I wrote this long-ass response that was the best post I had ever made. The computer wouldn't take it. I had to kill the page. I am so frustrated. The computer was working just fine until yesterday. I wrote a glowing report about how the computer was just fine for me. It was working perfectly until yesterday so I was willing to overlook its behavioral problems today. And now it's acting all "weird." The point of saying that was because I was trying to say that I trust that the universe will send me a random individual that I emphatically stated that I did not want, but will get anyway via Uncertainty Principle but that the random individual will work for me just fine--just as this Windows PC had been working just fine for me. But I emphatically stated to the universe that I did not want a Windows PC but an iMac Notebook instead and listed all the reasons why I didn't like Windows PC and that I did not want a Windows to look through. I was willing to overlook its behavioral problems today and say that I was happy with it. Well, I was until yesterday. But now I am not happy with it. I was willing to forgive its problems until it killed the most brilliant post that I had ever written. I think that "i forgot" was trying to tell me that, but I responded both times, "I do not understand what that means." I think I understand what i forgot means now. The universe might send me a random indivdidual that might have some kind of a "problem" and be dysfunctionable via Uncertainty Principle. Of course--if it operates via Uncertainty Principle--there's no way for me to tell what the Hell the universe will send. But Gebser told me to trust in the universe or something to that effect and that's what I was doing. I don't know what to make of any of this, frankly. I tried to respond to Quantum Paranormal but the reply button to his comment doesn't work. Yes, Ken Wilber has not been up-to-date on science in the past 30 years, so I hear. Many things about KW I disagree with and think is New Age, but many things I have learned. Good thing I have many other integral and developmental theorists to rely upon for other aspects of integral theory which I integrate into a wholeness. My pot above, for example--is based primarily on Jean Gebser's The Ever-Present Origin. But if you're trying to say that developmental theory or integral theory itself is New Age, I will have to say that you do not understand what you are talking about.

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July 8, 2009 - Wednesday  Paranormal: On the sensibility of requesting a date/mate to the Universe Current mood:  accomplished Category: Dreams and the Supernatural MySpace Music Playlist at MixPod.com Dialoge on Integral Romance   Me: I assume that you are referring to my remark, "So I'm trying to figure out how is it that I can meet all of the qualifications for integral but men cannot." I forgot: name:  Are you so sure? Me:   Yes, I really meant that in all seriousness.  You must understand that my concept of "integral" for a date is unconventional, as it also includes having physical beauty and someone of my own generation with musical or artistic talent (or at the very least, interests and tastes).  For a date or a mate, all of those traits in addition to being on my intellectual level, having an understanding and empathy for Asperger to act as a big brother/mentor for the neurologically-disordererd, and makes over $100,000 (that that is optional.  Ha ha). I forgot: If you can/do, you would realize that they can too. Me: I suppose that it is theoretically possible but I haven't met any yet--but am actually content with my solitude and actually prefer it though I do admit that after getting back 'sort of' into the social scene with other humans the solitary life is now boring and the match.com thing membership expired.. i forgot: Integral or not it is a rare thing to really meet someone you connect with deeply Me: . Indeed. i forgot: When you do, you will usually find your own doors slamming shut. Theirs too. Me: I do not understand what that means. i forgot: Then you have to want your own openness more than the resistance you are feeling for them. me: I do not understand what  that means, neither.. i forgot: Miraculously you can have it if you really want it. me: I don't know; maybe so.  That's why I'm typing up a letter of request and sending it out to the universe to place an order for a date, mate, or mail-order groom that meets my specific demands and qualifications.  As you can see, I've placed a very tall order with my exact specifications just as I did when i listed all the specifications that I needed for my computer but trust that the universe will make provisions for this random individual and it may be different from my order because when I sent a letter of request to the universe for an iMac Notebook computer, I got a Windows PC computer instead.  Yet it came to me for free by an anonymous donor.  But it is a very nice one and brand new one so I have no complaints because of my letter of request for one to the universe and posting it to a blog on the internet the sake of concretion of the spiritual.  And also for the "special someone."   I'm actually doing this as a test to see if this experiment can be repeated.  Last year, January 2008 I believe, I typed a letter of request and sent it out to the universe on my Myspace blog for a computer and then in April 2009--which was slightly over a year after sending my request to the universe--a brand new computer arrived on my doorstep in the mail somewhat randomly and unexpectedly.  It arrived via a random act kindness by a benevolent anonymous donor who didn't even read my blog over there on Myspace nor was aware of it, but is a member of Integral Life over here who wished not to be identified nor even reimbursed for the shipping or computer costs but had apparently learned of my computer problems via my complaints on Integral Life that i couldn't watch any videos and do many other things because my computer was messed up.  I didn't even really know this individual and never communicated with them before nor much since after thanking him except for one time (I think) on an open forum, yet the universe came through and and utilized the benevolent kindness of this individual I didn't even now who offered to send me a new one because he said that he always like to help out young people with their projects whenever they can, and they didn't need the computer..  Here's the link to that letter to the universe of request for a computer..   And now that I think of it--the link above is yet another example of verity and concretion of the Spiritual. Which in my experience, operates not by "grace" or by what others call "miracle" (well, you can call it that or whatever) but in a far more subtle way that is likely to go unnoticed and thus undocumented but when documented, likely to be dismissed by most for the fact that it seems like "magic" or think that I am crazy and is not something "dramatic" and "in your face" like Moses parting the Red Sea or Jesus walking on water (which are mythical proclamations anyway so are mythical--whereas concretion of the spiritual refers to the integral-aperspectival structure and is therefore beyond myth and is higher than mental-rational but in any case is real and must be made concrete and visible to demonstrate this reality).  However--because it is so  subtle, one must be attuned to such phenomena and have access to the internet or media in order to share these concretions with others besides oneself. Thus, "concretion of the spiritual" does not  appear (most of the time) to seem "dramatic" but does tend to be bizarre and freaky due to acausal elements which defy physics and mechancal causation.  In addition, I find that concretion of the spiritual operates with a sense of humor due to arational and alogical elements at work which often manifest as irrational and silly but, at any rate--are also bizarre and subtle and as such must be brought to concretion and made present and visible by those who are attuned to such phenomena to concretizing the spiritual to make them demonstrable and present and real to others--however silly or subtle.   The reason that they seem funny or bizzare most of the time is because access to the whole (pre-temporal origin) includes not only rationality and the normal lwas of physics but also forms of realizations and phenomena below rationality, logicality, and material causation..  The only way in which they will be made present and concrete to others is for those who are at this structure to bring pre-temporal origin to present to make them visible and real to others.  Individuals who are attuned to such phenomena (and, according to Jean Gebser--everyone at integral should have these capacities so I'm surprised no one else reports on them) it is, in fact, a moral imperative to concretize the spiritual for the sake elevating all consciousness to attend to the "real" task (which is not "magic tricks" or demonstrations of paranormal phenomena) to Global Warming and planetary scarcity issues which are currently threatening our survival as a species.  This means that one cannot operate below rationality nor at the mental-rational structure of consciousness to concretize the spiritual, since those who are below rationality are effectively negated in their powers to effect the world with the emergence of the technocratic rationality of the mental-rational structure.  But in a like manner, arationality and acausality of integral are in turn superior to the technocratic rationality of rational Orange and pluralistic Green who are largely confined to spatiality and hence, to physicality and mechanical causation and all the materiality and consumerism that goes with it, too.  It is the task of integral to negate these destructive and negative forces unleashed by Orange and Green (but mostly Orange), and to negate all negative and destructive effects from previous structures and integrate the positive manifestations of each. Thus, what is necessary is to make visible these elements that operate beyond mechanical causation and beyond rationality and logic.in order to demonstrate the efficacy of the newest, which is no longer confined to spatiality and hence, no longer confined to mechanical causation nor to logic or rationality, but is free to access the whole which means also making effectual those capacities that have gone dormant in in previous modes of consciousness which includes irrational and prerational element in addition to magical elements involving telepathy and other paranormal and magical abilities that are too weak to withstand rationality and are effectively negated by mental-rational.  This may entail making a complete fool of oneself..  After all: the sensibility of requesting a computer to the universe and blogging it on Myspace is not exactly "rational"; yet was necessary for the purpose of not only getting a computer--but more importantly to demonstrate to others the reality of arational and acausal elements operating beyond mechanical-causal laws and rational thinking of questioning the sensibility of requesting a computer to the universe and then getting one.  It may therefore also involve time lags to demonstrate concretion of the spiritual (Note: I didn't get an iMac notebook computer as I had requested--but at least I got a nice new and powerful Windows PC).   Thus, the granting of my request for a computer to the universe (after a short time lag) was neither an act of "grace" nor a mere coincidence because such things happen all the time--sometimes more than other times; sometimes not at all but typically, they seem too trivial to report but are noted anyway if they seem to be manifestations of the arational.  But whether trivial or major--such as the sun-cloud-cosmic ray hypothesis, writing about something that didn't make sense but was confirmed the next day, getting a computer, or meeting Satan and experiencing telepathy--they are true incidences that do indeed make me look like a complete fool which I do admit have a hard time believing myself; but reported anyway and are read with interest on Myspace when they happened.  For many months I have not had any unusual things to report until approximately 1 month ago, when weird things began happening again but when I posted them, they did not seem interesting to others. When we surrender to the "the whole," rationality's stranglehold over the mind begins to loosen its grrip or control and its exclusive claims to truth to permit perceptibility of the whole.  Which then permits the incursion of dynamics, chance, serendipity, uncertainty, meaningful coincidence, precognition, and a host of other unusual things to emerge and come into play which are normally supressed by mental-rational...  But not until abandoning all hope for personal security, salvation, or for all dreams for some brighter tomorrow, and extinguishing all expectation and desire and losing all hope did we begin to experience such things (not to say that this is a prerequisite)...   We wrote a letter to the universe requesting a computer not expecting anything of it.  I eventually forgot about the letter, and was content to rest in the vacuity of space expecting nothing of my stupid request for some gratuity from deep space in the physical universe which in and of itself is largely insentient and does not respond to letters of requests by random individuals..  But whenever we access pre-temporal origin we access the whole: and vacuity becomes plenitude.  Here is my thank-you note to the anonymous donor for the gift of donation.    http://integrallife.com/member/barbi-hammond/blog/thank-you-anonymous-donor-my-computer?show=all 3:43 AM  9 Comments (Add Comment) | 0 Kudos Translate Powered by English Albanian Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Chinese Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Maltese Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Vietnamese July 6, 2009 - Monday  Ongoing Interfaith Dialogues and Perennial Philosophy Current mood:  contemplative Category: Religion and Philosophy PrejudicePosted July 5th, 2009 by Greg in response to Maybe there was a communication breakdown. Dear Barbi: I take exception with your comment, without questioning your experience: It is mostly Christians who get insulted that way. That needs to change. I've had a long career as a Catholic priest and have been involved in numerous ecumenical endeavours. I can asure you that it is NOT "mostly Christians who get insulted..." Buddhist, Islamist, Jews and Hindus have expressed equal outrage when their religious and spiritual values are reduced to a commonly accepted social prejudice or a demeaning caricature. If you simply substitute "LGBT" or "women" in your sentence, you can image the outrage that would generate. When Christians express their outrage at being reduced to a caricature, they deserve no less respect, in place of the dismissive attitude you've express. -- Greg  Zen taught me everything I can do. Christianity taught me everything I can't do. Was this useful?   Currently, there are 0 votes.Which or whose prejudice are you referring to?Posted July 6th, 2009 by barbi hammond in response to Prejudice  Dear Greg: I realize that you are a Catholic priest and are very learned in theology, but I think you have misinterpreted what I said and will take full blame for that, since "It is mostly Christians who get insulted that way...." obviously came out "wrong" and that is certainly not what I meant.  It was in response to Jonathan's remark, that went like this: One thing that struck me is your remark about inclusiveness.  This, to me, is a problem with the perrenialists:  In trying to claim that all religions are essentially the same, they dumb down all the traditions and in doing so create their own form of ideological imperialism.  I would not dare insult the intelligence of Buddhists by claiming that my panentheistic beliefs are the same as their non-theistic beliefs.  We can easily agree to disagree about the existence of a theistic God, while noting our agreement about a higher reality which transcends all categories. How can one be both inclusive and an imperialist?  If one is an imperialist, one is demolishing a culture and replacing an indigenous culture with one's own--so is not at all inclusive.  Since when has perennial philosophy throughout the world become imperialistic toward other religions?  Why does Jonathan think that perennial philosophy claims that all religions are the same or would be insulting to people's intelligence?  Seems to me that the only ones whose intelligence would be insulted would those who do not understand perennial philosophy.  As you have correctly pointed out, Greg, the sense of outrage, insult, or intolerance expressed by many toward the concept of a perennial philosophy--that is, in finding a common thread, a perennial wisdom, or transcendant and mystical ground in all of the great wisdoms throughout the world is not a prejudice confined strictly to nor even necessarily mostly to Christianity--but is a form of intolerance that exists in every religion and even outside of religion.  And by "intolerance," I don't simply mean the narrow-minded hostility and outrage shown historically by religious zealots toward "other" people of other faiths and cultures who did not permit them to practice according to their own tradition and beliefs--as the emergence of Orange has pretty much eradicated this form of religious bigotry in most parts of the world.  The practice of burning people at the stake for heresy or religious deviance or dissidence is no longer acceptable, thanks to Orange rationality. Yet still fairly widespread in contemporary times is an intolerant attitude expressed by many toward the concept of a perennial wisdom that exists in all the higher teachings of the world.  After all: one can be the quintessance of an Orange or Green acceptance of religious freedom and tolerance to allow for the coexistence with people of other faiths and cultures while simultaneously being highly inflexible and intolerant of the concept of a common mystical ground in all the great religious teachings of the world due to a sense of religious exclusivity or lack of esoteric teaching..  And not only that--but even intolerant of a perennial wisdom altogether (even in one's own religion).  This is because it isn't Christianity or any other religion per se that promotes this particular prejudice but more the fact that religious fundamentalism exists in every religion of the world--and hence the intolerance to the concept of a common ground and the feeling of insult (Shin Buddhism, for example, is a form of religious fundamentalism in Buddhism who would reject the notion that there is a transcendant common ultimate ground in all the great religions other than their own).  And common to all religious fundamentalism, wherever it exists--is a view of religion that is dogmatic, exclusivist, literalist, mythical, and predominantly if not wholly exoteric in its outlook.  Such a combination of traits is fine and well for those who are at the mythical and concrete-literal stage who lack the cognizance and the intensity of consciousness (diaphaneity--e.g., transparency) to see any value in perennial or esoteric wisdoms and practices; as this is to be expected given their level of development which is capable of seeing no further than their concrete literalism of dogma and myth so cannot be faulted for that.  Yet conventional religion--which arose prior to modernity and in particular religious fundamentalism--also has the unfortunate impact of discouraging spiritual seekers who have moved beyond the mythical stage (yet who are nonetheless committed to their particular denomination due to a lifelong affiliation and early indoctrination in religious fundamentalism or other exoteric tradition) from seeking a more sublime and transcendant truth as provided by mystical (esoteric) wisdoms very amply from within their respective religious tradition (though not necessarily from within their particular denomination)--let alone from any other religious or mystical tradition provided elsewhere. What thus results is a mythical-rational view of religion that is essentially exoteric and devoid of any perennial wisdom, since individuals who have developed to the mental-rational structure (Orange and Green rationality) tend to be externally-oriented by nature, according to Gebser--which further reinforces their traditional exoteric outlook toward religion unless their newfound rationality and spatial orientation toward externality and physicality forces them to turn away entirely from religion and write it off completely as mythical and entirely fictitious.   Among the former, however (that is, those at Orange or Green who do not write-off religion entirely as "myth" but are still committed to conventional religion)--the tendency is to simply use logic and critical thinking to prop up an essentially premodern mythical religion with persuasive philosophical or scientific arguments (which are persuasive to themselves and to many others, at least) in order to elevate myth to something it is not: which is not rational.  Of course, you can always reinvent religion for the sake of continued relevance within a given tradition as it moves into rational which I think is necessary.  So what you wind up with is essentially a form of mythical-rational view toward religion using rationality to prop up premodern religious myth.  And I make no apologies for Ken Wilber's observation that Moses parting the Red Sea or Jesus being born of a Virgin mother is myth and I second that remark.   But getting back to Orange and Green rationality, the spatial orientation of externally-oriented Orange and Green to physicality seems to reinforce exoteric religion and diminish esoteric forms and seems more prevalent in the West.  The West is also more rational.  Not to say that this is all "bad'; rational people (at least some of them) have need for spirituality too that is more agreeable with their respective worldviews and levels of development.  And it does help to some degree to rationalize religious myth so as to have greater flexibility to interpret scriptural teachings beyond merely a strict concrete and literal interpretation of myth to move beyond religious fundamentalism--yet does little to promote perennial wisdom as taught by contemplative or mystical traditions. I personally do not see Whiteheadean philosophy, process philosophy, panentheism, or even Catholicism as opposed to perennial philosophy, but am not familiar enough with these forms of contemporary or traditional theology or philosophy to comment any further.  However, the way in which Jonathan has presented the contemporary forms is strictly exoteric due to an apparent opposition to mystical or esoteric teachings of perennial wisdoms, which involve alterations of consciousness.  I get the impression that Jonathan is suggesting that altered states of consciousness is something that is somewhat inferior to normal waking rational consciousness.  This could potentially be perceived as a threat if one's conviction is of a personal God who is completely conscious, intelligent, and rational and always has been and always will be for all eternity; and with no exceptions..  In addition, I think that the dismissal of perennial philosophy as a "dumbing down" of all religions or a demeaning caricature of religion reflects a distorted view of perennial wisdom and is a dismissive attitude in  turn, since perennial wisdoms exist in all religions and arose independently of each other throughout the world beginning approximately 2,500 years ago, yet tends to be far more prevalent in the East where esoteric or mystical religions are far more common and developed than in the West.   However, there are many contemplative traditions in the Western religion, Christianity, which is rich in esoteric and mystical contemplative traditions.  As well as in the Near East--such as Islam, which has its own forms of esoteric traditions.  None of these mystical traditions attempted to "dumb each other down" or demean their own practices by merely copying each other to "be more alike" to find a common ground in all religions.  Rather, they were realizations  that emerged fairly spontaneously and independently of each other the world over beginning two millenia ago.  They all surprisingly share many common recognitions concerning Ultimate Ground---which is what the perennial philosophy is about.  Not about dumbing down religions and discarding tradition, which is important to maintain in order to maintain relevance of a particular religious tradition to its respective culture and heritage and act as conveyor belt to its believers.. That is  to say--you can still practice your particular faith, tradition, or practice and embrace perennial wisdom without fear of the religion "dumbing down" to some generic or alien form or being demeaned to some caricature.  There is no evidence that perennial wisdoms in the past two millenia have ever "dumbed down" other religions or were ever imperialistic; as such no reason to posit this now.   To reiterate: perennial wisdoms arose spontaneously and independently everywhere--long prior to the discovery of modern scholars such as Huxley or Huston Smith who arrived on the scene to study comparative religion to make these various connections to realize that a common ground exists in all the great teachings of the world--which they dubbed as a perennial philosophy.  It's been around long before it had a name and long before these various perennial wisdoms knew about each other; and as such there is no reason to maintain the position that it is insulting to other religions when nearly every religion has a form of perennial philosophy.   It is worthwhile for students of perennial philosophy, integralists, theologians, and others to investigate these commonalities now more than ever.  It is especially important for those of us who come from not one--but from multiple seemingly incompatible traditions and cultures yet wish to find a common spiritual ground with my Christian child while honoring our differences and without comprimising on either his nor my particular spiritual outlook.   It may entail the jettisoning of myth including its claims to exclusivity as well as the jettisoning of a strict scientific materialism, logical positivism, or rationality (and their claims to exclusivity) and loosening the strictly exoteric view based not on contemplation, meditation, or on any other practice utilizing altered or trained states, but endorses subscribing to some belief system provided by myth or rational thought and little else.  As such a strictly mythical, rational, or exoteric view toward spirituality is no longer adequate for integral--which is beyond myth and rational thinking and is arational instead.  Arationality utilizes all present and previous modes of awareness including pre-rationality, irrationality, and rationality as well as consciousness, altered consciousness, or no consciousness in addition to positive manifestations of archaic, magic, mythical, and mentality to make visible and transparent what is present and true of Spirit or God and to bring these all into concretion.  This may involve the incorporation of a contemplative practice and trained states into one's tradition should one's tradition be exoteric and based instead on belief or pure faith or reason, yet these contemplative traditions exists in all the major religions so is not entirely impossible.  Alternatively, if one is not a member of any religious tradition and has neurological disorders making meditation difficult, it may involve some other unorthodox practice involving altered states of consciousness such as psychedelics, sacred plants, or some other ritual activity promoting "flow" or altered states such as that of music, writing, or sleeping very deeply during PMS on very rainy days. But getting back to the point, if you go back to my previous comment where I said that "It is mostly Christians who get insulted that way.  That needs to change," you will find that I was speaking from the context of my personal experience with Christians in the Deep South, who are largely confined to a form of Christian fundamentalism (i.e., Southern Baptists, Pentacostals, Church of God, etc.) whose encounters with me were met virtually every time with an instant reaction of offense and insult at my audacity of daring to suggest that some common ground could possibly exist between God's "truth"--and my mother's atheistic "falsehood."  So who is prejudiced?  Me, for wanting to find some common ground--or others, who express indignation and insult at the very notion of my attempting to do so? Of course, I did not mean literally or absolutely that "most Christians are that way"  as I am obviously speaking primarily from personal experience which is very limited in context and largely confined to Christian fundamentalism in South Georgia.  Obviously, I am not privy to the attitudes of "most Christians" from an absolute standpoint as there are 2.1 billion Christians who currently exist on the Earth and I do not know every single one of them in person; only a few.  Yet based on my studies and required readings as a Religious Minor and Philosophy and History major in college, it is widely acknowledged in many textbooks and among many scholars that generally speaking (though not always the case), Western religions tend to be more exclusivist and more exoteric than religions in the East and hence, less tolerant toward the concept of seeking some common ground in all religions via perennial philosophy (although perennial philosophies exist in Western esoteric religions) and have even converted the bulk of non-Western Christians to Christianity via conquest and abolishment of their indigenous cultures and religions .  Thus in that sense (but speaking only very generally, of course), "It is mostly Christians who get insulted that way, and that needs to change" although I do admit in hindsight that it could have been stated more empathetically than that so as to avoid painting a broad brush stroke over the entire religion and insulting all Christians as a consequence.  However, based on my personal experience, I have never encountered a Buddhist who was personally offended or insulted in my attempts to discuss some common ground between Buddhism and Christianity via interfaith dialogue.  Quite the contrary--they welcomed such a dialogue and shared my enthusiasm in seeking a common ground between the various religions but of course, they too were transplants to the United States so were probably themselves in a situation that is similar to mine in needing to reconcile contradictory views and finding common ground between various religions..  Needless to say I am not referring to all Buddhists such as the Shin Buddhist who are fundamentalists who would likely take offense and be insulted by such comparisons or dialogues.  I have also encountered this inflexibility of mind among non-religious who subscribe to scientific materialism--who think that their view (e.g. "scientism") is the only correct view while all religion is false--although from my experience they are not necessarily offended by dialogue; only dismissive more or less or otherwise argumentative but incapable of including spirituality and other non-physical forms of realtiy referring to interiority in their particular worldview.  I understand the need to battle against the pseudoscience and anti-science that are spreading like a rot in modern culture but some scientific humanists (such as Carl Sagan) seem to go too far by rejecting spirituality altogether as something that is pseudo-scientific or anti-scientific when it has nothing to do with science and as such should not be incompatible with science if unrelated to it.  Scientific humanism and rationality tend to believe only in the reality of things having spatial extent, which leads to consumerism and greed for material things in space.. So they too are exclusivist. Fundamentalists and exclusivists exist everywhere--a Pew Report recently polled religious viewpoints from people around the world and found that Alabamians and Iranians shared the most in common insofar as their fundamentalism and religious intolerance.  In fact, I have heard many Christians down here in South Georgia who believe that Catholicism is not even Christianity and that Catholics are going to Hell (go figure).  Yet it appears that even among Christians who are not fundamentalist--including yourself and Jonathan--who I assume are Christian and integral--I get the impression of a sense of outrage or insult at the idea of my seeking to find a common ground via integral or perennial philosophy between the various religions--in spite of my explanation that my reasons for doing so is to reconcile differences with people around me to find a common spiritual ground between myself and my Christian son, which I thought could be met with better empathy and understanding by Whiteheadean integralists and Catholic priests than merely dismissing me as being insulting to your religion.  So whose attitude is dismissive?  Mine, or yours and Jonathan's?  At least, Jonathan has acknowledged that some kind of "transcendant ground" exists that we can agree upon (this is what perennial philosophy is about) yet he seems to reject perennial philosophy as a dumbing down.  I have yet to notice any of you say anything positive about my hope to find a common spiritual ground with my child or any other Christian as a non-Christian and student of perennial philosophy whatsoever but only negativity as if to suggest that perennial wisdoms are a "dumbing down" of religions or a reduction of Christians to a caricature or diminishment of a personal God.  Perennial wisdoms exist in Christianity so it is obviously not a reduction of Christians to a caricature but is an affirmation of Christianity.   So to rephrase that remark, I didn't mean literally that  It is mostly Christians who get insulted that way as I obviously do not know whether it is mostly "Christians" (above and beyond any other religious practitioner or believer) who expresses such outrage and feel insulted over perennial philosophy, Godhead, impersonal God, esoteric wisdom, or interfaith dialogue.  However, based on my experience--both on these forums as well as in the real world--it appears that way based on the reactions and responses of Christians I have encountered.  Should this be a reflection of the general populace of Christians as a whole, then that needs to change.   I do apologize for my badly phrased remark as I do not mean to be dismissive or to reduce anyone to a mere caricature. It is more accurate to say that those who get insulted by perennial philosophy are confined to religious fundamentalism irrespective of religion, but is not necessarrily confined to fundamentalism as both you and Jonathan are obviously not fundamentalists yet appear insulted by the concept of a perennial philosophy (if I am reading you correctly) which leads me to suspect that perhaps Christianity may be more opposed to it.  Western theology as a whole seems less tolerant of perennial philosophy or in finding a common ground between religions via interfaith dialogue than Eastern mysticism or Western contemplative traditions due to its emphasis on exoteric religion and claims to exclusivity via dogma and scriptures.  That needs to change.  In addition, Western philosophy and science as a whole creates an atmosphere that is generally hostile toward spirituality and especially to esoteric wisdom due to its higher percentage of people who have arrived at rational Orange and Green and who are therefore externally-related to physicality and spatiality as the only viable reality.  That needs to change.   6:01 AM  0 Comments (Add Comment) | 1 Kudos Translate Powered by English Albanian Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Chinese Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Maltese Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Vietnamese July 5, 2009 - Sunday  Perhaps Time to Jettison the Myth (To Make Room for Godhead?) Current mood:  calm Category: Religion and Philosophy Was this useful?   1 out of 1 members found this useful.Perhaps time to jettison the myth?Posted July 3rd, 2009 by barbi hammond in response to Integral, not Mythic Yet another relevant post that may be useful to some, from the same thread: http://integrallife.com/member/jonathan-cobb/blog/do-you-believe-god?show=all  Jonathan, I second that what John Warner said concerning the concept of a personal God in Christianity as a separate being.  This may come across as harsh or critical but actually it's not very different from the recommendation that you offer--which is to jettison the mythical God.  This is not to say that God in second person does not exist nor that all of Christianity subscribes to a mythical-rational conception of deity.  However, what you have described is a mythical God but are propping up the argument with rationality.  It is therefore not yet integrated.  Call it transcendent if you will--it is still a mythical conception of your true nature which is the Godhead that you are but are treating as wholly other.  Except that you are not identfying with your true nature except in communion form, in prayers of appeasement to yourself, but most strikingly you are treating Spirit as other and using rationality to prop up a mythical conception of God as a separate entity..  The following excerpt I wrote just yesterday, which attempts to summarize my conception of self or Godhead. First of all, if Godhead is your birthright and your self, how can you be impersonal? But who, or what, are you?   What is self? To me self is identity.  However, if "self" is to be defined as "identity"--then complete identity would mean identification with everything--including Godhead and the whole.  This is possible but generally at the cost of a temporary cessation of consciousness, no?  This would thus entail a sort of "forgetfulness" leaving no room for subject, object, rationality, nor consciousness.  It would seem near impossible to be fully immersed in this identity which is the "whole," and with nothing to grab onto or left out to objectify as an object of awareness.     This changes once consciousness enters the picture and begins the process of observation, methinks.  Be it a thought that shoots out of the head of God or Godhead disturbing some particle or wave packet that catches the "eye" and pops into a "quiff."  At that moment, the "self" then contracts from complete identity or immersion from wholeness because it is now separated from the quiff that it "popped" by the very act of observation that came about as a  result of increasing consciousness and distancing from origin and from unconscious spirit (this portion is all highly speculative and is critiqued in Quantum Questions so I'm speaking only very metaphorically perhaps). Gebser associates complete identity with origin--i.e., the archaic structure of no consciousness.  It is a pre-conscious spirit whose consciousness is more accurately described as a form of foreboding, an undifferentiated wholeness, pre-temporal origin, the source of creativity.  This concept has many similarities to Biblical Creation or Origin and indeed many other creation myths, yet it differs dramatically from creation myths in that origin is not some distant past before the time of eternity but is ever-present.  Godhead differs also from William Paley's "God the Clockmaker," which suggests that "In the beginning," a fully conscious and rational God constructs a universe and mechanically sets it in motion before relaxing behind the wheel to sit back and enjoy his ride as Master of the universe.  This is not to dispute Spirit in masculine form nor in second person communion with "God the Father" but I suspect that all of these forms of divinity--while necessary for many at the mythical-rational stage--can potentially diminish your capacity to claim your birthright which is the Godhead.  If Godhead is a manifestation of you, me, and of all sentient beings, then the Godhead is not some impersonal entity as you assert.  Do you consider yourself "impersonal"?  Do I consider myself an impersonal entity?  I think not.  The archaic form--unconscious spirit--is still ever-present and is better conceived of as "impersonal"-but we are no longer referring to divinity as unconscious spirit but as conscious spirit or Godhead.  So in a way it is similar to Whitehead. I suspect that all of these forms of divinity, if not theism itself--while very good to acknowledge in traditional forms if that is where you are--are ultimately lesser teachings as they can also potentially pose difficulties to your recognition of your own birthright, which is the Godhead in first person.  Christianity does attempt to address this by including the trinity.  This is now more accurately a quadernity to acknowledge the feminine form of divinity.  As such it is no longer concernedexclusively with divinity in the form of a "wholly other," nature worship, ancestor worship, a matriarchy, a patriarchy, or a form of first-born child adulation.  Divinity is neither masculine nor feminine but is an integrum between a first, second, and third person face of divinity which is gender neutral yet includes a feminine face as well so as to acknowledge this godhead in everyone and everything--including self--that is, "me"--should the self happen to filter through some feminine or androgynous type of prism to "radiate" the Godhead in that way--for instance. The task of integrality is to return to a conscious form of pre-temporal origin and to re-claim this identity of Godhead--which is a birthright.  If conscious, which obviously you are and I am, then there is no reason to fret or worry that Godhead is an "impersonal entity" that is some kind of intangible or amorphous aether or force or nonperson.  If this is your ultimate identity--then you are obviously not "impersonal" but a living breathing person: a conscious spirit.  As such it would no longer be an unconscious form of archaic spirit completely immersed in complete unconscious identity with the "All" (at least--not all the time as in unconscious spirit of archaic) because it is obviously conscious and is posting and engaged in dialogue, yet I do see a place for a personal God in second-person for the purpose of communion although I must agree with  the other fellow that such a God is mythical and that you are propping up a mythical God with rational arguments and justifications for his or her existence.  Which reminds me...if, in fact, we must impose a personality or personhood other than your own person or identity to Godhead--hen it is obviously a "person" of some sort so we must also assign it a gender.  So what is its gender? Most humans today subscribe to a form of mythical-rational theism and call it transcendent if you wish--but ultimately you are referring to a personal being of some sort that is apart from you and not self-identical with you.  The fact that you must refer to it in second person or third person exclusively is a cultural or traditional thing, but can have the effect of blinding yourself from your own birthright or Godhead in first person.  This is not contradictory to the basic tenets of Christianity.  And this can be achieved in meditation, prayer, or in some other Christian or other ritual activity to promote vertical growth and group cohesion.  Curiously, "origin" is associated with androgyny, according to Gebser.  It is not at all gratuitous that the integral structure and even the precursors to integral (such as the holistic and pluralistic orientation of healthy green) attempts to transcend gender identity to achieve a state of androgyny to make present origin.  Furthermore, "origin" is not identical to "In the Beginning" but rather refers to the past, present, and future which are all ever-present. St. John of the Cross teaches the importance of forgetfulness, since forgetfulness is thought to be a prerequisite for entering the kingdom of heaven.  This is a form of submersion into unconsciousnessd while acknowledging that with mutation into integral comes an intensification of consciousness.  "Intensification of consciousness" need not be an oxymoron to 'forgetfulness'  (happens to me all the time) so long as this intensification of consciousness does not refer exclusively to magnitude (e.g. spatiality) or to brightness (e.g. strict mentality) but rather to an intensification akin to a clear light that makes transparent and present those other "layers" of self (including ego) passing through the various prisms. With increasing consciousness comes memory.  The very act of remembering and observation results in further distancing from pre-temporal origin (unconscious spirit) via observation and dis-identification with the object of awareness/  This in turn results consequently a separation from Godhead, identity, origin.  Thus, with increasing consciousness, there is a loss of identification from complete identity with pre-temporal origin or Godhead.  I would say that identity is possibly inverse proportional to increasing consciousness, but that intensification of consciousness permits identification with a conscious form of Spirit which is what most refer to as Godhead.  I think this works very nicely with both Buddhist and Christian concepts of divinity and creation without necessarily watering things down too much .   Chrisianity is largely confined to God in second person as a consequence of early church fathers who decided to permit Godhead to Jesus of Nazareth--but that no other person was bestowed this honor.  This was done to maintain the church's political power: the reasoning went that so long as we can confine the Godhead to Jesus and no other, the church can maintain its monopoly of being intermediary to the Godhead.  If everyone became God--the church would lose its influence.  This is not what Jesus had taught. To those who were throwing stones at Jesus he asked: "Why do you stone me?   The stone throwers replied: "Because you make yourself out to be God." "But we are all the sons and daughters of God" [translation: "the Godhead is everyone's birthright--not just mine"], replied Jesus.  But his words fell on deaf ears.  Of course, in Jesus's time (and even in ours)--it is heretical to claim that one is "God."  The best Jesus could do without commiting heresy or blasphemy and then burned at the stake was to simply claim that he is the son of God and was crucified.  But in reality he is "God" (Godhead) as are the rest of us. 3.  As for "consciousness" and "self" (identity), I tend to see them not necessarily as synonymous but perhaps as two sides of the same coin of divinity.  Incidentally the most "awakened" or alert consciousness--the mental-rational (orange and green)--is the most "conscious" insofar as rationality and "brilliance" but precisely for this reason cannot penetrate the layers of self (please refer to Anna's post) concerned with complete identity to access this "Beyond No-Self," perhaps.  As such the rational mind is the most dis-identified from origin and consequently the most apt to suffer identity crisis and other neuroses because of its sense of separate self.  4.  This is a clumsy way of putting it but the way I perceive of Godhead as "self."  And that "self" in the ultimate sense may be no-self but is not the ego-self.  Furthermore, I do not subscrbe to the notion of "one soul per person or zygote" (e.g. a multiplicity of "different" souls or personalities) but rather perceive this Divinity as one Spirit or Godhead whose degree or intensification of consciousness is many and varied but commensurate with the given apparatus or "tool" that the Itself (Divinity, Godhead) has on hand to make things visible and present and to bring them into concretion--be it a person, a kaleidescope, a prism, or other apparatus used as an instrument to perceive the whole.  Thus Godhead, once previously hidden from self and identity--is made transparent and visible through all sentient forms via mutation into higher modes of realization and consciousness.  Each sentient being could be likened to a prism that is capable of filtering different kinds and levels of perception of Godhead/Spirit depending on the colour, opaqueness, brilliance, or transparency of the entity and his or her filtering mechanism, yet these observations are ultimately perceptions emanating from the same source of divinity which is not confined to bodies, but pervades all of reality.  Aldous Huxley mentioned something also to that effect.  Ultimately what I am imparting to you as truth is that consciousness and likewise the Godhead pervades all of reality and filters through each person including yourself; as such it is your birthright.  This does not mean that God in second person can no longer be acknowledged but only that this face of God has lost its claim to exclusivity in Christianity and other Western religions and must make room for Godhead in first person as well as a third or fourth-person form of divinity as well to include the all.  The sooner one recognizes that God reveals herself in many different persons be it first, second, or third--the sooner one can jettison the myth.   I can't imagine that there is anyone who could prove to me otherwise that there is more than one "consciousness" or "self" in existence.  This differs from solipsism because I'm not suggesting that only "my" "mind" or consciousness exists but rather that identity/consciousness exists, but it pervades all of reality in varying degrees and filters through various filtering mechanisms such as people.  So there are lots of "people": but only one consciousness of God, as it were.  For instance : I have a lot of things running around in my "mind"--yet I still consider my composite of jumbled or disjointed thoughts to belong to a single consciousness which is divine in nature  There is a word for that but I cannot think of it.   Never have I experienced two or more consciousnesses "running around" at the same time in my mind.  This I think I read in Quantum Questions: Who was it that said that?  Schroedinger?  Niels Bohr?  I do recall that one of these pioneers of 20th century physics wrote that even when one is in a dream and is conversating with someone else, we speak back and forth as in a regular conversation, but do not know what the other person is going to say until they say it even though the other person and the dreamer are one and the same.  And that the dreamer--without even "knowing"-- is making up the entire conversation without the slightest clue that what the "other" person in the dreamer's dream is "saying" is coming from dreamer's own mind..not from "theirs.".  So maybe there is only one consciousness and this is all a dream that we are on.  I suppose you could call me a Monist.  This is badly written so I hope that it is at least somewhat comprehensible and coherent but I do not think that I am communicating very well today. 6:33 AM  0 Comments (Add Comment) | 0 Kudos Translate Powered by English Albanian Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Chinese Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Maltese Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Vietnamese July 5, 2009 - Sunday  Your Own Personal Jesus Current mood:  contemplative Category: Religion and Philosophy Was this useful?   Currently, there are 0 votes.Maybe there was a communication breakdown.Posted July 4th, 2009 by barbi hammond in response toMisinterpretation This was my most recent response to a thread on the existence of God.  I am doubtful that anyone will respond back, yet it is an issue that is important to me.  For full thread, please go here: http://integrallife.com/member/jonathan-cobb/blog/do-you-believe-god?show=all A note about these threads: it took me a long time to figure it out, but the threads in this forum are actually nested threads that do not permit reading of comments unless you manually click the option below the original post that says "show all sub comments." Obviously, there has been a communication breakdown.  Perhaps it would be useful to tease apart the traditional concepts of a personal God (such as the God of Abraham in Christian fundamentalism) from 20th century Whiteheadean or panentheistic conceptions of a personal God as you are referring to above.  What I gather is that while a "personal God" is acknowledged in both traditional and contemporary forms of Western theology and philosophy (based on your posts), that they differ fundamentally in meaning.  Whereas the former is mythical, the latter is at least on the level of rational although I am not thoroughly convinced that contemporary theology or philosophy goes beyond the level of rationality.  I could be mistaken; it's been many years since I've studied Whitehead (and even then, I kind of "skimmed" through it because it was required reading).  But at least feel that I am qualified to make some general remarks based on my limited knowledge and, as always, am open to corrections. Personally, I do not find that God or "Godhead" (whether personal or impersonal) disagrees with Whiteheadean philosophy, Process Theology, or panentheism although I do see how the concept of an impersonal form of divinity which you refer to as "Godhead" (and which I in turn, do not think is "impersonal" for the fact that I claim this Godhead and I am obviously not "impersonal" but a person who is therefore, "personal" who not only is "conscious"--but a conscious Spirit to boot--although I do concede nay, insist that the archaic form of Spirit (which is ever-present) is unconscious and hence, "impersonal") can be problematic for traditional Western theology.   Obviously, I was confused by your use of the term "personal God," which I initially associated with Depeche Mode prior to my confusion of the concept with Christian fundamentalists' claims of exclusivity in having a "personal relationship with God"--which is not at all inclusive due to its claims of exclusivity, since only those who have this special relationship with a personal God are the "chosen ones" who get to go to Heaven while the rest of us who do not have this "personal relationship" burn in Hell.  It is also less inclusive (the traditional form of a personal God, that is) for the fact that God is then personified as parental which then demotes humans to the status of children.  Furthermore, in the traditional view, God is not only "parental" but a patriarch--which then excludes females from identity with God and is therefore less inclusive in that sense as well.  The traditional view is also mythical, since those who claim to have this "personal relationship with God" (particularly fundamentalists) actually believe that they have these intimate and personal sit-down conversations with God one-on-one.   I am still somewhat confused by your emphasis on "personal" vs. "impersonal" forms of deity or Spirit and why you would insist that such perceived differences cannot be reconciled between Buddhism and Eros (on the one hand) and Whiteheadian philosophy, Process theology, or panentheism on the other.  Actually panentheism exists in Buddhism and Hinduism as well--so it is not a concept that is exclusive to Christianity. You seem to be pitting "personal" vs. "impersonal" forms of Spirit in a dual opposition, because not only are you giving primacy to the personalized form of Spirit (which is fine and well, if that is your tradition)--but you are rejecting altogether the concept of an impersonal or unconscious form of Spirit if I'm reading you correctly. I do admit that the term "personal" when coupled with "God" does indeed suggest a God with an ego and a human-like personality.  Of course, I did gather that you were not referring to this at all.  I would even venture to say that even the most hardcore Christian fundamentalist would object to such a diminished conception of God and reject it out of hand.   However, the alternative that you pose--a transcendent and immanent God who is both love and loving and both intelligent and intelligence--still suggests a personalized, supernatural being endowed with reason, intelligence, and volition minus the ego and personality. This too is fine and well but without the unconscious archaic form of spirit it is not much diifferent from those who are mythical (who also tend to reject the notion of ascribing ego and a human-like personality to God) unless you temper the "being" with "becoming" so as to allow for archaic, unconscious and impersonal forms of spirit to also be included as manifestations of God.     You'll have to excuse my gross misinterpretations of your posts as I am from another country, tradition, and am on the wrong planet altogether, but grew up in a Buddhist household in South Georgia since the age of 5.  Not to say that I'm a Buddhist, a Southerner, an American, Japanese, a Westerner, or even an Earthling--but nor am I a Christian.  In spite of this (or perhaps because of this), I find the concept of a personal God foreign since nearly everyone around me is a Christian fundamentalist who claims to have a one-on-one "personal relationship with God."  That said, I do basically agree with what you say about a God who both moves creation and is moved by it.  Perhaps the disagreement is more over semantics more so than over metaphysics or post-metaphysics, as most of what I've read of Whitehead I agree with.  However, as a half-Japanese, half-white child of a Buddhist mother and a Southern Baptist father (and Christian son), I would object very strongly to the notion that perennial philosophy is a "dumbing down" of all religions because there are some of us who are not from a single religious tradition or culture and have need to reconcile these seemingly contradictory or incompatible worldviews into some kind of coherent wholeness for the sake of commonality with my Christian son.  And also, as a child who was raised in a Buddhist household with many Buddhist relatives--I know for a fact that most Buddhists would not be insulted in the least by those who attempt to find a commonality between Buddhism and other religions (there is a panentheistic form of Buddhism, after all).  It is mostly Christians who get insulted that way.  That needs to change.   4:02 AM  0 Comments (Add Comment) | 1 Kudos Translate Powered by English Albanian Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Chinese Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Maltese Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Vietnamese July 4, 2009 - Saturday  If You Could Only Say It In Words: My Life On Film Current mood:  pirate Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities If You Could Only Say it in Words - Official Site I have not seen this movie and could not hear the video or audio clips because my speakers are messed up.  In spite of these inconveniences, however, I felt compelled to share them with friends upon reading the movie review and feeling a certain affinity with the protagonist, who is described as follows: . . . .a unique story of a man who belongs to an economic, racial, and a neurological minority. Due to the culture he grows up in, Nelson is never diagnosed with Asperger’s and the syndrome is never mentioned by name. However, it is clear from Nelson’s behaviors and quirks, that he would have been diagnosed with Asperger’s if he had grown up in a more advantaged family. I watched to video clips with the sound all garbled, yet I can definitely tell by the mannerisms and the mouth-movements of the protagonist (indicating speech) that the media has finally moved beyond the stereotypical portrayal of an autistic as someone who is moderately severe with an I.Q. of 50, mute or incommunicable, bangs his head against the wall, and spends his days memorizes telephone numbers from a phone book. In reality many if not most on the spectrum are not like that but are more like Nelson and I.  I'm glad that the media is finally catching on that not all people on the autistic spectrum are like "Rain Man": . . . .Alvin's performance as Nelson is quite possibly the most authentic portrayal of an autistic person that I've ever seen in the movies. Unlike the usual stereotypically overblown representation of autism so common in the media, Nelson's character more closely resembles someone you could know in real life. Nelson doesn't count cards at the casino and faces the same realationship problems that many of us have had. And it's quite likely that at least a couple people you know do have an undiagnosed case of autism. Autism occurs in 1 in 150 people and many more go undiagnosed. Despite what you may gather from the media, the stereotypical image of a child who cannot talk is an extreme and, like Nelson, many autistic individuals go through life without ever discovering that they are autistic. Those would like to get to know me should learn about Asperger. And should anyone care to listen to the audio and sear (see/hear) the video clips below, please comment me back to let me know what it's about. Everything below the dotted line is a re-post from Wrong Planet. ....................................................................................................................... Reposted from http://www.wrongplanet.net/article359.html If You Could Say it in Words: New Asperger's Movie (Interview) Posted on Sunday, February 10 @ 10:34:31 EST by Nicholas Gray’s directorial debut, If you Could Say it in Words, is a feature film about Nelson Hodge, a young African American guy with Asperger’s living in Philidelphia. While there have recently been a plethora of films about individuals with Asperger’s, most have been documentaries, and none have featured a protagonist with Asperger’s who falls into a lower-income socioeconomic class. Read on to listen to an interview with the director and lead actor. We also have exclusive video clips from the movie.  Audio Interview: .. (player not working? download the mp3)  If you Could Say it in Words, stands out as a unique story of a man who belongs to an economic, racial, and a neurological minority. Due to the culture he grows up in, Nelson is never diagnosed with Asperger’s and the syndrome is never mentioned by name. However, it is clear from Nelson’s behaviors and quirks, that he would have been diagnosed with Asperger’s if he had grown up in a more advantaged family. Nelson is played by Alvin Keith, who made his big screen debut in the critically acclaimed movie, Kinsey. His romantic interest, Sadie is played by Marin Ireland, an actress who was in The Manchurian Candidate and I am Legend.  I talked with director Nicholas Gray and actor Alvin Keith who visited me at my house in Virginia. We had so much fun talking that our conversation lasted hours. Consequently I will not be transcribing the interview and will instead be including the audio file which you can listen to near the top of this page. Nicholas has provided us with some trailers of the film which have been embedded into this article for your viewing enjoyment.  Clips from the movie: Reposted from: http://www.wrongplanet.net/article376.html Review: If You Could Say it in Words [Asperger Love Story] - October Premiere Posted on Thursday, September 11 @ 09:37:28 EDT by If You Could Say it in Words is a great new film about an autistic protagonist Nelson and his experience with love. The film is premiering at the Derby City Film Festival on October 8, 2008 at 9:00 PM. I wrote about my initial impressions of the movie and conducted an interview in February. You will also find clips from the movie in my previous article. The film explores Nelson's Asperger's Syndrome without mentioning the diagnosis. The choice is intentional because many individuals with Asperger's remain undiagnosed. A recent documentary,Billy the Kid, similarly did not mention the protagonist's Asperger diagnosis, but If You Could Say it in Words is the first narrative feature film I've come across that explores Autism in such depth without hitting the audience over the head over and over again with the fact that it's about autism. Additionally, the film appeals to an audience greater than the autistic community because the questions it raises about love apply to autistics and neurotpyicals alike. Alvin's performance as Nelson is quite possibly the most authentic portrayal of an autistic person that I've ever seen in the movies. Unlike the usual stereotypically overblown representation of autism so common in the media, Nelson's character more closely resembles someone you could know in real life. Nelson doesn't count cards at the casino and faces the same realationship problems that many of us have had. And it's quite likely that at least a couple people you know do have an undiagnosed case of autism. Autism occurs in 1 in 150 people and many more go undiagnosed. Despite what you may gather from the media, the stereotypical image of a child who cannot talk is an extreme and, like Nelson, many autistic individuals go through life without ever discovering that they are autistic. It's refreshing to finally see a film that explores an autistic individual who isn't two dimensional. You'll find you have more similarities with Nelson than differences. And that's the way you should feel about a movie's protagonist because the best movies are the ones with which we can all relate. Deliberate audio and visual choices emphasize the disconnect between Nelson and everyone else. The disorientating atmosphere created at times by the film in reference to Nelson reminds me of what it's like to get a sensory overload. Thus, If You Could Say it in Words proves that it is possible to make a movie about an autistic person without stereotypically relying on the character melting down every other scene.  I plan on attending the premiere in October and suggest you do the same. The director, Nicholas Gray has become an ally to the autistic community since he began working on this film.  For more information, here's the press release:  World Premiere of "If You Could Say It In Words" at Derby City Film Festival; Will Open Festival as First Feature Film WHAT: World Premiere of "If You Could Say It In Words" at the Derby City Film Festival WHO:  Writer/director and Louisville native Nicholas Gray Actor Alvin Keith (Broadway and regional theater veteran), Marin Ireland (Obie-award winner, major roles in upcoming films The Understudy, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men) Co-producers Katharine Clark Gray and Adam Eisenstein WHEN:  October 8, 2008 at 9:00 PM   WHERE:  Louisville Memorial Auditorium                 970 South Fourth Street                 Louisville, KY 40203   CONTACT: Adam Eisenstein, 646-221-2254 LOUISVILLE, [date of release] – If You Could Say It In Words, a film written and directed by Louisville native Nicholas Gray, will have its world premiere on October 8 at 9:00 p.m. on the opening night of the Derby City Film Festival at the Louisville Memorial Auditorium. If You Could Say It In Words is a nuanced, uncompromising look at a romance in which a painter with undiagnosed Asperger's Syndrome challenges a young woman's conventional ideas and his own understanding of love. Nelson (Alvin Keith) has Asperger's syndrome, a condition that impairs social function.  Undiagnosed, poor, African-American, and a painter, he is pushed to society's fringes.  He meets Sadie (Marin Ireland), a young woman with broken dreams who now treads water at a job that’s not her career, has a roommate who’s not her friend, and sleeps with her married boss, Mark (Gerry Lehane). A one-night stand grows into an unlikely romance wherein two people lost in different ways begin to find themselves through each other. But the conventional expectations imposed by others -- and by Sadie -- put their relationship in jeopardy.   Alex Plank, founder of autism advocacy website WrongPlanet.net, says “Alvin [Keith]'s performance as Nelson is quite possibly the most authentic portrayal of an autistic person that I've ever seen in the movies…It's refreshing to finally see a film that explores an autistic individual who isn't two dimensional.” If You Could Say It In Words is the first feature film produced by A Chip & A Chair Films LLC, whose mission is to support the unflinching vision of film and theater artists. The company raised money for If You Could Say It In Words through an innovatively democratic funding structure -- selling shares in the film to individual investors at $225 apiece. They raised enough money initially to shoot only less than half of the film; so they shot a selection of scenes, edited, and then used the material to promote the film to investors, eventually garnering enough shareholders to complete the shooting and post-production of the film over the course of several years. Nicholas Gray, Alvin Keith, and co-producers Katharine Clark Gray and Adam Eisenstein will be available for in-person interviews October 6-11 in Louisville. Phone interviews or a full press packet with photos from the film as well as further information about all cast and crew are available upon request. Writer/director Nicholas Gray was born in Louisville, Kentucky and grew up all across the state (Lexington, Lebanon, Campbellsville, and Louisville). He graduated from Ballard High School and first studied acting with Walden Theater Conservatory. Virtually Nicholas' entire family is in or from the state, with ties going back to the time before Kentucky formally joined the U.S. Nicholas currently plans to return to Louisville this winter as director and co-producer on a series of awareness videos for the Autism Self-Advocacy Network. As part of the series, he will be profiling the teacher whose remarkable relationship with his autistic children first inspired Nicholas to write a script with an autistic lead role. The film was shot by cinematographer Richard Sands, noted for his lighting direction of films by Francis Ford Coppola, Stephen Spielberg, Sam Ramie, Joe Dante, among others. Other featured actors in the film include New York theater veteran Gerry Lehane, Yvonne Woods(Yale Rep, ACT, Alley Theater), PaSean Wilson (Another World, Striptease), Stephen McKinley Henderson (Drama Desk Award Winner for Jitney, Everyday People, Law & Order) Dana Snyder (Master Shake from Aqua Teen Hunger Force). PRESS CONTACT: Adam Eisenstein Director of Marketing and Development Co-producer, If You Could Say It In Words A Chip & A Chair Films 646-221-2254 aeisenstein@chipchair.com WEBSITES: Movie: www.ifyoucould-movie.com Company: www.chipchair.com Film Festival: www.derbycityfilmfest.com 9:15 PM  0 Comments (Add Comment) | 1 Kudos Translate Powered by English Albanian Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Chinese Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Maltese Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Vietnamese January 8, 2009 - Thursday  On the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Category: News and Politics  I am currently reading up on the history of US-Israel relations, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the plight of the Palestinian refugees, Israel as a Jewish State and on a phenomenon known as American Christian Zionism. In regard to the latter, I'm reading about its influence on American policy and on public opinion. Palestinian family in early 20th century (Wikipedia) Not to say that I condone Hamas' suicide bombings or home-made rocket attacks on Israel but only to suggest that Israel is equally, if not more, to blame for ongoing and recent events. For one, Israel encourages Hamas and other more extreme militant groups to rise to power through its ongoing blockade and oppression of the Palestinians. Now that Hamas has gained political control, it is better to negotiate with Hamas than with Al Qaeda and agree to a truce. Which includes not only Hamas' ceasefire of rockets and smuggling of weapons through its borders but also to Israel's removal of a years' long illegal blockade to keep out the Palestinians from their homeland. Which not only interferes with mobility or migration but with necessary humanitarian supplies trying to reach the Palestinians in their refugee camps. I will refrain from the use of the word "terrorists" in describing Hamas since the meaning of the word is often disputed and more often used perjoratively; as "a terrorist" to one group of people may be a "freedom fighter" to another. Here are some interesting articles that I came across: Gaza Statistics Before and Since December 27, 2008 Data comes from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Life for the general population of Gaza has been getting worse and worse. Now it is at a complete standstill as they wait for the bombardment that began on December 27, 2008 to stop and fear for the well-being of their families. Gaza is a region just 25 miles long and 7.5 miles wide - about twice the size of Washington, DC - and has a population of 1.5 million. Over half the population of Gaza are children. The Gaza border has been closed since June 2007 - 18 months. All exports from Gaza have been suspended since then. Imports have been severely restricted since June 2007 and recently, even humanitarian imports have not been allowed into Gaza. The information below describes the humanitarian crisis that stripped Gaza bare before the shelling even began, turning Gaza into the nightmare it is today. BEFORE THE BOMBARDMENT • 70% of families in Gaza lived on $3 or less per day. • 80% of the water supplied in Gaza did not meet the World Health Organization standards for drinking. • Half the population of Gaza City had access to water for only several hours a week. • 23 out of 3,900 industrial enterprises were operating. • Hatchery owners were forced to kill 400,000 baby chicks in November because they didn't have enough fuel to heat the hatcheries and not enough feed to keep their chicks alive. • 70% of agricultural land was no longer being irrigated. • Medical equipment was failing and becoming obsolete due to lack of power, spare parts and maintenance. • More than one third of the people suffering from illnesses that need special treatment were denied exit from Gaza. • Most hospitals were relying on back-up generators for extended periods of time. • Flour stocks are depleted and five out of six mills stopped grinding. • 30 of 47 bakeries were forced to close down due to lack of cooking gas. Those that were open were forced to sell only 50 slices of bread per family daily. AFTER THE BOMBARDMENT • More than one million Gazans are without electricity or water - 75% of Gaza's electricity has been cut off. • Over 530,000 people are entirely cut off from running water, and the rest are receiving water only intermittently (every few days). • Food distributions have been suspended and all crossing points remain closed. • 5 of Gaza's 37 waste water pumping stations are shut down due to a lack of electricity and sewage is now flooding into populated areas, farmland, and the sea. • In northern Gaza the water and sewage networks have enough fuel to continue operations for 2-3 days. • An estimated 13,000 people (2,000 families) have been displaced because of the conflict. • All of Gaza City hospitals have been without mains electricity for 48 consecutive hours - they depend entirely on back-up generators. • Hospitals' generators are close to collapse. At Shifa Hospital collapse would have immediate consequences for 70 intensive care unit patients. • Most of the telephone network (landlines and cells) in Gaza is not functioning, since it now depends on backup generators with dwindling fuel stocks. • Thousands of homes have been damaged and it has become increasingly difficult for residents to stay in them given the cold weather. • 10 bakeries are operational. To make a donation, visit www.anera.org/gaza Profile: Gaza Strip (History of Hamas and timeline of current events in Gaza) ...But [Hamas] has not relinquished its assertion that Palestinian refugees from 1948 should be allowed to return to homes in what has become Israel - a move that threatens Israel's very existence as a Jewish state.... Seumas Milne: Israel and the West Will Pay a Price for Gaza's Bloodbath ...Most of those Palestinians are in fact refugees or the families of refugees from the towns of southern Israel, including Ashkelon and Ashdod, which have been targeted by Hamas - and from which they were ethnically cleansed when Israel was established in 1948. But the bulk of the western media would have us believe that the cause of this war is Hamas's firing of mostly home-made rockets into Israel - which no state could tolerate without retaliation. In this myopic fantasy land, there is no 61-year national dispossession, no refugee camps, no occupations, no siege, no multiple Israeli violations of UN security council resolutions and the Geneva conventions, no illegal wall, no routine assassinations, no prisoners and no West Bank... Divided loyalties Ian Black wades into the troubled history of the Middle East with four books on Palestine Ian Black The Guardian, Saturday 17 February 2007 Article history Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, by Jimmy Carter 264pp, Simon & Schuster, £17.99 The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan Pappe 313pp, Oneworld, £16.99 The Iron Cage, by Rashid Khalidi 281pp, Oneworld, £12.70 It is nearly 30 years since Jimmy Carter made his great contribution to the cause of peace in the Middle East: shepherding, cajoling and bribing Israel and Egypt into a treaty that has endured many crises, even though it failed to tackle the Palestinian core of the world's most intractable conflict. Carter is older and perhaps wiser than the president who doggedly brought Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin together at Camp David in 1978, though the "autonomy" tacked on to the "separate peace" excoriated by most other Arabs never went anywhere. Still, power to collect garbage and exterminate mosquitoes under Israeli occupation was never going to be enough for the Palestinians. The intifadas of 1987 and 2000 were terrible reminders of the price of stagnation: things have got much, much worse, since he was in the White House. Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid tells us little that is new or especially insightful to Arabs, Israelis or Europeans. But Carter challenges decades of mainstream American thinking to argue forcefully that Israel is an ally that has been far too closely protected by US power as it has continued occupying Arab territory, notwithstanding its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. This view is hardly inflammatory and certainly not anti-semitic, as some of his harsher critics claim. Most of what he says is the stuff of everyday debate on the left and centre in Israel itself and is winning converts among some Jews elsewhere. Controversy about the book flows largely from the word "apartheid" in the title: it is wrong if applied to Israel within its pre-1967 borders, where there is discrimination but not institutionalised racism. In the West Bank, with its confiscated land, unequal allocation of water resources, fortress-like settlements, security fence and segregated roads, it is fitting enough. No one who has seen subjugated Palestinians struggling with everyday life alongside armed Jewish settlers can quarrel with it. Carter implies that South African-type pariahdom will follow if the conflict is not justly and swiftly resolved - though that would have been a lot easier to achieve in 1978. Nowadays Israelis (and Jews) worry about the de-legitimation of their state, especially as the rise of the Islamist Hamas has revived anxieties about recognition that the PLO had resolved. The ranting of a Holocaust-denying Iranian leader pursuing nuclear weapons doesn't help. The answer is to go back to first principles: two states in Israel and Palestine. Historical interpretation and contemporary controversy coexist even more explosively in a new book by the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe. His story begins in March 1948, when the Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion and his advisers met in Tel Aviv to discuss strategy. Fighting had been going on since the previous November when the UN voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. By May 15, when the British mandate ended and Israel declared its independence, 250,000 Palestinians had already become refugees. By the end of the year there were 750,000-plus. Few ever returned to homes taken over by Israelis in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem, or blown up and bulldozed in hundreds of villages. Pappe, the revisionists' revisionist, identifies that March meeting as the start of a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" - a term coined in Yugoslavia in the 1990s but foreshadowed in Hebrew usage at the time. For him it was the result of a Zionist ideology whose "wordless wish" was for the Palestinians to disappear to make way for the Jewish state. Israel's "war of independence" or "liberation" was the Palestinians' nakba - "catastrophe". Pappe takes issue with fellow scholar Benny Morris, pioneer of the "new" history that has supplanted the rose-tinted version of the birth of Israel in which intransigent Arabs were largely the authors of their own misfortune. If Morris undermined the foundations of the old myths and smashed large parts of the walls, Pappe brings the roof crashing down: his clear view is that the expulsion and dispossession of the Palestinians was a grand design, not the partially planned and locally varied phenomenon - tragic but inevitable in the circumstances - that Morris painstakingly reconstructed from the Israeli archives 20 years ago. Emphasis apart, it is hard to say what is new in his account. The scheme discussed at the Tel Aviv meeting, Plan Dalet, has been known about for years. It has long been clear that the Palestinians were not, as used to be claimed, encouraged to leave their homes "temporarily" by Arab leaders. The fledgling Israeli state was not invaded, as the old David and Goliath narrative goes, by five Arab armies. Egypt attacked in the south and Jordanian and Iraqi troops entered the territory allotted to the Palestinians by the UN. Ethnic cleansing in Palestine is Israel's "original sin" laid bare - but without any mitigating circumstances. Rare exceptions in a catalogue of intimidation, expulsion and atrocity include the Jewish mayor of Haifa appealing to the city's Arabs to stay, despite attacks by Haganah forces. Nazareth's Christian Arabs were spared because Ben-Gurion realised that the outside world would not tolerate their removal. Pappe follows writers such as Meron Benvenisti who have documented the post-war cover-up: the rubble of Palestinian villages buried under parks and nature reserves, their fields and olive groves taken over by kibbutzim and immigrant housing projects, their Arab names Hebraized - or restored to their pre-Islamic biblical Hebrew ones. He fights the "power of deletion" over the fate of the Palestinians. But he does historical understanding a disservice by all but ignoring the mood and motives of the Jews, so soon after the end of a war in which six million had been exterminated by the Nazis. Ben-Gurion's public rhetoric about the dangers of annihilation or a second Holocaust, Pappe argues, was matched by private confidence about the outcome of an unequal fight. That does not mean the shadow of the Holocaust can be airbrushed out of the story. The Jews were fighting, as they saw it, with their backs to the wall, for survival. To ignore that perception - a huge factor in western sympathy for Israel in 1948 and for so long afterwards - is to misrepresent reality. Pappe's Israel is the "last post-colonial European enclave in the Arab world". It is true that Zionist settlers did act in many ways like French pieds noirs in Algeria or Brits in Rhodesia. But most wanted to replace rather than exploit the natives. The immigrants who began arriving in the late 1880s, their numbers peaking in 1935 with 60,000 mostly German Jews, were invariably fleeing discrimination, pogroms or, after 1945, worse. Few were leaving good lives or moving to a classic colony. It is not sufficient, in other words, to subsume Zionism into the wider narrative of colonialism, though that specificity made no difference to the final outcome - the near-eradication of Arab Palestine. Rashid Khalidi, the Palestinian historian, lingers perceptively on this absolutely vital point: Zionism simultaneously oppressed the Palestinians and represented a movement of national liberation for the Jews - and has produced a new people speaking their own language, living in a country called Israel. It is not a question of whether Arabs or anyone else find that paradox palatable or just. It is that this important story, then as now, doesn't make any sense without grasping it. Khalidi, tackling "historical amnesia", brilliantly analyses the structural handicap which hobbled the Palestinians throughout 30 years of British rule so that by the time the last high commissioner sailed away in 1948 they could neither accommodate nor successfully resist the Jews. His image of an iron cage represents the limits placed on them by the Balfour declaration in 1917, when the Jews were promised a "national home" as long as it was built without prejudice to the rights of what were absurdly called "non-Jewish communities" (then 90% of Palestine's population). This inbalance was constant: the UN partition decision of November 1947 gave the Jews, by then 33% of the population, half of the territory when they owned just 6% of the land. By 1949 they controlled 78% of it. Auden might have been anticipating the fate of the Palestinians in 1937 when he wrote in his great poem, "Spain", that "History to the defeated may say alas but cannot help or pardon." Pappe's militant work challenges such fatalism - though his call for a single binational state to replace Israel will neither persuade his Jewish fellow citizens nor convince Palestinians that it is achievable. Khalidi restores the Palestinians to something more than victims, acknowledging that for all their disadvantages, they have played their role and can (and must) still do so to determine their own fate. The lesson of these books - and the drearily familiar row over Carter's - is that in Israel and Palestine the past is still far from being another country. It will always be hard to change that. But independence and freedom for the Palestinians is the only way it ever will. 10:15 AM  3 Comments (Add Comment) | 4 Kudos Translate Powered by English Albanian Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Chinese Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Maltese Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Vietnamese January 3, 2009 - Saturday  Attn: People Who "Wanna Chat." Current mood:  annoyed Category: MySpace What is it with "wanna chat??" lately? I don't like to "chat" with complete strangers from Myspace nor with anyone for that matter unless they are chatting about what I am chatting about.  The only intelligent email i've received in the past day or so is the one about the music so I'm using as an example of the kind of connections that I hope to find via social online networking.  Yet even in this person, I had to correct him on his observation.   Mind you, I have a great many topics of interests for discussion beyond just music so when you email me, please email me about your topic of interest rather than asking me if I just "wanna chat."  If it is something that I am interested in, then I will respond back.  Depends on what you are "chatting about."     I don't mind "chatting" with people even if they're ugly, old, or fat so long as they are chatting about the things that I am interested in or "wanna chat" about.  The only person worth responding to of late was in bold.   I'm already chatting on my blog about the stuff that I like to chat about and you can comment me there if you like.  That way, I can know if you are intelligent or not.  But don't just email me and ask me if I "wanna chat."  Especially if you're old, ugly, fat, or don't have a picture of yourself on the email.  Why do people do that?   Date: Jan 2, 2009 12:27 PM Flag as Spam or Report Abuse [?] Subject: ya know barbi.. Body: You do have the sweetest eyes... Date: Jan 2, 2009 12:22 PM Flag as Spam or Report Abuse [?] Barbi.. Please.. Body: lol Lets chat sometime soon and bring in this new year nicely.. Date: Jan 2, 2009 12:21 PM Flag as Spam or Report Abuse [?]   Subject: Barbi.. Please.. Body: lol Lets chat sometime soon and bring in this new year nicely.. Date: Jan 2, 2009 8:52 AM Flag as Spam or Report Abuse [?] Subject: you Body: hello..and happy new year...how are    Date: Jan 2, 2009 7:52 AM Flag as Spam or Report Abuse [?]   Subject: No Subject Body: If you are interested in music, your homepage music theme is based ona pentatonic scale--sometimes called a whole tone scale. The scale consists of whole steps. You can take this scale, pluck away at it, and everything comes out sounding Asian.   Date:   Jan 2, 2009 12:23 AM Flag as Spam or Report Abuse [?]   Subject: hi gorgeous Body: Thanks for adding me. I look forward to flirting with you:)   Date: Dec 31, 2008 1:30 PM Flag as Spam or Report Abuse [?]   Subject: Hello Body: I could not help but to admire your beauty,and were your at Quitman my Indian Heritage Flows through there,why don't we begin to be friends..perhaps if you like..because i know i would like we should become what every leads us,don't be shy I'll be waiting for your message :) Date: Dec 26, 2008 4:16 PM Flag as Spam or Report Abuse [?] Subject: e-mail Body: i e-mail early to get togather for coffee my e-mail is.. i expect to here from you   Date: Dec 28, 2008 4:59 PM Flag as Spam or Report Abuse [?] Subject: talk,e-mail Body: Iknow I havent got a picture yet this is new to me i would like to talk   Date: Dec 26, 2008 12:41 PM Flag as Spam or Report Abuse [?]   Subject: me Body: I was checking the my space and i saw your picture and was wondering if we could meet. i am fourty four and five foot ten with strawing blond hair. i have full time job and a certified electrician and working at cook county high school. would like to meet with you for coffee. please call me at ... will be expecting your call   Well, sure--most traditional Far Eastern or non-Western music is based on a pentatonic scale.    Were that the only thing that distinguishes Sugo Tokumaru from other artists, there would be nothing whatsoever to set him apart from any other folk or traditional Japanese musician.  Most of whom already use pentatonic scales.  So in Japan, the pentatonic scale is a dime a dozen.  Although in the West, perhaps, it might sound like a novelty to you.  None of the rest are worth responding to.  So if you email me, please email me with something that I am interested in.  And if you are in your 40s and beyond, please notice that I do not look anywhere near 40 and have never been attracted to people who look middle age or older so please spare me the "pick up" lines unless you simply want to be a "platonic friend."  I'm not attracted to any of you so far.  I will still be your platonic friend so long as you are interesting, but in order for me to respond to you will have to talk about what I am interested in.  5:59 AM  4 Comments (Add Comment) | 4 Kudos Translate Powered by English Albanian Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Chinese Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Maltese Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Vietnamese December 28, 2008 - Sunday  I Have a Quantum Question (Re-post) Current mood:  high Category: Religion and Philosophy Friday, December 19, 2008 I Have a Quantum Question and a Complaint to Corey DeVos Category: School, College, Greek In response to: Does Quantum Physics Prove God? by Ken Wilber and Corey DeVos Posted at: http://www.integrallife.com/ Differentiating Gebser's Manifestations of the Fourth Dimension from "Quantum Physics=Mysticism Category: School, College, Greek   Part 1: Differentiating Gebser's Manifestations of the Fourth Dimension from Pre-Trans Fallacy Current mood:  presentiating Category: acategorical ..   Let us pause and observe for a moment that by introducing time as a fourth dimension, Einstein made possible changes in our knowledge of certain phenomena and occurrences which altered the foundations of physics and mechanics. But when we speak today of a fourth dimension, a wider frame of reference than that of Einstein's theory of relativity forces itself upon the observer, one which links the fourth dimension not merely with time or even the measurable time of particular movement of velocities, as in the case of Einstein's theory, but rather with the assumption of an invisibly efficacious component.   (Gebser)   I will attempt to explore a strange yet increasingly visible component of mutations called "parallel quadruplicities." These are symmetries created across the space-time continuum by at least two to four individuals (per set or symmetry) who are separated by space, time, or by both, so as to never come in contact with each other on a personal basis yet who repeatedly make similar discoveries independently of each other. These discoveries, when noted, create a pattern or a symmetry across not merely "space-time," but also across the achronon as they unfold.  Occasionally, symmetries occur "simultaneously" (in the sense that they occur either instantaneously or within a 10-year interval); but from personal observation they appear to be patterns that unfold over time or sometimes simultaneously. Something perhaps akin to "nonlocal correlation," a term coined in twenthieth-century physics that I came across while reading either The Tao of Physics or Quantum Questions when I was 27 years old.   Thus far I have noticed a second person and possibly a third on Myspace who is regularly in the habit of stealing my ideas or experiences before I think or have them and then posting them as if they were their own. My theory is that it occurs on Myspace on the Internet not as willful or conscious act within the respective co-participants or "ego-consciousnesses" (unless they become conscious to it) but occurs, instead, consciously within "the itself" ("beyond ego" in the transpersonal realm) for the sake of "presentiation," that is, for the sake of "making present."  By "Present," I mean: 2.  The "Present" is not identical with the "moment" but is the undivided presence of yesterday, today, and tomorrow which in a consciously realized actualization can lead to that "presentiation" which encompasses origin as an ineradicable present. [placeholder for definition] Should they fail to count as "presentiation," I would like to get to the bottom of these anomalies once and for all. I need to re-read Quantum Questions to refresh my memory of the current question so as to better tease apart Gebser's concepts of four dimensional, indeterminancy, and parallel-quadruplicities from New Age concepts relating to "quantum mechanics proves Eastern mysticism" of the 1970s. Wilber has already debunked these theories of Fritjof Capra, David Zukav, and Deepak Chopra and others as narcissistic and simple reductionism.  This--in spite of these authors having their "heart in the right places" and being "well-meaning" for the sake of integration between science and religion.    I've actually had the opportunity to communicate with "Fritj" himself, author of The Tao of Physics, via fax conversation during my senior year of college in '94. At the time, I was taking a philosophy course called "Science and Religion" and was writing a research paper called "The Red Queen, Eastern Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Physics," which explored the mysterious relationship between subatomic particles and Eastern mysticism and philosophy. At the time, I thought I was in the midst of some major scientific breakthough or discovery; unaware that this particular scientific or New Age paradigm had come and gone some time between the '70s-'80s, when I was only a kid.   Gebser, incidentally, was highly influenced by findings in the new physics of the early twentieth century such as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Einstein's Theory of Relativity.  He went on to interpret the findings of these and other disciplines of his day as irruptions and manifestation of the newest mutation in consciousness structure, in which the basic concern of consciousness shifts from spatiality (having sufficiently mastered "space") to that of temporics (a basic concern for time in all of its manifestations).  I am wondering why Wilber rarely (if ever) gives any treatment to time component of Gebser in his theory of consciousness.  Of course, I do realize that in the context of "primordial ground" or unmanifest formlessness of origin (which is always ever-present), there is no "space" or "time" to speak of.  However, whenever we speak of the manifest world in terms of consciousness-development or unfolding, there is indeed a reification of both space and time to reckon with in terms of increasing dimensionality.  There is also an increasing reification of the achronon [placeholder for link]. Gebser differs from Capra, et. al. in that he did not postulate that at the crux of this issue is whether consciousness truly alters the behavior of these subatomic particles by way of observation; nor whether any of these discoveries made in the the new physics have any validity in the exterior macro (spatial) world of Newtonian physics.  Nor, for that matter, did he argue that physics has any validity in the interior super-macro (and temporic: which includes also the timeless) transcendent spiritual realm beyond merely citing the discovery of these phenomena in physics as examples of a basic concern for temporics.  This is my interpretation.  Gebser did, however, incorporate a great many concepts from twentieth century physics such as "indeterminancy" and "time" as a fourth dimension into his overall theory of consciousness-development.  My current guess is that changes occur in subatomic particles as a result of light that is shined directly on these particles by instruments that interfere with these particles while in the act of observation; but not from "consciousness" or observation itself. However, at the time of writing my paper in '94, I was thoroughly convinced that the opposite held true in light of my conversation with Capra and his book, The Tao of Physics.  I had even used Wilber's Quantum Questions (my introduction to transpersonal psychology) to prove my contention.  A short time after submitting this paper--which my professor praised as being "the most fascinating paper he had ever read in his entire career"--I decided to re-read Wilber's book, Quantum Questions, which I had used as one of my sources for my research paper. At the time, I was in the habit of "skipping around" in a book so up to then, had only read a few essays of some physicists whose mystical writings were included in the book. So it wasn't until I actually went back to read the other portions of the book that I had previously skipped over (such as the important foreward or introduction written by Wilber) that I discovered that I had misread Wilber's position on "physics = mysticism" entirely.  And this is when I initially made the shocking discovery that my professor had, in so many words, called my failure (my research paper) "art."   Quantum Questions wasn't at all about "physics = mysticism" but was instead, a critique about the New Age movement and popular science writers who had popularized that notion during the '70s and '80s and as a consequence were being reductionistic in their thinking toward spirituality. When I made this realization at age 27, in 1994 or '95, it was a paradigm shift.  Except that this time, it was not a scientific breakthrough but, rather, about an inner breakthrough or discovery that was subtle yet far more significant and profound: my initial irruption, as it were, out of deficient Green immersion. Part 2: About saying things out loud & my complaint to Corey DeVos I emailed you, Corey, to get your permission to upload the conversation to my Reverbnation player to share with others at my blog on Myspace, which I feel provides a good introduction into the problem of Boomeritis as it relates to the Eastern mysticism and quantum physics. I was too young to be a part of Boomeritis but am told that I am afflicted with the narcissism. I disagree with such criticisms: I am not narcissistic: only honest. Honest as in, I've just figured out the meaning of these lyrics:   "Jump down turn around shake it on a Saturday nite, you don't have pay the crowd, but if you're gonna say it, say it out loud, YEAH!" (Track ? on Reverbnation, my 4 song of 2008) The song is about saying thing out loud and calling attention to certain things that should be kept silent. Part 3: A Note to Everyone But now to shift gears and return to my opening paragraphs from another post, "Update: Another Live Performance Coming Soon: If 'surfaces, surfaces, surfaces was all that I saw,' it was not because I didn't like the inside of a person but only that I found the outer shell of a person too disagreeable or disturbing as a consequence of hypersensitivity. This position or attitude is not a 'personal thing' or a matter of personal choice but may well be condemned as superficial or "unevolved" by those who are prone toward neurotypical bias or to delusions of spiritual grandeur or superiority. To some extent, at least in the social arena, the charge of my superficiality is possibly justified. And I will be the first to grant that in many different lines of personal development, I am less evolved than most individuals due to arrested development, emotional immaturity, an immature nervous system, or to abnormalities in the reptilian complex.   Were it not that I am faced with predators who regard me as a highly desirable sexual object to be taken advantage of (which compounds my issue of hypersensitivity), perhaps my issue of hypersensitivity could be more flexible or more forgiving and less of an issue. For this reason and others, I have avoided social contacts but not as a personal thing but rather a Sensory Processing Disorder issue. This disorder is further complicated by another neurological disorder, Asperger Syndrome: which is not always comorbid with Sensory Processing Disorder and ADHD but on rare occasions does indeed manifest comorbidly as a trivalent condition (as in my particular case). In addition, Asperger, combined with my committment to "just the truth of it, please," predisposes me toward political incorrectness and to the spiritual verticality of agency as opposed to the horizontality of communion or community.   I still intend to write about Gebser's philosophical contributions to the role of time as a novelty in the four dimensional structure of consciousness as I feel that it is necessary to differentiate his writings from mysticism = new physics from New Age thinking and popular junk science from the '70s and '80s. In addition, I also plan to discuss similarities and important differences between Gebser's discussions on manifestations of the newest consciousness in four dimensionality from those manifestations that are merely reactivations of lowered forms of consciousness from previous structures, such as the reactivation of deficient magic from the one dimensional structure or deficient psychic phenomena from the two dimensional structure, both of which are phenomena invoked unnaturally by psychics, mediums, or shamans.  Otherwise, these phenomena are invoked unwittingly or accidentally by "average" individuals who do not operate from higher structures. Yet, because of certain similarities shared by phenomena from these lower structures with manifestations of the newest consciousness in the fourth dimension--namely, that they all defy mechanical-causal explanations of rationality and logic within the three dimensional spatial world of "space,"--they are potentially all going to be "lumped together" and categorically dismissed by those who are Integral as "pre-trans fallacy" or New Age "spiritism" irrespective of dimension or structure of the manifestation or phenomena from which they arise.    I find it to be of signal importance to distinguish aspects of previous dimensions of consciousness from the arational and from manifestations of the achronon so as to integrate the work of Wilber with Gebser.  And also to make allowances for the reality of these various "supernatural" phenomena occurring within their respective structures.  Most of them are instances of reimmersion into magic or mythic consciousness both of which are structures still contained in us and superimposed on top of the reptilian complex, the most primitive portion of the brain.  Otherwise, these prerational, irrational, or arational phenomena may be dismissed categorically by the Integral as "pre-trans fallacy" and make-believe and/or categorically defined by those believers of New Age spiritism or shamanism as 'proof' of "spiritual evolution" irrespective of structure or dimension.   At first, I felt that this Wilber-DeVos introduction may have been necessary for an introduction on Ken Wilber's work on pre-trans fallacy with regard to quantum physics and Eastern mysticism to my Myspace readers. It still would have been ideal; but as I've had no luck in response from you, Corey, for permission to use your and Ken's audio (in spite of the fact that you've read my request), I will assume that you have a philosophical problem with the fact that I am a pirate or am occasionally prone on very rare occasions to criticize Ken's work from a theoretical standpoint. This is really unfortunate as Corey was the first and only person to personally welcome me into the integrallife.com community. For this reason, also, I have removed all audio conversations that I had once featured on Ken Wilber on my Reverbnation player until I go through the proper channels in consideration of copyright or piracy issues. I have not done so with any of the other artists on the playlist, all of whose works were copied without their permission but still remain on my Reverbnation until further notice. 4:41 AM  5 Comments (Add Comment) | 4 Kudos Translate Powered by English Albanian Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Chinese Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Maltese Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Vietnamese December 27, 2008 - Saturday  Subject : Another live performance coming soon! (Re-post) Category: Music Thursday, December 18, 2008 Update: Another live performance coming sooon. Category: Music Subject : An update to Another live performance coming soon! Original post Date: : Dec 17, 2008 2:34 AM I am happy to announce that Tommy Taro and Katie will be performing once again at a final competition after beating out four other local artists who were competing at Magpie's on 6 Dec. The next performance will be at Magpie's Coffee House some time in January.  I'm not sure of the exact date, but I am sure that it will be some time on a Friday or a Saturday Nite. I am currently accepting offers from the Internet for someone different to accompany me to this show.  Please send me a RECENT and clear photograph of yourself.  This is to avoid the embarrassing situation of accepting a blind date from a complete stranger from the Internet because I didn't want to go by myself to the show.  When Tommy's grandmother called me this morning and told me the news about Tommy's grades, she also informed me that while Tommy was very proud to show off his mom that night, the blind date that I brought was too scary-looking so embarrassed my son because he was concerned that people would think that the dude was his "dad."  I am a hypersensitive as well so please send me a picture of yourself if you would like to be considered for this date.    Also, if you send me a picture or email me, please make sure that your face is clearly visible on the email.  This means that if you are on Myspace, you will have to show your real face/head on your profile.  Not your ass, not a logo, or any other fake thing that I've been receiving lately. I am also happy to announce that both Tommy and Katie made it on the Dean's List after completing their first semester at Valdosta State University.  Tommy's GPA is 3.8.  I will have to find out what Katie's is and post it here.  I think it is 3.6. Tommy sent me a bunch of video links to the last event but all of them with the exception of the following video were blocked for privacy.  The only link that would work for me is the one below, which is not the performance of Tommy and Katie but of someone else performing an Elliott Smith cover:     I don't know why Tommy sent me this the other day.  It doesn't sound like a cover version of a different artist at all but like Elliott Smith's exact song that underwent voice-removal software so that he could overdub his own voice into Elliott Smith's musical accompaniment in the background.  The guy is obviously not Elliott Smith but an imposter who is singing karaoke.  He doesn't even look like he is really "singing" so is possibly lip-synching.  I think my son looks more like Elliott Smith than he does.       I taught Tommy his first chords and turned him onto Elliott Smith.       Tommy and me, 2006     Tommy and Katie, 2007     Tommy and Katie, 2008 at Magpie's Coffee House, Friday, 6 Dec 2008 Thursday, 18 Dec 2008 I thought they were going to clean my teeth first and give me a nitrous oxide experience so I was a little disappointed.  Good thing i flossed. I have just increased my Top 10 songs of 2008 to my Top 20 songs.  But many of them are not on Project Playlist so I will have to upload them to my pirate radio, Reverbnation.com. Please note:  I have re-arranged some songs but plan to post a review of each song in the near future. 10:22 PM  0 Comments (Add Comment) | 0 Kudos Translate Powered by English Albanian Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Chinese Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Maltese Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Vietnamese December 17, 2008 - Wednesday  Blind Superhuman Artists & Not really sure, but some kind of mammal. Category: School, College, Greek Part 1 of 10 "The Real Superhumans and the Quest for the Future Fantastic!" After initially posting this message yesterday, I noticed a post from 2006 that contains a direct link to the Myspace artist page of what I thought to be a Superhero blind artist page and something that looks like a chimera rodent-type page on the very same post. But I have confirmed that at least one of those links works after clicking one on to verify for myself.  The other one that i tried came up as "invalid url: the user has deleted the account or the url is no longer working."  Here's the link: http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=86169228&blogID=320449701&indicate=1 UPDATE: I went back to check out the picture of what I thought to be a person who was posing as an appotomus or a mouse chimera.  I am now thinking that I was mistaken yesterday after seeing it once again today and noticing that the head is too big and face is too fat to be a mouse or an appotamus, which have much smaller and skinnier faces.  It is probably only a raccoon or some other type of mammal instead and not a mouse or an appotomas chimera.  If so, please accept my apologies to all of you who were directed to the page mistakenly.  Also, a discussion on the ethics of genetic engineering.  Autistic Test and people who do not understand simple algorithms.  The re-discovery of three-dimensional perspective during 15th century Italy.  Mediocre I.Q.s and Gradations of intellectual capacity.  A correction on Petrarch.  Some words of wisdom from Longchenpa (under comments). Above is the first five minutes to "The Real Superhumans and the Quest for the Future Fantastic" (The Science Channel, 2007), a two-hour documentary that investigates the future of human evolution by examining people with extraordinary powers or gifts.  Featured on this program are:  The Ice Man An athlete who can withstand freezing temperatures by mentally "heating up" his own body temperature. The Blind Painter An artist who was born without eyes but is capable of producing amazing three-dimensional artwork using colour, shadow, and perspective. The Synaesthete A musician who is not only capable of hearing sounds and musical intervals but tasting them as well, in addition to seeing a different colour appear from the source(s) of sound, depending on the note or chord that is heard. The Human Calculator A mathematic genius who did poorly in math until the age of 21, when he suddenly developed an ability to perform complex calculations in his head. Also featured in this documentary is Bruce Lahn, a genetic scientist who created the first test-tube chimera (half mouse, half other rodent species): Part 3 of 10.  The Human Calculator discusses his lonely childhood of growing up friendless and speaking backwards.  Because of The Human Calculator's lack of friends growing up and unusual backward-language speaking ability, many people considered him to be odd and accused him of being the Antichrist or of having a secret pact with the Devil.  Yet, considering that he flunked out of math four times and was the worst math student in his class (and the fact that he didn't acquire his superhuman abilities until the age of 21), perhaps there could be some truth to their accusations (lol..j/k).  In this section, The Human Calculator is about to have his brain scanned by a neurologist who suspects that he is a savant on the autistic spectrum. Meanwhile, Dr. Bruce Lee, the genetic engineer, attempts to explain these extraordinary powers as genetic mutations and hopes to isolate these genes to some day replicate them through genetic engineering.  And in so doing, alter the course of human evolution.  There is of course an ethical dimension to all of this which is not discussed in this section of the program. Also in this section, Dr. Lahn attempts to merge the DNA of a mouse with another rodent-type species to create the first-ever genetically-engineered chimera, an animal that is 1/2 of one species and 1/2 another species. Part 4 of 10. The Synaesthete and The Blind Artist. I'm going ahead and posting this video but will have to return to this section later after reviewing the section on "perspectival thinking" by Gebser. Part 5 of 10.  Putting humans in charge of their own evolution is risky business.  Dr. Lahn discusses the enormous risks and benefits involved in genetic engineering.  The most dangerous risk being, to paraphrase, "It could drastically widen the gap between the genetically-enhanced haves vs. the have-nots.  If those with money  can afford to design more advanced children than those without, it's possible that the human race could split off into two different species.  It would become stratified both socially and genetically." Also featured is Ray Kurzweil, a pioneer in nanotechnology and information technology. Incidentally, Kurzweil was the first to predict the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of global information technology via Internet.  He believes that we are in the midst of an exponential rate of change in both technology and genetic engineering. Kurzweil, 59, has a personal stake in the matter of advancing technology exponentially: he could benefit from this technology as he has inherited two genetic markers, one for diabetes and one for heart disease: both of which are diseases that both his father and grandfather died from before the age of 59.  He is hoping to live long enough (15 or more years) so that he will be able to benefit from a medical breakthrough which may come about to cure his current diseases within 15 years.    Additionally, The Ice Man is submerged in extremely cold water for 20 minutes to test his resistance to cold temperatures and to check his vital signs for the upcoming marathon in Lapland, where he plans to run in only jogging shorts and barefoot to break a world record. Part 6 of 10.  The Autistic Test and people who do not understand simple algorithms. .. In this section, The Human Calculator undergoes psychological testing by a psychologist, who suspects that The Human Calculator is a savant on the autistic spectrum.  If so, then the tests would reveal that The Human Calculator is not a person endowed with "superhuman abilities" but is instead, an autistic savant who is merely able to memorize and parrot back copious amounts of information without really digesting it or understanding the material.  In other words, the tests would show that The Human Calculator is only "mimicking" knowledge by detecting certain algorithms or details that fall below the radar of most humans without actually understanding "the big picture."  The specialist is confident that the tests he will conduct will explain all of The Human Calculator's "superhuman abilities" as merely savant abilities on the Autistic Spectrum Disorder, which would mean that he is merely a slave to a particular algorithm.. The first test was a simple "count the dots" test that I set up and performed in advance on all of my blog readers to test them for autism.  As far as I can tell (after checking once again the test sites for verification), everyone has flunked the test for autism after failing repeatedly to detect any blind Superhuman artists or sub-human chimera mice or rodents.  Part of this is my fault since one of the subjects had apparently deleted their account without my knowledge.  So one of the links no longer works.  I even made the test very simple by using a very simple system along with a very simple algorithm.  Unbeknownst to me at the time (as I've never seen this program prior to yesterday nor ever known about such a test), this is an actual test given to autistics.   In the video above, the tests show that The Human Calculator's amazing performance cannot be explained as autistic savant abilities.  Meaning that he is not a slave to a particular algorithm and actually invents new algorithms as he goes along whenever the specialist intentionally tries to "trip him up" in his calculations.  The specialist is baffled by The Human Calculator's ability to invent new algorithms and to "see the big picture" and says that it was "mathematically impossible" for someone to achieve such a perfect score without being an autistic.  He ends by saying that "some scientists say that there is no algorithm" (I wasn't exactly clear on what he meant by that).  Also in this video, The Synaesthete is being tested to see if her synaesthesia gives her superior memory.  What the test reveals is that colour not only applies to music or sounds, but to words as well.  Later in the video, when she goes off to meet other synaesthetes from around the world who all come together to be genetically tested, she learns that other synaesthese detect colour and sometimes flavor not only in words, but in names, as well. .. Part 7 of 10.  The Blind Painter travels to Florence, Italy, the birthplace of the European Rennaissance and "perspective."  Thus, to scientists and researchers, the most fitting and appropriate setting for testing The Blind Painter's capacity for "perspectival vision."  According to the documentary and many other sources, this discovery was initially made by Fillippo Brunelleschi in 1413, when he stood before an octagonal building to correctly "see" and depict its structure in life-like proportions in three-dimensionality.  Prior to that time, perspectivity had never been fully mastered or realized by artisans or artists and, as a consequence, buildings would collapse under their weight and glasses of wine would topple over and spill onto tables.  For full post, go to http://blog.myspace.com/barbiplease When I decided to write about this documentary the other day, I was singlemindedly consumed by one thought and goal: on how to correctly interpret, and present (or "presentiate," if you will) what I had learned from the program on perspective from the Gebserian and also Wilberian standpoint in a manner that is capable of rendering the truth of perspectivity from the highest possible perspective that is available to us today: which is no longer merely "perspectival" but is also, in addition, "integral-aperspectIval" minus the illusion of "aperspectival madness" while still acknowledging the existence of this particular illusion or delusion that afflicts consciousness during the deficient phase of Green.  I then went on to discover other aspects of the documentary that I wrote about in Parts 1-6 above after watching it again section by section on Youtube. The prefix a- is generally understood to mean "not, without."  When attached to "perspective," however, the word aperspectival may erroneously suggest that the person lacks "perspective" or is otherwise antagonistic, confused, or ambivalent toward perspective, that is, is somehow averse toward having a "point of view" or to having a certain outlook or a vista in relating to the world.  Yet that in itself, of having an aversion to perspective, is actually a perspective or "position" in and of itself such that ultimately, it is impossible to transcend "perspective" wilfully by choosing a "position" of "anti-perspectival." or "ambivalence" in the three-dimensional world of space.  The act of doing so, of being noncommital or ambivalent on a conscious level, is not a solution to any problem but is merely a response to Orange to combat the rigidified perspectival thinking of deficient Orange (which is perspectival but not yet "multi-perspectival" as in Green).  This position or stance ultimately leads not to transcendence from the spatial world but to "aperspectival madness" which differs entirely from "integral-aperspectival" because it is fragmented rather than integrated.  The fourth-person perspective of Green is therefore not yet integrated so should not be confused with "four-dimensionality" of Gebser's "integral-aperspectival."  The aperspectival madness of deficient Green is, instead, along with Orange, a stage in the three-dimensional structure of consciousness.  Both of which, whether Orange or Green, are mental forms of realizaiton such as cognitive thinking (i.e., "formop" or "postformal operational," which are both spatial so are both inherently "perspectival."  It is possible, on the other hand, for some individuals to be "pre-perspectival" as in one-dimensional magic (which is prerational) or "unperspectival" as two-dimensional mythic  (which is irrational and ambivalent).  In which case, one is not making a decisive choice to take a "position" of ambivalence or anti-perspectivity or noncommitment to perspective but is only doing so more or less unconsciously and automatically because of having no other way to identify with Self or to relate to the external world of self and other.  And the particular form of identity that Self will take on in this world of self and other and hence, this entire manifest reality, will unfold over time in both space and time to ever higher levels of concretion.  In previous structures such as one-magic or two-dimensional mythic, for example, there is no "space" to speak of in the three-dimensional sense.  A person immersed in these structures would therefore be incapable of objectively "taking on a position" (perspective) in space since "positioning" itself is an inherently spatializing act of locating one's self and "position" (object or stance) in three-dimensional space.  Thus all cognitive thinking is spatial and therefore, "perspectival" (see chart below) although not all forms of perspectivity are "perspectival."  For this reason and for others, including the potential for misreading the word, "aperspectival," altogether to mean "anti-perspectival" or to mean the act of being consciously noncommital on some "position" or "perspective" taken by others--and especially given that "aperspectival madness" as a delusion or madness did not fully take hold at the time of Gebser's The Ever-Present Origin to be defined in those terms, I believe that Wilber has deliberately chosen another word instead, multiperspectival, to refer to perspectivity beyond the first, second, or third-person perspectives rather than Gebser's "aperspectival," which is potentially confusing in light of deficient Green given the contradictory or negating aspect of the prefix, a-.  When moving beyond the third-person singular perspective of rationality, perspectivity can initially manifest as "aperspectival madness" (fourth-person perspective), whereby the sheer quantity of information via multiple perspectives initially presents itself as bewildering or mutually incompatible to each other to the thinking subject.  When taken to extremes, the subject comes to view everything as ultimately meaningless or "relative" to the subject or beholder.  However, when moving beyond the initial illusory stage of "aperspectival madness" of fourth-person multiple perspective of Green, one begins to integrate and better evaluate these multiplicity of perspectives into an integrated wholeness and transparency.  When used in the context of Gebser, however, "aperspectival" does not mean "aperspectival madness" such as relativity or pluralism but instead refers exclusively to "the Integral" (fifth-person perspective and beyond).  In the Gebserian sense, therefore, the prefix a- is reserved for terms or concept belonging exclusively to "the Integral" realm, which is the spatio-temporal world of four-dimensionality so as to differentiate these words from their previous manifestations in the three-dimensional mental-rational structure (which is three-dimensional so is therefore, spatial rather than spatio-temporal so is inherently visual and therefore, inclined to describe all phenomena visually and objectively (i.e. "point of view" or "outlook"; "here's how I 'see' it," etc.) ).  Thus, in the context of Gebser in the sense of "arational" or "aperspectival," the prefix a- is not the negation of "rationality" or "perspective" but rather the transcendence, inclusion, and, hence, supersession of the singular third-person or pluralistic fourth-person connotations of these words into an integrated multiplicity of perspectives beyond the rational, which in turn unfold to ever-higher levels of transcendence or inclusivity. Thus, the negating aspect of "a-" in "aperspectival" is not the negation of perspective per se but the negation of the isolating sectorization that is inherent in rational thinking in the three-dimensional world of third-person singular perspectivizing or in fourth-person plural multi-perspectivation: neither of which, whether from the standpoint of singular or multiple perspectives, can be integrated into a higher wholeness so are isolated and sectorized and therefore fragmentated.. And what does all this have to do with the documentary above?  Let me see...  At first, I attempted to define Gebser's meaning of "aperspectival" and to differentiate "perspectivity" from "perspective" in the Gebserian sense but realized after several paragraphs that I was digressing and getting no where in spite of several paragraphs.  So I had to cut "off" that portion of the presentiation and "see" that I will reserve my thoughts on "aperspectival" for another post to focus here only on the documentary's use of "perspective" as it is conventionally defined (i.e., as having a "point of view" or a window or vista to the world) and to other important details of Part 7.  The only other other thing that I will add for now is a chart on Gebser's "Space and Time Relationship" to perspectivity as it seems to be a crucial component to understanding perspectivity in the Gebserian sense.  In light of Gebser's work, I don't think it is sufficient to define "perspective" merely in terms of personal "identity" from first- to sixth-person perspectives or by means of levels, states, stages, lines, or quadrants.  Fundamentally, I think, the key to understanding perspectivity is knowing its relation to the ever-reifying manifest world of spatio-temporality which unfolds over time in both space and time to consciousness: so not only is "perspectivity" concerned with identity or to "perspective" or "position" or point in space spatially, but also to all of these things temporically and in all of their forms.  In regard to the chart below, Gebser writes: We are now able to see how every mutation of consciousness that constituted a new structure of consciousness was accompanied by the appearance and effectuality of a new mutation.  This clearly underscores the interdependence of consciousness and a space-time world; for each unfolding of consciousness there is a corresponding increase of unfolding of dimensions.  An increase in the one corresponds to an increase of the other; the emergence of consciousness and the dimensioning imply and govern each other. What we have defined as perspectivity is accordingly only one, although essential, aspects of the respective space and time relation--an aspect which only stands out when viewed from the present-day perspectivally rigidified world.  This shows that consciousness-unfolding and -dimensioning are accompanied by an increasing reification or materialization of the world.    Gebser's Space and Time Relationship to Perspectivity and to Structures of Consciousness At the beginning of Part 7, The Blind Painter is asked to undergo an MRI scan so that scientists could observe and measure his brain activity while he was in the act of drawing.  To their surprise, regions of his brain that shouldn't have had any activity due to his blindness began lighting up whenever he would draw.  Their conclusion was that perspectival vision, after all, involves more than information that is brought to the eyes.  Thus, there is more to perspectival vision than vision itself as it also involves space, distance, direction, and angle and depth: and all of these are aspects of the spatial world so are available to touch. Since "space" is concerned with mass, measurement, and quantity, the three-dimensional spatial world is concerned primarily with objects or external phenomena in "space."  However, not all phenomena in the spatial world possess mass or location in physical space.  In such circumstances we refer to them as "nonphysical objects," meaning objects that exist only conceptually, numerically, or abstractly rather than concretely in physical space.  Yet even in these objects, which exist only conceptually or abstractly or numerically but not in physical "space," they are still "spatial objects" for the fact that they possess numeric quantity.  In perceiving such objects, neither sight nor touch are sufficient to correctly apprehend them but also thought.   Phenomena such as imaginary numbers,  pyramidal thinking or "conceptual" (clock) time are thus spatial three-dimensional objects concerning quantity and objects in the conceptual or abstract world of space.  Even conceptual time, that is, "clock time," is not true "quality time" but is only quantified time and hence, time that is abstracted and then spatialized conceptually. Making it possible for The Blind Artist to "see" through touch and thought without ever actually "seeing."  Strangely in my particular case, the opposite seems to hold true.  My vision, while perfect in the sense of visual acuity, seems distorted in other ways such as ability to judge space, distance, direction, angle, size, and depth to the point that it makes me a liability and disability to the work force.  In fact, I scored a "0" in my audio-visual processing test while scoring perfectly in visual acuity when I was tested by a psychiatrist in 2006.  I was told at the time that I have an "abnormality" in the back of the head that is indicative of autism and/or a moderate head injury.  The visual and other sensory processing difficulties in turn interfere with my ability to relate to the external world of space.  My theory on this is that unlike The Blind Painter above, who lacks the sight of vision so is forced to use his fingers and sense of touch in order to get around and survive, I grew up by contrast an a hypersensitive and dislike the touch or feel of anything that is disagreeable or unpleasant to my skin or to me in general.  Or come to think of it, I have an aversion to any other unpleasant sensory object whether it is visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, or motor.  If it is unpleasant, I do not like to do it and tend to avoid it.  Resulting in an "avoidance" type personality in things which do not appeal to me.  Had I been forced to do what The Blind Painter was forced to do--"feel my way around" throughout life by walking laboriously and blindly around an octagonal building while scraping my hands against the rough concrete surface in the process--the experience alone would have been too jarring and upsetting for my hands and sensory system to ever allow me to ever take an active interest in the external world around me.  I would say that because of my aversion to many things in the sensory world of space, it is quite possible that I may have never developed a capacity for judging aspects of space such as distance, directionality, perspective, depth, or anything related to exterior objects: especially when there are many things together in the visual or auditory field and everything is moving in different directions simultaneously.  I don't think that my lack of spatial awareness or perspectivity in the visual or sensory world applies to logic or critical thinking; only to the concrete world of space or possibly only to the abstract world of numbers.  Nor do I think that my impairment prevents me from accessing the integral-aperspectival such as sixth-person perspective or beyond.  So in a sense, I may be impaired neurologically to certain forms of perspectivity but unlike The Human Calculator, I have always been very poor with numbers and had to audit my one algebra requirement in college three times before finally taking it in a Learning Disabled class and then barely passing with a "C."  I also have a poor sense of direction and am constantly getting lost in familiar places.  I am told that it is a learning disability but the name of it escapes me for now.  It is very likely a combination of many different learning disabilities.  As a person of mediocre intelligence based on intelligence testing (math IQ 100, verbal IQ 117), I've noticed that a great many people who surpass me in I.Q. are cognitively below me at the formal operational stage of development.  This is because I.Q. tests can only measure quantitative intelligence.  Anything concerning qualitative intelligence, i.e. development or evolution, is overlooked entirely: such as being able to quantitatively distinguish the "formal operational stage" from "post-formal operational stage" of cognitive development.  Nor, for that matter, can these tests distinguish formal operational from concrete operational, or first from second tier consciousness.  This is because gradations of intellectual capacity refer not to quantity or "amount" of intelligence but to value or quality such as "degrees" or "stages" of intelligence.   And, of course, since there is no such thing as "single intelligence" anyway but rather "multiple intelligences" within a single individual, intelligence itself is ultimately neither quantifiable nor qualifiable as there are many lines of intelligence beyond the cognitive line (such as musical I.Q., social I.Q., athletic I.Q., and so on).  Yet even in the realm of cognitive I.Q., intelligence tests are very limited in scope because they can only measure certain quantitative aspects of cognitive intelligence but nothing in the way of quality or gradations of intellectual capacity.   I don't think that this mediocrity in "I.Q." creates an overall deficit in my capacity for perspectivity in the logical sense such as "pyramidal thinking" or "diaresis" of Aristotelian or Platonic logic.  Which incidentally, are forms of perspectivity that preceded the perspectival art of the Rennaissance by almost one and a half millenia.  Which goes to show, perhaps, that "perspective" in the three-dimensional sense, while inherently "visual" in that it is spatial and, as a consequence, involves mass and measurement and therefore, access to regions of the brain concerned with "vision," perspective itself encompasses not only ocular vision the way of vision or touch nor only of abstraction or spatial intelligence involving math skills but also other forms of "thinking" such as critical thinking, logic, and deduction.  All of which are forms of perspectivity of perspectival thinking in the mental-rational three-dimensional structure of consciousness which are inherently spatial, that is, objective and quantitative.  And it is these spatial aspects that give "perspectival thinking" in three-dimensionality its unique stamp in perspectivity. Perspectivity preceded the discovery of three-dimensional perspective in 15th century Italy by at least a millenia by the ancient Greeks, but a lesson which had to be repeated in the European world by Petrarch in the 13th century before it would actually take root and hold in 15th century Italy in Brunelleschi. By contrast, places outside of the occidental world of European thought have remained largely "unperspectival."  The primary difference between "perspectival" and "unperspectival" being the realization of three-dimensional space.  However, also crucial to understanding perspectivity is identity: such as the somewhat more "unperspectival" (mythical-ambivalent) world of "we" as it exists in Japan.  By contrast, the European world (which includes America and all other colonized areas) places greater emphasis on individuality or "I."  This is because in order to stand in opposition to three-dimensional objects in space to objectify and measure it, there must be a thinking ego-subject ("I") who has extricated himself or herself from this space to stand in opposition to it so as to measure it correctly.  Thus, while many novel innovations occur in the West, the East tends to "copy" and imitate what it sees in the West to go on and perfect them.  However, not much in the way of ground-breaking or innovation occurs in the East.  This is not because of any genetic or intellectual differences between individuals in the East and the West but merely because perspectival  thinking and vision was re-discovered in the West approximately 500 years ago in Rennaissance Europe.  The West is therefore more advanced than the East by approxmately 300-500 years on the LL quadrant, that is, in terms of I-expression or individuality as a cultural norm to aspire toward. According to Gebser, it was not Brunelleschi in 1413 who discovered three-dimensional perspective for the first time but rather, the Fransciscan monk Petrarch in 1336 who first recorded it after initially climbing a mountain and then peering down from above for an aerial view of his place of birth, the home where he grew up, his place of residence, his entire village, and everywhere he had ever been to up to that point comprising his entire world and beyond in one single glance three-dimensionally.  This is because he extricated himself from the "we-space" of village and two-dimensionality to see a greater area of space three-dimensionally from a higher altitude.  This discovery of "space" spooked Petrarch to the point that he kept it secret throughout most of his life, revealing his discovery to only one other person in a letter.  In it he remarked that such sights were possibly reserved for God alone and the angels in heaven.  It would take another 80 years for perspective to be re-discovered once again by Brunelleschi in 1413, and then another 80 years for perspective to become consolidated by Leonardo da Vinci, who then perfected perspective in 1500. Here is article from New Scientist on "The Blind Painter": The Art of Seeing Without Sight IT IS an odd sight. A middle-aged man, fully reclined, drawing pictures of hammers and mugs and animal figurines on a special clipboard, which is balanced precariously on a pillow atop his ample stomach. A half-dozen people buzz around him. One adjusts a towel under his neck to make him more comfortable, another wields a stopwatch and chants instructions to start doing this or stop doing that, and yet another translates everything into Turkish. A small group convenes in a corner to assess the proceedings. A few of us just stand around watching, and trying not to get in the way. The elaborate ritual is a practice run for an upcoming brain scan and the researchers want to get everything just right. Meanwhile, the man at the centre of all this attention, a blind painter, cracks jokes that keep everyone tittering. 3:31 PM  2 Comments (Add Comment) | 0 Kudos Translate Powered by English Albanian Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Chinese Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Maltese Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Vietnamese Older Posts