-p) x 3p(3/p)

I (1p(1p)) had a first person perspective (1p(1-p)) of my body (3p(3/p)). The equation strip away my personal meaning and allows you to put it in your own contexts although you can still understand the mechanics of the perspective. I’m seeing the body as a separate object the same way I might see a tree or my coffee cup, but perhaps (since the body actually holds the perspective) it should be written like this:

1p(1p) x 1p(1-p) x 3p{(1p(1p) x 1p(1-p) x 3p {…}}

Which is to say, I had a first person perspective of my body which contains a my first person perspective of my body which has a first person perspective of my body…. And so on. So it becomes like two mirrors facing one another. The only way to maintain the stability of my lucid dream perspective was to minimize my awareness of my body.

Out of Body Experience

In his book, Astral Dynamics, Robert Bruce talks about similar experiences. But he takes it a step further because his theory is that the body itself continues to dream and have its very own perspectives while the subtle body has its very own experiences. He attributes the relatively low number of the phenomenon to loss of memory caused by the body “overwriting” the “shadow memory” of the subtle body.

So it would look like this…

Sleep & Dreaming mind/body seeing objects in the dream: 1p(1p) x 1p(1-p) x 3p(3-p)

Subtle body experience/altered state of consciousness seeing the sleeping body: 1p(1p) x 1p(1-p) x 3p{1p(1p) x 1p(1-p) x 3p(…)}
Traditional science tends to attribute OBE to some sort of brain anomoly hallucination (despite actual evidence of nonlocal consciousness), but for the purposes of this post we are only concerned with perspective. And the perspective is my first person perspective of the body with a first person perspective of the body… Whatever meaning that Robert Bruce, you or I attribute to this phenomenon should be put in its “own box” so to speak. And with Intergral math, that is easy to do.

Written by elamb · Filed Under Integral Naked, astral dynamics, feature, integral hacking, integral math, metaphysics, occult, postmodernism, wilber 

8-Coil Shakti – Part 5: Wearing My Body

January 16, 2008

15 Jan. 08 – 11-12am

Location of coils: Frontal Lobe
Duration: 60
Signal type: Altered States (For Beginners)
(volume 81% output)

Overview:
This is my 5th Shakti session and this time the feeling it produced was unmistakable. I felt like I was “wearing my body”. The intensity of the feeling came in waves.

Wearing My Body
I followed Todd Murphy’s advice, I updated the Shakti software to v.5g.8 and used the longer session (60min for beginners). About 5 minutes into it the session I felt some sort of subtle sinus type pressure in the center of my frontal lobe. I immediately wrote this off. But as I sit here typing, I wonder about that because I have no cold, no sniffles and no frontal feeling until I put the Shakti on. That pressure was persistent until about 45 minutes into the Altered States session when a different experience slapped me in the awareness. I laid on my bed relaxed feeling like I was wearing my body.

Now I know this will sound like an insane contradiction but I felt like a disembodied spirit wearing a body. Its was as if at any moment I could pop out and go else where. It was a very strange feeling. I’ve felt it before a few times (once after reading Osho’s book called Awareness, The Key to Living in Balance… good book). And a couple times in meditation using Robert Bruce’s “rope technique“. I have yet to have a successful OBE after having that experience with the rope technique but I definitely feel something.

So this session was great and I’m anxious to do it again.

Written by elamb · Filed Under 8-coil shakti, altered states, astral dynamics, entrainment, feature 

OBE… what good it it?

January 15, 2008

Since I was a kid reading Robert Monroe’s Journey’s out of the body, I have been obsessed with out of the body experiences. Mainly because I was relieved and facinated that someone had had the same experience I’d had. Sadly, I don’t have them anymore (or at least none that I can recall).

When I was having them, I found it quite terrifying. I’d come to awareness and feel like I was floating on the ceiling or partially through the bed and floor and suddenly wake with a start only to realize… I was paralyzed. I couldn’t move my body. Like a chinese finger trap, the more I struggled the harder it was to move. Only when I relaxed was I finally able to slowly wake up my slumbering physical corpse. And when I opened my eyes I didn’t ever want to close them again for fear of being “locked in”.

I was able to conquere my fear of those other worldly experiences and eventually stop them almost completly by time the time I got to Junior High School, but by that time I’d read several books that talked about what I came to know as “sleep paralysis”, astral projection (OBE) and what you could do with these abilities. I was facinated and wanted to be able to do them again, but was never able to recreated the frequency I had when I was in elementary.

These days (’08 in my 30′s) I’m just as obsessed but even more shut out from those experiences. I have strange unexplainable experiences maybe twice per year if that.

Today as I read, Robert Bruce’s Astral Dynamics, I find my self asking what practical good is Out of the Body Experience, anyway? Don’t get me wrong. This is not me playing Aesop’s Fox and blowing the whole thing off because I am an “OBE failure”. Further, I don’t doubt that it is a real experience. The theories behind this global, cross-culture phenomenon may not agreed upon, but I personally know its real because I’ve experienced it. What IS the experience and WHY is another matter altogether.

A bigger question (for me) is, what good is it? If you can do it at will and can teach others, so what? Sure it feels good, its amazing, its exciting (and I definitely want to do it), but how can we use it to make the world a better place. I suppose you could argue that knowing that some part of the self may indeed survive death is pretty signifigant. I guess that accounts for something (I’ll mention with a shrug of my shoulders). Perhaps if everyone knew that physical reality was a mere stepping stone to another place they would behave better.

A warm fuzzy feeling is all well and good however I would submit this to you: OBE is not as important as the ability to shift to different states of consciousness. OBE seems to be only one of many grand symptoms reflecting what the human mind is capable of achieving in altered states of consciousness. Consider some of the inventions, music and discoveries achieved from altered states of consciousness:

Scientist Otto Loewi dreamed the experiment that enabled him to prove that nerve impulses are chemically transmitted, a discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.
Beethoven composed a canon in his sleep, and transcribed it after waking.
Tartini dreamed a famous violin sonata.
Robert Louis Stevenson received his stories in a twilight state of “reverie” in which benign spirits he called “brownies” helped him to compose.
William Butler Yeats wrote his celebrated one-act play Cathleen ni Houlihan from a dream, and much of his poetry flowed directly from dreams and visions.
Elias Howe, the inventor of the modern sewing machine, dreamed the solution to the technical problem that had stumped him.

— Robert Moss, Way of the Dreamer, “Two Minute History”

Others altered state creations include some of Paul McCartney’s songs, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Madame C.J. Walker (first American Woman Millionaire… who also happen to be African American) and here are many other examples.

I would take this idea a step further and suggest that our best professional athletes also experience altered states of consciousness when they are “in the zone”. Just thing of the possessed demon that wore #27 in the Chicago Bulls. Micheal Jordan’s enlightenment was a tongue out slam dunk in a 27 point game. Consider Lance Armstrong state of mind while he won his SIXTH tour de France after kicking cancers NATURAL BLACK ASS. Is it a stretch to believe that the greatest among us are capable of reaching the far reaches of human mind by accessing shamanistic states of bliss with amazing feats of focus.

I would also mention some of histories great porn stars, but I guess that would make everything I just a big joke to some. But consider it.. your best sexual performance probably included your most amazing state of mental, emotional physical focus… you were in the zone and the pay off is something you’d repeat every day if you could.

Written by elamb · Filed Under astral dynamics, feature 

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