a robot, i am not » human beings

a reason money won’t make you happy

jritch — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:30:21 +0000

We all seem to acknowledge that money isn’t going to make us happy but Jonah Lehrer covers the evidence of why:

Taken together, our findings provide evidence for the provocative notion that having access to the best things in life may actually undermine one’s ability to reap enjoyment from life’s small pleasures. Our research demonstrates that a simple reminder of wealth produces the same deleterious effects as actual wealth on an individual’s ability to savor, suggesting that perceived access to pleasurable experiences may be sufficient to impair everyday savoring. In other words, one need not actually visit the pyramids of Egypt or spend a week at the legendary Banff spas in Canada for one’s savoring ability to be impaired—simply knowing that these peak experiences are readily available may increase one’s tendency to take the small pleasures of daily life for granted.

[Read the full article at The Frontal Cortex]

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Post tags: happiness, human beings, money

Berman on the need for authentic experience

jritch — Sun, 30 May 2010 01:39:49 +0000

I’ve found Morris Berman to be one of the most articulate and lucid commentators on the modern American experience. In a recent blog post, he covers the human need to have authentic experiences,

In his autobiography, the psychologist Carl Jung tells the story of a man who comes to him for therapy, apparently at the insistence of his wife. The man is dull as a stick: a Swiss high school principal of about sixty years of age, who did everything “right” all his life, and never experienced a moment of ecstasy or imagination. Jung suggests that he keep a record of his dreams, which he does, showing up at the second session with something potentially disturbing. He dreamt that he entered a darkened room, and found a three-year-old infant covered with feces, and crying. What, he asked Dr. Jung, could it mean? Jung decided not to tell him the obvious: that the baby was himself, that it had had the life crushed out of it at an early age, and was now crying out to be heard. Exposing the “shadow” to the light of day, Jung told himself, would precipitate a psychosis in this poor guy; he wouldn’t be able to handle the psychic confrontation. So Jung gave him some sort of neutral explanation, saw the man a few more times, finally pronounced him “cured,” and let him go.

One wonders if the good doctor did the right thing. Is a living death preferable to a psychotic awakening? On the other hand—and I have a feeling Jung would agree with me on this—aren’t we all that man, to some degree? Perhaps not as wigged out, but it may be a question of degree, nothing more. Abandonment of that cellular identity is the abandonment of life itself; the abandonment of the part of ourselves that is in touch with the “miraculous,” as some have called it.

There is, of course, in virtually every society, a kind of conspiracy to keep that memory out of conscious awareness. We need to ask why that would be the case; but meanwhile, it’s clear that if it emerges at all, it is by “accident” (the madeleine that triggers a kinesthetic memory, e.g.), or in a therapist’s office, or in a dream (or a poem). If the cellular world is repressed within the individual, it is also repressed within society. Hence, to study human psychology is really to study abnormal psychology, and to study sociology is to really to study a kind of institutionalized insanity; or weirdness, at the very least. But it is hardly an accident that the two go hand in hand. Observing the phenomenon in the United States, the psychiatrist Thomas Lewis remarks that “A good deal of modern American culture is an extended experiment in the effects of depriving people of what they crave most.” “Happiness,” he concludes, “is within range only for adroit people who give the slip to America’s values.”

A grim assessment, but I doubt there is any way of denying it. Nor is it limited to the United States, of course; if Freud was right, there is no civilization without deep discontent. It just takes a different form in different cultures. And in any case, it is hard to imagine what a society based entirely on cellular memory would be like—although figures such as Rousseau and Nietzsche did their best to sketch it out. True, the results are less than impressive, but one would like to think that more can be done in this direction beyond individual initiative. It is very rare for a society to literally stop, for a moment, and collectively discuss what an authentic way of life might consist of. Indeed, I can barely imagine such a thing, except that it actually happened in France in May/June of 1968, and for those who were privileged enough to have been at the two-month “teach-in” held at the Sorbonne during that time, it was like breathing oxygen. What is man? What is the good life? What are we doing here? And: Why aren’t we asking ourselves these questions all the time?

[via Morris Berman's Dark Ages America blog]

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Post tags: human beings, humanity, spiritual experience

human energy energy generation

jritch — Thu, 06 May 2010 04:39:46 +0000

Why am I researching solar panels when we can just use humans? This Georgian man can use his highly anomalous electric field to illuminate handheld fluorescent lamps.

The best part: “I’ve been sitting here forever trying to light this lamp… and obviously failing miserably”

The expert at the end is clearly believable because an organic molecule is behind him.

One day, it starts as a minor discovery. The next? We’re sitting in liquid vats harvested for our energy. I’ve got my eye on your evil plans robots.

the spiritual experiences of Blaise Pascal

jritch — Sun, 02 May 2010 23:06:00 +0000

I’m always interested in the spiritual experiences of thinkers past. Many of the people who founded the very basis of Western society, received their inspiration from supposed, “spiritual beings”. Blaise Pascal provides another example. Pascal is best known for scientific contributions like the principle of hydrostatics, known as Pascal’s Law. In math, Pascal helped develop probability theory and also made a very large contribution to the understanding of infinite series and to the geometry of curves. But later in his life, Pascal had a sudden religious conversion. During the night of the 23rd to 24th of November 1654, he was accompanied by a lighted vision which he interpreted as fire which brought him the total conviction of God’s ‘reality and presence’. After this point, he devoted the rest of his life to understanding religion.

A recent neuroscience paper aims to interpret his religious experience through migraines. Regardless of the source of the experience, Pascal’s case is yet another example of a highly rational and developed scientific thinker having an amazing spiritual experience which changed his life.

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Post tags: human beings, inspiration, spiritual experience

another solution to being human

jritch — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 17:00:55 +0000

The Wayfinders by Wade Davis (House of Anansi, 2009)

With the converging crises of imminent energy scarcity, environmental degradation, resource depletion and economic insolvency, suddenly I’m recognizing the apogee of our modern civilization may have passed us by a few decades ago. Being on the slope of globalization’s decline as opposed to its ascent or plateau is a precarious position, mainly because the evidence increasingly indicates an ever more bleak definition of the future. But that’s precisely why I found Wade Davis’ 2009 CBC Massey Lectures collected in The Wayfinders so deeply inspiring. The way we define our lives and the meaning of being a human is far from an absolute and objective answer to reality, it has been the result of numerous decisions made in a compounding form over hundreds of years. Because humanity at large expresses itself in the form of modernity is largely a result of the ever growing demand our lifestyle has on ever more hard to reach raw material inputs. Although I listened to this entire series of lectures through the CBC Ideas Podcast, Davis’ presentation hit me with much more gravity the second time around.

The genius and intelligence recognized by modern humanity is only in that of highly advanced technology while the genius of the cultures detailed in The Wayfinders takes many different forms. Each culture is far from trivial but an answer to the questions that come with being human, all of these answers just as impressive as our own. Our tendency is for to look at the naked and painted body of the native as a failed attempt at modernity. A native to be saved by induction into our economic system with all the benefits of employment and monetary exchange. Even until the 1960′s some Australian textbooks included the Aboriginals among, “interesting animals of the country”. To this point Davis quotes from the testimony of a Penan nomad to the UN General Assembly in 1992, “The (Malaysian) government says that it is bringing us development. But the only development that we see is dusty logging roads and relocation camps. For us, their so-called progress means only starvation, dependence, helplessness, the destruction of our culture and the demoralization of our people. The government says it is creating jobs for our people. Why do we need jobs? My father and grandfather did not have t o ask the government for jobs. They were never unemployed. They lived from the land and from the forest. It was a good life. We were never hungry or in need… In ten years all the jobs will be gone and the forest that has sustained us for thousands of years will be gone with them.”

Davis is able to continue his discussion without resorting to the “noble savage” or the Hobbesian, “nasty, brutish and short” dichotomy. For the cultures he touches on from Australia, the Americas, Africa and Asia it is clear that a genius is required to flourish in harsh environments, against any odds we would consider possible. And all of this despite harmful environmental degradation brought about by our lifestyle. Denial of climate change is a luxury provided by a temperate environment and disconnection from the natural world. For native peoples, when the glaciers their ancestors have worshiped for generations are disappearing and the Arctic lands they’ve hunted annually for all of history fail to freeze but for a few months there is no ideology, only survival.

I was nearly drawn to tears by the examples of rituals and lifestyles Davis uses to illustrate the depth of beauty of human experience. The Pacific islanders sailing thousands of kilometers between beautiful islands with wind blowing through their hair to complete the Kula gift sharing ring live the lives we can only experience through fictional characters projected onto glowing rectangles. The indigenous have no sense of paid employment, of work as burden as opposed to leisure as recreation. These cultures are the definition of the human experience that we have lost and try to replace through futile substitutes. These people experience pain and suffering along with glory and triumph, but through the full spectrum of being human, as opposed to our path which fails in its attempts to shield us from the realities of death and darkness.

These cultures have disappeared rapidly over the last hundred years, entire ways of life wiped out in less than a generation. Davis wonders why we have a universal rejection of genocide yet the ubiquitous practice of ethnocide destroys more than individuals but whole solutions to the human experience. We may discredit an indigenous approach to life, but they disdain the fact that so many of our own suffer from abject poverty. A native tribesman from Malaysia when observing the homeless in Canada said, “How can homelessness exist, a poor man shames us all.”

The most important lecture included in this collection was the discussion of sacred geography, of the stewardship shown by indigenous to their land. When the Spanish tore down Incan churches and monuments, building Christian churches and monasteries in their place, the native villagers celebrated because this further confirmed the sacredness of those sites. Likely not the reaction the Spanish intended. If we are to look at cultures in terms of success and failure, wouldn’t the successful culture be the one that has survived for over 50,000 years in the harsh deserts of Australia as opposed to our modern world on the verge of extinction after only 300? An idea of a sacred connection to land may be dismissed as meaningless superstition, but if it does not draw from an actual spirit world, perhaps it was the technological solution created long ago to ensure our species wouldn’t destroy the earth.

Davis has convinced me that when we talk about threats to our planet such as climate change or peak oil, we’re really talking about the end of our globalized civilization and not the extinction of humanity. Our species can exist in many other forms that live far more meaningful lives than the “modern man”. And for that reason, no matter how bleak the global situation may appear to be, the existence of the indigenous and their ability to maintain ancient wisdom despite all odds is a reason for hope.

Fortunately, to see these ideas and illustrations you don’t have to buy the book, you can listen to Wade Davis’ entire series of 2009 CBC Massey lectures online for free.

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Post tags: climate change, culture, human beings, humanity, indigenous

change everything you think in two hours

jritch — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 17:00:53 +0000

This is the one track of audio to rule them all. In it, bard and sage and storyteller and author Terence McKenna speaks on the origin of human consciousness in a talk titled, Evolving Times.

Terence McKenna has had a tremendous influence on the way I’ve developed since I first discovered him back in 2004. One of my first books to buy was a print copy of his trialogues with Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake. But even if you aren’t familiar with him or his ideas, you don’t have to be because I’ve discovered the one two hour podcast that will absolutely blow your mind and introduce you to him. This is the best talk I’ve ever heard by Terence McKenna.

If you truly devote two hours of your attention to this piece of audio, it has the potential to change the way you think about everything.

Even if Terence’s description of human brain development clashes with your ideology too much to even conceive it possible, the topics he covers will get you to re-think the most basic ways you approach your brain and society.

This isn’t to say that I believe wholeheartedly everything he says. Quite the contrary. In fact, doing so would be an insult to his legacy. But what I do think is that Terence gives a plausible description for something we have no feasible explanation for: the origin of human consciousness. And if you this narrative is crazy or off the mark, you can easily do some of your own research.

I’ve listened to this podcast several times now and below are the notes I’ve taken, in which I broke Terence’s thesis into several pieces. Thanks to Lorenzo at the Psychedelic Salon for putting this track out and for putting audio out on a regular basis.

Notes on Terence McKenna’s Evolving Times

The Origin of Consciousness

The commonly accepted notions of human evolution can explain many aspects of our world but humans emerged too quickly and our brain grew too fast
Lumholtz called this, “the most dramatic transformation in the history of life”
Evolution can’t explain us, the creatures that created the theory in the first place
Consciousness appeared in a creature that had reached an evolutionary climax, we were monkeys living the canopy and we made out pretty well
The best scientific explanation for consciousness: our need to throw led to a bigger brain with more capabilities (and from this complexity and number of connections consciousness emerged?)
Evidence is strong: our ancestors developed in Africa
Very little of biology pushes forward
Strife/environmental changes catalyze species change
Africa has been slowly drying
Simple animals die of starvation
Complex animals try new things
The drying of Africa led to our ancestors leaving the canopy to try new food sources
This was the era of knuckle walking, etc…
A recent paper said that monkeys leave the canopy for one thing only: mushrooms
Our ancestors tried eating everything, sometimes to terrible consequences
In the act of eating everything, they certainly encountered mushrooms containing psilocybin
Psilocybin can perhaps explain the rapid growth of the simian brain at a rate 10x faster than evolution seems to allow

Effects of Psilocybin

Can psilocybin explain human development? Let’s look at its effects.
Our ancestors would have certainly encountered psilocybin mushrooms, the ones that grew in Africa are big and shiny and attractive
At low doses: edge detection is improved; a highly competitive grassland environment selects for this, can avoid predators
At a higher dose: the primate gains an urge to reproduce in, “successful instances of copulation”
Thus from the above two points, monkeys that eat psilocybin are outbreeding their counterparts that may be allergic to it, don’t want it, etc…
At even higher doses, something happens that we can’t explain: a full blown “psychedelic experience”
Language like behaviour is common at this stage, glossolalia, i.e. speaking in tongues
Lingustics spontaneously organize
Language would have been entertainment before it had meaning
Eventually, an enterprising creature connected the “words” and meaning

Social Structure of a Society Like This

A dynamic balance likely emerged between land and creature
A mushroom that was widely available eventually became scarce
These creatures likely tried to preserve, probably did so in honey
Honey preservation forms alcohol
Alcohol promotes a different set of social values
All monkeys develop a set of heirarchy of dominant modes
Psilocybin inocculated against against male dominanted heirarchies and dissolved boundaries towards monogamy
Likely, group mushroom parties that “got out of hand… regularly”, mardi gras is a modern example
Orgiastic style dissolved lines of paternity and led to collectivist behavior
Men began thinking of “our children” instead of “my children”
During this stage, all the things that make us humans were developed
But as the mushroom went away, we had language and social structures
When the mushroom went away, we lost a sense of who we are and gained a sense of “why can’t we be as we weren’t were”
To replace this utopia, humans addict
We addict to everything: ideology, other humans, substances
Knowledge of the mushrooms were lost to all humanity except for remote groups in other areas
Was rediscovered in Mexico in 1955 and was outlawed by 1966; they are dangerous to our society
Science didn’t explore this and then move on; its never been there; we don’t know what it is

Consequences for our Social Structure

We structure our society so that people can get their thrills jumping out of planes and off bridges
In general: psychedelics dissolve boundaries
All societies are about boundaries
Anything that introduces questioning of boundaries is threatening
Our society is just the current download of the linguistic enterprise
We need our ego to ensure that at a restaurant we put food in our mouth, and not just our guest
However, the ego becomes like a cist or tumor that keeps going and becomes chronic; its incurable except…
Except for the use of non-perscription drugs; psychedelics dissolve this ego
They promote values other than the bottom line and value acquisition
This theory outlined above, ends up having tremendous social consequences; a political debate
What society should we build if its all arbitrary?
We are addicted to things
Not enough petroleum, heavy metals, etc.. too keep giving things to the ‘thing addicts’
We’ll have to accept major catastrophe or re-order society
We simply do not know what the psychedelic experience is
It connects you to nature
Nature only sees us as a giant gene swarm
The earth is a thermostatic, self-regulator
A kind of mind
The early humans worshipped the feminine b/c they connected to an intelligence they felt as feminine
Our intelligence is harmful to the world if we don’t acknowledge this
Our social creative space is incredibly impoverished
We can create more art in 20 minutes with our brain
There are no political solutions, only technological ones
All ideology is toxic b/c it is an insult to human free thinking
Technology is an extension of man
The difference between psychedelics and computers is that computers are too big to swallow
The old paradigm cannot continue; as the old paradigm changes we must act as sitters for society; spreading calm

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Post tags: consciousness, evolution, human beings, humanity, thinking

cultural revolution is the solution

jritch — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:47:19 +0000

Paul Ehrlich is convinced that global civilization collapse is coming and that the only solution is a cultural revolution. Ehrlich made a name for himself by taking controversial stances on population and many people have interpreted that as eugenics. I don’t think we are overpopulated in principle but overpopulated in method.I don’t think massive changes in the financial and environmental ecosystem will support the societies that allowed the dramatic population increases during the Age of Oil. With roughly 1.5 billion humans on the earth before oil and now approaching 7 billion, petroleum has revolutionized the human experience dramatically. However, we absolutely must try to prevent massive die-offs because we’ve borrowed success from the future rather than building on the past. I’m hoping that technology can help to soften the blow.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Post tags: collapse, human beings, peak oil

realms of the human unconscious

jritch — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:29:16 +0000

Stanislov Grof's first book

Maybe we have to be born with an interest in the origin of consciousness, where it resides and how it operates, I’m one of those people. No explanation garnered by science, religion, mystics, or from indigenous wisdom has ever fully approximated what I’ve seen in the world. Transpersonal psychologist Stanislov Grof’s first book, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research (Dutton, 1976) reveals many fascinating accounts relayed from his personal experience while conducting hundreds of LSD sessions with patients. Grof offers his comments on what the trends of these experiences hint at, frankly admitting in the epilogue that such outlandish comments will draw harsh commentary from peers, but is wise in saying that omitting them will only continue the retardation of humanity’s ability to understand the final frontier: the human mind.

Grof discovered from working with patients suffering particular neuroses that a condensed experience brought about by ingesting a few hundred micrograms of lysergic acid diethylamide can induce profound healing experiences allowing people to transcend even lifelong problems. Many of the accounts are quite gruesome as Grof is working with some particularly psychotic people, he spares no details and I felt my gut wrench as descriptions of rapes, abuse, war scenes poured from the pages. However hard these accounts were to read, it was the very ability to relive these experiences (sometimes even from the perspective of others at the scene) that allowed the patients to ultimately improve.

The description of the power and capabilities of this condensed experience (COEX) framework makes up a large portion of the book. Grof notes that these highly symbolic psychodynamic experiences consist of material originating in the human unconscious. However, time after time, Grof wondered about the accuracy of the scenes and situations described by his patients reliving these condensed experiences. In those cases where he could follow up, he did so and confirmed that sometimes the details were quite exact. For example, a patient named Dana described a traumatic event that occurred when she around 12 months of age. Dana drew elaborate images of the room she was in at that time, including the patterns of embroideries. Grof independently followed up with Dana’s mother and learned that the mother found Dana’s description bristling with accuracy. The room was described almost photographically by Dana and was, “unquestionable because of the very unusual character of the furniture and some of the objects involved.” There was no way Dana could have known this because before Dana was two years old, the family moved and the house was condemned, torn down and the furniture and objects weren’t retained. There were no photographs of the room and the mother didn’t recall ever mentioning anything from that room to Dana.

Another interesting observation Grof passes on is that repeated LSD sessions almost always led to the patient reliving his or her birth and various trauma associated with the birthing process. Patients would describe thoughts, feelings, and toxins that were passed to them by their mother while in the womb and in rare cases described exact scenarios their mother faced. Grof is highly skeptical (as I think we all should be) that the perinatal experience can pass on such a multitude of information to the eventual individual, forming the bases for neuroses and locking in patterns of life however there is a significant amount of evidence that (at the least) should amplify the significance of a birth.

The transpersonal, mystical and multidimensional experiences patients faced with quite regularity after reliving a birth experience were highly interesting. Grof breaks these phenomena into multiple categories: ancestral experiences, collective and racial experiences, past incarnation experiences, procognition/time travel, out of body experiences, ego transcendence, space travels, telepathy, animal/plant/planetary/extraplanetary consciousness, encounters with extradimensional intelligences/entities, intuitive understandings of universal symbols and consciousness of the universal mind. He then proceeds by laying out accounts describing these particular scenarios. The final two chapters which include these accounts are sometimes shocking but thoroughly mind blowing. One example: the ability for a patient to assume specific advanced yogic poses despite not even knowing what yoga is. To summarize these experiences would be to completely strip them of any comprehension so its best to watch Grof’s videos on YouTube. I was continually amazed by the ability of patients to describe complex mythological sequences from obscure religions (ex. ahura mazda v ahriman from Zoroastrianism) or when patients described traumatic experiences from their parent’s early childhood they had no way of knowing (but that Grof could confirm through follow-up with parents). Reading over these accounts seems to point to some sort of collective mind, encoded in our DNA or accessible in altered states of consciousness, something like the morphic fields Dr. Rupert Sheldrake has been working on. Equally amazing were the detailed accounts of alternate universes and the beings within.

Realms of the Human Unconscious indicates that the human mind is not only our most powerful asset but also our most underused asset as we rarely develop it. Perhaps consciousness is like a radio station we’ve tuned into for the time being, by modifying the receptors in our brains we can temporarily turn the dial on the radio hardware, allowing us to pick up a different signal. As Grof states early in the book, “It does not seem inappropriate and exaggerated to compare their [psychoactive drugs] potential significance for psychiatry and psychology to that of the microscope for medicine or the telescope for astronomy.” I find it deplorable that society has been unable to build much on Grof’s work in the last 33 years and this inability to accept responsibility for our unconscious is clearly leading to global complexity our current technology can no longer handle.

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Post tags: brain chemistry, human beings, neurology, psychology

restoring humanity

jritch — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 17:08:08 +0000

A great post by Xander Stone over at Reality Sandwich addresses the failure of our modern lifestyle to address true human needs.

I’m personally challenging my own internal and external dialogue, to avoid from referring to time as an equivalent to money. I’m finding that time is more abundant the more I detach myself from money, to complete the revolution I have to detach my language from monetary metaphors.

When the work day is done, the only way many people can change gears or get relaxed is to crack open the bottle or load up the pipe. Our use of mind-altering substances also displays our need to return to the being of our human nature. By losing regular contact with our underlying non-anxiety- driven, non-neurotic, but stable, calm and reflective inner nature, we have ceased to function or find fulfillment as the human beings we are.

Indeed, we are becoming increasingly like the programmed devices with which our technological society inundates us, giving the outer impression of vast and dynamic possibilities, but removed from the human heart. Because we lack a true connection with our inner being, we are terrified of being alone, or of being at rest, and paradoxically, through our compulsive obsessions with the frenetic, technology-driven pace of life, we have alienated ourselves from ourselves.

“We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about.”

–Joseph Campbell, The Power Of Myth

interview with John Taylor Gatto on the problems of US schooling

jritch — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 19:56:44 +0000

The Living Hero podcast has quickly become one of my favorite monthly listens. Host Jari Chevalier interviews pioneers from various fields that have the ideas and actions with world changing potential. Some of you that know me personally may know that I’m a big fan of John Taylor Gatto and his books about challenging the myths of American schooling so I was excited to hear John on Living Hero. If this podcast has room for improvement, it is in the production quality, the audio quality is very low. However, that’s the only down side. Fully worth the hour listen, this show provides a spectacular introduction to the history of compulsory schools and their inherent downfalls. Enjoy!

From Rockefeller’s General Education board,

In our dreams. . . people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. . . . We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple. . . we will organize children . . . and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.

General Education Board, Occasional Letter Number One, 1906 [via Charles Eisenstein's Ascent of Humanity]

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Post tags: history of american education, human beings, schools