Dr Richard Dawkins, author of books such as The Selfish Gene (http://amzn.to/NjmDZ8) and The God Delusion (http://amzn.to/NdfGdY), is famous for his materialist views about the nature of reality and his belief that “the supernatural… can never offer us a true explanation of the things we see in the world and the universe around us.” On 3 November 2011, Dr Dawkins visited the British city of Bath to promote his new book The Magic of Reality (http://amzn.to/NdfMm5) and gave a reading at the Bath Central Library. In the Q&A session following the reading Graham Hancock, author of books such as Fingerprints of the Gods (http://amzn.to/x7PNY3), Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind (http://amzn.to/thGLVP), and Entangled (http://amzn.to/sKUGuR), pointed out to Dr Dawkins that many traditional hunter-gather cultures believe there are other realities — spirit worlds and so on and so forth — and concrete techniques, such as the use of psychoactive plants, to access them.
Dr Graves’ findings provide a credible map for what philosopher and psychedelic pioneer Terence McKenna called The Archaic Revival. According to Graves, humanity is indeed making a momentous leap in consciousness, which is characterised in part by the re-emergence of archaic themes. One of these themes is tribalism; not a regression to ancient tribalism, but the emergence of one global tribe.
What happens in the brain when we feel for others? Neuroeconomist Brian Knutson of Stanford University studies meditating monks to explore what compassion looks like in the brain.
“Reliably they like the art more if the faces they showed compassion to came before it,” Knutson said. “Which leads to a hypothesis that there is some sort of compassion carryover happening.”
Here are seven suggestions to help you transcend ingrained ideas of self-importance. All of these are designed to help prevent you from falsely identifying with the self-important ego. 1. Stop being offended.
Sacred Economics traces the history of money from ancient gift economies to modern capitalism, revealing how the money system has contributed to alienation, competition, and scarcity, destroyed community, and necessitated endless growth.
Today, these trends have reached their extreme - but in the wake of their collapse, we may find great opportunity to transition to a more connected, ecological, and sustainable way of being.
TED Talks When game designer Jane McGonigal found herself bedridden and suicidal following a severe concussion, she had a fascinating idea for how to get better. She dove into the scientific research and created the healing game, SuperBetter.
"Quinn may be about to transform the art of storytelling itself. This summer he will launch The Silent History, a sprawling electronic novel that plays with the mechanics of how stories are told, taking full advantage of the tablet’s GPS and touchscreen, along with platform features like in-app purchasing."
During our recent chat with Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan on subject of the fifth and final season of the show, he illuminated several storytelling principles that have helped make the series such a success.
"Being open to change and constant discovery has yielded strong results for Gilligan. In fact, so much so Gilligan has been able to create twice as many hours of Breaking Bad than what he originally planned. “Having a rock solid idea of how it all should end is counterproductive,” Gilligan says, “If you’re too rigid in your thinking you may miss some wonderful opportunities for storytelling.”
Everyone who plays multiplayer games will have encountered a griefer at some point. Their aim is to deliberately irritate and harass all the other players or sometimes one specific player. The anonymity of the Internet has a definite dark side; for websites it’s trolls, for video games it’s griefers. Multiplayer games, especially in the first-person shooter genre, attract more than their fair share of griefers. Combine their gaming behavior with their immature chatter and provocatively racist usernames and you’ll find that they can usually lay claim to the troll title as well.
"The greatest fortune that can befall an author is not to be read, a painter not to be seen, or to be seen with haste, like on those horrendous group museum tours: as long as the work is talked about, obviously. Or, if they see you, if they read you, you’re fortunate to be misunderstood. If they understand you, no one will think you’re right; if they don’t understand you, everyone will project onto you their inchoate desires, their secret dreams. And your success is assured." — Paul Klee, explaining to a writer the benefits of not being read, from Giovanni Orelli’s Walaschek’s Dream (trans. by Jamie Richards)
In her hymn of one hundred names taken from the Mundamala Tantra she is given such epithets as, “She who is smeared with blood,” “She who likes blood,” and “She who enjoys blood sacrifice.” There can be no doubt that the alignment of Ma Tara’s eyes with the harikath is intentional, for her power is not confined to the sanctum sanctorum. The entire temple complex, cremation ground, and surrounding village belongs to the goddess Tara. For her devotees, Ma Tara is not perceived as a merely localized phenomenon, but is seen as all-encompassing force. As one aghori told me she is shakti, or power itself; the “world-in-charge” mother of all existence.
As far as aya goes, this is it, in a nutshell - jero
"Reality Sandwich and Evolver Los Angeles present "The Ayahuasca Monologues: Tales of the Spirit Vine" [The Ayahuasca Monologues] • In this video Tony Moss sh..."
"This story is not about a tragic childhood. It is not about mean adults or about how difficult it was growing up in the Harlem of the 1980s. This story is a response to a number of recent stories that go slumming through other people’s misery, a response to privileged authors who want to imagine themselves as saviors of the less fortunate, to those who don’t recognize their own power when they write about racial “others.” The adults in my life knew this othering game all too well and they did everything they could to protect me from it. This is a story about being inside of outside. Cowbirders, when the look at “outsiders” only reaffirms your own inside status, it's time to rethink what you mean by "outside.""
For decades, the U.S. government banned medical studies of the effects of LSD. But for one longtime, elite researcher, the promise of mind-blowing revelations was just too tempting.
Who hasn’t, at least for a moment, thought a Choose Your Own Adventure book would be fun to write? It’s like making a game out of words. Branching narratives are a surprisingly natural approach to make books interactive.
E. dying, Y., a dharma brother called for advice on the son of a friend and neighbour who is dying in hospital. It’s a life phase, I thought, a time after forty in which we move ever closer to death,...
CloudEngine is an easy way to create a social web site for discussing and aggregating ideas and resources. It is centred around social objects “social objects” - Clouds and Cloudscapes - surrounded by a social space for discussion. These social objects can be cumulatively and collectively improved. It is ideal for running events and fostering discussion. The best way to get a feel for what CloudEngine does is to go and look at the Cloudworks website where you can see the software in action.
It is free and open source software, licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2
We are not controlled by a neural zombie within. We are controlled from the outside. But this control actually explains our freedom and is not a threat to it.
"The best way to find out what people will do is not to look into their hearts, or their brains; it's simply to understand the situation they are in. Social psychologists have shown this again and again. Who will be more likely to perform an altruistic action, the priest or the business person? Answer: The one who just found some money. (See, for example, Levin and Isen's "Further Studies on the Effects of Feeling Good on Helping" for support for claim.)"
"You should let your followers know they’re following you, the filmmaker, not just your film.
Share photos from a day of shooting or of you on the road. Post videos—either actual clips from the film, or some sort of special feature you’ve created for your followers. Tumblr is a perfect place for a production journal (be it in text, photo, or video format)."
We've said it before: we love Pixar. Their stories are original, funny, and appeal to all audiences. They're masters. That's why Jess and I got excited when we saw Pixar's 22 rules to storytelling.
In this exclusive interview for Life Arts Media, author Gregory Sams shares some ideas from his latest book 'Sun of gOd'. In his work Sams bridges ancient an...
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