Saturday, January 28, 2012

The Nature of Things








what kind of world do you want?





("I propose that a reader of Da rerum natura is going to find joy.")


The highest good?

Joy?

Beauty?

Pleasure?

Ecstasy?

Suffering?


(what's the point again?)


"The Monkey In The Machine and the Machine in the Monkey"




This is a story about the rise of machines.


And why no one believes you can change the world for the better any more.


How we decided that we were machines ourselves.


Played video games.


And helped start Africa's world war.



*please note the amount of dancing in this video. Obviously it's intentional. The clearest expression of JOY is dance.



“Death is nothing to us.”

So, when our mortal frame shall be disjoin’d,
The lifeless lump uncoupled from the mind,
From sense of grief and pain we shall be free;
We shall not feel, because we shall not be.
Though earth in seas, and seas in heaven were lost,
We should not move, we only should be toss’d.
Nay, e’en suppose when we have suffer’d fate
The soul should feel in her divided state,
What’s that to us? for we are only we,
While souls and bodies in one frame agree.
Nay, though our atoms should revolve by chance,
And matter leap into the former dance;
Though time our life and motion could restore,
And make our bodies what they were before,
What gain to us would all this bustle bring?
The new-made man would be another thing.

~Lucretius On The Nature of Things (trans John Dryden)



Lucretius, who was born about a century before Christ, was emphatically not our contemporary. He thought that worms were spontaneously generated from wet soil, that earthquakes were the result of winds caught in underground caverns, that the sun circled the earth. But, at its heart, “On the Nature of Things” persuasively laid out what seemed to be a strikingly modern understanding of the world. Every page reflected a core scientific vision—a vision of atoms randomly moving in an infinite universe—imbued with a poet’s sense of wonder. Wonder did not depend on the dream of an afterlife; in Lucretius it welled up out of a recognition that we are made of the same matter as the stars and the oceans and all things else. And this recognition was the basis for the way he thought we should live—not in fear of the gods but in pursuit of pleasure, in avoidance of pain.~Stephen Greenblatt

"That's the 'good news'?"







Monday, January 23, 2012

Thanks Frank! (happy new year!!!)


So here it is, a new year. And my wife recently related how one goes about preparing for the Chinese New Year. She said that first you need to be thankful to the previous year for all that it was . . . Thank the spirit animal for all it provided.

And so I need to thank you, Frank! 2011 was a tremendous year. You were a great metal rabbit and you led me to a number of things I couldn't have found without going down your rabbit hole . . .

2011 was a year of celebrations. I spent western new years in a cabin w/ a bunch of punks last year. Thank you!


Later, you led me to The Source on my birthday. That was a lot of fun! Thanks so much! What a birthday!


The big find of the year though, was when I followed Rabbit Creek to the Solstice and The Black Rock. You led me there by following a dream, my Phaedra Dream. WOW!!!




We had a number of other fun adventures also. It was a year of exploration. Thank You! Incredibly, toward the end of the summer, you led my son and I to The Heart of The Monster. Incredible! . . . Add to that a couple of Alchemical Weddings, and a family music festival in the Sawtooths, and it was almost perfect! Thanks!


--The icing of course, was the big meet up at The Sync Cabin. What a time! Thank you sooo much!




ahh yes, there was this too . . .




Thanks!!!!

and having done that, one is to open all the windows at midnight and let the year go, which we just did. NOW,one is to only think and talk about the future for the next 24 hours.

Speaking about the future . . .




So, a dragon huh?
a fire dragon you say?







piece of cake!

Monday, January 16, 2012

an unearthed treasure that changed things.



(School is back in tomorrow, and I just wanted to share with you what I'm reading and have been reading . . .)





(This one, I can tell, is one I'm really going to enjoy!)
(the following two may be connected to 1984)



(somehow I want to connect the top to the bottom with this . . .)



quantumsync

Abe's Axe is a symbol. Like the firey wand of Hermes, it is the conduit for bringing into action manifestations from the creative imagination. He is not killing vampires so much as freeing living dead men. The great emancipator would like to bring you into the 4th dimension of consciousness. He is going to have to kill you to do this, though. Or, actually, just annihilate your ego to transport you. In this instance, his axe is the craft. A craft is both a transport and a skill. The magician's wand is both. A pen can be mightier than the sword. What's your craft? Use your symbol well. . .

Heal The King!

Heal The King!