Once Upon A Time...

I am unwritten, can't read my mind,

I'm undefined, I'm just beginning,
The pen's in my hand, ending
unplanned.....

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. ~The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. ~The Call of Cthulhu', by H. P. Lovecraft

My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of a different kind. ~Metamorphoses by Ovid

It was a pleasure to burn. ~Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. ~One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquesas

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. ~The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

If you're going to read this, don't bother. ~Choke by Chuck Palladium

My suffering left me sad and gloomy. ~ Life of Pi by Yann Martel

The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark, furious sea like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out of an impenetrable swamp.

~ The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. ~Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Call me Ishmael. ~Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. ~Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

Midway on our life's journey, I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost. ~The Inferno by Dante Alighieri

Charlie lived in a place where the illegal was legal, where the immoral was moral, and where some people’s fantasies were other people’s realities. ~An Island Away by Daniel Putkowski.

Once upon a midnight dreary, as I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
~The Raven', by Edgar Allan Poe.

I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. ~Notes from Underground by Fedora Dostoevsky

A screaming comes across the sky. ~Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. ~The Go-Between by L. P. Hartleyn

The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was. ~Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams

To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.'" ~The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Antigone

Sophocles’ Antigone is a beautifully written Greek tragedy that has long captured the attention of philosophers and revolutionaries alike. It is a story of conflicting orders of values, of radical divisions and of opposition between family and state, men and women, ethics and politics, individuality and collectivism and religion and law.

In this play Antigone, the unflinching and uncompromising heroin, defies an ordinance issued by the King of Thebes (Creon) to let her slain brothers body rot and deteriorate above ground without a proper burial because of his betrayal of the city of Thebes. Antigone defies the king and buries her brother citing her duty to her family and to divine law.

"I intend to give my brother burial. I'll be glad to die in the attempt, if it's a crime, then it's a crime that God commands."

Antigone feels no remorse for her actions and refuses repentance, thereby inflaming the king who quickly decries:

“Show me a greater crime in all earth!
She, she destroys cities, rips up houses,
Breaks the ranks of spearmen into headlong rout.
But the ones who last it out, the great mass of them
Owe their lives to discipline. Therefore
We must defend the men who live by law,
Never let some woman triumph over us.
Better to fall from power, if fall we must,
At the hands of a man—never be rated
Inferior to a woman, never.”

Antigone’s sprit of defiance has long been heralded by feminists as a noble and revolutionary act in which Antigone stands in opposition to Creon in what seems to be an irreconcilable debate, Antigone becoming the embodiment of moral idealism and individuality and Creon political realism and collectivism.

Antigone espouses the ability to use social rebellion and civil disobedience to destabilize a society and traditional gender roles. As the story unfolds, Antigone exposes the falsities and failures of such oppositions and seeks to reveal and break down such false dichotomies as man and woman, individualism and collectivism and morality and law, showing a radical transcendence of an outsider living in a patriarchal society.

“I didn't say yes. I can say no to anything I say vile, and I don't have to count the cost. But because you said yes, all that you can do, for all your crown and your trappings, and your guards—all that your can do is to have me killed.”

Birth

Every cell in the human body regenerates on average every seven years. Like snakes, in our own way we shed our skin. Biologically we are brand new people. We may look the same, we probably do, the change isn't visible at least in most of us, but we are all changed completely forever.

When we say things like "people don't change" it drives scientist crazy because change is literally the only constant in all of science. Energy. Matter. It's always changing, morphing, merging, growing, dying. It's the way people try not to change that's unnatural. The way we cling to what things were instead of letting things be what they are. The way we cling to old memories instead of forming new ones. The way we insist on believing despite every scientific indication that anything in this lifetime is permanent.

Change is constant. How we experience change, that's up to us. It can feel like death or it can feel like a second chance at life. If we open our fingers, loosen our grips, go with it, it can feel like pure adrenaline. Like at any moment we can have another chance at life. Like at any moment, we can be born all over again.

The Declaration of Evolution

When in the course of organic evolution it becomes obvious that a mutational process is inevitably dissolving the physical and neurological bonds which connect the members of one generation to the past and inevitably directing them to assume among the species of Earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature's God entitle them, a decent concern for the harmony of species requires that the causes of the mutation should be declared.

We hold these truths to be self evident:

• That all species are created different but equal;
• That they are endowed, each one, with certain inalienable rights;
• That among them are Freedom to Live, Freedom to Grow, and Freedom to pursue Happiness in their own style;
• That to protect these God-given rights, social structures naturally emerge, basing their authority on the principles of love of God and respect for all forms of life;
• That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and harmony, it is the organic duty of the young members of that species to mutate, to drop out, to initiate a new social structure, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its power in such form as seems likely to produce the safety, happiness, and harmony of all sentient beings.

Genetic wisdom, indeed, suggests that social structures long established should not be discarded for frivolous reasons and transient causes. The ecstasy of mutation is equally balanced by the pain. Accordingly all experience shows that members of a species are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, rather than to discard the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpation's, all pursuing invariably the same destructive goals, threaten the very fabric of organic life and the serene harmony of the planet, it is the right, it is the organic duty to drop out of such morbid covenants and to evolve new loving social structures.

Such has been the patient sufferance of the freedom-loving peoples of this earth, and such is now the necessity which constrains us to form new systems of government.

The history of the white, menopausal, mendacious men now ruling the planet earth is a history of repeated violation of the harmonious laws of nature, all having the direct object of establishing a tyranny of the materialistic aging over the gentle, the peace-loving, the young, the colored. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to the judgment of generations to come.

• These old, white rulers have maintained a continuous war against other species of life, enslaving and destroying at whim fowl, fish, animals and spreading a lethal carpet of concrete and metal over the soft body of earth.
• They have maintained as well a continual state of war among themselves and against the colored races, the freedom-loving, the gentle, the young. Genocide is their habit.
• They have instituted artificial scarcities, denying peaceful folk the natural inheritance of earth's abundance and God's endowment.
• They have glorified material values and degraded the spiritual.
• They have claimed private, personal ownership of God's land, driving by force of arms the gentle from passage on the earth.
• In their greed they have erected artificial immigration and customs barriers, preventing the free movement of people.
• In their lust for control they have set up systems of compulsory education to coerce the minds of the children and to destroy the wisdom and innocence of the playful young.
• In their lust for power they have controlled all means of communication to prevent the free flow of ideas and to block loving exchanges among the gentle.
• In their fear they have instituted great armies of secret police to spy upon the privacy of the pacific.
• In their anger they have coerced the peaceful young against their will to join their armies and to wage murderous wars against the young and gentle of other countries.
• In their greed they have made the manufacture and selling of weapons the basis of their economies.
• For profit they have polluted the air, the rivers, the seas.
• In their impotence they have glorified murder, violence, and unnatural sex in their mass media.
• In their aging greed they have set up an economic system which favors age over youth.
• They have in every way attempted to impose a robot uniformity and to crush variety, individuality, and independence of thought.
• In their greed, they have instituted political systems which perpetuate rule by the aging and force youth to choose between plastic conformity or despairing alienation.
• They have invaded privacy by illegal search, unwarranted arrest, and contemptuous harassment.
• They have enlisted an army of informers.
• In their greed they sponsor the consumption of deadly tars and sugars and employ cruel and unusual punishment of the possession of life-giving alkaloids and acids.
• They never admit a mistake. They unceasingly trumpet the virtue of greed and war. In their advertising and in their manipulation of information they make a fetish out of blatant falsity and pious self-enhancement. Their obvious errors only stimulate them to greater error and noisier self-approval.
  

• They are bores.
• They hate beauty.
• They hate sex.
• They hate life.

We have warned them from time to time to their inequities and blindness. We have addressed every available appeal to their withered sense of righteousness. We have tried to make them laugh. We have prophesied in detail the terror they are perpetuating. But they have been deaf to the weeping of the poor, the anguish of the colored, the rocking mockery of the young, the warnings of their poets. Worshiping only force and money, they listen only to force and money. But we shall no longer talk in these grim tongues.

We must therefore acquiesce to genetic necessity, detach ourselves from their uncaring madness and hold them henceforth as we hold the rest of God's creatures - in harmony, life brothers, in their excess, menaces to life.

We, therefore, God-loving, peace-loving, life-loving, fun-loving men and women, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the Universe for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the Authority of all sentient beings who seek gently to evolve on this planet, solemnly publish and declare that we are free and independent, and that we are absolved from all Allegiance to the United States Government and all governments controlled by the menopausal, and that grouping ourselves into tribes of like-minded fellows, we claim full power to live and move on the land, obtain sustenance with our own hands and minds in the style which seems sacred and holy to us, and to do all Acts and Things which independent Freemen and Freewomen may of right do without infringing on the same rights of other species and groups to do their own thing.

And for the support of this Declaration of Evolution with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, and serenely confident of the approval of generations to come, in whose name we speak, do we now mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.

by Dr. Timothy Leary, Ph.D.

Seahorse

I'm high and I'm happy and I'm free.

I have my whole heart
laid out right in front of me.
And I finally can see
the way it's always been,
the need for peace
starts from within.

So I leave my possessions to the wind,
and I'm done with ever wanting anything.
Well I can die satisfied,
no desires do I hide.
Not today, not today,
nor for the next one thousand lives.

I'm scared of ever being born again.
If it's in this form again.
I want to know how, why, where, when and then,
I want to see you be the bright night sky.
I want to see you come back as the light.

Culture is your Operating System

When your cultural operating system is wiped clean something older, more vitalistic, more in touch with the animal soul replaces it. Something not determined by history or geography but something writ in the language of the flesh itself. This is who you are, this is true nakedness, shed of all religious assumptions, prejudices, your fears, your illusions and your delusions. When you shed the cultural operating system then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche.

A Step Without Feet

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky,

to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.

First, to let go of life.

In the end, to take a step without feet;

to regard this world as invisible,

and to disregard what appears to be the self.

Explosions

This great evil - where's it come from?

How'd it steal into the world?
What seed, what root did it grow from?
Who's doing this?
Who's killing us, robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we mighta known?
Does our ruin benefit the earth, aid the grass to grow and the sun to shine?
Is this darkness in you, too?
Have you passed through this night?

A Holographic Universe

We now know that under certain circumstances subatomic particles, such as electrons, are capable of instantaneously communicating with one another other regardless of the distance separating them. They can be 5 miles or 5 billion miles apart, it doesn’t matter. Each particle always knows what the others are doing. This perfect synchronicity violates Einstein's theory that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light and has left many scientists questioning their most basic understanding of the universe.

University of London physicist David Bohm has taken these findings and along with his own research has come to believe that objective reality does not exist. That despite its apparent solidity the universe is, at heart, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram. And holograms have some incredible characteristics. If a hologram of a daisy is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the daisy, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole. Western science has long believed that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts. A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, only smaller wholes.

Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something. Bohm says that we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality. They are facets of a deeper and more underlying unity. Since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons" the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.

If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected. The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky. Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.

In a holographic universe even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else. At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously.

Stanford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality. Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.

The hologram theory explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime. Holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage, simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film; it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information. And one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information, another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with every other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system. Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

So if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion. We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, the collective unconscious, out of body experiences, precognitive glimpses of the future, and regression into apparent past life incarnations don’t seem so unbelievable. If the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.

And if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain -- as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical. Maybe “reality” is nothing more than a consensus among humanity, formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected. If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality. What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we desire.

Eaarth

In Eaarth, Bill McKibben paints a picture for us, a picture detailing the intricacies and interwoven nature of this planet we call Earth. He then goes on to tell us that this pale blue dot that we call home is no longer the Earth that we evolved on and the Earth that evolved right along with us, sustaining us all the while, this is a new Earth, one that we no longer know anything about. This new Earth is unpredictable, hauntingly beautiful and seemingly angry. This new Earth no longer plays by the rules we once thought we understood. This new Earth that we find ourselves residents of is a volatile place in which melting ice causes the sun to reflect off the blue of the ocean causing a temperature rise, which in turn causes a myriad of consequences, everything from the release of methane, to peat bogs drying out, to water shortages and hurricanes.

This new Earth is a place in which the poorest and most vulnerable of species, those members of our community that are causing the least amount of harm, are paying the highest price, millions are paying with their lives. This new earth is a place in which most of us avoid personal responsibility, pushing our problems off on someone else, leaving the hard work to the next generation to deal with. But, as McKibben writes, this problem can only be pushed off for so long, because this new Earth, the only home we’ve ever known, is being killed, one drop of carbon and one demolished tree at a time. Future generations are staring back at us through time, silently pleading to us, and begging us to see past our own selfishness and greed.

McKibben bombards his readers with shocking statistics about the acidity of our oceans, the un-breathability of our air, and the annihilation of our forests. He shares with us stories of struggling agrarians and fisherman who are trying desperately to feed their families and of entire countries facing the possibility of evacuation. And this is all happening today, not in the future, and although we haven’t had that much time to study this new Earth we do know one thing, things are speeding up. Processes that used to take hundreds and thousands of years now take a decade or less. The time has run out. As Mckibben tells us, even if every environmental bill was passed that has ever been proposed and every politician kept her promise about cleaning up the air and creating clean energy, it still wouldn’t be enough. We have caused irreparable amounts of damage to the very thing that keeps us alive and now we are left with the consequences of those actions. So now the question is, what are we going to do about it?