What can you do to push and motivate yourself?

[ouffha]

Have you been in Rimini, buyram?

Lea Rimini? from King of Queens?

[we are watching you]

Great thread!

[QIR]

In Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground," the protagonist implicitly supports the idea of 2 plus 2 making 5, spending several paragraphs considering the implications of rejecting the statement "2 times 2 makes 4." His purpose is not ideological, however. Instead, he proposes that it is the free will to choose or reject the logical as well as the illogical that makes mankind human. He adds: "I admit that 2 times 2 makes 4 is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, 2 times 2 makes 5 is sometimes a very charming thing too."

Dostoevsky was writing in 1864. However, according to Roderick T. Long, Victor Hugo had used the phrase back in 1852. He objected to the way in which the vast majority of French voters had backed Napoleon III, endorsing the way liberal values had been ignored in Napoleon III's coup. Victor Hugo said "Now, get 7,500,000 votes to declare that 2 and 2 make 5, that the straight line is the longest road, that the whole is less than its part; get it declared by 8 millions, by 10 millions, by a 100 millions of votes, you will not have advanced a step." It's very plausible that Dostoevsky had this in mind. [...]

He might well have had that in mind...

[schel]

Hahaha QIR

[pregap]

A claim frequently heard about the San Pedro experience is that the user embarks on a flight of a telepathic nature being transported across time and space. A user who embarks on this "astral journey" may perceive events happening in distant parts of the world, or in metaphysical realms. This flight phenomenon, which I have not encountered in my experience with San Pedro, may result from solanaceous plants which are frequently included in the San Pedro brew and contain the Belladonna alkaloids.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but remote viewing is the term it's usually used, isn't it?

Suspect Zero is a 2004 thriller, directed by E. Elias Merhige. It opened to decidedly mixed reviews, and failed to earn back half of its estimated $27 million production costs at the box office. It has also been criticized to have a similar ending as the movie Se7en.

FBI Agent Thomas Mackelway (Aaron Eckhart) and Agent Fran Kulok (Carrie-Anne Moss) are put on the trail of Ben O'Ryan (Ben Kingsley), a serial killer who exclusively targets other serial killers. As the investigation proceeds, the agents begin to become aware of the possible existence of Suspect Zero, a mythical "super serial killer" responsible for hundreds of deaths across all 50 States who leaves no evidence behind to link his crimes together. The agents must decide if O'Ryan is the key that will allow them to catch Suspect Zero, or if he is Suspect Zero himself. As it turns out, O'Ryan was part of a secret government experiment attempting to cultivate telepathic abilities in individuals for military purposes. The experiments gave O'Ryan the ability to see the actions of serial killers. These disturbing visions constantly torment O'Ryan, and drive him to find the killers and kill them. O'Ryan seeks out Mackelway because Mackelway shares his abilities to some degree and was involved in a controversial case that made headlines. O'Ryan hunts down Suspect Zero, whose child victims are giving O'Ryan even more nightmares.

The actual "Suspect Zero" is a mentally sick man who travels over the United States with a truck. He targets children, which he kidnaps and transports to his ranch to be killed. Eventually, Mackelway and O'Ryan find Suspect Zero at his ranch. After a struggle outside, Suspect Zero is killed by a rock from Mackelway. O'Ryan is then shot by Kulok who believes O'Ryan is trying to harm Mackelway but instead is trying to fulfill the prophecy which was foreseen earlier in the film. A major theme of the film is remote viewing, and the DVD's extra features include interviews with people who worked with the US military and intelligence agencies as part of those programs.

[Kore]

If you're not gay, a druggie, a fag hag or a whore, don't even think about going to Crobar -- you'll be treated as a nuisance.
 

crobar appears to be like law school

LOL r e g g i e

When this niteclub closed in New york city an entire crowd of clubbers got relieved - that's how horrible the environment was..

[shell oil]

When this niteclub closed in New york city an entire crowd of clubbers got relieved - that's how horrible the environment was..

Great username, Kore! Correct me if I'm wrong, but here it is my understanding of the Kore archetypes. Kore is the Greek word for "virgin." In ancient Greek culture, virgin meant a woman who had not yet given birth, not the Christian meaning of a woman who had not yet had sex. The Greeks believed there were three basic Kore archetypes: Kore Persephone, Kore Athena, and Kore Artemis.

Kore Persephone was the "young maiden," a girl who was Kore because of youth. Persephone is said to have a younger counterpart to herself -- Kore -- another name for the young Persephone. Psychologically, this may be a representation of two or three levels of this archetype: Kore, the Maiden, Persephone (or Demeter), the mature Woman, and Hecate, the Wise Crone.

Kore Athena was the career woman, who remained Kore because of dedication to some craft-based business.

Kore Artemis was the "wild woman," who remained Kore because she was a lesbian.

It is through the Greek influences of Artemis that Dianic Witchcraft became associated with lesbianism. At this time many lesbian Dianic rituals came into being.

[small talk]

Holding the Tensions

Carl Jung gave the image of the alchemical vessel in which processes of sublimation and purification take place. Psychotherapy provides this same kind of containment whereby tensions and paradoxes are charged with energy until they give way to active transformation. Even nuclear fusion requires the hot plasma to be contained long enough for fusion reactions to take place. The same is true of scientific and philosophical ideas. David Bohm regretted the speed with which Neils Bohr tried to resolve the tensions inherent in quantum theory. Within a year of Heisenberg's discovery of matrix mechanics Schrodinger produced his wave equation and Bohr and others quickly demonstrated the mathematical equivalence of the two approaches. Yet both approaches do subtly different things - Heisenberg's matrix mechanics, for example, makes no reference to an underlying or background space. If only the two approaches could have been held in tension, emphasizing both their similarities and differences, Bohm argued, then it may have been possible to develop a much deeper theory, one that transcended conventional notions of space-time and allowed for an intimate connection with relativity.

A similar tension exists today between scientific approaches to "consciousness theory" (in which the origin of mind is attributed to objective structures and processes within the brain - albeit some of them being quite novel, such as Penrose's notions of the gravitational collapse of the wave function) and our subjective experiences of consciousness, rare moments of transcendence and those inexplicable occurrences in which the irrational breaks through in dreams, synchronicities, etc. Then there are other phenomena which seem to have a foot in both camps, these include Jung's psychoid which is neither matter nor mind and both, the aforementioned synchronicities and phenomena such as projective identification. Rather than seeking a quick resolution between the subjective and objective it is valuable to hold on to the differences and paradoxes and use them as pointers to something deeper. Now that psychology has discovered the objective within consciousness (Jung's collective unconscious) so too physics must discover the subjective in matter; in fact, physics must come to terms with "the irrational in matter". Science is producing ever more delicate information about processes within the brain. Openness to Eastern meditative traditions brings with it alternative theories of consciousness and subtle matter. Transpersonal psychology addresses the idea of collective mind. Quantum theory and chaos theory help to loosen the appeal of traditional mechanistic theories and reductionistic approaches and, in the process, providing us with new metaphors. Nevertheless we are still victim to over two hundred years of mechanistic thinking and we work within a language that reflects and supports such a world view. As soon as we speak about mind and consciousness we find ourselves talking about objects, concepts, things, localization in space, separation and movement in time. Yet both quantum theory and Eastern psychology point to timelessness, active process and the ultimate illusion of the personal observer. It is very difficult for us, even now, to fully embrace the quantum paradigm, even the mathematics of quantum theory is still (paradoxically) expressed using space-time coordinates when the same theory predicts the break down of space-time structure. And time itself, as Prigogine points out, has never treated correctly in physics. Up to now it has been used more as an ordering parameter 't', and conveys nothing of the dynamics in which being gives way to becoming.

Locality and Beyond

The central question is: What is it that exists independent of the physical brain? Yet as soon as we attempt to formulate this questions we prejudice the answer through our linguistic concepts of object, location in space and so on. Current "consciousness studies" in the hard sciences assume that mind, or consciousness, emerges out of the physical brain and cannot therefore exist independent of it - although a variety of physical signals can be sent between brains. Our experience of consciousness awareness - scanning the environment and having access to our memories - is certainly conditioned by the state of the physical brain. But to suggest that brain is the sole cause of mind does not logically follow. Consciousness studies also argue in favour of some sort of quantum mechanical origin for consciousness. In its barest form it proposes that the sort of things done by consciousness (Penrose picks out mathematics) cannot all be reduced to algorithmic processes and therefore mind does not have a mechanical basis. While parts of it may be hard wired it does not totally operate like a computer. Quantum theory, the argument goes, is the other thing that cannot be reduced to algorithmic form. Ergo quantum theory must have something to do with consciousness. From there researchers rush on to theories of quantum tunneling, collapsing wave functions, non-local connections and coherent quantum structures. But a variety of other explanations are possible:

- That mind was present in the universe ab inito. For example, in the form of a proto mind associated with even the elementary particles.

- That mind is of a totally different order and makes its liaison with matter via the medium of the brain (The dualism of Popper and Eccles).

- That both mind and matter (at the quantum level) arise out of some deeper level.

- Or, to follow Bohm, that mind and matter form an unanalyzable whole which must be addressed through some totally different order of explanation - the Implicate Order. In this case the Cartesian cut is an illusion present only at the Explicate Order of perception and explanation.

Subatomic particles that are separated in space and time behave as if they 'know' about each other. Archie Roy describes the attempts of physicist David Bohm to account for this profound unity of the world - a unity that might explain the paranormal.

Most of us have had the experience of standing on a bridge, watching a rain-swollen river slip by beneath, its surface deceptively calm. Only the occasional eddy reveals the vicious undertow of unseen currents.

On the Sun's surface, 'eddies' immensely greater, often as large as the Earth itself, are often visible. These sunspots, regions of swirling gas thousands of degrees cooler than the rest of the Sun's surface, move with the Sun's rotation. They travel in pairs, the members of a pair being termed the 'leader' and the 'follower'. Study of their light shows that each spot has a magnetic field. And even though they may be thousands of miles apart, if the leader has north magnetic polarity, the follower invariably has south magnetic plarity, and vice versa. How does the follower 'know' the polarity of the leader so that it can 'decide' to be of opposite polarity?


The unseen bond between sunspots. A vortex forms beneath the Sun's surface, generating a magnetic field with jumbled lines of force. The field lines 'float' to the surface, dragging the vortex with them. Where they break through, two sunspots of opposite polarities form, bound together by the field.

This question is extremely easy to answer. If we could delve deep into the Sun - that is, add a third dimension to our appreciation of the problem - wc would discover that each member of a sunspot pair is a 'broken end' formed when a twisting, rope-like vortex of gas is forced upwards from the Sun's depths and 'snaps' at the surface. The two sunspots therefore rotate, in opposite directions. Since this rotation causes thc magnetic field, the spots display opposite magnetic polarities. The connection between the sunspots is easily explained. But quantum mechanics suggests a large-scale interconnection among particles in the Universe that is not so easy to understand. The problem is shown in an acute form in a famous paradox presented by Albert Einstein with two collaborators, Nathan Rosen and Boris Podoisky, in 1935. It states an inescapable conclusion of quantum mechanics that seems outrageously incompatible with the theory of relativity and the belief that the velocity of light is a maximum limiting velocity for everything. Suppose an electron and its anti-particle, a positron collide with each other. They vanish and are converted into pure energy - two photons, which fly apart like shrapnel from an exploding grenade. In subsequent measurements the two photons are found to have opposite 'polarisations'. To understand polarisation, it is necessary to use the wave 'picture' of light.

[small talk]

Light is said to be polarised when its waves all lie in one plane: thus a light beam travelling horizontally could be polarised so that its vibrations were all vertical. Alternatively, it could be polarised so that its vibrations were all horizontal, or at any orientation between these. (Ordinarily, light is unpolarised: its vibrations can lie at any orientation around the beam.) Each photon travelling away from the mutual annihilation of the electron and positron can have any polarisation at all - but the other photon is then certain to be polarised at right angles to it. So by measuring the polarisation of one, we can predict the result of a measurement on the other. The question asked by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen can be put in these terms: why do polarisation measurements always produce corresponding results? Does some unknown influence - a 'signal' - travel from one to the other to produce agreement?

Such a question may seem as naive as the question asked earlier about the magnetic polarities of the sunspot pair. Surely, it may be said, the polarisations of the two photons are fixed at the moment of the electron-positron annihilation, and remain the same thereafter. There is no need for a 'signal': the measuring instruments are merely discovering a pre-existing correlation. But according to the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics, this is precisely what is not happening. The photons cannot be said to be in a definite state of polarisation before the measurement. The polarisation is 'potential' rather than actual:   this is related to the fact that the results of quantum-mechanical measurements are not fixed in advance - there is only a certain probability of a given result occurring. Yet if each photon cannot be said to have a given state of polarisation before the measurement, how can the measurements at different places give correlated results?

An argument similar to this was used by Einstein and his collaborators as a weapon against the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics. They argued that quantum mechanics was fundamentally incomplete. Behind the properties physicists measure, such as polarisation, lie further, unknown properties, called 'hidden variables'. Variations in these 'hidden' properties would explain the variable results obtained in the polarisation measurements. But Einstein's arguments were not accepted by the majority of physicists. And subsequent work by theorists has shown that, if the experimental results predicted by quantum mechanics are correct - and experiments are continuing to yield evidence of their correctness - and if hidden variables exist, then they behave very curiously indeed. In the electron-positron annihilation experiment, we could imagine a measurement on one of the photons sending some unknown kind of 'signal' that would influence the other photon - just as our 'naive' questioner supposed. These 'signals' would travel faster than light in some cases.


The paradox of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen. An electron and its anti-particle, a positron, collide and are converted into two photons travelling apart. Each meets a polarisation analyser, which acts like Polaroid sunglasses: it blocks photons polarised at the 'wrong' angle. According to the usual interpretation, the photon now 'jumps' into a definite polarisation state, and is either passed or blocked by the analyser. The other photon, even though it may he extremely remote, also 'jumps' into a corresponding state, with a polarisation at right angles to that of the first .How does this correlation occur?

It is more likely that, as Niels Bohr argued in 1935, our common-sense way of viewing such experiments is at fault. Our tendency to split the experimental situation into independent quantities, such as the measuring instruments and the photons, and thinking of them as being localised in space and time, is a legacy from classical physics. Such a way of thinking is inadequate. Bohr went so far as to say: 'There are fundamental limitations met with in atomic physics, on the objective existence of phenomena independent of their means of observation.' This view seems to imply that the observer and his decisions play an integral part in actualising, or at least influencing, the Universe he observes; that in some deeper way the observer's measurements, the particles and the apparatus are all related and indivisible.

In Wholeness and the implicate order, published in 1980, David Bohm, professor of theoretical physics at Birkbeck College, London, describes a theory of quantum physics that treats such matters in an illuminatingly fresh, if controversial, way. The book is not easy to read, for it is dense with technical terms, often inadequately defined. But it should certainly be studied by anyone interested in theoretical physics and the nature of the connection between matter and consciousness. Bohm argues that, although our separation of the world into a large number of seemingly autonomous objects has worked admirably in the development of our understanding and control of our environment, such a division is seen on a deeper level to be false. He puts forward reasons for believing that the level of reality manifesting itself, the level that we study, is produced by the creative, flowing processes of a subworld. Objects and patterns are briefly thrown up, like the forms fleetingly seen in clouds. They seem to have a certain stability, exist for longer and shorter durations, and can be described by laws based on observation. But because they are manifested, or projected, from a deeper, more fundamental world of dynamic processes, certain anomalies or paradoxes occur. They reveal that, however deeply we believe we have come to grips with ultimate reality, the artefacts we are studying are, as it were, projections into a lower number of dimensions from a higher-dimensional realm.

Bohm gives the rough analogy of a man watching two television sets, each showing the view transmitted from one of two cameras focused on a fish-tank. If the cameras focus through different walls of the tank, the two scenes watched by the man will be completely different. Nevertheless he will in time see a certain relationship between the images, a decided correlation of behaviour of the fish on one screen with that of the fish on the other. If he did not understand that the screens show two-dimensional aspects of an overriding three-dimensional reality, he might find the correlation puzzling and paradoxical. Bohm looks upon the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox and other aspects of quantum mechanics as hinting at this deeper, 'implicit' world.

[small talk]

An analogy for Bohm's 'implicate order'. We notice correlations among widely separated events (represented by the apparently unconnected television pictures) and deduce that they represent aspects of a single underlying reality, or implicate order (the three-dimensional scene in the studio). We cannot study the implicate order directly, just as the viewer knows nothing directly about the studio


He also points out that we should expect non-local, non-causal relationships between observed elements if these are projections of a higher-dimensional reality. One is reminded forcibly of the principle of acausal synchronicity formulated by Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli to describe the seemingly meaningful coincidences that occur in people's lives from time to time with such arresting force. By no stretch of the imagination are their elements connected by cause and effect and so, however striking an effect they produce on their observers, they are dismissed glibly as 'mere coincidences'.' It may be that, like paradoxes, they should spur our minds to take fresh and original views of reality. Bohm makes a courageous attempt to include mental events in his theory. The sequence of notes that we hear when listening to music is the 'explicit' aspect of the piece. When we understand the music sufficiently to grasp it 'in its wholeness', we are grasping its 'implicit' order. Mozart said that his compositions came to him as a whole, and he simply had to write them out. Bohm regards this as showing an intuitive grasp of an implicit order that could only be conveyed to others through the explicit ordering of the music.

Similarly he contrasts a thinker's understanding of a logical or mathematical problem to the sequence of steps by which he conveys his understanding to others. The field of mental phenomena, however, is made explicit to us in a manner so different from that in which material entities are made manifest that we have traditionally held them to be completely separate, displaying such completely different natures that we have puzzled for millennia over such problems as how mind and matter could ever interact. It is thought-provoking to apply Bohm' s ideas concerning the transience of objects and the relationships among them to the world of human personality, of the conscious and unconscious minds. Does his theory make more comprehensible the interaction between individual minds and the deeper, more permanent world of the archetypes and the collective unconscious itself? Bohm is noncommittal, but believes that such problems, and the problems of the paranormal, are more likely to find a solution within the framework of his ideas than they ever could in classical science.

Paranormal phenomena abound with paradoxes, those painful spurs to human thought. Telepathy and clairvoyance treat space with contempt. Precognitions seem to make nonsense of our most cherished conviction that cause always precedeseffect, undermining our belief in time's orderliness. Such seeming paradoxes, like the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, may be messages to us, drawing our attention to hidden realities. Careful study of the paranormal will guide us in uncovering, mapping and partially understanding such realms. We have achieved the simple things, such as mastering flight, tapping and controlling atomic energy and sending members of our species to the Moon. In the paranormal we are facing the greatest challenge yet to our intellects. We should not expect to make fast progress, for we are entering areas yet more alien than quantum mechanics to everyday common-sense concepts. But we have plenty of time, if only we do not let our own stupidity wipe us from the face of our planet. In our uncertain world, the elusive phenomena of the paranormal are whispers of encouragement, glimpses of human personality beyond the physical and ephemeral.