I'm not advocating for sorcery, Mr.A. and I know squat about Buffy except that the theme is supernatural. Free market capitalism won't work indefinitely on a finite planet and the emphasis on mastery of the spiritual and mental realms, rather than material ones, has acquired a great appeal for many, as a consequense.
Oh, it appeals, but only because they WANT TO BELIEVE in myths. But these myths are unfounded. And we have proven it. Oh, that's right, we don't have to prove anything, THEY do. Is this just a reaction to the futility of the flesh? Or is it because behind these "myths" lies something science is too impotent to understand?
Oh, and to Mr. Anonymous, This thread seems similar in a minor way to one I started not too long ago. Take that, and meld it with the incommensurability thread... Aliens is an apt description of the supposed beings who may or may not abduct, interact, or mess with human beings. In and out of this dimension. Dimensions. Yes, where did OUR visible universe come from? I asked that question once, and was assured that one day science would explain. That science could explain the existence of something that has persisted forever, and come from nothing, is rather extraordinary. Is energy created and destroyed? Then why IS it? In the first place? All of that is alien. Am I right? Wrong? I am right. Energy/matter is neither created nor destroyed, and yet it exists, and must have had an origin somewhere. It must have. If something has never been created, then how can it exist? Is this why we have theoretical physicists pondering higher dimensions? How high do they need to go? Rael's explanation of human existence was that aliens created humans from their own genetic code, or something like that. When asked where the ALIENS came from, he said they were created by other aliens. And where did these other aliens come from??? From other aliens BEFORE the other aliens. And it goes on to infinity, says Rael. But there is no God, says Rael. Only infinity. After hearing Mr. Rael's theories, I concluded that he was simply giving a different name to the same concept. In fact, he sounded rather feeble when it came to the hall of mirrors. Alien is what I call it. I don't need any dictionary to tell me yes or no. Dictionaries are human in origin.
And if these "rational" skeptics say that "aliens" are unlikely, why should I put my faith in them when they can't even explain why we humans are likely? It seems pretty strange that I would take their word as truth. And not so strangely, I don't.
Mr A old chappie....bet ya thought yerd tripped me up. pardon the pun, with that aztec/Mayan card ey what...... well no dude. yes i am very aware of those cultures and how they used as aacrament psilocybin mushrooms---the elite did anyhow their myth was that the Sun had sacrifice ITSelf to give life, so they figures that sun needs blood to continue, hence massive bloody sacrifices. have notes about other shit about this i may drag out ata later time this is a very complex isse iaintjust skimmed over mr A. to just quicly preface a brief summary then... We hae to differentiate between agraian peoples/indigenous peoples who were respectful of nATURE AND HELD MOREE TO A goddess CONCEPT OF REALITY FROM THE SOLAR/SKY GOD WARRIOR CULTS/TRIBES WHO appropriatedTHE SACRAMEnT....YES? This is all adequately gone over in tis book, Shamanism and the Drug Propaganda: Patriarchy and the Drug War, by Dan Russell ISBN: 0-9650253-1-4 for example you get the move from oepn settlements suddenly being taken over by warrior invaders. thy have their sky-god 'marry' the people-of-te-lands Goddess and warp their mythology to suitthe new iron age agenda of warring and machoness etc, ANDmake sure their, now, slaves, do not havea share in the sacrament. only the warriors/elite do. right? so as i said. it is a situation of warrior culture versus psychedelic culture, or sacramental respect of Nature and celebration of life culture. you withme?? surely you could see a resurface of this mood in the 60s right? and what happened? ......it got smashed down....byyyy? why by the by-NOW heavy-ily armed--talking nuclear fukin WARHEAD-armed warrriORRRR culture, dig. and its gettin even fatter as we speak. now. onto your patronizing. 'listen mate its just yer brain doin is' nonesense. as i have tried to explain for quite awhile now. philosophy and varius fileds o science are now tying to tackled what subjective consciousness may mean. David Chalmer's has called this research 'the hard problem'. s you pontificating you know exactly what psychedelic/deep experience IS is a littloe naive to say the least, dont yer think i always feel more sad when i hear people whove HAD psychedelic experience and underestimate it tan i do from pople whove never had it who challenge it enuf fo now. mo later!
Interesting, Duendy, interesting. The first part I respect, yes. But physical life? You're basically, and correct me if I'm wrong, describing two sides to nature: masculine vs. feminine. Nature and life is feminine, and masculine is "warrior culture" and materialism. Isn't this dichotomy what physical life is about? Two opposing factions that are at their centers intertwined?
no your being'male-hating' with tat assumption-----hmmmm, digressin a tiny tick. we know misogyny is hatred of women ...right?....so what's a term for 'hater of men'..??? continuing . no this is NOT a male versus femal thing. it is a male-oriented MINDSET. for rememberits not onoy been women who were persecuted by this mindset, but men also, as well as all other speciesof both sex. it is a male MINDSET which diides itself from itsself and from Nature. tis mindset usually views Nature as being feminine and thus inferior accordin to teir book.
of course, an many prepatriarchal poples also had insight into this. but agin the patriarchal mindset appropriates this METAPHOR, next thing wees being preached to by the Christians that the 'saved/good' areneither 'female' nor 'male' in heaven and dont do sex....!!
found someofme notes about the Aztecs: "Saw a review of te current Aztec exhibition last night. Learnt a lot about Aztecs (pssst - there was no mention of magic mushrooms!) --That their underlying religious belief was that the gods had sacrificed themselves to create the sun etc. So, in order to appease them, the Aztecs sacrificed many pple so as to feed the gods - including the Earth Goddess, blood! The priests actually matted their hair with blood. Most of the icons of the Aztecs are male - and very without any sense of humanness. The only representations of the female included a fierce goddess figure. There was a large spherical stone carving of the moon goddess which was carved underneath. This was to represent their myth of having decaptiated the moon goddess. This dogma says to me that their rejection of the Feminine, the Goddess--the curse was their bloodlust-habit and inhumanity/subhumanness. They apparently took quickly to their invaders' mythological ideology of the Son of God, Jesus, who was 'sacrificed' to appease God. Obviously resonating with the similar ethos....."
Interesting book about psychedelics, 'Breaking Open the Head', Daniel Pinchbeck. You won't be able to put it down once you start reading it. He has an interesting point of view and is a formidable writer, so it's really delightful. . From the book: I asked the spirits to show me Shakespeare. They said, "okay" (they are not always so accomodating). He was a magical being of great size and power, made of energy. There were a million spirits in the form of fizzy colored lights dancing around him, like tiny Japanese lanterns or candleflames, helping him as he wrote, his pen scrawling across the quantum Void. James Joyce was there as well - he was like a little pendant resting on Shakespeare's desk. I recognized that part of the artist's spirit went directly into their creations. Their spiritual power depended on the earthbound public's continued desire for their work. That is the deeper meaning of the artist's quest for immortality." http://www.breakingopenthehead.com/read_the_book_phantasticum.htm About the author: Daniel Pinchbeck has written features for The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Wired, Harper's Bazaar, The Village Voice, Salon, and many other publications. He is one of the founders of Open City, an art and literary journal, and an independent book publisher. He was a 1999 - 2000 Fellow of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University. He has also been a columnist for The Art Newspaper of London, and an editor at Connoisseur Magazine. Born in 1966, he grew up in New York City, where his father, Peter Pinchbeck, was an abstract painter. His mother, Joyce Johnson, was part of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. She is the author of several books, including Minor Characters, a memoir. He went to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, then worked as a magazine editor and journalist, In the late 1990s, after years of working in the media, Pinchbeck fell into the classic existential or spiritual crisis. Life seemed to have no point or transcendent meaning. He began to feel as if he was already dead, a ghost walking around the streets of Manhattan. http://www.breakingopenthehead.com/about_the_author.htm
i actually tried to get a emal communication goin with him coupla years or maybe llonger ago...but found him a bit ...what i call ' i am published-ism'. ie., i have noticed with some pople who get their work published and abit of renown tend to clam up when it comes to spontaneous conversation....pisses me off when they say read my so and so, instead of actually talkin real time...goot a go for shit ..later
what i wanted to explore with him was this: i tend to feel, from research...tat shamanism, and in tis case South American shamanism is tending to patriarchism--defined s male supremacy. for example: one ofthe shaans Daniel raves on about is Don Caesrio. now, the story goes that tese women trafelled far to attend a shamanistic ritual wit Ayahuasca (a powerful psychedelic brew)..but, because one was in mntruation Don ouldn't not oly allow her to participate but also didn't want her near the sacrament etc for fear of affecting it negatively......! now tat is patriarchl. he Don Caesario also champions asceticism and celibacy--anoter patriarchal trait now.....a really informative book i have read--Shamanism: The Foundation of Magic, by Ward Rutherford reveals that shamanism from its beginnings was in rivalry with the more open communion/ecstasy for ALL Goddess vegetative rituals. wher everyone takes the sacrament and becomes 'possessed' so do you see. i find tis extraordinarily intrigueing. and worthwhile looking deeper into. but i sensed Daniel was a bit aversw to me bringing this up.....
Emmm, duendy? Since you acknowledging the fact that: You seem to be confusing reiterating what I originally said myself with making some form of point of your own - this issue I raised wasn't what they believed or why they particularly believed it, fascinating though that may actually be - the point was, and indeed actually remains - these fucked up, drug quaffing arseholes slaughtered their own people horribly wholly on the basis that their own fucked up, transcendental, hallucinogenic fuelled mind trips dictated it not merely acceptable, but necessary. Y'know d, the way in which you can contrive to completely skip a whole inconvenient fact, never ceases to astound.... It's boggling, really. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Duendy, I think you must have missed this when I asked you a while back. Do you have any examples of scientific insights which have been arrived at by the use of hallucinogenic substances? I remember once reading about a researcher who was convinced that, by taking LSD and subjecting himself to sensory deprivation, he could communicate telepathically with a nearby group of dolphins. Bizarre.
Indeed. There was also this one scientist in particular I distinctly remember watching documentary about - came to the conclusion that the only way to defeat the invading alien spine-parasytes threatening to take over our world was to in fact inject teenagers with pure LSD... No wait. That wasn't actually a documentary at all. That was Vincent Price in The Tingler. I'm sorry. I've been nibbling the corners of duendy's posts. Man. The colours... :m:
Well, you kind of answered your own question with starting out with a flawed concept - say matter/energy did originate from a higher dimension. You explain how matter/energy comes to first exist out of nothing in this dimension, but not how it first came to exist in this other, higher, dimension - except by it entering into this higher realm from some other, even higher dimension, and so on and so forth... If you take that fully to its logical conclusion, there being yet more, infinite numbers of dimensions above that - then matter/energy still ends up coming out of absolutely nothing because there ends up being no "original" first higher dimension in which matter/energy originally forms to leak out into all the others. Equally, if there is such a place as some kind of first, original higher dimension with no others higher than it, then matter/energy still has to form out of nothing within it. In neither respect does the proposition answer anything, really. One way or another, in either scenario, matter/energy still ends up coming into existence completely out of bugger all.
